Ep. 133 | The Yogurt Shop Murders

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Four teenage girls were closing a yogurt shop in North Austin on Friday night in December. And two of them worked there, and two were waiting on a ride home. The shop shut at 11 o'clock, and they would never be seen alive again. The city of Austin, Texas, would then spend over 30 years trying to solve the case. This is a story of the Yogurt Shop Murders. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. And today, we are talking about quite an infamous case in Texas, one that almost went cold. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go muck-fuck on the highway, slam

• 2:09Speaker 02

  on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this almost-cold case together.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Let's take a quick pause to talk about something that's annoying, okay? And that's when you're out and about and your phone dies. But that's not a problem I have, because I don't leave the house without my Ridge Power Bank. And that's my gifting rule for this year, is that nothing will end up sitting in a drawer. Because Ridge's 5-in-1 Travel Power Bank has built-in cables, MagSafe wireless charging, and an Apple Watch charger, Lightning and USB-C, so one thing charges, literally everything. And with 20 watts and a 10,000 MAH battery, you get up to three full phone charges. Perfect for anyone upgrading to the iPhone 18. Plus, there's free shipping and a 99-day risk-free trial, and a lifetime warranty. And if that's not your thing, or the thing that you think that the person you're gifting

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  wants, Ridge also has wallets, luggage, and tracker cards for the person who loses everything, like me. But you can find the Power Bank at Best Buy, Amazon, or head to ridge.com and get 10% off with code CCCM. That's ridge.com code CCCM for 10% off. And when they ask, "Who sent you?", let them know that I sent you. Thank you so much to Ridge for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. By the winter of 1991, Amy Lee Ayers was 13 years old. She was an Austin girl, born on January 31, 1978, and raised on a ranch by her parents, Bob and Pam Ayers. And her only sibling was her older brother, Shawn, who was 19 that winter.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And her parents described her as "a cowgirl, she's country." Clint Black Garth Brooks. And her father, Bob, continued, "Beans and cornbread, onion, bowl of cereal, every morning with chocolate milk." Her family called her "an old soul" at an early age. She'd been a horse rider since she was only three years old, and she started showing them at the same age, competing in front of judges. And recently, she'd been showing cutting horses, which are the ones trained to pull a single cow out of a herd. And Pam said, "I can see her riding and just taking off across a pasture on a horse and enjoying it because she loved it so much."

• 4:37Speaker 02

  But she didn't stop with horses, because she also took part in the Travis County Livestock Show, where she showed hogs and entered the Arts and Crafts Fair. And Shawn competed in rodeos, and Amy went to watch him whenever she was able. And she'd even trained her dog herself with a few tricks and basic commands. Animals that ran from other people would walk right up to her. She had a connection with them. And also, she fished and just loved being outdoors. She was a country music fan with a crush on George Strait. And she dreamed of eventually owning a ranch herself and carrying on with showing horses, as well as becoming a veterinarian. So at the time, she was an eighth grader at Burnett Middle School, where she would be on the yearbook staff.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  And her future Farmers of American Chapter, or FFA, was at Lanier High School, where she'd already made junior member, and she was in line to be vice president, so just an extremely accomplished young girl. Now Shawn had been in the FFA before her, and he brought her into the organization, though she didn't need much pushing, as she was showing up to school in a cowboy hat already. But the FFA is where she met Jennifer Harbison, her sister Sarah, and their friend Eliza Thomas. But Sarah was the one she grew closest to. So Jennifer Ann Harbison was born on May 9, 1974, in Texarkana, Texas. And she was the older of Mike and Barbara Harbison's two daughters.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And Sarah came along two years after her. Now Jennifer was five, and Sarah was two when their parents separated, and Barbara took them both to Austin. And Mike stayed behind in New Boston, a small town in Texas back by the Arkansas border. So he was a few hours' drive away, but he stayed close to both of them. And in Austin, Barbara met a Dell computer technician named Frank "Suerchi," who everybody just called "Skip." And they married, and the girls grew up in their mother and stepfather's house out in the northern suburbs. And both girls went to a private Christian school through middle school at St. Louis Catholic Church, where the family went to mass on the weekends. But they wanted the full public school experience.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And by December of 1991, Jennifer was 17 and a senior at Lanier High School, where the teachers and staff all really liked her. And she was president of the school's FFA chapter, and she ran the 400 and 1600-meter relay for the track team as well. And she was the student speaker of the house, and she was on the school drill team, the Vikeettes. And a classmate from her government class, Amber Sweeney, said of her, "Jennifer was very opinionated. She wouldn't be afraid to say how she felt, along with her corny jokes." And her best friend at Lanier was Eliza Thompson, who was in the same grade. And in their senior year, the two of them were both nominated for FFA Queen.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  So as her senior year was underway, Jennifer looked past high school to the future. And her mother wanted her to enjoy the years she had left as a teenager, but Jennifer wanted money of her own put away, so she'd be ready for college. And her parents had recently bought her a Chevy S10 pickup, and the purchase came with two conditions: she had to help make the payments, and she had to drive Sarah around when Sarah needed it, her sister. And honestly, she didn't mind the second one, because she and Sarah got along better than most sisters their age. And her first job was at an Albertson supermarket, but then Eliza told her what a good job the yogurt shop was, and Jennifer applied. And Barbara said Jennifer "loved working together with Eliza."

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Now Sarah Louise Harbison was born on October 28, 1976, in Texarkana, just like Jennifer. And she grew up admiring her big sister and copying her, as we do with younger sisters. And they had a very close relationship, only made stronger by the fact that they liked similar things. And they had a tight-knit family dynamic after their parents were no longer together. Now Sarah graduated on a humanitarian scholarship from St. Louis Catholic School in the spring of 1991. And in the fall, she started at Lanier as a freshman, so 15 years old and finally on the same campus as Jennifer. She played volleyball and basketball there too, and she led the school's junior varsity cheerleading squad, and she was a student council representative.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And like Jennifer, she was deep into the school's FFA chapter. The sisters raised lambs and took them to livestock shows, and their mother kept a photo of them together at a show. And Barbara said, "I just love that picture of the girls kissing those lambs." So only a few months into the school year, the freshman had made her mark. And Lanier's principal, Paul Turner, said, "She had already established herself as assertive and enthusiastic, a vital member of the freshman class. She was a leader." And Sarah had a new boyfriend that she had started dating a few weeks earlier. Now he'd already given her his senior ring, which became one of the things she prized most. Now their friend, Eliza Hope Thomas, drove a bright-green 1971 Volkswagen Carmonja,

• 9:43Speaker 02

  and she said the color was like her birthstone, which was emerald. And people thought the car was somewhat ugly, but she adored it. And she was born on May 16, 1974, in Austin. And her parents were James and Maria Thomas, and she had one sister, Sonora. Who was 13 in the winter of 1991. And Eliza was seven or eight when her parents separated and they later divorced. And James worked as a social worker and he remarried. And his second wife, Norma Fowler, taught at the University of Texas. And the sisters split their time between the two households. And that December, Eliza was living with Maria while Sonora was with James. Now, Sonora said her sister was, quote unquote, "very social, energetic.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  She was really into fitness and fashion, trying to discover who she was." So Eliza started high school at McCallum High, then transferred to Lanier High School so she could join its FFA chapter. And her father said she had always been, quote unquote, "nuts about animals." She kept crayfish in her bedroom and rats, which James thought were ugly. And she was also raising a pig to show at a livestock show. And she was just as good with machines. She did well in small engine repair and in welding, and she took part in the school's agriculture mechanics program. She could fix basically anything with parts in it. And that Christmas, she asked mostly for car parts so she could do the work on her Gia herself.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  And she bought that Gia with the funds she earned from the yogurt shop. And Eliza had been working there for months before Jennifer started. She took the weekday shifts and on the weekends, the two of them worked together, talking for hours and often closing the place by themselves. So in 1991, Austin was a city of about 465,000 people, the fifth largest in Texas. Only Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and El Paso were bigger. And it thought of itself as a college town and a tight-knit one at that. People there felt safe, leaving their front doors unlocked at the time. And the northwest corner of the city was a fairly wealthy area. But Northcross Mall was at the heart of it.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  It had a movie theater and an ice rink, and on Friday and Saturday nights, it would be full of teenagers. And for the kids in that part of Austin, it was the place to be. And that was just the thing to do in the 90s and early 2000s. You just go to the mall. It was like the only thing to do, anywhere. And less than half a mile away was a strip mall called the Hillside Center. And the "I can't believe it's yogurt" shop sat there at 2949 West Anderson Lane. And there was a Mr. Gaddy's Pizza a few doors down. And for Jennifer and Eliza, this yogurt shop was their workplace. And not many jobs around gave teenagers the kind of responsibility that they got, especially considering they were allowed to work unsupervised.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  The shop itself was deep and narrow, and the public space occupied the front two-thirds of the unit with the tables and the counter and the register. And a door behind the counter led to the back third where the preparation area was. So it closed at 11 o'clock at night, and two teenagers would close it on their own. And part of the routine was stacking the chairs up on the tables. Now, parents were in the habit of dropping in during the weekend shifts, buying some yogurt just to check in and see that everything was fine. So December 6, 1991 was a Friday, and a gloomy one in a string of similar days. It was a second-to-last Friday of the semester, and every kid in Austin was getting ready for winter break.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Now Jennifer left school that afternoon and drove to her boyfriend Sammy's apartment, and they spent a few hours there together. And he had missed school that day for a funeral with his family. And Barbara got home from work around 5:30, worn out from a long day. And Sarah was sitting on the couch, and she was in a wonderful mood. And because of that, she wanted to go to the Northcross Mall with Amy that evening. So Barbara was open to it, but she was just too tired to drive them. So Jennifer came home around 7 to get her work clothes. So she took the two of them to the mall on her way to work instead. And neither Sarah nor Amy had been to the mall on their own before. There had always been a parent or an older sibling.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  So the plan was that Sarah and Amy would spend the evening at the mall and ride home with Jennifer once she finished her shift. And Amy would stay over at the Harbison's house that night. And the two of them had been looking forward to the sleepover since the start of the month, because they went to different schools and hardly saw each other. So it was just their chance to catch up on all that had been going on. Now, Eliza began her work shift at 7 o'clock, and Jennifer started hers at 8 o'clock. So the shop, as usual, was theirs to close that night. So customers came and went all evening, as was typical for a weekend night. And a woman named Lucella Jones came in between 8:15 and 8:30. And her husband was recovering from dental surgery, and she was buying him some yogurt.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  And the two teenage boys were sitting in a booth by the front door, the only other customers in the place at that point. Now, it looked like they were focused on something that was on the table between them, in a stack of some kind. And the pair left her feeling uneasy. Now, Northcross Mall closed at 9 o'clock, so Sarah and Amy came up the road to the yogurt shop, which was about a 10-minute walk. And while they waited for Jennifer's shift to end, the two of them went a few doors down to Mr. Gaddy's, which closed at 10:00 PM, and bought a pizza. And they brought it back and ate in the lobby while enjoying their conversation. Now, people who came in over the next hour remembered seeing them there. And at about 9:30, Eliza's mother, Maria, stopped in. And she bought some yogurt and stayed for a few minutes.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Now, the shop was empty apart from the girls at this time, and everything seemed to be like it would be a normal evening. Now, somewhere between 9:30 and 10 o'clock, a man named Dural Croft came in with a couple acquaintances. Now, Croft had been a military policeman and now ran a security firm, and he had parked a security vehicle out front with lights on it like a police cruiser. So inside, the place had filled up again with two young couples and one young man on his own. And the young man was deep-voiced with a large nose and appeared fidgety when Croft spoke with him. And he seemed confused by the vehicle outside. And he bought one can of soda, carried it toward the bathroom at the back, and Croft never saw him come out again. Now, the last sale went through the register at 10:42 PM.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  And it was placed by a couple who had just come out of a movie and wanted dessert before they headed home. And they noticed two people at the table nearest the register in jackets or heavy sweatshirts that hid their faces. And one looked bigger with a muscular build, and the other was thin. And the couple left at about 10:47 PM, while one of the girls was already wiping down tables and putting up chairs. So the only two chairs that were still on the floor were the two by the register that the remaining people were sitting in. Now, nobody remembered seeing Sarah and Amy in the lobby in that last half hour. They likely had gone to the back to help clean up, because the shop closed at 11 o'clock. And after 11, nobody was expecting them straight home, because all four girls kept animals at the FFA site on North Lamar Boulevard,

• 16:52Speaker 02

  and they stopped in twice a day, morning and evening, to see them. So a late run out there before heading home would have been an ordinary Friday errand. So next door to the yogurt shop was a party supply store, and its owner was working late that night. And he heard something up on the roof, followed by a series of popping noises. And he went outside to investigate and noticed smoke coming out of the front of the yogurt shop. And the smoke had started getting into his own store by then, so he opened his back door to clear it out. And from there, he could see that the yogurt shop's back door was standing partly open and that there was a fire inside. And at the same moment, a police car came down the alley at the back of the row.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And Troy Gay was a young officer working northwest Austin that night, out looking for drunk drivers. But he spotted the fire and radioed it in at 11:47 PM. And at first, they thought that it might be a kitchen fire. And since it was a quiet Friday in Austin, the emergency response was immediate. And Rene Garza was one of the firefighters who took the call. And he pulled up to the shop with its lights off and its closed sign turned outward. And through the front door, he could see the fire burning inside and the black smoke packing the room. And the front door was locked, but they opened it without much trouble. And inside, it was dark and thick with smoke, and the worst of the fire was in the back.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  And Garza and another firefighter, David DeVoe, went in low with flashlights and worked their way toward the flames. And as they did, they found a foot, then an arm, then a body, and then three more. The manager of the yogurt shop was 24-year-old Reese Price. And she was brought in to identify her own employees, but was unable to do so. Quote, "There wasn't anything there to identify," she said. Quote, "Fire is very destructive. It's not forgiving," unquote. So the homicide detective who worked the case was named John Jones. And he was unable to enter the shop from the front entrance, as a fire crew was still working in there. So he came through the party supply store next door.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Quote, "It was still smoldering. They had pulled down the ceiling, so there was water everywhere. There was steam everywhere. There was smoke everywhere," unquote. And he described the scene afterwards as, quote unquote, "wholesale carnage." It took time to make out how the bodies were arranged. Quote, "As it started to clear out, you could see the bodies, three together and then one away from the others," unquote. The first room through the door behind the counter was the preparation area, which featured a sink and a table. And past that, at the back left of the shop was the storage area, its shelves stacked with paper goods and cleaning supplies. Now, the preparation area floor was where they found Amy.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And Eliza, Sarah, and Jennifer were on the floor of the storage room under rubble that had come down in the fire. And Eliza was lying across Sarah with Jennifer alongside the two of them. The three of them had been basically stacked together, and Jennifer, the evidence indicated, rolled off the pile as the fire burned. Now, all four girls- Had their clothes removed, which had been used to tie and gag them. And all four had contact gunshot wounds to their heads. And Eliza, Sarah, and Jennifer had each been killed by a single 22 round to the back of the head. And Amy had been shot twice. A 22 struck her first, high on the left side of her head, failing to penetrate the skull.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  And the medical examiner noted that it did not kill her, and the second was fired behind her left ear by a 380. And it went through her head and right out her right cheek. There was a ligature around her neck as well, and the autopsy found she had been strangled by hand, though not to death. But three of the four girls also showed evidence of being sexually assaulted. And Eliza, Sarah, and Jennifer were burned badly. Jennifer was the worst of the three. Amy, however, was not charred like the others. She had second-degree burns and the beginnings of third-degree burns over a quarter to a third of her body. Now, at least two guns had been fired.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Four 22 rounds came out of the girls at autopsy, to damage to say whether one weapon or more had fired them. And investigators recovered a 380 bullet at the scene and a spent 380 casing out of the floor drain. Now, the rifling on the 380 bullet was unusual enough that a firearms examiner could name the model, which was an AMT Backup, which is a small silver-gray semi-automatic. But neither gun was found. And the register drawer was sitting out on the table in the first room. And it was determined that around $540 was stolen, and most of it was out of the register itself. Now, the register's own log had recorded a last transaction at 11:03, three minutes after the shop should have been closed.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  So the girls had gotten most of the way through closing, and the routine ended with them leaving by the front door, locking it, and placing the key underneath in an envelope. And when the fire was out, the key was still sitting in that lock. But almost everything else was completely gone. The fire took the evidence, and the water from the shop's automatic sprinklers finished it. And the 380 casing in the drain would come to be described as the only piece of physical evidence recovered from the scene. And at the autopsy, Amy's fingernails were clipped, and those clippings were held on to, though nobody made much of it at the time. So a local television crew had been riding with Detective Jones that night, filming. The camera was on him when the radio went, quote-unquote, "Jonesy, you hear about the

• 22:32Speaker 02

  call at 2900 West Anderson." "2900, that's a business," he would say back. And the footage shows the scene as they arrived. Blue and red lights all over the front of the shop, with fire hoses running across the street and the parking lot. Now, the cameras stayed outside as he entered the building, and by the time he came back out, the reporters had arrived. Someone asked whether the girls had been found together or apart. And Jones said, quote, "I can't give you that. We will give you as much as we can, but we are going to have to hold some things back because we are handling it as a murder," unquote. Now, the families were told in the early hours of December 7th. And Barbara said, quote, "At 3 o'clock that morning, some people were at my door, and

• 23:15Speaker 02

  then they said there was a fire, and they told us that both of my girls were dead," unquote. So Norah Thomas had lost her only sister. Quote, "I remember the shock. I remember fantasizing for days that my sister had somehow escaped and run away, and she was going to come back. And so that's what I was kind of holding on to," unquote. And Jones went to see the families the next day. And he hadn't slept yet and was still in the same clothes. He wore a green and white, almost fluorescent shirt that he'd bought that week off a bargain rack at Sheplers for the TV crew ride-along. Quote, "I just have to assume that whoever designed it was colorblind," unquote, he said. It had been hidden under his police jacket the night before, but now the families could

• 24:00Speaker 02

  see it as he comforted them. And they asked him where he'd got it, and it was the one light moment any of them had. So he made them a promise. Quote, "I said, 'Next time you see this shirt, it'll be because the case is solved,'" unquote. Now, Jones had grown up in East Austin and had gone to Austin High. And he had been a music major at the University of Texas before he quit to join the police in the early 70s. And he was 15 years in when they moved him to homicide. And that December, he was the violent crimes detective on duty, the one who took the homicides, suicides, and assaults as they came. Quote, "I just went at it clinically. What do I need to do here?" unquote. He would say, quote, "We hadn't had a case like that.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Multiple bodies, fire, gunshot wounds, probable robbery," unquote. And he called for help as soon as he saw the complexity of the scene. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the FBI, and the Texas Department of Public Safety all came in with DPS swabbing the girls. And he had very little to work with. Quote, "There was smoke and soot on every surface. Kind of made fingerprinting kind of difficult," unquote, Jones would say. And two different calibers meant, to the people working it, at least two killers. Quote, "As soon as we knew what type of guns we were looking for, that information went out nationwide," unquote, he would say. And Jones regularly kept in touch with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And their advice was that whoever fronted the investigation should look confident on the theory that it, quote, "would cause the bad guy to shiver in his boots," unquote. Now, the tips came in faster than anyone could work them. And a new detective named Jeff Addicks was loaned to the case for 30 days. And one of his jobs was to empty the tip line's answering machine every single morning. Thousands of leads went through the unit, and almost none of them went anywhere. Quote, "The only time we eliminated a suspect is when they made bed count in jail that night," unquote, Jones would say.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Now, the once-common assumption that this was a place where nothing like this would happen was gone, because the fire and killings had taken place in the more well-off end of town, and it happened to children. The fear landed hardest on other businesses, the ones where teenagers worked the same hours at the same kind of job. And parents who had pushed their kids into late shifts to teach them some responsibility started regretting it right away. And employers changed how they ran the evenings. Nobody was allowed to cross a dark parking lot on their own anymore, and exterior doors got locked before closing time rather than after. And the number of people working shifts at any given time was increased. And guards were being hired across Austin in unprecedented numbers.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And gun shops were selling more and taking calls from business owners who wanted to know whether they could legally keep a weapon behind the counter. And Barbara said of the situation, quote, "What did we do wrong here? We moved to a nice house in a nice neighborhood. We did all the middle-class American things that you can do to protect your family and make it wholesome and right," unquote. And the city put itself to work on the case. And volunteers went out with flyers, and white ribbons went up on trees around town. And a group of local businessmen had put up $100,000 in reward money, and the girls' faces went up on billboards. And Sonora Thomas said, quote, "The whole city was in shock.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Everywhere we drove, you know, there were these billboards with a picture of my sister on it," unquote. And the billboards asked the question, "Who killed these girls?" And on the following Monday, three days afterwards, there was a vigil at St. Louis Catholic Church, and more than 1,000 people came. And the funeral mass was the next day. And the church filled, and another 500 people stood outside on the lawn. And at the end, a linear senior named Dan Aguilera stood up with a trumpet and played Amazing Grace. And it was a week to the day after the murders. People gathered again, and this time at the shop itself, and stood in silence. And Mayor Kirk Watson later said that Austin had lost its innocence.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  So by the end of December, investigators had grown tired of the dead ends from the many tips they were receiving. And Lieutenant Andrew Waters, who supervised the homicide division, said, quote, "I'm sorry to say there's little evidence. It's getting very frustrating. We've run through most of the phone tips we've had. The information has dried up, and we haven't gotten anything," unquote. Now, just over a week after the murders, a 16-year-old named Maurice Pierce had been picked up at North Cross Mall carrying a 22 handgun. And police believe that a gun of the same make and model had been fired inside the shop. So under questioning, he said his friend, 15-year-old Forrest Wellborn, had used it at the yogurt shop.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  But ballistics couldn't tie the gun to the murders, and both boys passed a polygraph. And Jones also questioned the other two teenagers Pierce had named, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, but let all four of them go. Quote, "We got to a point to where we couldn't go any further with any of the four," unquote, Jones would say. And investigators traced 52 separate people who'd been inside the shop at some point that day and sat down with every single one of them. And several of them described the same two men, the ones sitting at the table by the register just before closing. Neither of them bought yogurt, only a drink. But nobody ever identified either man. Quote, "And we did everything. We even hypnotized some folks," unquote, Jones would say.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Now, over the years, more than 50 people told Austin Police they had killed the girls. And Jones said, quote, "And you know, at first, they puff out their chest, but after a few minutes, you know, they give it up. Oh, well, I was just kidding. We had six written confessions. Some of them were pretty good," unquote. would say, and some of those men even knew things the department believed only the killers would know, which meant somehow those details had gotten out. So in February of 1992, a sergeant named Hector Polanco was put in charge of the task force working the murders. And the next month, a suspect named Alex Briones gave him a written confession to the murders.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Now Briones ended up failing a polygraph and the confession was thrown out, and Polanco was taken off the task force. Now Polanco was charged with aggravated perjury and suspended indefinitely after refusing to accept a 30-day suspension. And he won reinstatement on appeal, but the department wouldn't have him back in homicide and put him in a walking unit instead. So on August 7, 1992, America's Most Wanted ran a segment on the case with Jones alongside the host, John Walsh, and it brought in about 60 tips. And in October of 1992, Mexican police arrested two men Austin investigators wanted to question, and one of them confessed. Porfirio Villa Sivadra and Alberto Jimenez Cortez had been indicted

• 31:06Speaker 02

  by a Travis County grand jury over the abduction and sexual assault of an Austin woman the month before the murders. And Cortez looked similar to a man seen outside the shop that night. Barbara watched the two of them brought out in front of reporters on the local news, and she would say, quote, "I just got the chills when they said he'd been charged with murder. I've been sick to my stomach all day. You want to feel good about it, but it brings all the reality back. I'm not ready for murder yet. I'm still juggling grief." Unquote. Now, the men eventually recanted, saying officials in Mexico had coerced them. So after years with no arrests, Jones was moved out of homicide in the summer of 1994. And he said, "It was time. People ask me how long I was in homicide, and my standard

• 31:50Speaker 02

  answer is 154 bodies, because that is how time is measured in there." And the images in his mind from the work caused insomnia that never quite went away, and he'd had treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. And he said his troubles played a part in his divorce. For the first 10 years after the day at the shop, he made himself unavailable on December 6, saying, quote, "It was a day to hide. I just didn't want people coming up to me. How are you doing? How are you doing? How am I supposed to be doing?" Unquote. So a new detective, Paul Johnson, took the case over in 1996 and had to reorganize the file before he could work it, to make sure nothing was missed. Now, there was information on more than 1,200 suspects in it, and over 5,000 handwritten pages, and a computer record

• 32:35Speaker 02

  that ran past 10,000 pages. And Kenneth Macduff, a serial killer already on death row, confessed in 1998, with his execution date coming up, but nothing actually tied him to the shop. And almost eight years on, Bob and Pam Ayers were still waiting, saying, quote, "I don't think they'll ever solve it. I want to know who did it and why. I need to know that somebody's paying for this." So as Johnson reworked the evidence, the case file still had four names in it for that first week. Maurice Pierce, who was 16, Forrest Welborn, who was 15, Robert Springsteen, who was 17, and Michael Scott, who was 17. All had been brought in and questioned within days of the murders and then released, as we know. And all four dropped out of high school, and none of them had more than minor run-ins

• 33:19Speaker 02

  with law. Pierce had initially been picked up on December 14, and on the 15th, detectives put a wire on him and sent him out driving with Welborn in an attempt to get a confession. And Jones wrote in his report, quote, "It was evident to everyone that Pierce was trying to force the issue on Welborn, who appeared to have no idea what Pierce was talking about." Unquote. And Welborn told them that the night after the murders, the four of them had driven a stolen Nissan Pathfinder to San Antonio, and that took detectives to Scott and Springsteen. Now Scott and Springsteen said they knew nothing about the murders, and Welborn said the same. So they came away believing Pierce had a mental problem that made him invent the story about the gun. So the homicide unit was buried in leads,

• 34:04Speaker 02

  and nobody took the line of questioning any further. So police went back to Pierce and Welborn in 1996, and again in 1997, and tried to see if they could gather any new information. And both denied having any sort of involvement with the murders again. And then in 1998, Johnson put together a task force with the purpose of going back through the evidence. And one of the leads he chose to reopen was the one they called "The Pierce Tip." And that February, he called Michael Scott. Now Scott answered with a short account of that night, and nothing in it was incriminating. And in September of 1999, Johnson handed the next step over to a sergeant named Ronald Lara for a follow-up interview. And Scott agreed to meet him on September 9.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Let's take a quick pause to talk about something positive, and probably something you don't think I was ever going to talk about, and that is my bra. I am extremely particular about my bras, because I know this is weird, but I get chronic migraines and headaches. And if you know, you know. If you wear bras, if it's too tight, if it fits wrong, it can like cause stress in your shoulders, which causes me to have headaches. And the best thing in the world is just taking it off at the end of the day. So I strived to find a bra that didn't give me that feeling, that I felt like I could really sleep in. And honestly, Skims provided that with their Fits Everybody collection. And I was already a fan of their pajamas specifically. I have, but let's just say I have a few of them,

• 35:29Speaker 02

  all right? And let's just say, after my workday, I live in those pajamas, because they are quite literally one of the comfiest things I've ever put on my body. But my whole problem with bras is that by hour three of recording, I'm counting the minutes until it comes off. But the Fits Everybody crossover bralette specifically is like wearing a second skin. It is so comfortable. The fabric just molds to your body, and not to mention, it's actually supportive without squeezing the life out of you. But it's what I reach for basically every day now. And the underwear they have is the same story. I'm slowly replacing my entire drawer. And I've gifted Skims to my mom, my sister, my other sister, and my other sister, my aunties, and they all just rave about it. So I highly recommend you go

• 36:12Speaker 02

  check out Skims and shop the Skims Fits Everybody collection at skims.com. And after you place your order, be sure to let them know that I sent you. And you can do that by selecting Podcast in the survey, and be sure to select My Show in the drop-down menu that follows. But thank you so much to Skims for giving me some comfy bras and underwears and pajamas and all sorts of other stuff, and for supporting the channel. And let's get back to it. So two detectives picked Scott up at 8:30 in the morning from the parking lot where his wife worked. And by 9:10, he was sitting in a homicide interview room with a hidden camera in it. And Lara said he went in to, quote, "spend maybe an hour or two with Scott to obtain the information that he had relevant to the Maurice Pierce tip and to move on." Unquote. But the interview went differently almost at once. And the officers realized

• 36:57Speaker 02

  that, quote, "Things were just not going as normal in the witness interview." Unquote. And they questioned him for about 20 hours. 18 of those were on videotape in the interview room over the 9th, the 10th, and the 12th. And the sessions ran on until the 21st, at the station, in the car on the way there, and at his own home. And he was driven home at the end of each session. And nobody read him his rights until September 14, when they took a written statement. Now, the officers told Scott that Springsteen, Pierce, and Welborn had already given up his part in the murders. But that wasn't true, as we know. And they told him, "The brain keeps a record of everything a person has ever

• 37:38Speaker 02

  seen, and that his only needed unblocking." So on the second day of questioning, they brought in the 22 Pierce had been carrying at the mall. And they believed showing it to him might, quote, "Put him back in there mentally in that store with that gun in his hand." Unquote. Merrill handed Scott the revolver, which was unloaded, obviously. And then, holding the gun himself, again, he put a finger against the back of Scott's head. Quote, "Is that the gun you walked up behind somebody with and shot in the head? Is that the one?" Unquote. Scott said his mind had gone blank, and they gave him half an hour to recover. And when the interview started again, he told Merrill, quote, unquote,

• 38:20Speaker 02

  "You scared the shit out of me." And Merrill would say, "I meant to scare the shit out of you." And by the end of the second day, he was saying he'd set the fire, that he'd shot one shot, and that he likely shot one of the girls. And his account of that night changed regularly, though. And he never actually got the inside of the shop right. A wall was missing one time, and a hallway that didn't exist was added next. The girls were clothed, then partly undressed, then completely naked. And their hands had been tied with underwear or jeans, or skirt or napkins, or an electric cord, depending on when he was asked. And they had been strangled, beaten, kicked, stabbed, or shot, according to his

• 39:01Speaker 02

  accounts. And he never made it clear who had shot whom, or with which gun. Now, there was evidence to suggest that at least one fact from the interviews had been given to him by the questioners. And on the first day, an officer asked him, quote, unquote, "So one of the girls, you're saying, was shot twice?" And Scott himself had said nothing of the kind up to that point. And he agreed from then on. It was as if he claimed it to begin with. So Merrill flew to Charleston on September 14 and interviewed Springsteen at the police station the next day. And the interview took about five hours, and it was also videotaped. And an hour in, Springsteen was still telling them he had no involvement, quote, unquote, "I wasn't in there," he would tell the three detectives in the room. And

• 39:45Speaker 02

  he would continue to say, "I'm telling you, I wasn't in there. I feel like I'm stuck in a corner because you guys have to go where you have to go." Unquote. Three hours later, with detectives shouting into his face, he confessed. And he told them he'd kept the back door open with a folded pack of cigarettes, or a rock. And he told them about a silver .380 automatic. And he told them he had raped one of the girls, and that he had shot one of them with a silver gun in the back of the head while she was crawling and screaming. Now, both Scott and Springsteen took back their confessions almost as soon as they had said them. And Richard Leo, a University of San Francisco law professor

• 40:27Speaker 02

  who studies false confessions, said the police of that era didn't understand just how widespread false confessions were. Quote, "They believed it was especially unlikely to get false confessions in very serious cases, homicide cases, capital cases, for example." Unquote. Now, a false confession is convincing for the same reason that it's false. The person giving it knows things only the killer could know, because the people asking the questions told him. So there's a level of planting and coercion going on. So Pierce, Welborn, Scott, and Springsteen were arrested on October 6, 1999, and each was charged with capital murder. And in the spring of 2000, Forrest Welborn's lawyer gambled and let two prosecutors question

• 41:11Speaker 02

  his client in his own office. And they questioned him for more than three hours and came away with nothing. And two grand juries heard the case against Welborn and neither one indicted him. And Diana Castaneda sat on the first one, saying, quote, "In my mind, there wasn't anything that put him at the scene at the time," she said. And Judge John Weiser dismissed four counts of capital murder at the end of June after the second grand jury ran out its term without acting. Now, part of the problem was that Scott and Springsteen's accounts disagreed about Welborn. One had him keeping watch from the car, and the other had him getting frightened and running off completely. And Welborn had been out on $375,000 bail since his arrest.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  His mother said he lost his auto repair shop he just opened and couldn't get work afterwards. And in June, the validity of the original gun came apart as well. And a federal ballistics report found that the 22 taken off Pierce at the mall probably wasn't used in the killings at all. And a detective even acknowledged that he'd known that for months before the four were arrested. And Welborn's lawyer wanted to know why Paul Johnson hadn't mentioned it at the pre-trial hearing, saying, quote, "I don't think he testified truthfully." And Barbara, the Harbison's girl's mom, still believed the police had the white men. "They don't have enough evidence to hold him now. That doesn't mean they won't have more evidence after the others are tried."

• 42:38Speaker 02

  So Springsteen's trial began in May of 2001, and prosecutors had nothing physical tying him to the shop, and instead built the case on what he'd said in Charleston. And Judge Mike Lynch let the jury hear parts of Scott's confessions, too, even though Springsteen's lawyer could not cross-examine Scott, who was awaiting his own trial. And a juror named Gunther Goetz said that the two confessions matching each other was what helped them make their decision. "That really struck a chord. Do people make up facts that weren't known? I think all of us were wishing it would have been an easier decision for us, and if there had been a lot of physical evidence, it would have been easier." So on May 30, they found him guilty of capital murder for the killing of Amy Ayers.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  And it took the jury 11 hours over two days to deliberate. Springsteen was 26, and his face was flat while Lynch read the verdict, his hands clasped in front of him. Lynch read, quote, "I hereby assess your punishment at death." And on the side of the courtroom, the Ayers family took up the whole front row, and the row kept for Springsteen's relatives was close to empty because prosecutors had subpoenaed them. And most days, the only person there to support him was his grandmother, Mary Jane Rhoadbush. Now, outside, one of his lawyers, Berkeley Bettis, said he told his clients this was, quote, "Not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning." And Springsteen would say back, "Right."

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Now, there was still a gag order preventing public discussion, so Pam Ayers kept her remarks short. And she thanked the police, the prosecutors, and the city, saying, quote, "For their prayers and support for the last nine and a half years." Now, Scott went on trial the following year, and this time, it was Springsteen's statements the jury got to hear. And the case against him was built on the 20 hours of videotape. His lawyers told the jury that the confession was false and had been squeezed out of him. And the officer who booked him in 1999 testified as well, and he'd asked Scott, going down the standard list of questions, whether he had ever considered suicide. And Scott answered December 6, 1991.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  And the jury would convict him on September 22, 2002, but couldn't agree on a death sentence, so he got life. Now, Pierce waited three years in jail for a trial that never came. And in January of 2003, the district attorney dismissed the charges for lack of evidence, and he walked out of the Travis County Jail at DeValley into a crowd of reporters. So Springsteen got an automatic appeal under Texas law, and Scott appealed as well. Now, Scott's lawyers argued that nobody had read him his rights, and that he had been in custody the whole time, and that the confession had been forced out of him. And the Austin Appeals Court turned that down. He hadn't been in custody, it held, because the officers drove him home at the end of

• 45:29Speaker 02

  each day and never told him he couldn't go. So the court called what Merrill did with the revolver improper, but found that the act hadn't broken Scott's will to the point of forcing him to submit to questioning or making false statements. And both Springsteen and Scott's convictions turned instead on a Supreme Court ruling that landed while the appeals were pending. So Crawford versus Washington was decided in 2004, and it held that a confession given in a police interview could not be used against somebody else unless the person it was being used against got to question the person who gave the confession. I know that was a mouthful. So to put it plainly, each jury heard the other man's confession, and neither man had

• 46:13Speaker 02

  ever had the chance for cross-examination, so they weren't questioned. So the Austin court agreed Scott's rights had been violated and upheld his conviction anyway, on the view that the error hadn't changed the verdict. But the Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed, and it threw out Springsteen's conviction on May 24, 2006, and Scott's the year after. And by then, Springsteen was already off death row, as the Supreme Court had barred the execution of anyone who was under 18 when they offended. Because Springsteen had been 17, his death sentence was commuted to life. And John Jones heard the news about the first ruling and said, quote, "This is going to be tough on the parents to have to live through all of this again."

• 46:56Speaker 02

  And Rosemary Lenberg, by then the district attorney, was determined to try them both again. But before she did, her office ordered a kind of testing that was still fairly new at the time, called YSTR, which looks only for male DNA. And they ran it on vaginal swabs taken from the girls in 1991. And it found a partial male profile on one of the swabs, but that profile didn't connect any of the four men in question. So Lenberg's office went looking for an innocent explanation. More than 100 men were tested, among them, crime scene investigators and staff from the medical examiner's office, anyone who might have touched a body and left something behind. But not one of them matched either.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  So Springsteen and Scott were let out on personal bond in June of 2009. And on October 28, they came back before Judge Mike Lynch, who had sentenced Springsteen to death eight years earlier. And Lenberg's office asked him to dismiss the charges and told him the state still had no match and wasn't ready for a jury. So Lynch granted the request, and Lenberg spoke afterwards, saying, quote, "Make no mistake, this is a difficult decision for me, and one I would rather not make." And in the courtroom, the two men smiled at each other and shook hands without saying anything. Now, Scott put his arms around his wife, Janine. Quote, "This has been a long time coming. I'm happy to be here."

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Because they had been locked up for nearly 10 years, and they walked out of that courtroom released, though not fully cleared. So nothing in the dismissal said they hadn't done it, and nothing stopped the state charging them again. Bob Ayers sat through the hearing, and he expressed no emotion on his face and said nothing to the reporters outside. Pierce had been out since 2003, and his wife Kimberly described him as a hardened man when he came home. She believes the police never left them alone afterwards. And on Thursday night in December of 2010, two officers watched a car go through a stop sign in a residential street in North Austin, and the driver was Pierce, who, quote, "was trying to elude them," and then ran from the car on foot.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  And when the police officers caught up with Pierce, he took a knife off Officer Wilson's belt and cut him with it across the ear, the trachea, and the carotid artery. And Wilson fired one shot, leaving Pierce dead. Now, Darlena Crowder, a lawyer who represented Pierce on other charges, explained why he might flee. "He had been in jail for such a long time on those cases, that every time he gets detained, he is traumatized and runs because he is so scared of the police." And Pierce's daughter, Marissa, was on the phone with him while it happened, and she says he panicked, and that he was trying to get away rather than hurt anybody. Quote, "And in those last moments, he had just said, 'I'm sorry, I don't think you're gonna see me again, and I love you.'"

• 49:48Speaker 02

  So the case had gone back on the shelf when the state dropped the charges in 2009, where it sat for several years. And at Austin Police Headquarters, the cold case unit kept a scale model of the shop on display with photographs of the four girls beside it. So nobody could walk into that office without looking at the girls' faces. Now, everything now rested on the partial male profile taken off one of the swabs, but it was difficult to determine who it belonged to. Now, the profile had just 16 markers, and only a trace of a physical sample was left to work with. And the low marker count meant that they had enough to clear a suspect, but not enough to name one. So in 2017, an investigator in Austin ran a profile through a public database of DNA

• 50:30Speaker 02

  collected for population research, and he got something. Nothing in years had looked this good. And the only problem was that FBI anonymously put that sample into the database itself with no name attached. And Austin officials asked the Bureau for the name, but the answer was no on privacy grounds. And the city then went to Michael McCall, the US Congressman from Austin, and McCall urged the FBI to cooperate. And in early 2020, the Bureau finally agreed to work with Austin Police on further testing. And the new round of testing pulled nine more markers out of the crime scene sample, taking it from 16 to 25.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  However, this showed that the profile from the scene and the database one no longer matched each other. And the FBI wrote to McCall that the results, quote, conclusively exclude the male donor of the FBI sample. As such, the FBI YSTR profile is not an investigative lead. And that was the greatest disappointment because we really thought we had it, unquote. Now, throughout that time, the families made sure nobody at the police department forgot. And Bob Ayers regularly searched for answers in person, saying, quote, "Every chance I got, I went to the police department to make sure they were working on the case," unquote. And when the rest of the Ayers family had run out of steam, Angie Ayers, the wife of Amy's brother Sean, stepped in. Quote, "Sean said,

• 51:55Speaker 02

  'I need you to do this. Would you help us?' And I went, 'Absolutely,' unquote." And Angie became the point of contact between investigators and the other family. And she also suggested the investigators bring in a genealogist. And Barbara Ayers Wilson had stopped expecting any answer by this point. Quote, "I am open to facts, but after all this time, justice is far gone. I just don't know that we have the skill to solve this case," unquote. The case also produced a federal law as well. And on August 3, 2022, President Biden signed the Homicide Victims Families Rights Act, which makes federal agencies go back through cold murder files with current technology, as well as giving a victim's immediate

• 52:38Speaker 02

  family the opportunity to ask for a cold case review upon meeting the criteria. And when the law was announced, Senator John Cornyn's office said it had been inspired by the Austin case. So in March of 2025, a documentary series about the case premiered at South by Southwest, The Yogurt Shop Murders, and featured four episodes directed by Margaret Brown and produced by A24, with Emma Stone among its executive producers. And Brown had come to Austin for the music scene a few years after the murders. And by that point, they had, as she put it, "settled into the city itself and become a ghost story." Brown said, quote, "All of the family members always said to me, 'There never is closure. You learn how to live alongside

• 53:22Speaker 02

  it, but it never loses its potency,' unquote." So it aired on HBO on August 3, 2025, given the case Austin had lived with for 33 years, a much broader audience. Let's take a quick pause to talk about something that is serious, but not as serious. Listen, if I ever go missing, please question my cat, baby, first, because every morning at 6:00 a.m., baby, my cat, sits on my chest and stares at me like she's planning something. And the motive is an empty bowl, because she wants her Smalls. And if I don't give it to her, I don't want to know what's gonna happen. But Smalls is fresh, protein-packed cat food made with

• 54:02Speaker 02

  preservative-free, 100% human-grade ingredients, delivered right to your door. And since we switched, her coat has been overall shinier. She's honestly just healthier in general, even though vets say so. And she's hacking up a lot less. She used to like do this thing where she like is scarf and barf. She would like eat her food so fast and then barf immediately. She doesn't do that with Smalls, which is great for me and for her. And honestly, her litter box is a lot less stinky as well, which is also really nice for me. Now, Forbes ranked Smalls the best overall cat food, and if your cat won't eat it, they'll just refund you. But your cat's health and longevity starts with what they eat. And for a limited time, because you are a crime conspiracy cult and murder listener, you can get 60%

• 54:46Speaker 02

  off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to Smalls.com/CCCM. That's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to Smalls.com/CCCM. Thank you so much to Smalls for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel. Let's get back to it. So in 2022, on his first day running Austin's unsolved homicide unit, a detective named Dan Jackson was called in to see his supervisor with the door shut. But Jackson assumed he was already in trouble. Instead, he was given an order to solve the yogurt shop murders. Quote, "I knew at that point, the gravity of this case, how big it was at that point, it would be with me the rest of my life," unquote, he would say. And he was around eight to nine months younger

• 55:31Speaker 02

  than Amy Ayers and had grown up about 30 miles south of Austin, and the murders were something he'd known of all his life. So he wanted to keep testing things, but was aware the science still had some catching up to do. So he sat down with DNA and genealogy specialists and drew up a tiered list of things from the scene worth testing again. And in August of 2023, Jackson volunteered for a night on patrol and was shot by an armed suspect. Quote, "I got shot mostly in the right arm, but a little bit to the face with a 12-gauge shotgun from about 10 feet away," unquote. And after surgery and rehab, he came back on light duty, but went straight back to working on the case. So in late June of 2025,

• 56:14Speaker 02

  he went back to the 380 casing from the floor drain. And nobody had run it through the National Ballistics Database in years, and the software had gotten much better in the meantime. So Jackson submitted it again. And the answer came back within hours. And on July 2, while Jackson was on vacation at the beach with his family, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives called him. Quote, "He's like, 'Do you have a drink in your hand?' I was like, 'I have a drink in my hand.' He said, 'Good, you're gonna need it.' And he goes, 'We got a hit,' unquote." The bullet casing matched the tool markings of a gun from an unsolved 1998 Kentucky murder. And some of the details for the two crimes

• 56:56Speaker 02

  lined up, so Jackson started working with the Kentucky detectives, still without a name for the man. So in August, he asked every lab in the country holding YSTR profiles to run the Austin profile by hand. And several came back with partial hits, 16 or 17 markers out of the 27 the profile now carried. And one lab in South Carolina had all 27. And the report reached Jackson on August 22, and it tied the yogurt shop profile to a man already named in a 1990 sexual assault and murder in Greenville. And rather than wait for South Carolina to call him back, Jackson looked up the date and the place,

• 57:37Speaker 02

  and the name that came up belonged to a serial killer. And on the phone afterwards, the detective in South Carolina asked Jackson a question, quote, "He said, 'Hey, let me ask you something. Did he tie the victims up with their own clothing?' And that's when the hair on the back of my neck stood up," unquote, Jackson would say. And he would continue, quote, "I was like, 'We're on the right path.' And I said, 'Yeah, he did that in my case, too,' unquote." And a background check found the man on his way out of Texas within two days of the murder. So on December 8, 1991, Border Patrol stopped him at a checkpoint on the highway running west out of El Paso toward La Cruzas, driving a car stolen out of Georgia

• 58:20Speaker 02

  and carrying a 380 pistol. And the checkpoint pistol serial numbers matched the pistol the man would use on himself in 1999. And then, on September 15, Jackson sent off the fingernail clippings taken at Amy's autopsy in 1991 in hopes there might be a connection. And it was a risky move because usable DNA would be spent in this process. Quote, "This is it. We're gonna push our chips. We're going all in," unquote, he would say. Now, the DNA under her nails was his, and the odds were two and a half million to one. And this man's name was Robert Eugene Braschers. He was a serial killer and a rapist who had

• 59:01Speaker 02

  killed at least three people between 1990 and 1998. And nobody in Austin had ever heard of him. And he had never been a suspect, and his known crimes were spread across South Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky with nothing on record putting him anywhere near Texas. Nobody anywhere knew he was a serial killer until 2018, nearly two decades after he was already dead. And when authorities in Missouri matched his DNA to a 1990 strangling in South Carolina and to a mother and daughter shot in Missouri in 1998. And why he was in Austin that night is something the police still can't answer. And Mayor Kirk Watson

• 59:43Speaker 02

  opened the September 29, 2025, press conference with a moment of silence. And then Jackson and Mindy Montford, who runs the cold case unit at the Texas Attorney General's office, spent close to 90 minutes walking the room through the ballistics, the DNA, and the police work behind them. And the families had already been briefed, but they sat stone-faced while the details were gone through again. And Jackson told the families, quote, "This is something that could not have happened until 2025. I'm sorry that it took 34 years for us to get here, but we're here now. And you know, Amy's final moments on this earth were to solve this case for us. It's because of her, fighting back," unquote. And Barbara

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Ayers Wilson said, quote, "I'm full of gratitude. It has been so long, and all we wanted for this case was the truth. We never wanted anyone to go to jail or be charged with anything that they did not do. Vengeance was never it. It was always the truth," unquote. And Sonora Thomas said, quote, "One part of my brain has been screaming, 'What happened to my sister?' And the other part kept repeating, 'I will never know. I know now what happened, and that does ease my suffering," unquote. And Angie Ayers spoke to the other police departments, saying, quote, "To law enforcement far and near, open the cold case boxes. Please, put the evidence in the databases. Run the rape kits. Do not wait. Do it today. You

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  can help ease someone's pain," unquote. And Bob Ayers pinned a "We Will Not Forget" badge on Jackson. And it was one of the badges his parents had made right after the murders. And Jose Garza, the district attorney, commented on the findings, saying, quote, "The overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and the innocence of four," unquote. Now, a few weeks earlier, Jackson called John Jones and said, quote, "He said, 'Hey, Jones, this is Detective Jackson. Do you still have the green and white shirt?" And that was one detective to another telling him, "We got this," unquote. And when Jones got to City Hall, he hugged Sonora, and then he opened his jacket to show her the shirt and said, quote, unquote, "I'd fulfilled my promise."

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Now, Braschers was born in Newport News, Virginia, on March 13, 1958. And next to nothing about his childhood is on record beyond a description of him as intelligent, manipulative, and good with tools and weapons. Now, the record of his violence begins in 1985 in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where a woman named Michelle Wilkerson got into his car with him on friendly terms. And when she tried to get out, though, he shot her. Luckily, she lived and was able to identify him. And he was convicted of attempted murder and given 12 years, but he was paroled in 1989. Now, in April of 1990, a 28-year-old named Genevieve Zatricki was found beaten and strangled

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  in her bathtub in Greenville, South Carolina. And that was the case that would one day hand the city of Austin the killer's name. And during those years, he ran a construction company, but would leave on various occasions for weeks at a time. And his family was told he was working. But in 1997, at a house in Memphis, Braschers tied three women up and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl. And in 1998, in Portageville, Missouri, he shot Sherri Sherer, who was 38 at the time, and her daughter, Megan, who was only 12 at the time, in their own home. Now, his daughter, Deborah, was five years old when he got out of prison and returned to the family, where he helped raise her two half-sisters

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  as well. And she has two photographs of him. In one of them, he is pretending to choke her sisters while they beat him with hairbrushes. Quote, "It doesn't look like a serial killer or a rapist," unquote, she said. And the two years he spent living with them began a few months after the Memphis crimes and ran through the killing of the Sherers. So he was holed up in a Super 8 motel room in Kennett, Missouri, with his wife and three girls when the police caught up with him on January 13, 1999. And after a standoff with police, he let them out and then turned the gun on himself. But it took him six days to die. Now, the 2018 identification was made possible by Missouri investigators having his body

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  dug up for a sample. And state police came to Deborah's door that September, and by October, she had been told the truth of her father. And Deborah responded, quote, "There are people who live to kill, and then there are people who have double lives that kill every now and then, obviously. That was my father. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing," unquote. So investigators had believed since the beginning that there had to be more than one perpetrator in the yogurt shop murders that night. But Braschers had demonstrated in Memphis that he was capable of controlling multiple victims by himself. Binding the girls with their own clothes was on the list of overlaps between the yogurt shop and

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  the other crimes Braschers committed, including sexual assault and fires set at some of the crime scenes. And he was known to carry more than one gun, and he was known to only work alone, offering an explanation for the two different calibers of weapons that were found at the scene. Now, the fire in the shop had always been taken for an attempt to burn off whatever evidence he had left behind. And what turned that from a guess into a habit was the incident in Kentucky, because Linda Rutledge, the woman murdered in 1998 that the casing matched, was killed inside a strip mall business, and the business was burned down. And asked whether anyone had been with him, Jackson was careful. Quote, "At this point, there was no evidence he had an accomplice," unquote.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  But the case is still open for now. And the pair, the couple noticed on their way out, sitting by the register with their faces half-hidden, have never been identified. And the hardest part to swallow is how close the investigation came, twice in the first two weeks. Two days after the murders, federal agents had him at checkpoint with the gun in a stolen car. And six days after that, Maurice Pierce turned up at the mall with a 22, leading the case another direction. And the casings out of the drain sat in an evidence room for 33 years. And Jackson spent three of those looking for the man who left it at the scene and never once came across the name. Quote, "I never heard his name, and surprisingly, he wasn't anywhere in our case file as a tip to look at," unquote.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  So since Braschers had been dead for 26 years, by the time Austin learned his name, there was nobody left to put on trial. And a laboratory was only able to tie him to his crimes years after he was dead. And in 2019, after Missouri investigators spoke with her about her father, Deborah said, quote, "I feel ashamed for it being my father, and I feel, every day, I feel a different way about him. He never got charged, he never got caught, and got away with this for almost 20 years. Even being dead got away with this for 20 years," unquote. And detectives have asked anyone who can place Braschers in Austin that December to come forward. And Jackson also believes there might be other unsolved cases that belong

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  to Braschers. Quote, "If you had any unsolved murders with a similar MO between 1989 to early 1992, especially if it's a 30-80 involved, and then again in 97 and 98, when he was back at a prison, please get in contact with us," unquote. So in December of 2025, the district attorney's office filed notice of exonerating evidence, asked the court to appoint lawyers for all four men, and set a hearing for February 19. And Michael Scott was the only one of the four to take the stand. Quote, "Every day, I carried the weight of a crime I did not commit," unquote, he would say. And Welborn's mother told the court of the nightmare that her family had lived through, and that her

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  son had called her from a jail cell with a million-dollar bond looming over him, asking for help she did not have to give. Quote, unquote, "It broke my heart," she would say. And her daughter had died of brain cancer that September, after promising she would learn the killer's name in heaven and clear her brother. And 15 days later, detectives identified Braschers. And Kimberly Pierce told the court about the two years and more that Maurice had spent in solitary, and about holidays spent visiting him, separated by Plexiglas, she would say. And by the middle of the day, Judge Dana Blasey had declared each of the four men actually innocent. Quote, "No ruling can restore the time taken from you. No judgment

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  can fully remedy the burden that you have carried. But the court can and does state, without qualification or hesitation, that you are cleared and that your innocence is affirmed," unquote. And on May 28, 2026, the city council voted unanimously to pay them $35 million, the largest settlement Austin has ever made. And Scott and Springsteen get 9.85 million each, Welborn 4.85 million, and Pierce's family 10 million. The settlement also bound the police to a change. No suspect under 18 is allowed to be questioned without supervision, a provision the Innocence Project of Texas has pushed for. So the detectives working Austin in the late 1980s and early 1990s became known for coercing

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  false confessions out of people. Keith Hampton, the defense attorney who represented Maurice Pierce in 1991, remembers what the courtrooms of that era were like, saying, quote, "It takes a long time to change a culture and to change an attitude," unquote. And until DNA began proving confessions false, quote, "It was a joke that somebody was innocent," unquote. And six confessions came out of the yogurt shop case over the years, and John Jones said he never approved any of them. So back at the December press conference, Barbara Ayers-Wilson used her turn at the microphone to thank the police, saying, quote, "Every officer that I see in Austin that has been there for us and loved us and what they have done, people don't understand how

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  hard they work. I really just came to say thank you to the Austin Police Department and all the love and support that you have given us over the 34 years," unquote. And Sonora Thomas gave a heartfelt speech, saying, quote, "The outpouring of love from strangers because of these tragic circumstances has taught me about the nature of humanity. Living through something like this, you would think that I'd feel worse about humanity, but instead, I feel better," unquote. And Maria Thomas died by suicide in 2015, never knowing who had killed her daughter. And Angie Ayers pointedly addressed a painful moment, saying, quote, "There's been a great amount of emotion today that no one can explain unless you experience it. And to those that leaked it, leaked it before all the family members were notified, shame on you. This

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  has never been a story to us. And the one day that we were trying to cope with it and take a breath, you took that from us," unquote. And Sean and Angie still celebrate Amy's birthday, usually a cake at home or a dessert split at a restaurant. And though the yogurt shop is no more, there's a memorial still there at the strip mall where it once was. A metal plaque set into granite carries the four names: Amy Ayers, Sarah Harbison, Jennifer Harbison, and Eliza Thomas. And beneath them are the words, "Forever in our hearts." And on December 6, 2021, 30 years to the day, people kept stopping by, and a visual was held there that evening. And Nat Porter, who had known Eliza, spoke there, saying,

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  quote, "I encourage everybody to speak these girls' names and just keep them alive. You die twice when you actually die, and when the last person speaks your name. So speak their names. Jennifer, and Sarah, and Amy, and Eliza did not get to be a part of the community. And the community is less for it because they were really good citizens. They would have made a difference somehow," unquote. So that is the case of the murders of Jennifer, Sarah, Amy, and Eliza. And I will choose to remember their names, and I hope you do too. And also, if you have any information regarding the awful, awful human being Braschers, and any crimes that he might have been involved

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  in, in those years he was active, please contact your local police. But thank you to everyone that suggested I look into this case. And if you have any other cases you would like me to look into, please let me know down below. And until then, please stay safe out there and stay beautiful. All right? Bye.