A SUSPECT has been identified in the notorious Yoghurt Shop Murders 34 years after four teen girls were tied up, shot dead and incinerated.
The bodies of Eliza Thomas, 17, Jennifer Harbinson, 17, Sarah Harbinson, 17, and Amy Ayers, 13, were found charred beyond recognition in a Texas yoghurt shop in 1991.
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After more than three decades of mystery and false starts, police in Austin revealed they linked Robert Eugene Brashers to the murders using “a wide range of DNA testing”.
Brashers killed himself back in 1999 during a tense armed stand off with police.
He was a serial killer and rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the states of South Carolina and Missouri.
Brashers was identified after investigators managed to link DNA on a bullet casing found in a drain inside the yoghurt shop to the gun he shot himself with.
The four girls were discovered naked, bound up and with bullet holes in their heads in the storage room of an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin on December 6, 1991.
The shop had also been set on fire, making it very difficult to collect any evidence.
At least one of the teens had also been raped.
As time dragged on without anyone charged, the murders became one of Austin’s most notorious unsolved crimes.
Police there waded through thousands of leads and numerous false leads, and we hampered by the lack of evidence at the burned-out crime scene.
The FBI was even called in to bolster the investigation – but it went cold for years.
In 1999, however, four men – Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn – were arrested and charged with the murders.
They had been only teenagers at the time of the murders, and were all first questioned in the days immediately following the crime.
In December 1991, Piper had been arrested at a nearby mall with a .22 calibre gun – the type of weapon believed to have been used to shoot the girls.
All were released back then in the face of a lack of evidence, but an invigored investigation in 1999 obtained confessions from two of the group – Springsteen and Scott.
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These confessions were later withdrawn, however, and the pair claimed they had been coerced into giving them.
Nonetheless, they went to trial, while charges were dropped against Pierce and Welbourne.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based solely on their own withdrawn confessions and went to jail.
Their convictions were dropped and they were released ten years later, in 2009, after new DNA analysis methods did not link them to the crime.
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Police had realised the girls were sexually assaulted and obtained male DNA samples from vaginal swabs of the victims.
For years, they hunted for a match.
One finally came this month, according to the original investigator John Jones.
Separately, two Mexicans were also arrested in connection but later ruled out as suspects.
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