The Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders: Part Four (Conclusion)
Sources:
https://time.com/7321492/yogurt-shop-murders-suspect/
https://people.com/austin-police-significant-breakthrough-murders-4-teen-girls-yogurt-shop-new-suspect-34-years-later-11820020?
https://www.statesman.com/news/local/article/archives-no-dna-match-yogurt-shop-case-21069666.php?
https://allthatsinteresting.com/austin-yogurt-shop-murders
https://allthatsinteresting.com/robert-eugene-brashers
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Zevon Odelberg is a true crime podcast host and disability advocate. Zevon has cerebral palsy and he wants Kinda Murdery to be welcoming community for people with disabilities and for people living with challenges of any kind. Life can be hard, but being together makes it better.
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Speaker 3: Hey, everybody, I'm so happy you decided to be here.
Speaker 3: Your time is valuable, and the fact that you want
Speaker 3: to share it with me forms my heart. I am
Speaker 3: Zevan Odelberg, and this is the kind of Murdery podcast,
Speaker 3: And you have found your way to Part four, the
Speaker 3: final part, the conclusion of the Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop murders.
Speaker 3: But I did say part four, So if you haven't
Speaker 3: heard parts one through three yet, go back and listen
Speaker 3: to them. I'll save you a set. I'll even keep
Speaker 3: it warm for you. But if you're all caught up,
Speaker 3: I say, let's dive right into this. So here we go.
Speaker 3: Part four, the conclusion of kind of murderies the Austin,
Speaker 3: Texas yogurt shop murders starts. Now as we wrap up
Speaker 3: the story here, I'm going to go ahead and name
Speaker 3: each part as we enter it, and this first part
Speaker 3: of the last part of the story, I'm calling the
Speaker 3: evidence that stayed. By the time the case had entered
Speaker 3: its third decade, the investigation no longer depended on witnesses, confessions,
Speaker 3: or memory. Those avenues had been exhausted and in some cases, discredited.
Speaker 3: What remained was what had been collected in the first
Speaker 3: hours of the fire, items sealed, labeled, and stored with
Speaker 3: the expectation that they might matter later, even if they
Speaker 3: could not be fully understood. At the time. The yogurt
Speaker 3: shop crime scene had been damaged in two fundamental ways.
Speaker 3: The fire had altered surfaces, destroyed materials, and degraded biological evidence.
Speaker 3: The water used to extinguish that fire had done its
Speaker 3: own kind of damage, spreading contaminants, diluting trace material, and
Speaker 3: shifting objects from their original positions. In nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 3: forensic teams worked within those limitations, collecting what they could
Speaker 3: and preserving it as carefully as possible. They did not
Speaker 3: yet have the tools to extract full value from everything
Speaker 3: they gathered. What they did have was discipline. Every item
Speaker 3: that survived the initial processing was cataloged. Swabs were taken
Speaker 3: from areas where biological material might still exist, even if
Speaker 3: it was not visible. Fragments of fabric used for binding
Speaker 3: were collected and separated. Bullets recovered during autostopsies were preserved
Speaker 3: and logged. Even debris from the burned room, pieces of flooring,
Speaker 3: charred material residue was stored where it could potentially contain
Speaker 3: trace evidence. For years, those items sat in storage. They
Speaker 3: were not forgotten, but they were not actively producing answers.
Speaker 3: The DNA testing available in the early nineteen nineties required larger,
Speaker 3: cleaner samples than the yogurt shop scene could reliably provide.
Speaker 3: The fire had broken down much of the biological material,
Speaker 3: and what remained was often too degraded to generate a
Speaker 3: complete profile. Investigators could test, but the results were limited
Speaker 3: partial readings inconclusive comparisons fragments that did not match anyone
Speaker 3: in available databases. That changed gradually. By the late two
Speaker 3: thousands and into the twenty tens, forensic science had advanced
Speaker 3: in ways that directly addressed the kind of evidence preserved
Speaker 3: from the yogurt chop. Techniques for extracting DNA from degraded
Speaker 3: samples improved. Analysts were able to work with smaller quantities
Speaker 3: of biological mans material and reconstruct profiles from fragments that
Speaker 3: would have previously been unusable. The case file did not change,
Speaker 3: but the tools used to read it did. When investigators
Speaker 3: returned to the evidence, they approached it with a narrower focus.
Speaker 3: They were no longer looking for a full, clean profile
Speaker 3: that could immediately identify a suspect. They were looking for
Speaker 3: anything that could survive the conditions of the scene, anything
Speaker 3: that could be amplified, stabilized, and compared. From that process,
Speaker 3: a profile began to emerge. It was not complete. The
Speaker 3: DNA recovered from the yogurt chop evidence was partial, meaning
Speaker 3: it did not contain enough markers to identify a specific
Speaker 3: individual with certainty on its own, but it contained enough
Speaker 3: information to serve two critical functions. It could be compared
Speaker 3: against known samples, and it could exclude individuals that did
Speaker 3: not match the same type of analysis that had excluded
Speaker 3: Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce, and forrest welborn years
Speaker 3: earlier could now be applied with greater sense activity. Investigators
Speaker 3: could confirm with more confidence than before that those men
Speaker 3: were not contributors to the biological material recovered from the scene.
Speaker 3: But exclusion was only half the equation. The other half
Speaker 3: required a match. The DNA profile was entered into national databases.
Speaker 3: Those systems had grown significantly since the nineteen nineties. More
Speaker 3: offenders were included, more jurisdictions participated. The likelihood of a
Speaker 3: match statistically was higher than it had ever been. At first,
Speaker 3: there was no result. The profile existed in the system,
Speaker 3: waiting to align with something already present or something that
Speaker 3: might be added in the future. Investigators understood that this
Speaker 3: process could take time. DNA databases did not solve cases
Speaker 3: on demand. They resolved them when two pieces of information
Speaker 3: collected years apart, often in different states, happened to intersect.
Speaker 3: While the DNA sat in the system, detectives continued reviewing
Speaker 3: the rest of the preserved evidence in Peril. The ballistic
Speaker 3: findings had not changed. The use of a three eighty
Speaker 3: caliber pistol and a twenty two caliber revolver remained one
Speaker 3: of the most stable elements of the case. Those details
Speaker 3: were revisited, not because they had been questioned, but because
Speaker 3: they could now be considered alongside a growing body of
Speaker 3: forensic information from other jurisdictions. Firearm usage patterns, ammunition types,
Speaker 3: and casing characteristics could be compared more broadly than they
Speaker 3: had been in nineteen ninety one. The same applied to
Speaker 3: the Arson findings. The fire had been deliberate, that conclusion
Speaker 3: never shifted. What changed over time was the ability to
Speaker 3: contextualize that behavior within a larger set of cases. Investigators
Speaker 3: could now examine whether similar sequences control execution style killings
Speaker 3: followed by Arson had occurred elsewhere, and whether any of
Speaker 3: those cases had produced usable forensic evidence. The yogurt chop case,
Speaker 3: once isolated, began to be viewed as part of a
Speaker 3: larger landscape, not because a connection had been established, but because,
Speaker 3: for the first time it was possible. What had stayed
Speaker 3: consistent across all those years was the evidence itself. It
Speaker 3: had not improved, it had not expanded, but it endured,
Speaker 3: and because it endured, it remained capable of answering a
Speaker 3: question that had outlasted every other part of the investigation,
Speaker 3: the profile and the name. When the preserved evidence was
Speaker 3: reintroduced into modern forensic testing. Investigators were not expecting a
Speaker 3: complete answer. The condition of the material made that unlikely.
Speaker 3: What they were looking for was something narrower, any profile
Speaker 3: that could be stabilized enough to compare across systems that
Speaker 3: did not exist when the crime was committed. The DNA
Speaker 3: recovered from the yogurt chop evidence produced exactly that. It
Speaker 3: was not a full profile. It did not contain enough
Speaker 3: markers to identify a person on its own, but it
Speaker 3: was consistent, reproducible, and specific enough to be entered into
Speaker 3: national databases and compared again known offenders. That alone marked
Speaker 3: a shift from the earlier years of the investigation, when
Speaker 3: testing had produced results too incomplete to be useful beyond exclusion.
Speaker 3: The profile was uploaded. At first, nothing happened. There was
Speaker 3: no immediate hit, no direct match to an individual already
Speaker 3: in the system. That outcome was not unexpected. Even with
Speaker 3: expanded databases, A profile can remain unmatched if the person
Speaker 3: it belongs to has never been injured, or if available
Speaker 3: DNA is only partial. Investigators expanded their approach. Instead of
Speaker 3: waiting for a direct match, they began looking for partial alignments,
Speaker 3: profiles that shared enough markers to suggest a possible connection,
Speaker 3: even if they did not meet the threshold for identification.
Speaker 3: This type of comparison carried limitations. It could not establish certainty,
Speaker 3: but it could generate direction. From that process, a name surfaced,
Speaker 3: Robert Eugene Brashers. The connection was not absolute. The DNA
Speaker 3: from the yogurt shop did not produce a full match
Speaker 3: to Brashers. What it produced was a partial correspondence, enough
Speaker 3: shared markers to justify further investigation, but not enough to
Speaker 3: stand alone as proof. What made the name significant was
Speaker 3: not just the DNA. By the time the comparison was made,
Speaker 3: Brashers had already been linked, through full DNA matches, to
Speaker 3: multiple violent crimes across the South. Investigators and other jurisdictions
Speaker 3: had connected him to rapes and homicides committed in the
Speaker 3: early nineteen nineties. Those cases had their own evidence, their
Speaker 3: own time lines, and their own forensic confirmations. The yogurt
Speaker 3: shop profile did not exist in isolation any more. It
Speaker 3: existed alongside a known offender with a history of violence,
Speaker 3: mobility across state lines, and confirmed biological evidence tying him
Speaker 3: to other crimes. Investigators began building around that intersection they
Speaker 3: established that Brashers had been alive and active in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety one. They examined his movements during that period as
Speaker 3: closely as records would allow. One detail stood out quickly.
Speaker 3: Within forty eight hours of the yogurt Chop murders, Brashers
Speaker 3: had been stopped at a border patrol checkpoint in al Paso, Texas.
Speaker 3: He was driving a stolen vehicle. He was in possession
Speaker 3: of a firearm. That stop placed him in the same
Speaker 3: state within a narrow window of time following the murders.
Speaker 3: It did not place him in Austin directly, but an
Speaker 3: established proximity that had not existed with any other prior
Speaker 3: suspect tied to the case. The firearm added another layer
Speaker 3: years later. When Brashers died in nineteen ninety nine, he
Speaker 3: used a gun that investigators would later compare to the
Speaker 3: type of weapon involved in the yogurt Chop case. The
Speaker 3: comparison did not produce a definitive ballistic match. There was
Speaker 3: no recovered weapon from nineteen ninety one to testigans, but
Speaker 3: the class characteristics aligned. The type of firearm he possessed
Speaker 3: and used fell within the same category identified in the
Speaker 3: original ballistic analysis. Again, it was not proof, it was alignment.
Speaker 3: As investigators layered the information partial DNA correspondence, geographic proximity,
Speaker 3: firearm consistency, and a pattern of confirmed violent offenses, the
Speaker 3: case began to take a shape it had not held before.
Speaker 3: For decades, the yogurt Chop murders had existed without a
Speaker 3: suspect who could be connected both behaviorally and forensically. Previous
Speaker 3: theories had relied on statements on proximity or on speculation
Speaker 3: and motive. None had been supported by physical evidence that
Speaker 3: survived scrutiny. Brashers was different. He was already tied to
Speaker 3: other crimes through DNA, he had demonstrated the capacity for violence, control,
Speaker 3: and the use of firearms. He had moved across state
Speaker 3: lines during the same period, and now his profile intersected
Speaker 3: imperfectly but meaningfully with biological evidence from the yogurt shop.
Speaker 3: The name did not close the case, but it changed it.
Speaker 3: For the first time since nineteen ninety one, investigators were
Speaker 3: no longer working without a direction that was anchored in
Speaker 3: the evidence. Itsselns, the timeline, the pattern, the weight. Once
Speaker 3: Robert Eugene Brashers entered the investigation, the work shifted from
Speaker 3: identification to placement. The DNA connection, partial as it was,
Speaker 3: did not stand on its own. Investigators needed to determine
Speaker 3: whether he could be situated within the timeline of December
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety one in a way that aligned with the
Speaker 3: facts of the case. The first point of confirmation came
Speaker 3: from a record that had nothing to do with Austin.
Speaker 3: Within forty eight hours of the yogurt shop murders, Brashers
Speaker 3: was stopped at a US Border Patrol checkpoint in Elpaso, Texas.
Speaker 3: The stop was routine, the vehicle he was driving was not.
Speaker 3: It had been reported stolen. The report from that encounter
Speaker 3: documented more than just the vehicle. Brashers was in possession
Speaker 3: of a firearm, along with items that indicated mobility and preparation, tools, equipment,
Speaker 3: and the kinds of things that allowed him to move
Speaker 3: from place to place without relying on fixed residents or
Speaker 3: routine employment. The checkpoint did not connect him to the
Speaker 3: murders of the time. It was processed as a standalone incident,
Speaker 3: but when investigators revisited the record decades later, its timing
Speaker 3: became relevant. Olpasso sits more than five hundred miles from Austin.
Speaker 3: The distance is significant, but it is not prohibitive. A
Speaker 3: person moving by car could cover it in a matter
Speaker 3: of hours. But checkpoint placed Brashers in Texas, moving west
Speaker 3: shortly after the night of December sixth. It established that
Speaker 3: he had been in the state within a window that
Speaker 3: overlapped the murders. From there, investigators began reconstructing what they
Speaker 3: could of his movement during that period. Records were incomplete.
Speaker 3: There were no continuous logs of his location. What existed
Speaker 3: were points, arrests, stops, encounters, separated by time and geography.
Speaker 3: The task was to determine whether those points could reasonably
Speaker 3: be connected into a path that passed through Austin. They
Speaker 3: could not prove that he'd been at the yogurt shop,
Speaker 3: but they could no longer rule it out. The reconstruction
Speaker 3: did not see stop with geography. Investigators turned to the
Speaker 3: other cases that had been definitively linked to Brashers through DNA.
Speaker 3: Those cases provided something the yogurt chop investigation had lacked
Speaker 3: for decades, confirmed behavior tied to a known individual. In Missouri.
Speaker 3: DNA evidence connected Brashers to the rape and murder of
Speaker 3: Sherry Shearer and her twelve year old daughter, Megan Shearer.
Speaker 3: The crime involved injury into a private residence, control of
Speaker 3: multiple victims, and the use of a firearm. The sequence control,
Speaker 3: violence and lethal force aligned with elements seen in Austin,
Speaker 3: though the settings differed. In South Carolina, he was linked
Speaker 3: to the rape and murder of Genevin's Atrichi in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3: That case, like the others, involved close contact, a firearm,
Speaker 3: and direct violence carried out at proximity. In Tennessee, DNA
Speaker 3: connected him to the rape of a fourteen year old girl.
Speaker 3: The victim survived, providing details that could be compared against
Speaker 3: other physical evidence. The pattern again included control, the use
Speaker 3: of force, and the willingness to escalate. Each of these
Speaker 3: cases stood on its own evidence. They were not speculative connections.
Speaker 3: They were established through DNA linking brashers directly to the crimes.
Speaker 3: When investigators placed those cases side by side, certain consistencies emerged.
Speaker 3: He used firearms, He operated in environments where he could
Speaker 3: isolate victims, homes, private spaces, places where control could be
Speaker 3: established quickly. He moved across state lines, committing offenses in
Speaker 3: different jurisdictions without remaining in one place long enough to
Speaker 3: form a clear pattern in real time. The yogurt shop
Speaker 3: murders did not mirror any of those cases exactly. The
Speaker 3: number of victims was higher, the setting a retail business
Speaker 3: was different. The use of arson added a layer not
Speaker 3: present in the other confirmed crimes, but the underlying elements
Speaker 3: were not inconsistent. Control, proximity, firearm use, the capacity to
Speaker 3: move from encounter to violence without hesitation. Investigators did not
Speaker 3: frame this as a perfect match. They framed it as
Speaker 3: a set of behaviors that did not conflict with what
Speaker 3: had been observed in Austin. For the first time, the
Speaker 3: yogurt shop case could be considered alongside other crimes committed
Speaker 3: by a single individual with confirmed forensic ties. The analysis
Speaker 3: extended to the weapons. From the beginning, the yogurt shop
Speaker 3: investigation had identified two firearms, a three eighty caliber pistol
Speaker 3: and a twenty two caliber revolver. Those findings had remained
Speaker 3: unchanged for decades. What had been missing was a suspect
Speaker 3: who could be associated with weapons of that type in
Speaker 3: a way that could be examined further. Brasher's history provided
Speaker 3: that association. In multiple documented encounters, he had been found
Speaker 3: in possession of firearms. The specific weapon used in his
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety nine suicide was later examined in the context
Speaker 3: of the yogurt shop case. Investigators compared the characteristics of
Speaker 3: the firearms to the ballistic evidence recovered from the scene.
Speaker 3: They did not find a direct match. There was no
Speaker 3: way to establish that the weapon used in nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: nine had also been used in nineteen ninety one. The
Speaker 3: evidence did not allow for that conclusion. What they found
Speaker 3: instead was consistency. The type of weapon he possessed fell
Speaker 3: within the same class identified in the yogurt chop investigation.
Speaker 3: The calibers aligned, the use of a firearm is a
Speaker 3: primary tool of control. Aligned. The presence of multiple weapons
Speaker 3: in his possession at different points in his life, aligned
Speaker 3: with the possibility raised in the original investigation that more
Speaker 3: than one gun had been used in the shop. Again,
Speaker 3: it was not proof, it was alignment. By this stage,
Speaker 3: the case was no longer built on a single piece
Speaker 3: of evidence. It was built on accumulation. The partial DNA
Speaker 3: profile did not identify Brasher's outright, but it intersected with
Speaker 3: him in a way that justified further investigation. The geographic
Speaker 3: timeline did not place him in Austin at the exact
Speaker 3: moment of the crime, but it placed him in Texas
Speaker 3: within a narrow and relevant window. The pattern of confirmed
Speaker 3: crimes did not replicate the yogurt shop murders exactly, but
Speaker 3: it demonstrated behavior that did not conflict with what had
Speaker 3: occurred there. The weapon characteristics did not produce a definitive
Speaker 3: ballistic match, but they aligned with the types of firearms
Speaker 3: he had possessed and used. Each element was on its
Speaker 3: own incomplete. Together, they formed a structure that had not
Speaker 3: existed before. For decades, the yogurt shop murders had resisted
Speaker 3: any kind of structure. The case had moved through phases
Speaker 3: initial investigation, false lead, confessions, convictions, reversals, without ever producing
Speaker 3: a suspect who could be supported across multiple forms of evidence.
Speaker 3: Brashers changed that. He was not introduced through a statement,
Speaker 3: He was not introduced through proximity alone. He entered the
Speaker 3: case through the evidence itself and was reinforced by every
Speaker 3: additional layer investigators were able to examine. The result was
Speaker 3: not a single moment of conft. It was an ever
Speaker 3: increasing pressure, a gradual narrowing, a point at which the
Speaker 3: number of plausible explanations for the crime began to shrink,
Speaker 3: and one name remained consistently aligned with the facts that
Speaker 3: had endured since nineteen ninety one, the announcement the limits
Speaker 3: the end by September twenty twenty five were talking just
Speaker 3: six months ago, folks thirty four years since the crime.
Speaker 3: But by September twenty twenty five, the case that had
Speaker 3: moved in cycles for more than three decades returned to
Speaker 3: public view with a different kind of statement. There was
Speaker 3: no arrest, there was no defendant. There was no court
Speaker 3: room waiting to receive the evidence. Instead, there was a
Speaker 3: press conference. Officials from the Austin Police Department stood before
Speaker 3: cameras and outlined what the investigation had produced after years
Speaker 3: of renewed forensic work. The language was measured, it had
Speaker 3: to be The standard bee addressed was not the same
Speaker 3: as the one required in a court room, but it
Speaker 3: was still bound by evidence. They named Robert Eugene Brashers.
Speaker 3: They did not present him as a man who had
Speaker 3: been charged. They did not present him as someone who
Speaker 3: would stand trial. They described him as a primary suspect,
Speaker 3: supported by a combination of forensic analysis, investigative reconstruction, and
Speaker 3: corroborating information drawn from cases in other jurisdictions. The statement
Speaker 3: rested on several points. A partial DNA profile recovered from
Speaker 3: the yogurt shop evidence showed correspondence with Brashers. The profile
Speaker 3: was not complete, but it was consistent enough to justify
Speaker 3: inclusion in further investigation. That profile did not match any
Speaker 3: of the men who had previously been charged and convicted
Speaker 3: in the case. Brashers had been placed in Texas within
Speaker 3: forty eight hours of the murders, stopped at a border
Speaker 3: checkpoint in Elpaso while driving a stolen vehicle and carrying
Speaker 3: a firearm. He had been linked through DNA to multiple
Speaker 3: violent crimes committed in the early nineteen nineties across the South.
Speaker 3: Each of those points existed independently, together they formed the
Speaker 3: basis of the announcement. Investigators did not describe the conclusion
Speaker 3: as definitive in the way a conviction would be. They
Speaker 3: described that as the strongest alignment of evidence the case
Speaker 3: had produced since nineteen ninety one. For the city of Austin,
Speaker 3: the announcements reopened a story that had never fully closed.
Speaker 3: The names of the four victims, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison,
Speaker 3: Eliza Thomas, and Amy Ayers were spoken again in the
Speaker 3: context of a development that had not existed when the
Speaker 3: case first dominated headlines. For the families, it felt as
Speaker 3: though the information arrived almost in some kind of horrible vacuum.
Speaker 3: There was no trial date, no jury selection, no sequence
Speaker 3: of testimony that would unfold in a court room. The
Speaker 3: announcement provided direction, it did not provide legal resolution, and
Speaker 3: that distinction defined the final phase of the case. Under
Speaker 3: the standards required for prosecution. The evidence did not meet
Speaker 3: the threshold necessary to bring charges. The DNA profile was partial.
Speaker 3: It could not on its own identify Brashers with the
Speaker 3: level of certainty required for a criminal conviction. There was
Speaker 3: no confession. There was no eye witness placing him inside
Speaker 3: the yogurt shop. The physical evidence, degraded by fire and time,
Speaker 3: could not establish his presence in the room in a
Speaker 3: way that would withstand the scrutiny of a trial. The
Speaker 3: man identified as the primary suspect had been dead since
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety nine. He'd been dead for twenty six years.
Speaker 3: Even if the evidence had been stronger, there would be
Speaker 3: no proceeding against him. The legal system requires a defendant.
Speaker 3: There was none. The difference between investigative certainty and legal
Speaker 3: certainty became unavoidable. Investigators could assemble a case based on
Speaker 3: cumulative evidence. They could examine how the DNA aligned, how
Speaker 3: the timeline fit, how the pattern of confirmed crimes corresponded
Speaker 3: to what had occurred in Austin. They could evaluate the
Speaker 3: consistence andy of that alignment against every other possibility that
Speaker 3: had been considered over the years. But a court room
Speaker 3: requires something more rigid. It requires evidence that can be presented, challenged,
Speaker 3: and proven beyond a reasonable doubt before a jury. The
Speaker 3: yogurt shop case, as it stood in twenty twenty five
Speaker 3: could not meet that standard. Still, that failure did not
Speaker 3: return the case to where it had been sure. The
Speaker 3: case remained open. In a technical sense, no charges had
Speaker 3: been filed against Rashers, no court had issued a ruling
Speaker 3: on his involvement. But the investigation had reached a point
Speaker 3: where no alternative explanation aligned with the preserved evidence as
Speaker 3: consistently for the families. That distinction existed alongside everything that
Speaker 3: had come before it. The initial investigation in nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 3: the arrests in nineteen ninety nine, the convictions in two
Speaker 3: thousand and one and two thousand two, the reversals in
Speaker 3: two thousand and six and two thousand seven, the years
Speaker 3: in which the case had returned to uncertainty and now
Speaker 3: the identification of a suspect who could not be tried.
Speaker 3: The process had not moved in a straight line. It
Speaker 3: had advanced, collapsed, and advanced again under different standards of evidence.
Speaker 3: Each phase had carried its own version of certainty, some
Speaker 3: of which did not could not hold. The yogurt shop
Speaker 3: itself no longer bore any visible connection to the events
Speaker 3: of December sixth, nineteen ninety one. The space had been rebuilt,
Speaker 3: the damage repaired. The businesses that followed operated without reference
Speaker 3: to what had occurred there. The physical location did not
Speaker 3: preserve the history the evidence did. It had been collected
Speaker 3: in a burned room under conditions that limited what investigators
Speaker 3: could do with it at the time. It had been stored,
Speaker 3: re visited, and tested again as methods improved. It had
Speaker 3: survived the period in which the case moved in different directions,
Speaker 3: when confessions replaced forensic grounding and led to conviction that
Speaker 3: did not hold. In the end, It was that preserved material,
Speaker 3: partial degraded but intact enough, that intersected with information collected
Speaker 3: elsewhere and produced the name Robert Eugene Brashers. No witness
Speaker 3: identified him in nineteen ninety one, no confession tied him
Speaker 3: to the crime, no investigation at the time of the
Speaker 3: murders connected him to Austin. The answer emerged from evidence
Speaker 3: that remained unchanged, while the ability to interpret it evolved.
Speaker 3: The four victims remained the fixed point. Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison,
Speaker 3: Eliza Thomas, Amy Ayers. Their names appeared at the beginning
Speaker 3: of the case and remained at the end of it,
Speaker 3: and their names are names worth remembering. I'm z Evan
Speaker 3: Odelberg and this has been kind of Murdery.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please subscribe, review and tell
Speaker 1: your friends. You can find us on social media at
Speaker 1: kai Na Murdery or email at Kindomurdery at gmail dot com.
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