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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Police named a dead man Friday as a new suspect in the 1991 unsolved killings of four teenage girls at an Austin yogurt shop, saying DNA evidence led to a “significant breakthrough” in the brutal crime that has haunted Texas’ capital and stumped investigators for decades.
In a statement, Austin police said DNA tests led investigators to Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 during a standoff with law enforcement. He has since then been linked to several killings and rape in other states.
The announcement came amid renewed attention on the case with the release last month of “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” an HBO documentary series. Police said the case remains open and scheduled a Monday news conference to detail their findings.
The murders stunned Texas’ capital city and became known as one of the area’s most notorious crimes. Austin police investigators and prosecutors had stumbled over the case for years as they waded through thousands of leads, several false confessions and badly damaged evidence from the burned-out crime scene.
“Our team never gave up working this case,” Austin police said.
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. The building was then set on fire.
Investigators have said that around closing time, someone entered the store through the back door, attacked the girls and set the fire. The bodies were found when firefighters were still battling the blaze.
The autopsy report offered glimpses of the lives of teenage sisters and friends: Ayers wore small, white earrings. Sarah Harbison was wearing a gold necklace and a Mickey Mouse watch. Jennifer Harbison wore a high school ring and a Timex watch.
It also suggested the horror: their hands were tied with underwear and mouths were gagged with cloth. Ayers was shot twice.
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.
Still both were tried and convicted. Initially Springsteen was 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.
In 2018, Missouri authorities said DNA evidenced 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.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hours-long standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
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This story has been corrected to show that Eliza Thomas was 17 years old, not 1 years old.
