How DNA Solved the Yogurt Shop Murders

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.

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. 

In 1999, the task force called back the four suspects for additional questioning. In new interrogations, Springsteen and Scott confessed to the killings, but Pierce and Welborn did not. 

Police arrested all four young men, who were between the ages of 15 and 17 at the time of the murders, and prosecutors charged them with capital murder, even though physical evidence never linked them to the crime. 

A grand jury declined to indict Welborn, and prosecutors dropped the charges against Pierce. But Scott and Springsteen were put on trial separately and found guilty. Scott was sentenced to life in prison, while Springsteen received the death penalty. His sentence was later commuted to life without parole.  

By 2007, however, appeals courts had overturned both Springsteen and Scott’s convictions. In Springsteen’s case, defense attorneys successfully argued that he’d received an unfair trial. Scott’s attorneys argued that his conviction was used unfairly to earn Scott’s conviction. 

They were ordered new trials, but two years later, following fresh DNA testing that excluded all four men from the profiles obtained at the crime scene, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg announced she had dropped charges against Springsteen and Scott. “Make no mistake, this is a difficult decision for me, and one I would rather not have to make,” she said at the time—but the lack of scientific evidence left her with no choice.

In December 2025, the DA’s office filed a motion under the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct to initiate the exoneration process for Scott, Springsteen, Pierce and Welborn.

Sixteen years after charges were dropped against the only men ever arrested in the crimes, a police detective assigned to the case took new steps: He submitted a .380 bullet casing recovered from a drain in the yogurt shop to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a database used to link firearms to crimes. He also requested a more advanced, more sensitive DNA test.

On August 22, 2025, forensic scientists matched a DNA sample from underneath Amy's fingernails to a profile from a 1990 sexual assault and murder in South Carolina. The profile belonged to Brashers, although he was never charged in the crime: He’d died in 1999.

However, the bullet casing cinched Brashers’ connection to the yogurt shop murders: Patterns on the casing matched those made by the handgun Brashers used to die by suicide after he was pulled over by police in Missouri for driving a stolen vehicle. 

Brashers has been linked to at least eight killings committed between 1990 and 1998 across several states. 

Following the announcement that police had found the real killer, Detective Dan Jackson spoke to reporters and credited the break in the case to Amy. “It was Amy's fighting back that solved this case,” he said. “I'm sorry that it took 30, 40 years for us to get here, but we’re here now. And, you know, Amy’s final moments on this earth were to solve this case for us. It is because of her fighting back.”