Case Closed: Do We Finally Have Answers to the Decades-long Yogurt Shop Murders Mystery?
The road to solving the case of the yogurt shop murders was paved with false convictions, false confessions, families torn apart by grief, and lives destroyed. Let’s take a look at the timeline of the events:
On Dec. 6, 1991, Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were murdered at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas. The girls had been bound, gagged, and shot. The perpetrator set the scene of his crimes on fire, seemingly to destroy any evidence that would lead to his arrest. He was successful, it seems, and any remaining evidence that could provide investigators with any leads was destroyed by firefighters.
In 1999, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn were arrested and charged with the murders. Austin Police Detective Hector Polanco obtained a confession from two of the men, and Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were convicted by juries for the murders in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Their convictions were later overturned by the appellate court.
But the suspects remained so and were not off the hook in the eyes of the District Attorney at the time, Rosemary Lehmberg. Using DNA to solve crimes was still in its infancy at the time, but a sample was obtained from one of the victims.
Unable to match the DNA to either Scott or Springsteen, charges were dropped and they were released after nearly 10 years behind bars. What followed was a bit of tag-you’re-it between the FBI and APD. The sample turned out to be incomplete, but as technology evolved, a full spectrum of the sample was realized.
Now, 34 years later, officials say they have their man. Robert Eugene Brashers, a convicted attempted murderer, was arrested 2 days after the yogurt shop murders in possession of a pistol in El Paso, Tx, which could place him in the proximity of Austin at the time of the murders. And according to archivist and filmmaker Claire Huie, “He had the same M.O. in a lot of his other crimes which was to be completely depraved in very specific ways. And the DNA was a match to a degree that made it quite definitive.”
Who was Robert Brashers?
An itinerant construction worker, Brashers committed multiple crimes in his time on Earth, but ultimately was not convicted of the more heinous ones. He did, however, serve time in 1985 for the attempted murder of Michelle Wilkerson in Fort Pierce, Florida. After his release he committed a string of murders and rapes that remained unsolved cases. He met his end by his own hand in 1999 during a standoff with police in Kennett, Missouri, where he was holed up in a Super 8 motel with his wife, daughter, and two stepdaughters. Police were there to investigate a stolen vehicle in the parking lot that turned out to be the one he and his family arrived in. While they entered his room, he hid under the bed and opened fire on the officers. The officers escaped the gunfire and Brashers held his family hostage for four hours. He eventually released them and shot himself in the head.
Posthumous Revelations
In 2018, Brasher became a suspect in multiple unsolved rape and murder cases through a partial DNA match. Investigators had his body exhumed and completed the match. Among the victims were:
Jenny Zitricki, who had been bludgeoned, raped, and strangled in Greenville, South Carolina, on April 5, 1990. Mother and daughter Sherri and Megan Scherer were found shot to death in their home in Portageville, Missouri, on March 28, 1998. He attempted assault on another woman only 2 hours later, but she fought hard. Brashers escaped the scene.
On March 11, 1997, a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee, was raped in her home. In this case, Brashers tied up the other occupants of the house.
He has been linked to all of these cases in addition to the rape and murder of a Kentucky woman.
On Sept 29, 2025, in a press conference at Austin City Hall, lead detective Dan Jackson identified Brashers as the killer of Amy, Eliza, Jennifer, and Sarah. District Attorney Jose Garza addressed the unfortunate circumstances of the arrests of Springsteen, Scott, Pierce, and Welborn, and the subsequent convictions of capital murder for Springsteen and Scott, stating, “[the] overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man,” and expressed, “If the conclusions of APD’s investigation are confirmed, as it appears that they will be, I will say: I am sorry, though I know that that will never be enough.”
Parenthetically, something I’d like the rest of the country to know: Garza is not a well-respected pillar of the community in Austin, Tx. Not that he had a presence in solving this case, but let’s just say his thoughts on the matter don’t bring a lot of value.
A Convenient Untruth
That brings us to the matter of those false confessions. The 2025 HBO Max documentary, simply titled, “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” went deep, outlining the interrogation technique of one Hector Polanco. Polanco was known as the police detective who always gets the confession. He aimed to maintain that title at all costs, and he was not above threats. Michael Scott stated, “This case stole decades of my life, but the truth has finally come to light.” To this I say: Get a lawyer. And show Polanco and the City of Austin the same mercy you received all those years ago.
And what of Maurice Pierce – shot dead by police when a traffic stop led to a struggle in December 2010.
What brought Pierce to such an end? Perhaps a lifetime of grief and struggle that anyone who hasn’t experienced being ostracized by their community and stigmatized by an unsolvable mass murder wouldn’t understand. Someone must be held accountable when the ambition and hubris of one man (Polanco) leads to such destruction of human life. There was never any evidence to tie Springsteen, Scott, Pierce, or Welborn to the murders.
Now What?
The term “closure” is being thrown around a lot in relation to this case, as in, “The families have some closure now that the killer has been identified.” I’ll bet it doesn’t feel very different. My guess is that it doesn’t bring them any peace. According to Huie, “he’s dead so it’s anticlimactic.” I can’t speak to the crippling loss the families have endured, but in the words of crime fiction writer James Ellroy — whose mother’s murder remains unsolved to this day — “Closure is bullshit.”
