Police in Austin say a new, rapidly unfolding DNA and ballistics evidence trail led them to declare a dead man as the likely perpetrator in the killing of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in the city 1991, a horrific crime that haunted the city for decades. And officials noted there was no known connection between the new suspect and the two men previously convicted in the killings, one of whom was briefly sent to death row. Austin police now say all evidence leads to Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 during a standoff with law enforcement, the AP reports. In recent years, Brashers has been linked to several killings and rapes in other states.
On December 6, 1991, Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged, and shot in the head at the "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" store where two of them worked. "There was evidence of sexual assault," Austin police cold case detective Daniel Jackson said at a news conference Monday, per NBC News. "All four have been shot in the head with a .22 caliber pistol, and Amy was also shot with a .380 pistol, and then the building was set on fire before the suspect left the scene."
- DNA under Amy Ayers' fingernails provided key evidence, Jackson said. "Amy's final moments on this Earth were to solve this case for us," he said. "It's because of her fighting back."
- Jackson said Brashers was sentenced to 12 years in prison after he shot a woman who rejected his sexual advances in Florida in 1985, but he was released on parole in 1989, NBC reports.
- In 2018, Missouri authorities said DNA evidence linked Brashers to the strangulation of a South Carolina woman in 1990 and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998. The evidence also connected him to the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee. "After he died, basically, DNA linked multiple unsolved murders and sexual assaults across the country to him," Jackson said. "Between 2006 and 2017, they knew that they had a serial killer in these different jurisdictions, but they didn't know who he was."
- Brashers, 40, died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri. Jackson said that after genealogy testing of relatives, investigators decided to exhume his body and found links to multiple crimes. He said Brashers' DNA was found in three of the murdered girls' sexual assault kits and in Amy Ayers' fingernail clipping.
story continues below
In the years after the murders, police waded through thousands of leads and several false confessions, the AP reports. In 1999, authorities arrested four men on murder charges. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were teenagers at the time of the murders. They initially confessed and implicated each other. But both men quickly recanted and said their statements were made under pressure by police. Both were tried and convicted. Springsteen was initially sent to death row, but his sentence was then reduced to life in prison. Their convictions were overturned and they were set for retrial a decade later. A judge ordered both men freed in 2009 when prosecutors said new DNA tests that weren't available in 1991 had revealed another male suspect. Brashers had no known connection to the men, authorities said.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
