The Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders: Part Three
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 2: True Crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish,
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Speaker 3: We are here at Saturday afternoon slash evening depending on
Speaker 3: where you live, and I am just now delivering the Austin,
Speaker 3: Texas Yogurt Shop Murders Part three. I plan to be
Speaker 3: back to the regular schedule of Thursday releases going forward.
Speaker 3: I sure do appreciate you sticking with me. By the way,
Speaker 3: this is kind of murdery and I am Zevan Odelberg.
Speaker 3: And yes, I did say Austin Yogurt Chop Murders Part three.
Speaker 3: So if you haven't heard parts one and two yet,
Speaker 3: go listen to them and then come join us. I
Speaker 3: will save you a seat, I will keep it warm
Speaker 3: and toasty for you. And if you're all caught up, well,
Speaker 3: then let's get right down to business as kind of murderies.
Speaker 3: The Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders Part three starts now.
Speaker 3: The verdicts held for a time. Robert Springsteen the fourth
Speaker 3: had been sentenced to death in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3: Michael Scott had been sentenced to life in prison in
Speaker 3: two thousand and two. The prosecution had secured convictions in
Speaker 3: one of Austin's most notorious unsolved cases. For several years,
Speaker 3: the outcome appeared settled, but the foundation of those convictions
Speaker 3: was never physical evidence. It was confessions As the appeals
Speaker 3: process began, defense attorneys focused on how those confessions had
Speaker 3: been obtained and how they had been used in court.
Speaker 3: They examined the transcripts, They review the recordings. They compared
Speaker 3: what each defendant had said and how those statements had
Speaker 3: been introduced to the jury. A central issue emerged from
Speaker 3: that review. At the trial, the prosecution had used each
Speaker 3: defendant's confession to support the case against the other. Michael
Speaker 3: Scott's statements referenced Robert Springsteen. Robert Springsteen's statements referenced Michael Scott.
Speaker 3: Jurors heard both accounts as part of a single narrative
Speaker 3: of the crime, but Scott and Springsteen had been tried separately.
Speaker 3: Because of that, neither man had the opportunity to directly
Speaker 3: question the other about those statements in court. The issue
Speaker 3: reached the appellate courts as a constitutional question. Under the
Speaker 3: sixth Amendment, a defendant has the right to confront the
Speaker 3: witnesses against him. Defense attorneys argued that by introducing one
Speaker 3: defendant's confession in the trial of the other without allowing
Speaker 3: cross examination, the prosecution had violated that right. The courts
Speaker 3: agreed in two thousand and six, Robert Springsteen's conviction was overturned.
Speaker 3: The ruling did not declare him innocent. It did not
Speaker 3: resolve what had happened inside the yogurt shop. Instead, it
Speaker 3: addressed the legal structure of the trial itself. The court
Speaker 3: found that the way that the confessions had been used,
Speaker 3: used each reinforcing the other without cross examination, was incompatible
Speaker 3: with the requirements of a fair trial. A year later,
Speaker 3: in two thousand seven, Michael Scott's conviction was also overturned
Speaker 3: on similar grounds. The case, which had once appeared closed
Speaker 3: was suddenly open again. Prosecutors initially signaled that they intended
Speaker 3: to retry the case. The confessions still existed, the narrative
Speaker 3: constructed in nineteen ninety nine had not disappeared, but the
Speaker 3: legal landscape had changed, and the prosecution was now facing
Speaker 3: a more difficult question. Could the case be proven without
Speaker 3: relying on the same use of confessions that had led
Speaker 3: to the overturned convictions. At the same time, another development
Speaker 3: began to reshape the case in a more fundamental way.
Speaker 3: Advances in DNA testing had progressed significantly since the early
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties. Evidence collected from the yogurt shop limited and
Speaker 3: partially degraded, though it was could now be re examined
Speaker 3: using newer techniques. Forensic scientists were able to extract and
Speaker 3: analyze biological material that earlier methods had not been able
Speaker 3: to interpret fully. The results introduced a new complication. Male
Speaker 3: DNA recovered from the crime scene did not match Michael Scott.
Speaker 3: It did not match Robert Springsteen. It did not match
Speaker 3: Maurice Pierce or Forrest Welborne. The absence of a match
Speaker 3: did not by itself establish who had committed the murders,
Speaker 3: but it removed the only biological link that might have
Speaker 3: connected the four men to the scene. For a case
Speaker 3: that had relied so heavily on confessions, the DNA findings
Speaker 3: shifted the balance. The prosecution now faced a situation where
Speaker 3: the central evidence used to secure conviction had been ruled
Speaker 3: inadmissible in its original form, and the available forensic evidence
Speaker 3: did not place the defendants inside the yogurt shop. The
Speaker 3: planned retrials began to falter. Without stronger physical evidence, prosecutors
Speaker 3: could not present the same case that had persuaded juries
Speaker 3: in two thousand and one. In two thousand and two,
Speaker 3: the legal and evidentiary landscape had changed two significantly. Eventually,
Speaker 3: the charges were dismissed. The men who had been convicted
Speaker 3: of capital murder were no longer facing prosecution for the
Speaker 3: yogurt shop killings at all. The case returned to its
Speaker 3: original state unresolved. By the end of two thousand and seven,
Speaker 3: it had come completely a part. For several years, there
Speaker 3: had been an answer. Two men convicted sentences handed down
Speaker 3: a court room version of events that placed four teenagers
Speaker 3: inside the yogurt shop on the night of December sixth,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety one. That version had held long enough to
Speaker 3: feel settled. Then it didn't. The convictions were overturned. The
Speaker 3: DNA did not match, the charges were dismissed. The structure
Speaker 3: that had been built in nineteen ninety nine and reinforced
Speaker 3: in court rooms in two thousand and one and two
Speaker 3: thousand and two no longer stood. What remained was the
Speaker 3: same set of facts investigators had been working with since
Speaker 3: the beginning. Four victims, two fire, a fire set after
Speaker 3: the killings, a crime scene that had been partially erased
Speaker 3: the moment the flames took hold. The difference now was
Speaker 3: not the evidence, it was the context. The case had
Speaker 3: already been solved. That's in quotes. Of course, once that
Speaker 3: changed how everything was viewed moving forward inside the Austin
Speaker 3: Police Department, the investigation did not reset cleanly. It could not.
Speaker 3: The file was no longer just a record of a
Speaker 3: crime and an initial investigation. It was also a record
Speaker 3: of interrogations, confessions, trials, convictions, appeals, reversals and dismissals. Every
Speaker 3: step taken after nineteen ninety nine had to be re examined.
Speaker 3: Detectives assigned to the case in the years that followed
Speaker 3: approached it with a different posture. They reviewed the original
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety one reports again. They revisited witness statements that
Speaker 3: had been taken before any suspects had been named. They
Speaker 3: separated what had been known before the confessions from what
Speaker 3: had been introduced after afterwards. This was an important distinction.
Speaker 3: Once a confession enters a case, it can reshape how
Speaker 3: evidence is interpreted. Details that sam ambiguous can appear meaningful
Speaker 3: when viewed through the lens of a statement. After the
Speaker 3: convictions were overturned, investigators had to ask a difficult question
Speaker 3: which parts of the case had been influenced by the
Speaker 3: confessions and which stood independently. The physical evidence was limited,
Speaker 3: but it still existed. Ballistic reports confirmed that two weapons
Speaker 3: had been used, a three eighty caliber pistol and a
Speaker 3: twenty two caliber revolver. That detail had never changed. It
Speaker 3: remained one of the few concrete elements of the case.
Speaker 3: Whether it indicated multiple offenders or a single offender carrying
Speaker 3: more than one weapon was still unresolved. The arsenal analysis
Speaker 3: also remained intact the fire had been set deliberately after
Speaker 3: the murders. That finding had not been challenged by any
Speaker 3: later development. Whoever committed the crime had taken steps to
Speaker 3: destroy the evidence and delay discovery. The DNA evidence introduced
Speaker 3: a new dimension, but not a complete one. Investigators had
Speaker 3: a male DNA profile recovered from the scene. The sample
Speaker 3: was partial, It was not sufficient at the time to
Speaker 3: identify a specific individual, but it was strong enough to
Speaker 3: exclude the four men who had once been charged. That
Speaker 3: exclusion carried weight. It meant that the case no longer
Speaker 3: had a suspect tied to the crime scene by biological evidence.
Speaker 3: It meant that any future investigation would need to identify
Speaker 3: someone who both matched the DNA and could be placed
Speaker 3: in Austin on the night of the murders. The suspect
Speaker 3: pool widened again. Names that had been set aside in
Speaker 3: the early nineteen nineties were reconsidered. Individuals who had been
Speaker 3: interviewed briefly and cleared were looked at again with fresh eyes.
Speaker 3: Detectives reviewed lists of known offenders in the area at
Speaker 3: the time, people with histories of burglary, sexual assault, or
Speaker 3: violent crime. They also expanded beyond austin. The possibility that
Speaker 3: the perpetrator had not been local became more prominent. The
Speaker 3: crime itselfuggested a level of boldness and control that did
Speaker 3: not necessarily require familiarity with the victims. A person passing
Speaker 3: through the area, someone with access to firearms and a
Speaker 3: willingness to commit violence could not be ruled out. At
Speaker 3: the same time, the absence of a clear suspect made
Speaker 3: the case harder to work. Cold cases rely on new information,
Speaker 3: a witness who comes forward a piece of evidence reinterpreted,
Speaker 3: a technological advance that allows old material to be analyzed
Speaker 3: in a new way. Without those developments, investigations can remain
Speaker 3: in a holding pattern for years. The yogurt shop murders
Speaker 3: entered that phase. Detectives continued to work the case, but
Speaker 3: the pace slowed. Leads were followed when they emerged, evidence
Speaker 3: was preserved carefully, with the understanding that future forensic techniques
Speaker 3: might extract more information than current methods allowed. The file
Speaker 3: remained active, but it no longer moved quickly. For the families,
Speaker 3: the reversal of the convictions meant returning to a place
Speaker 3: they had been before, reading without an answer. The legal
Speaker 3: system had provided a resolution and then taken it back.
Speaker 3: What remained was uncertainty, the same uncertainty that had existed
Speaker 3: in the early months of nineteen ninety two. Public attention
Speaker 3: shifted over time. New cases emerged, new stories replaced old
Speaker 3: ones in headlines, but the yogurt chop merders did not
Speaker 3: disappear entirely. They became part of the city's history, referenced
Speaker 3: when discussions turned to unsolved crimes or to the limits
Speaker 3: of forensic evidence in the early nineteen nineties. Inside the department,
Speaker 3: the case was not forgotten. It was cataloged, maintained, reviewed periodically,
Speaker 3: and left open. By the end of the decade, the
Speaker 3: investigation had returned to its most basic form, no confirmed suspects,
Speaker 3: no active prosecution, a set of facts that had not changed,
Speaker 3: and a question that had not been answered. The case
Speaker 3: had been built once, it would have to be built again.
Speaker 3: For the families of the victims, the reversal was not
Speaker 3: simply a legal technicality. It meant that the answer they
Speaker 3: had been given after nearly a decade of waiting, had
Speaker 3: been taken back. The question of who killed Jennifer Harbison,
Speaker 3: Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas and Amy Ayers was no longer
Speaker 3: settled in a court room. It was unsettled there in
Speaker 3: the Austin Police Department, another open case file. The evidence
Speaker 3: had not changed, The crime scene was still what it
Speaker 3: had been in nineteen ninety one, burned, disrupted incomplete. The
Speaker 3: confessions still existed, but their role in any future prosecution
Speaker 3: had been weakened. The DNA evidence pointed away from the
Speaker 3: men who had been convicted. An investigation that had once
Speaker 3: apparently reached its end had been pushed back to the beginning,
Speaker 3: and by the late two thousands, the yogurt shop murders
Speaker 3: were once again a cold case. When the case settled
Speaker 3: back into the cold case unit, investigators were left with
Speaker 3: the task that was both simple and profoundly difficult, separate
Speaker 3: what could be proven from what they had only ever believed.
Speaker 3: The confessions from nineteen ninety nine did not disappear. They
Speaker 3: remained in the file, recorded, transcribed, and studied, but their
Speaker 3: role changed. They were no longer the foundation of a prosecution.
Speaker 3: They became pieces of information that had to be weighed
Speaker 3: against everything else, tested, compared, and in some cases set aside.
Speaker 3: Detectives began working backward again, focusing on what had existed
Speaker 3: before any suspect had been named the crime scene. The
Speaker 3: physical layout of the yogurt shop had been documented in detail,
Speaker 3: the front counter, the narrow hallway, the back room where
Speaker 3: the victims were found. Measurements had been taken, photographs preserved, angles, distances,
Speaker 3: and positions. Even after the fire, enough of the structure
Speaker 3: remained to establish how the space had been used. The
Speaker 3: movement of the victims into that back room remained one
Speaker 3: of the most important facts in the case. More individuals
Speaker 3: had been controlled, restrained, and relocated. That required time and coordination,
Speaker 3: whether it was one offender or more than one. The
Speaker 3: act itself suggested that the perpetrator was able to maintain
Speaker 3: control over the situation without interruption. No evidence indicated that
Speaker 3: anyone outside the shop had intervened. The bindings were also
Speaker 3: re examined. Investigators looked again at the materials used, how
Speaker 3: they had been applied, or whether there were patterns that
Speaker 3: might suggest a particular method or prior experience. Even partially
Speaker 3: burned fibers could sometimes reveal origin, type of rope, type
Speaker 3: of fabric, whether it was something commonly available or something
Speaker 3: more specific. The conclusions remained limited the fire had done
Speaker 3: its work. The ballistic evidence, however, was unaffected by fire.
Speaker 3: Two weapons had been used, a three eighty caliber pistol
Speaker 3: and a twenty two caliber revolver. The bullets recovered from
Speaker 3: the victims had had been analyzed for rifling characteristics, and
Speaker 3: those findings did not change with time. They were among
Speaker 3: the few pieces of evidence untouched by the later legal developments.
Speaker 3: Investigators revisited those reports, asking the same questions they had
Speaker 3: asked in nineteen ninety one. Was it two shooters or
Speaker 3: one person carrying two firearms? Was there a sequence to
Speaker 3: the use of each weapon? Did one weapon correspond to
Speaker 3: a specific victim or victims? The answers were not definitive,
Speaker 3: but the presence of two guns added a complexity to
Speaker 3: the crime. The arson findings were also stable. The fire
Speaker 3: had been intentionally set in the area where the bodies
Speaker 3: were located. That indicated a decision made after the killings
Speaker 3: to destroy evidence, to obscure what had happened, to delay discovery.
Speaker 3: It was not an accidental ignition. It was part of
Speaker 3: the sequence. That fact shaped how investigators thought about the offender.
Speaker 3: It suggested awareness. It suggested that whoever committed the murders
Speaker 3: understood that evidence could link them to the scene and
Speaker 3: took steps to prevent that. The timeline remained narrow. The
Speaker 3: girls had been alive some time before eleven p m.
Speaker 3: Smoke had been observed shortly before midnight. Within that window,
Speaker 3: the offenders had entered the shop, controlled four victims, committed
Speaker 3: sexual assault, carried out the shootings, and set the fire.
Speaker 3: Everything happened in less than one hour. That compression of
Speaker 3: time continued to stand out. It indicated efficiency. It indicated
Speaker 3: that the offenders, whether one or more, moved through the
Speaker 3: sequence without hesitation. Investigators returned to the question of injury.
Speaker 3: There had been no clear signs of forced injury at
Speaker 3: the front door. That detail had always been uncertain because
Speaker 3: of the damage caused by the fire, but it remained
Speaker 3: part of the working understanding of the case. If the
Speaker 3: door had not been forced then it had been opened.
Speaker 3: If it had been opened, then someone inside had made
Speaker 3: that decision. That possibility. It did not mean the victims
Speaker 3: knew the offender. It could have been a response to
Speaker 3: a knock, a request, or a moment of hesitation at
Speaker 3: closing time, but it narrowed the sequence. It suggested that
Speaker 3: the initial contact may not have been immediately violent. Investigators
Speaker 3: documented that distinction carefully. The cash register remained another fixed point.
Speaker 3: Cash had been taken. The amount was not large. It
Speaker 3: supported the possibility of a robbery, but did not fully
Speaker 3: explain the scale of the crime. Detectives revisited that question repeatedly.
Speaker 3: Was the theft the motive or was it incidental to
Speaker 3: something else? The answer remained uncertain as the review continued.
Speaker 3: Detectives also looked at the evidence that had been collected
Speaker 3: but not fully understood in nineteen ninety one. Items that
Speaker 3: had been stored, cataloged, and preserved swabs, fibers, fragments. Each
Speaker 3: piece was re examined with the awareness that forensic science
Speaker 3: had advanced. The DNA profile recovered from the scene remained partial,
Speaker 3: but it existed. It represented one of the few direct
Speaker 3: biological links to the person who had been inside that room.
Speaker 3: At the time, it was not enough to identify anyone,
Speaker 3: but it was enough to wait. Cold case work often
Speaker 3: becomes a matter of preservation as much as investigation. Detectives
Speaker 3: maintain evidence, not because it can answer questions immediately, but
Speaker 3: because it might answer them later. The yogurt shop case
Speaker 3: entered that phase. What still held was not a suspect.
Speaker 3: It was a framework, a sequence of events, a set
Speaker 3: of facts that had survived fire, water and time. Those
Speaker 3: facts did not point to a name, but they also
Speaker 3: did not change, and because they did not change, investigators
Speaker 3: knew that whatever answer eventually emerged would have to fit
Speaker 3: inside them. The DNA profile, partial as it was, became
Speaker 3: one of the central points of focus. It did not
Speaker 3: match the men who had once been convicted. That fact
Speaker 3: alone reshaped the case, but it also did not identify
Speaker 3: anyone else. At that stage, the profile existed more as
Speaker 3: a boundary than a solution. It excluded, it did not name.
Speaker 3: Detectives understood what that meant in practical terms. The person
Speaker 3: responsible for the murders had left biological material at the scene.
Speaker 3: The material had survived fire water and the years that followed,
Speaker 3: but without a match in any database, it remained an
Speaker 3: unanswered question. The case waited for something to intersect with
Speaker 3: that profile, a new arrest in another jurisdiction, a convicted
Speaker 3: offender whose DNA was entered into a database, a technological
Speaker 3: advance that allowed partial profiles to be compared in ways
Speaker 3: that had not been possible before Until that happened. The
Speaker 3: DNA remained static. The rest of the evidence did not evolve.
Speaker 3: The ballistics reports still identified two weapons. No firearm had
Speaker 3: been recovered that it could be tied to the crime.
Speaker 3: The arsenal analysis still indicated that the fire had been
Speaker 3: set deliberately after the killings. The timeline still confined to
Speaker 3: the sequence of events to less than an hour. Nothing
Speaker 3: contradicted those findings, nothing expanded them. The witness statements remained
Speaker 3: as they had been taken early in the days of
Speaker 3: the investigation. People remembered seeing cars, people remembered being in
Speaker 3: the area, but memory fades in the passage of time
Speaker 3: made those recollections less reliable. With each passing year, investigators
Speaker 3: occasionally revisited those witnesses, asking the same questions in slightly
Speaker 3: different ways, looking for details that might have been overlooked.
Speaker 3: The answers rarely changed. The yogurt shop itself no longer
Speaker 3: carried the physical imprint of the crime. The damage had
Speaker 3: been repaired, the space had been repurposed. New businesses occupied
Speaker 3: the location. Customers entered and left without any visible reminder
Speaker 3: of what had occurred there, but the address remained in
Speaker 3: the case file, a fixed point for the families. The
Speaker 3: passage of time did not alter the central fact. The
Speaker 3: men who had once been held responsible were no longer
Speaker 3: facing charges. But someone out there had killed those girls.
Speaker 3: That was also a fact. Fort Pierce, nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 3: the first time Robert Eugene Brashers was tied to a
Speaker 3: violent crime. It did not happen in Texas. It happened
Speaker 3: in Fort Pierce, Florida, in November of nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 3: Brashers was twenty seven years old. The setting was not isolated,
Speaker 3: It was not remote. It was a bar, public, social ordinary,
Speaker 3: the kind of place where people meet without planning to
Speaker 3: remember each other later. That was where he met Michelle Wilkerson,
Speaker 3: a twenty four year old woman. They spoke, they drank.
Speaker 3: At some point they left together. What happened next was
Speaker 3: reconstructed from Wilkerson's account. After leaving the bar, the two
Speaker 3: continued drinking. The interaction, whatever it had been, initially shifted.
Speaker 3: Brashers made a sexual advance. Wilkerson refused. When she tried
Speaker 3: to leave, he pulled a gun. He shot her. The
Speaker 3: weapon was a twenty five caliber automatic pistol. She was
Speaker 3: hit in the head and neck. The injuries were severe,
Speaker 3: but not immediately fatal. Wilkerson remained conscious. She moved away
Speaker 3: from him, found a place to hide, and waited. At
Speaker 3: some point Brashers stopped searching for her. He left the area.
Speaker 3: When she was certain he was gone, she found help.
Speaker 3: What she provided to investigators was not a guess. It
Speaker 3: was a description. She described Brasher's himself, his clothing, his manner.
Speaker 3: She described his car. She described the type of cigarettes
Speaker 3: he smoked. Details that, taken together, gave detectives something to
Speaker 3: work with beyond the scene itself. Police located him quickly.
Speaker 3: The arrest followed with out the kind of delay that
Speaker 3: would characterize later investigations into his actions. This was a
Speaker 3: case where the victim survived, spoke, and identified the person
Speaker 3: who had attacked her. Brashers was charged in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: He was convicted. The sentence was twelve years in prison.
Speaker 3: The conviction established a record. It defined him in legal
Speaker 3: terms as someone who had committed a violent offense involving
Speaker 3: a firearm. It also established something else, something not recorded
Speaker 3: in the formal language of the case filed, but evident
Speaker 3: in the sequence of events. He had shot a woman
Speaker 3: to close range, he left her for dead, and he
Speaker 3: had walked away. The system responded in a way consistent
Speaker 3: with the time a conviction a sentence time to be served,
Speaker 3: but the sentence did not run its full course. In
Speaker 3: May nineteen eighty nine, barely three years later, Robert Eugene
Speaker 3: Brashers was released from prison. The reason was listed as
Speaker 3: good behavior. From the standpoint of the record, the case
Speaker 3: in Florida was complete. The offender had been identified, prosecuted,
Speaker 3: and released according to the rules governing his sentence. From
Speaker 3: the standpoint of sequence, though it was not complete, his
Speaker 3: release placed him back into the public less than three
Speaker 3: years before the night of December sixth, nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3: At that point, there was no connection between the man
Speaker 3: who had been convicted in Florida and the murders that
Speaker 3: would later occur in Austin, Texas. No shared jurisdiction, no
Speaker 3: shared investigation, no shared evidence, only a timeline, a violent
Speaker 3: offense in nineteen eighty five, a release in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 3: and a gap of time that had not yet been examined.
Speaker 3: The Fort Pierce case did not attract national attention. It
Speaker 3: did not become a defining story. It existed as one
Speaker 3: file among many, a documented act of violence followed by
Speaker 3: a conviction. But the details of that case would remain present.
Speaker 3: Served the weapon, the method, the proximity, the fact that
Speaker 3: the victim survived and described him. Those details did not change.
Speaker 3: They waited in the record, separate from the events in Austin,
Speaker 3: separated by distance and by years, with nothing to connect
Speaker 3: them at the time. The connection would not be made then.
Speaker 3: It would not be made in nineteen ninety one. It
Speaker 3: would not be made in nineteen ninety nine. It would
Speaker 3: come much later, when the case in Austin had already
Speaker 3: been built, once taken apart and set aside for now.
Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty five, Robert Eugene Braschers was simply a
Speaker 3: man who had been convicted of a violent crime and
Speaker 3: released back into the world. Nothing in the record suggested
Speaker 3: where he would go next, only that he had already
Speaker 3: done it once. When Robert Eugene Braschers walked out of
Speaker 3: prison in May nineteen eighty nine. The record described the
Speaker 3: release in neutral terms, good behavior, time served, case closed.
Speaker 3: There was no notation that followed him out the door,
Speaker 3: nothing that forecast what would come next, no mechanism to
Speaker 3: connect what he had done in Florida to where he
Speaker 3: might go or what he might do once he was
Speaker 3: no longer under supervision. He was thirty one years old,
Speaker 3: free to move, and he did over the next few years.
Speaker 3: Brasher's did not settle into a fixed place or a
Speaker 3: stable pattern that would have made him easier to track
Speaker 3: in hindsight. Instead, his movements cut across state lines through
Speaker 3: the South, without a single location anchoring him for long.
Speaker 3: He drifted, not invisibly, but without drawing sustained attention. There
Speaker 3: were arrests. In February nineteen ninety two, he was taken
Speaker 3: into custody again, this time in possession of a stolen
Speaker 3: vehicle and a stolen firearm. The arrest report listed more
Speaker 3: than just those two items. Officers recovered a police scanner,
Speaker 3: a police style jacket, a set of burglary tools, and
Speaker 3: a fake Tennessee license. Each item on its own could
Speaker 3: be explained. Together, they suggested preparation mobility, an ability to
Speaker 3: move through places without being immediately identified for what he was.
Speaker 3: He was sent back to prison, not for what would
Speaker 3: later be connected to him, but for what officers could
Speaker 3: prove at the time. He remained incarcerated until nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3: That gap nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety two, then
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety seven sits in the
Speaker 3: timeline like a set of brackets around the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 3: a period when his movements intersect with the years in
Speaker 3: which a number of violent crimes would later be re examined.
Speaker 3: At the time, those connections were not visible. There was
Speaker 3: no shared suspect across jurisdictions, no centralized system that would
Speaker 3: have allowed detectives in one state to compare notes with
Speaker 3: investigators in another and see a pattern forming in real time.
Speaker 3: Cases were local evidence stayed where it was collected, names
Speaker 3: stayed inside individual files. When Brasher's was released to get
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety seven, the pattern resumed movement contact opportunity.
Speaker 3: In April nineteen ninety eight, he was arrested once more,
Speaker 3: this time while attempting to break into a woman's home
Speaker 3: in Paragold, Arkansas. The woman was someone he had done
Speaker 3: work for, an entry point that did not require force.
Speaker 3: At the beginning, he knew the location, he knew the layout.
Speaker 3: By the time he was stopped, the circumstances had shifted,
Speaker 3: the phone lines had been cut. He had with him
Speaker 3: a video camera and tools consistent with forced injury. The
Speaker 3: arrest interrupted whatever was about to happen next, but again
Speaker 3: the charge did not hold him for long. He was released.
Speaker 3: The pattern remained intact across these years. There was no
Speaker 3: single case that defined him publicly, no headline that followed
Speaker 3: him from state to state. What existed instead were fragments, arrests, possessions, encounters,
Speaker 3: each handled within its own jurisdiction, each resolved within the
Speaker 3: limits of what could be proven at that moment. From
Speaker 3: the outside, it did not look like a single story.
Speaker 3: It looked like separate incidents. But the continuity was there.
Speaker 3: A man who had already used a firearm against a
Speaker 3: woman at close range, a man who carried tools that
Speaker 3: allowed him to move, to observe, to enter, a man
Speaker 3: who did not remain in one place long enough to
Speaker 3: become predictable. And then in January nineteen ninety nine. The
Speaker 3: movement stopped, not because he had been arrested again because
Speaker 3: he had been located. After stealing a car, Brashers drove
Speaker 3: to a Super eight motel in Canet, Missouri. He was
Speaker 3: not alone. Members of his family were with him. Police
Speaker 3: were notified about the stolen vehicle. They came to the motel.
Speaker 3: What followed did not resolve in a conventional arrest. Brashers
Speaker 3: had a firearm. He did not come out immediately. He
Speaker 3: released his family. He stayed inside. The standoff lasted four hours.
Speaker 3: Then he shot himself. The wound was not immediately fatal.
Speaker 3: He was transported for medical care. He remained alive for
Speaker 3: six days. On January nineteenth, nineteen ninety nine, Robert Eugene
Speaker 3: Brasher's died. At that moment, the record closed again. A
Speaker 3: man with a history of violence, multiple arrests, a suicide
Speaker 3: following a police standoff. There was no public accounting of
Speaker 3: anything beyond what had been documented in those individual cases.
Speaker 3: No linkage, no broader pattern, nothing that tied him to
Speaker 3: events in Austin, Texas in December nineteen ninety one. That
Speaker 3: connection did not exist yet, not in the files, not
Speaker 3: in the evidence, not in the investigation, but the timeline
Speaker 3: held nineteen eighty nine, released nineteen ninety one. Austin nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety two, arrested with a stolen gun and vehiclenineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 3: released again nineteen ninety eight, arrested attempting injury into a
Speaker 3: home nineteen ninety nine. Dead. The sequence was complete, the
Speaker 3: meaning of it had not yet been established, and if
Speaker 3: you'd like to know more about that meaning, please rejoin
Speaker 3: me on Thursday, March twenty sixth for part four of
Speaker 3: the Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders. And Hey, if you
Speaker 3: know anybody that likes a true crime podcast, please do
Speaker 3: recommend the show, whether it's friends, family, and acquaintance, somebody
Speaker 3: you bump into an elevator. If you spread the word, ah,
Speaker 3: I sure would appreciate it and I'll see you next week.
Speaker 3: I'm Zevan Odleberg 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: kinda Murdery or email at Kindamurdery at gmail dot com
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