Austin police announce suspect in 1991 killings at yogurt shop

Texas’ Austin Police Department said Friday that DNA testing turned up a deceased suspect in the 1991 killing of four people at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop.

The suspect in the killings, police said, is Robert Eugene Brashers, who killed himself in 1999. The police added that the investigation into the murders remains ongoing.

First responders found sisters Jennifer Harbison, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15, Eliza Thomas, 17, and Amy Ayers, 13, bound with underwear, gagged with cloth and shot in the head inside the burning store on Dec. 6, 1991, according to The Associated Press. 

Other suspects were previously convicted in their deaths. Robert Springsteen IV and Michael Scott confessed in 1999 but later took it back and said police coerced them, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Mr. Springsteen’s conviction and death sentence were overturned in 2006 after a court found his confession was used against him improperly, while Mr. Scott’s conviction and life sentence were overturned in 2007 for similar reasons.

Prosecutors then dismissed the charges against both in 2009 after new DNA testing failed to implicate either man, according to the American-Statesman.

The yogurt shop case is not the first tied to Brashers by DNA testing since his 1999 suicide. 

In 2018, the Missouri State Highway Patrol said DNA evidence connected Brashers to the 1990 killing of Genevieve Zitricki, 28, in her Greenville, South Carolina, home; the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee; and the 1998 murder of Sherri Scherer, 38, and Megan Scherer, 12, in Portageville, Missouri. Megan was also sexually assaulted, police said.