After more than 30 years, a chilling Austin yogurt shop murder case that claimed the lives of four teenage girls has finally had a breakthrough with DNA testing, and the killer is not any of the four people previously accused.
The Austin Police Department announced this week that serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999, was responsible for the December 6, 1991, yogurt shop murders, in which four girls were bound, shot, and left nude before the building was set on fire.
Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both 17, at the time of the murders, worked at the yogurt shop. Sarah Harbison, 15, and Amy Ayers, 13, were there with them as the employees closed for the evening.
The fire and water from the store’s sprinklers severely hampered evidence collection, Austin police said Monday in a news release, but investigators worked to gather as much evidence as possible.
Within a week of the murders, 16-year-old Maurice Pierce was arrested for bringing a gun to Northcross Mall. The weapon was the same make and model as one used in the yogurt shop murders.
After hours of interrogation, Pierce confessed, but further interviews revealed inconsistencies with the crime scene. Ballistics testing on the seized .22 gun was inconclusive.
In 1999, the Yogurt Shop Task Force reopened the case and questioned four men who were all teenagers at the time of the murders: Pierce, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, and Forrest Welborn.
Springsteen and Scott confessed and blamed each other, while Pierce and Welborn denied involvement. Authorities believed Welborn may have acted as a lookout outside the shop. All four were arrested for capital murder.
Scott and Springsteen were tried and convicted based on their confessions, with Scott sentenced to life without parole and Springsteen sentenced to death. Pierce’s charges were dropped, and Welborn was not charged by a grand jury.
No physical evidence from the scene linked any of the men to the crime, the ADP said Monday in the release.
Following the 2004 Crawford v. Washington ruling, Scott and Springsteen were granted a new trial. Advanced DNA testing later excluded all four original suspects from a Y-STR profile developed from sexual assault evidence. Investigators continued collecting hundreds of DNA reference samples.
On December 23, 2010, Pierce was stopped for a traffic violation, fled on foot, and stabbed APD Officer Frank Wilson in the neck. Wilson survived, and Pierce was shot and killed.
In 2022, Detective Daniel Jackson was assigned to the case. Working with DNA and genealogy experts, he retested evidence from the scene.
By June 2025, a .380 cartridge found in a drain at the shop, which had not been submitted to a national database for years, was finally entered and matched a 1998 unsolved murder in Kentucky. Further Y-STR DNA testing produced a full 27-marker match from South Carolina.
On August 22, 2025, Jackson confirmed that the DNA from the yogurt shop belonged to Brashers, who died by suicide in January 1999 during a police standoff in Missouri. He used a .380 pistol, the same model used to shoot Ayers.
Records also show that less than 48 hours after the yogurt shop murders, Brashers was stopped by Border Patrol near El Paso in a stolen car and had a .380 pistol with the matching serial number.
Brashers committed at least seven murders across multiple states between 1990 and 1998 and had prior convictions for attempted murder, aggravated battery, grand theft auto, and impersonating a police officer.
Brashers’ daughter, Deborah, was just four months old when the yogurt shop murders occurred and eight when her father died by suicide. She told KVUE on Friday that she began learning about his criminal past in 2018, which left her with many unanswered questions.
“My mother’s not here to ask all these questions,” she said. “I don’t know who I can go to to ask all these questions. I don’t know who I can trust to ask all these questions.”
Deborah Brashers remembered her dad as intelligent, but also “was very, very, very strange.”
“My father was a businessman. My father was a con artist,” she told the outlet.
Despite still grappling with her father’s past crimes, Deborah Brashers addressed the families of his victims directly.
“I’m sorry for the pain and everything that my father has put everyone through,” she said. “And I wish my father was here today to be able to be punished for his crimes.”
