The Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders: Part Three

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning. Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now.

0:18 Speaker 2: True Crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange, and the darkly comic. A podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all, just so long as it's kind the murdery. Hey everybody, I'm so glad you're here with me today. Look, I owe you an apology. I didn't manage to put out an episode last week. I'm sorry. I was at the Game Development Conference, a video game business conference in San Francisco, and I was staying at a hotel and I just got so darned busy I didn't manage to record an episode.

1:00 Speaker 2: And then even this week, I got all wrapped up in sideways and didn't manage to put an episode out on Thursday like I'm supposed to. So sorry about that.

1:11 Speaker 3: We are here at Saturday afternoon slash evening depending on where you live, and I am just now delivering the Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders Part three. I plan to be back to the regular schedule of Thursday releases going forward. I sure do appreciate you sticking with me. By the way, this is kind of murdery and I am Zevan Odelberg. And yes, I did say Austin Yogurt Chop Murders Part three. So if you haven't heard parts one and two yet, go listen to them and then come join us. I will save you a seat, I will keep it warm and toasty for you.

1:47 Speaker 3: And if you're all caught up, well, then let's get right down to business as kind of murderies. The Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders Part three starts now.

2:07 Speaker 3: The verdicts held for a time. Robert Springsteen the fourth had been sentenced to death in two thousand and one. Michael Scott had been sentenced to life in prison in two thousand and two. The prosecution had secured convictions in one of Austin's most notorious unsolved cases. For several years, the outcome appeared settled, but the foundation of those convictions was never physical evidence. It was confessions As the appeals process began, defense attorneys focused on how those confessions had been obtained and how they had been used in court.

2:42 Speaker 3: They examined the transcripts, They review the recordings. They compared what each defendant had said and how those statements had been introduced to the jury. A central issue emerged from that review. At the trial, the prosecution had used each defendant's confession to support the case against the other. Michael Scott's statements referenced Robert Springsteen. Robert Springsteen's statements referenced Michael Scott. Jurors heard both accounts as part of a single narrative of the crime, but Scott and Springsteen had been tried separately.

3:16 Speaker 3: Because of that, neither man had the opportunity to directly question the other about those statements in court. The issue reached the appellate courts as a constitutional question. Under the sixth Amendment, a defendant has the right to confront the witnesses against him. Defense attorneys argued that by introducing one defendant's confession in the trial of the other without allowing cross examination, the prosecution had violated that right. The courts agreed in two thousand and six, Robert Springsteen's conviction was overturned.

3:48 Speaker 3: The ruling did not declare him innocent. It did not resolve what had happened inside the yogurt shop. Instead, it addressed the legal structure of the trial itself. The court found that the way that the confessions had been used, used each reinforcing the other without cross examination, was incompatible with the requirements of a fair trial. A year later, in two thousand seven, Michael Scott's conviction was also overturned on similar grounds. The case, which had once appeared closed was suddenly open again.

4:18 Speaker 3: Prosecutors initially signaled that they intended to retry the case. The confessions still existed, the narrative constructed in nineteen ninety nine had not disappeared, but the legal landscape had changed, and the prosecution was now facing a more difficult question. Could the case be proven without relying on the same use of confessions that had led to the overturned convictions. At the same time, another development began to reshape the case in a more fundamental way. Advances in DNA testing had progressed significantly since the early nineteen nineties.

4:52 Speaker 3: Evidence collected from the yogurt shop limited and partially degraded, though it was could now be re examined using newer techniques. Forensic scientists were able to extract and analyze biological material that earlier methods had not been able to interpret fully. The results introduced a new complication. Male DNA recovered from the crime scene did not match Michael Scott. It did not match Robert Springsteen. It did not match Maurice Pierce or Forrest Welborne. The absence of a match did not by itself establish who had committed the murders, but it removed the only biological link that might have connected the four men to the scene.

5:33 Speaker 3: For a case that had relied so heavily on confessions, the DNA findings shifted the balance. The prosecution now faced a situation where the central evidence used to secure conviction had been ruled inadmissible in its original form, and the available forensic evidence did not place the defendants inside the yogurt shop. The planned retrials began to falter. Without stronger physical evidence, prosecutors could not present the same case that had persuaded juries in two thousand and one. In two thousand and two, the legal and evidentiary landscape had changed two significantly.

6:07 Speaker 3: Eventually, the charges were dismissed. The men who had been convicted of capital murder were no longer facing prosecution for the yogurt shop killings at all. The case returned to its original state unresolved. By the end of two thousand and seven, it had come completely a part. For several years, there had been an answer. Two men convicted sentences handed down a court room version of events that placed four teenagers inside the yogurt shop on the night of December sixth, nineteen ninety one. That version had held long enough to feel settled.

6:39 Speaker 3: Then it didn't. The convictions were overturned. The DNA did not match, the charges were dismissed. The structure that had been built in nineteen ninety nine and reinforced in court rooms in two thousand and one and two thousand and two no longer stood. What remained was the same set of facts investigators had been working with since the beginning. Four victims, two fire, a fire set after the killings, a crime scene that had been partially erased the moment the flames took hold. The difference now was not the evidence, it was the context.

7:10 Speaker 3: The case had already been solved. That's in quotes. Of course, once that changed how everything was viewed moving forward inside the Austin Police Department, the investigation did not reset cleanly. It could not. The file was no longer just a record of a crime and an initial investigation. It was also a record of interrogations, confessions, trials, convictions, appeals, reversals and dismissals. Every step taken after nineteen ninety nine had to be re examined. Detectives assigned to the case in the years that followed approached it with a different posture.

7:46 Speaker 3: They reviewed the original nineteen ninety one reports again. They revisited witness statements that had been taken before any suspects had been named. They separated what had been known before the confessions from what had been introduced after afterwards. This was an important distinction. Once a confession enters a case, it can reshape how evidence is interpreted. Details that sam ambiguous can appear meaningful when viewed through the lens of a statement. After the convictions were overturned, investigators had to ask a difficult question which parts of the case had been influenced by the confessions and which stood independently.

8:22 Speaker 3: The physical evidence was limited, but it still existed. Ballistic reports confirmed that two weapons had been used, a three eighty caliber pistol and a twenty two caliber revolver. That detail had never changed. It remained one of the few concrete elements of the case. Whether it indicated multiple offenders or a single offender carrying more than one weapon was still unresolved. The arsenal analysis also remained intact the fire had been set deliberately after the murders. That finding had not been challenged by any later development.

8:53 Speaker 3: Whoever committed the crime had taken steps to destroy the evidence and delay discovery. The DNA evidence introduced a new dimension, but not a complete one. Investigators had a male DNA profile recovered from the scene. The sample was partial, It was not sufficient at the time to identify a specific individual, but it was strong enough to exclude the four men who had once been charged. That exclusion carried weight. It meant that the case no longer had a suspect tied to the crime scene by biological evidence.

9:25 Speaker 3: It meant that any future investigation would need to identify someone who both matched the DNA and could be placed in Austin on the night of the murders. The suspect pool widened again. Names that had been set aside in the early nineteen nineties were reconsidered. Individuals who had been interviewed briefly and cleared were looked at again with fresh eyes. Detectives reviewed lists of known offenders in the area at the time, people with histories of burglary, sexual assault, or violent crime. They also expanded beyond austin.

9:54 Speaker 3: The possibility that the perpetrator had not been local became more prominent. The crime itselfuggested a level of boldness and control that did not necessarily require familiarity with the victims. A person passing through the area, someone with access to firearms and a willingness to commit violence could not be ruled out. At the same time, the absence of a clear suspect made the case harder to work. Cold cases rely on new information, a witness who comes forward a piece of evidence reinterpreted, a technological advance that allows old material to be analyzed in a new way.

10:29 Speaker 3: Without those developments, investigations can remain in a holding pattern for years. The yogurt shop murders entered that phase. Detectives continued to work the case, but the pace slowed. Leads were followed when they emerged, evidence was preserved carefully, with the understanding that future forensic techniques might extract more information than current methods allowed. The file remained active, but it no longer moved quickly. For the families, the reversal of the convictions meant returning to a place they had been before, reading without an answer.

11:01 Speaker 3: The legal system had provided a resolution and then taken it back. What remained was uncertainty, the same uncertainty that had existed in the early months of nineteen ninety two. Public attention shifted over time. New cases emerged, new stories replaced old ones in headlines, but the yogurt chop merders did not disappear entirely. They became part of the city's history, referenced when discussions turned to unsolved crimes or to the limits of forensic evidence in the early nineteen nineties. Inside the department, the case was not forgotten.

11:35 Speaker 3: It was cataloged, maintained, reviewed periodically, and left open. By the end of the decade, the investigation had returned to its most basic form, no confirmed suspects, no active prosecution, a set of facts that had not changed, and a question that had not been answered. The case had been built once, it would have to be built again. For the families of the victims, the reversal was not simply a legal technicality. It meant that the answer they had been given after nearly a decade of waiting, had been taken back.

12:10 Speaker 3: The question of who killed Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas and Amy Ayers was no longer settled in a court room. It was unsettled there in the Austin Police Department, another open case file. The evidence had not changed, The crime scene was still what it had been in nineteen ninety one, burned, disrupted incomplete. The confessions still existed, but their role in any future prosecution had been weakened. The DNA evidence pointed away from the men who had been convicted. An investigation that had once apparently reached its end had been pushed back to the beginning, and by the late two thousands, the yogurt shop murders were once again a cold case.

12:51 Speaker 3: When the case settled back into the cold case unit, investigators were left with the task that was both simple and profoundly difficult, separate what could be proven from what they had only ever believed. The confessions from nineteen ninety nine did not disappear. They remained in the file, recorded, transcribed, and studied, but their role changed. They were no longer the foundation of a prosecution. They became pieces of information that had to be weighed against everything else, tested, compared, and in some cases set aside.

13:25 Speaker 3: Detectives began working backward again, focusing on what had existed before any suspect had been named the crime scene. The physical layout of the yogurt shop had been documented in detail, the front counter, the narrow hallway, the back room where the victims were found. Measurements had been taken, photographs preserved, angles, distances, and positions. Even after the fire, enough of the structure remained to establish how the space had been used. The movement of the victims into that back room remained one of the most important facts in the case.

13:59 Speaker 3: More individuals had been controlled, restrained, and relocated. That required time and coordination, whether it was one offender or more than one. The act itself suggested that the perpetrator was able to maintain control over the situation without interruption. No evidence indicated that anyone outside the shop had intervened. The bindings were also re examined. Investigators looked again at the materials used, how they had been applied, or whether there were patterns that might suggest a particular method or prior experience.

14:34 Speaker 3: Even partially burned fibers could sometimes reveal origin, type of rope, type of fabric, whether it was something commonly available or something more specific. The conclusions remained limited the fire had done its work. The ballistic evidence, however, was unaffected by fire. Two weapons had been used, a three eighty caliber pistol and a twenty two caliber revolver. The bullets recovered from the victims had had been analyzed for rifling characteristics, and those findings did not change with time.

15:05 Speaker 3: They were among the few pieces of evidence untouched by the later legal developments. Investigators revisited those reports, asking the same questions they had asked in nineteen ninety one. Was it two shooters or one person carrying two firearms? Was there a sequence to the use of each weapon? Did one weapon correspond to a specific victim or victims? The answers were not definitive, but the presence of two guns added a complexity to the crime. The arson findings were also stable. The fire had been intentionally set in the area where the bodies were located.

15:42 Speaker 3: That indicated a decision made after the killings to destroy evidence, to obscure what had happened, to delay discovery. It was not an accidental ignition. It was part of the sequence. That fact shaped how investigators thought about the offender. It suggested awareness. It suggested that whoever committed the murders understood that evidence could link them to the scene and took steps to prevent that. The timeline remained narrow. The girls had been alive some time before eleven p m. Smoke had been observed shortly before midnight.

16:14 Speaker 3: Within that window, the offenders had entered the shop, controlled four victims, committed sexual assault, carried out the shootings, and set the fire. Everything happened in less than one hour. That compression of time continued to stand out. It indicated efficiency. It indicated that the offenders, whether one or more, moved through the sequence without hesitation. Investigators returned to the question of injury. There had been no clear signs of forced injury at the front door. That detail had always been uncertain because of the damage caused by the fire, but it remained part of the working understanding of the case.

16:51 Speaker 3: If the door had not been forced then it had been opened. If it had been opened, then someone inside had made that decision. That possibility. It did not mean the victims knew the offender. It could have been a response to a knock, a request, or a moment of hesitation at closing time, but it narrowed the sequence. It suggested that the initial contact may not have been immediately violent. Investigators documented that distinction carefully. The cash register remained another fixed point. Cash had been taken.

17:23 Speaker 3: The amount was not large. It supported the possibility of a robbery, but did not fully explain the scale of the crime. Detectives revisited that question repeatedly. Was the theft the motive or was it incidental to something else? The answer remained uncertain as the review continued. Detectives also looked at the evidence that had been collected but not fully understood in nineteen ninety one. Items that had been stored, cataloged, and preserved swabs, fibers, fragments. Each piece was re examined with the awareness that forensic science had advanced.

17:59 Speaker 3: The DNA profile recovered from the scene remained partial, but it existed. It represented one of the few direct biological links to the person who had been inside that room. At the time, it was not enough to identify anyone, but it was enough to wait. Cold case work often becomes a matter of preservation as much as investigation. Detectives maintain evidence, not because it can answer questions immediately, but because it might answer them later. The yogurt shop case entered that phase. What still held was not a suspect.

18:32 Speaker 3: It was a framework, a sequence of events, a set of facts that had survived fire, water and time. Those facts did not point to a name, but they also did not change, and because they did not change, investigators knew that whatever answer eventually emerged would have to fit inside them. The DNA profile, partial as it was, became one of the central points of focus. It did not match the men who had once been convicted. That fact alone reshaped the case, but it also did not identify anyone else. At that stage, the profile existed more as a boundary than a solution.

19:12 Speaker 3: It excluded, it did not name. Detectives understood what that meant in practical terms. The person responsible for the murders had left biological material at the scene. The material had survived fire water and the years that followed, but without a match in any database, it remained an unanswered question. The case waited for something to intersect with that profile, a new arrest in another jurisdiction, a convicted offender whose DNA was entered into a database, a technological advance that allowed partial profiles to be compared in ways that had not been possible before Until that happened.

19:51 Speaker 3: The DNA remained static. The rest of the evidence did not evolve. The ballistics reports still identified two weapons. No firearm had been recovered that it could be tied to the crime. The arsenal analysis still indicated that the fire had been set deliberately after the killings. The timeline still confined to the sequence of events to less than an hour. Nothing contradicted those findings, nothing expanded them. The witness statements remained as they had been taken early in the days of the investigation.

20:21 Speaker 3: People remembered seeing cars, people remembered being in the area, but memory fades in the passage of time made those recollections less reliable. With each passing year, investigators occasionally revisited those witnesses, asking the same questions in slightly different ways, looking for details that might have been overlooked. The answers rarely changed. The yogurt shop itself no longer carried the physical imprint of the crime. The damage had been repaired, the space had been repurposed. New businesses occupied the location.

20:53 Speaker 3: Customers entered and left without any visible reminder of what had occurred there, but the address remained in the case file, a fixed point for the families. The passage of time did not alter the central fact. The men who had once been held responsible were no longer facing charges. But someone out there had killed those girls. That was also a fact. Fort Pierce, nineteen eighty five, the first time Robert Eugene Brashers was tied to a violent crime. It did not happen in Texas. It happened in Fort Pierce, Florida, in November of nineteen eighty five.

21:32 Speaker 3: Brashers was twenty seven years old. The setting was not isolated, It was not remote. It was a bar, public, social ordinary, the kind of place where people meet without planning to remember each other later. That was where he met Michelle Wilkerson, a twenty four year old woman. They spoke, they drank. At some point they left together. What happened next was reconstructed from Wilkerson's account. After leaving the bar, the two continued drinking. The interaction, whatever it had been, initially shifted.

22:04 Speaker 3: Brashers made a sexual advance. Wilkerson refused. When she tried to leave, he pulled a gun. He shot her. The weapon was a twenty five caliber automatic pistol. She was hit in the head and neck. The injuries were severe, but not immediately fatal. Wilkerson remained conscious. She moved away from him, found a place to hide, and waited. At some point Brashers stopped searching for her. He left the area. When she was certain he was gone, she found help. What she provided to investigators was not a guess.

22:40 Speaker 3: It was a description. She described Brasher's himself, his clothing, his manner. She described his car. She described the type of cigarettes he smoked. Details that, taken together, gave detectives something to work with beyond the scene itself. Police located him quickly. The arrest followed with out the kind of delay that would characterize later investigations into his actions. This was a case where the victim survived, spoke, and identified the person who had attacked her. Brashers was charged in nineteen eighty six.

23:13 Speaker 3: He was convicted. The sentence was twelve years in prison. The conviction established a record. It defined him in legal terms as someone who had committed a violent offense involving a firearm. It also established something else, something not recorded in the formal language of the case filed, but evident in the sequence of events. He had shot a woman to close range, he left her for dead, and he had walked away. The system responded in a way consistent with the time a conviction a sentence time to be served, but the sentence did not run its full course.

23:49 Speaker 3: In May nineteen eighty nine, barely three years later, Robert Eugene Brashers was released from prison. The reason was listed as good behavior. From the standpoint of the record, the case in Florida was complete. The offender had been identified, prosecuted, and released according to the rules governing his sentence. From the standpoint of sequence, though it was not complete, his release placed him back into the public less than three years before the night of December sixth, nineteen ninety one.

24:22 Speaker 3: At that point, there was no connection between the man who had been convicted in Florida and the murders that would later occur in Austin, Texas. No shared jurisdiction, no shared investigation, no shared evidence, only a timeline, a violent offense in nineteen eighty five, a release in nineteen eighty nine, and a gap of time that had not yet been examined. The Fort Pierce case did not attract national attention. It did not become a defining story. It existed as one file among many, a documented act of violence followed by a conviction.

24:57 Speaker 3: But the details of that case would remain present. Served the weapon, the method, the proximity, the fact that the victim survived and described him. Those details did not change. They waited in the record, separate from the events in Austin, separated by distance and by years, with nothing to connect them at the time. The connection would not be made then. It would not be made in nineteen ninety one. It would not be made in nineteen ninety nine. It would come much later, when the case in Austin had already been built, once taken apart and set aside for now.

25:34 Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty five, Robert Eugene Braschers was simply a man who had been convicted of a violent crime and released back into the world. Nothing in the record suggested where he would go next, only that he had already done it once. When Robert Eugene Braschers walked out of prison in May nineteen eighty nine. The record described the release in neutral terms, good behavior, time served, case closed. There was no notation that followed him out the door, nothing that forecast what would come next, no mechanism to connect what he had done in Florida to where he might go or what he might do once he was no longer under supervision.

26:12 Speaker 3: He was thirty one years old, free to move, and he did over the next few years. Brasher's did not settle into a fixed place or a stable pattern that would have made him easier to track in hindsight. Instead, his movements cut across state lines through the South, without a single location anchoring him for long. He drifted, not invisibly, but without drawing sustained attention. There were arrests. In February nineteen ninety two, he was taken into custody again, this time in possession of a stolen vehicle and a stolen firearm.

26:44 Speaker 3: The arrest report listed more than just those two items. Officers recovered a police scanner, a police style jacket, a set of burglary tools, and a fake Tennessee license. Each item on its own could be explained. Together, they suggested preparation mobility, an ability to move through places without being immediately identified for what he was. He was sent back to prison, not for what would later be connected to him, but for what officers could prove at the time. He remained incarcerated until nineteen ninety seven.

27:18 Speaker 3: That gap nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety two, then nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety seven sits in the timeline like a set of brackets around the early nineteen nineties, a period when his movements intersect with the years in which a number of violent crimes would later be re examined. At the time, those connections were not visible. There was no shared suspect across jurisdictions, no centralized system that would have allowed detectives in one state to compare notes with investigators in another and see a pattern forming in real time.

27:52 Speaker 3: Cases were local evidence stayed where it was collected, names stayed inside individual files. When Brasher's was released to get in nineteen ninety seven, the pattern resumed movement contact opportunity. In April nineteen ninety eight, he was arrested once more, this time while attempting to break into a woman's home in Paragold, Arkansas. The woman was someone he had done work for, an entry point that did not require force. At the beginning, he knew the location, he knew the layout. By the time he was stopped, the circumstances had shifted, the phone lines had been cut.

28:29 Speaker 3: He had with him a video camera and tools consistent with forced injury. The arrest interrupted whatever was about to happen next, but again the charge did not hold him for long. He was released. The pattern remained intact across these years. There was no single case that defined him publicly, no headline that followed him from state to state. What existed instead were fragments, arrests, possessions, encounters, each handled within its own jurisdiction, each resolved within the limits of what could be proven at that moment.

29:05 Speaker 3: From the outside, it did not look like a single story. It looked like separate incidents. But the continuity was there. A man who had already used a firearm against a woman at close range, a man who carried tools that allowed him to move, to observe, to enter, a man who did not remain in one place long enough to become predictable. And then in January nineteen ninety nine. The movement stopped, not because he had been arrested again because he had been located. After stealing a car, Brashers drove to a Super eight motel in Canet, Missouri.

29:42 Speaker 3: He was not alone. Members of his family were with him. Police were notified about the stolen vehicle. They came to the motel. What followed did not resolve in a conventional arrest. Brashers had a firearm. He did not come out immediately. He released his family. He stayed inside. The standoff lasted four hours. Then he shot himself. The wound was not immediately fatal. He was transported for medical care. He remained alive for six days. On January nineteenth, nineteen ninety nine, Robert Eugene Brasher's died.

30:17 Speaker 3: At that moment, the record closed again. A man with a history of violence, multiple arrests, a suicide following a police standoff. There was no public accounting of anything beyond what had been documented in those individual cases. No linkage, no broader pattern, nothing that tied him to events in Austin, Texas in December nineteen ninety one. That connection did not exist yet, not in the files, not in the evidence, not in the investigation, but the timeline held nineteen eighty nine, released nineteen ninety one.

30:55 Speaker 3: Austin nineteen ninety two, arrested with a stolen gun and vehiclenineteen ninety seven, released again nineteen ninety eight, arrested attempting injury into a home nineteen ninety nine. Dead. The sequence was complete, the meaning of it had not yet been established, and if you'd like to know more about that meaning, please rejoin me on Thursday, March twenty sixth for part four of the Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders. And Hey, if you know anybody that likes a true crime podcast, please do recommend the show, whether it's friends, family, and acquaintance, somebody you bump into an elevator.

31:34 Speaker 3: If you spread the word, ah, I sure would appreciate it and I'll see you next week. I'm Zevan Odleberg and this has been kind of Murdery.

31:47 Speaker 1: If you like the show, please subscribe, review and tell your friends. You can find us on social media at kinda Murdery or email at Kindamurdery at gmail dot com