DNA helps solve 'haunting' yogurt shop quadruple killings more than 3 decades later
Police in Austin, Texas, said DNA technology has helped them finally identify the man who killed four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in 1991 in a crime that haunted the city for years.
Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas and Amy Ayers were attacked in the shop and all shot in the head, lead detective Daniel Jackson said at a news conference on Monday.
The girls were left nude and tied up, and there was evidence of sexual assault, he said. The building was set on fire before the killer fled the scene, Jackson said.
In 1999, four suspects were arrested, with two suspects confessing but later recanting, police said. Charges were dropped against two, but the two suspects who confessed went on trial and were convicted of capital murder, officials said. The convictions were later overturned on appeals due to constitutional errors, and before they could be retried, prosecutors said advanced DNA analysis pointed to another person, and both men were ordered freed in 2009, according to The Associated Press.
No physical evidence ever linked those men to the yogurt shop, Jackson said.
Jackson, who took over the case in 2022, said this June he started researching a spent .380 casing found at the scene.
"It had not been submitted into the NIBIN system in many years. NIBIN is a National Integrated Ballistic Information Network -- it's kind of like CODIS [the Combined DNA Index System] for shell casings," Jackson explained.
In July, Jackson learned of a hit in NIBIN: It appeared the same gun was used in an unsolved murder in Kentucky, which shared "similar details" with the yogurt shop murders, he said.
"But aside from the MO [modus operandi] and the NIBIN hit, there are no obvious links," he said.
Since 2008, investigators have also tried many DNA testing strategies, Jackson said, conducting new searches over the years as DNA databases have grown. From the scene, investigators had obtained the suspect's Y-STR, which is y chromosome DNA, he said.
Jackson said police reached out to labs that conduct Y-STR typing and "asked if they can manually search against our unknown profile -- and we got a match."
"The South Carolina state lab was the only lab in the country that responded that they had a match ... the full profile and every allele was the same," Jackson said.
In August, that lab found a match to a 1990 sexual assault and murder in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson said. "And this was the profile that they had: Robert Eugene Brashers," he said.
Austin police then retested the Y-STR DNA from under Ayers' fingernails, he said. "It was directly compared to Brashers' profile -- and it matched," Jackson said.
Before the yogurt shop murders, Brashers had served time in prison for shooting a woman, and he was granted parole in 1989, Jackson said.
DNA also links Brashers to multiple "unsolved murders and sexual assaults across the country," Jackson said. "He's good for sexual assaults and murders throughout the '90s that he never had to stand trial for."
Brashers died by suicide in 1999 after a standoff with officers, police said.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis called the murders "one of the most devastating and haunting cases in the city’s history."
Barbara Ayres-Wilson, mom of victims Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, said at Monday's news conference, "I'm full of gratitude. It has been so long, and all we ever wanted for this case was the truth."
"We never wanted anyone to go to jail or be charged with anything that they did not do -- vengeance was never it," she said. "It was always the truth."
At the news conference, Travis County District Attorney José Garza addressed the four suspects who were arrested in 1999.
"There are still investigative steps that are underway. That being said, the overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and the innocence of four," he said. "If the conclusions of that investigation are confirmed, the Travis County District Attorney's Office will take responsibility for our role in prosecuting these men, in sending one to death row and one to serve life in prison. If the conclusions of APD's investigations are confirmed, as it appears that they will be, I will say I am sorry, though I know that that will never be enough."
