In the years after four teenage girls were killed in 1991 inside an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas, dozens of people confessed and two men were ultimately convicted, then cleared, of the grisly crime, leaving the high-profile case unresolved for decades.
But in September 2025, 34 years later, authorities announced they had finally identified the real murderer: New DNA evidence pointed to alleged serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers, who investigators claim shot the girls, then set the yogurt shop ablaze to erase the evidence.
The announcement by the Austin Police Department brought closure to the killings of 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 15-year-old Sarah Harbison and 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, and it marked a turning point in a case long defined by missing evidence.
'Wholesale Carnage'
On December 6, 1991, a police patrolman saw flames coming from I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! in the city’s South Lamar neighborhood. After firefighters extinguished the blaze, they found the burnt bodies of the four girls, who had each been gagged and shot in the head execution style.
At least one of the girls, Amy, had been raped.
According to investigators, Amy and her friend, Sarah, had come to the shop that evening to meet Sarah’s sister, Jennifer, who worked at the shop with Eliza, and get a ride home with her. Detective John Jones, the first investigator on site, described the scene to reporters as “wholesale carnage.”
The crime was difficult to investigate: The fire—and the sprinklers that activated as the flames spread—destroyed or tainted much of the evidence, authorities said, and while thousands of tips poured into a police taskforce created to solve the murders, none led to a definitive suspect.
Within a week of the killings, police arrested 16-year-old Maurice Pierce for carrying a handgun inside a local mall. The make and model of Pierce’s gun was the same make and model as one of the murder weapons, police said. After hours of questioning, Pierce confessed to the crime and implicated three other teenagers: Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn.
But Pierce’s confession didn’t match key details in the crime, and ballistics testing was unable to pinpoint Pierce’s gun as the murder weapon. The case went cold for nearly eight years.
