AUSTIN YOGURT SHOP 4: True Crime Recaps 2022 - People Magazine Investigates TV - The Yogurt Shop Murders TV -
Austin: 4 teenage girls were executed in a strip mall yoghurt shop. For the next 30 years the case would be known simply as the Yogurt Shop murders. True Crime Recaps: Two Unsolved Murders, Youtube 36.42, 2022
Austin: All 4 girls were naked, bound, gagged with their own clothes and they’d all been shot … The store went up in flames. ibid.
The firefighters are shocked to discover that they are people who got caught in the building … They were all shot … naked … People Magazine Investigates s7e7: Who Killed Our Girls? Quest Red 2023
We think the perpetrator just panicked and shot the girls … The fire was started by paper products. ibid. rozzer
DNA excluded all four boys: Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn. ibid.
[TV reporter]: On this day in 1991, 4 teenagers were shot and murdered inside what was a yogurt shop inside this strip-mall. The Yogurt Shop Murders I: Fire & Water, HBO 2025
Everybody who was touched by it can’t get to the bottom of the narrative. ibid. comment
There was fire trucks in the back alley and there was media everywhere. ibid. shop manager
A passing police officer noticed smoke coming out of the store. ibid. TV news
What really, if you want to get down to it, made this almost impossible to solve was the fire and the water. ibid. author
All four girls [Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Amy Ayers] were tied with their own underwear, braziers, and were shot in the back of the head with a .22 calibre pistol. ibid. comment
[comment]: If my dad had not been away that night, I would have been with my sister and I would have been the fifth victim. The Yogurt Shop Murders II: The Fifth Victim
I want you to talk about why and how it came to be that you confessed. ibid. 48 Hours dude
The price of life seems to be getting cheaper and cheaper these days. ibid. investigating rozzer
The police department is supposed to be on our side. You have to trust them. ibid. comment
[comment]: We were trying to make a documentary about false confessions. The Yogurt Shop Murders III: Mental Evidence
Those guys that we got. They did it. ibid. rozzer
After 8 years, and no physical evidence to tie any of the 4 men to the murders, why did the Austin police focus on them? ibid. news
When it’s the words of the accused himself [Robert] saying, I did this, and he’s saying it into a video camera – but I want you to just for a moment imagine the stress he was under when he was making that statement, the fear, the uncertainty … ibid. defence brief
Michael’s biggest problem was that he trusted the police. ibid.
The fire investigator had told them back [rozzers] in 1991 the fire started on the shelves. ibid.
Foremost the admissibility of the defendant’s own statement. The more difficult question involved admissibility of the co-defendants’ statements. ibid.
Maurice Pierce is free, no longer waiting for his day in court. ibid. news
[Michael Scott 2009]: To hear that my sentencing was overturned was huge. Oh man, I was standing at my cell door when the officer comes to you … The Yogurt Shop Murders IV: In Your Own Time
The most important thing the DNA stands for is it was someone else. It is not any one of these four boys. ibid. defence brief
So they began testing … anybody else they think it could be. After testing more than 200 men who had just even looked at this body, were anywhere near this body, there’s nobody else. ibid.
June 2009: Our evidence in the deaths of these four young women includes the DNA of one male whose DNA is not yet known to us. ibid. district attorney’s press conference
Everybody is unsatisfied with there being no final determination. ibid. appeal judge
We need to keep searching for the donor of this DNA. ibid. district attorney’s press conference
When I found out he [Maurice Pierce] had been killed, it really didn’t bother me. ibid. comment
Each time you talk to these [DNA] labs, they are able to do more with less. ibid. rozzer
The Yogurt Shop Murders was released in August 2025 as a four-part series. One month later, the Austin Police Department’s Cold Case Unit announced a major breakthrough in the case. The Yogurt Shop Murders V: The End of Wondering, HBO 2026
We put that [bullet] on the wire coast to coast. We knew what we were looking for exactly. The system’s called NIBIN, National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. ibid. rozzer
We got a hit to another unsolved homicide in 1998 in Lexington, Kentucky [Linda Rutledge] … Same gun, seven years later, same MO. ibid.
South Carolina: They got a hit 27 out of 27 markers. A Y profile from a sexual offender in South Carolina in 1990. ibid.
When I researched one of these potential matches I found this article. This guy was convicted of attempted murder and rape in 1985 in Florida. ibid.
He was deceased and buried in Arkansas. And so they got a judge’s order and dug him up. Put it into CODIS. And he was a perfect match for all those crimes: Robert Eugene Brashers. ibid.