DNA Links Dead Man to Horrific Austin Murders
Tributes lay on a memorial Friday, Sept. 26, 2025, for four teenage girls who were killed in a yogurt shop in 1991 in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Paul J. Weber)
Austin police announced Monday that new DNA and ballistics evidence has identified Robert Eugene Brashers as the likely killer in the notorious 1991 yogurt shop murders, a case that left the city haunted for decades. Authorities confirmed that Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 during a standoff with law enforcement, has now been linked through DNA to the brutal deaths of four teenage girls.
On December 6, 1991, Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, 17 and 15, were bound, gagged, sexually assaulted, and shot execution-style inside the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The killer then set fire to the building. Detective Daniel Jackson said DNA found under Amy Ayers’ fingernails proved pivotal in solving the case: “Amy’s final moments on this Earth were to solve this case for us. It’s because of her fighting back.”
Brashers’ violent criminal history stretched across several states. In 1985, he shot a woman in Florida who had rejected his advances and served 12 years in prison before being paroled in 1989. Later investigations connected him to a string of violent crimes, including the strangulation of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee in 1997, and the 1998 shooting of a Missouri mother and daughter.
After Brashers’ death at age 40, DNA testing linked him to multiple unsolved murders and assaults nationwide. Cold case investigators eventually exhumed his body, confirming that his DNA matched evidence from three of the yogurt shop victims and from under Ayers’ fingernails.
The original investigation saw thousands of leads and several false confessions. In 1999, police charged four men—two of whom, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were convicted after making statements later recanted. Springsteen was sentenced to death, later reduced to life in prison. Both convictions were overturned, and the men were released in 2009 when new DNA evidence pointed to an unidentified suspect. Police now say Brashers had no known ties to those men.
“This case has haunted our community for decades,” Jackson said. “We now know the person responsible, and we can finally close this chapter.”
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