In a breakthrough for a case that has haunted Austin, Texas, for over three decades, police announced they have identified the man responsible for the brutal 1991 murders of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop.
Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas, and Amy Ayers were tragically killed in a crime that left the city grappling with fear and unresolved questions.
At a news conference held recently, lead detective Daniel Jackson revealed that the girls were attacked in the shop, shot in the head, and found nude and bound at the scene.
Additionally, evidence indicated sexual assault had occurred, and the perpetrator set fire to the building to cover up the crime before escaping.
The investigation had its early twists in 1999 when four suspects were arrested.
Two of these suspects confessed to the crime but later recanted their statements, leading to a complicated legal battle. Charges against two others were dropped.
The two who initially confessed were later convicted of capital murder, but their convictions were overturned on appeal due to constitutional errors.
Before prosecutors could initiate a retrial, advancements in DNA technology linked the crime to another individual, ultimately resulting in the release of both men in 2009.
Detective Jackson, who assumed responsibility for the case in 2022, revisited a spent .380 caliber casing left at the crime scene this June.
“It had not been submitted into the NIBIN system in many years.
NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, functions similarly to CODIS, which is used for DNA.
Upon submission in July, a match was found indicating the same firearm was potentially used in an unsolved murder case in Kentucky with similar details to the yogurt shop killings,” he detailed.
Despite this promising lead, Jackson noted that apart from the similarities in method, there were no apparent connections between the Kentucky case and the murders in Austin.
Since 2008, investigators had been actively pursuing various DNA testing methods, revisiting the case as DNA databases expanded.
From the original crime scene, authorities had collected Y-STR DNA, which is Y chromosome DNA specific to male suspects.
Jackson and his team contacted laboratories that specialize in Y-STR typing.
After a careful manual search against their unknown profile, they struck gold: a definitive match was found.
Notably, the South Carolina state lab responded as the only facility in the nation confirming the full match, with every allele being identical.
This information led to Robert Eugene Brashers, whose profile was linked to a 1990 sexual assault and murder in Greenville, South Carolina.
The Austin police proceeded to reexamine the Y-STR DNA from under the fingernails of victim Amy Ayers.
The results were conclusive: it matched Brashers’ profile.
Before the yogurt shop incident, Brashers had a history of violence, having served prison time for shooting a woman and subsequently being paroled in 1989.
Det. Jackson underscored that Brashers’ DNA also connected him to numerous unsolved murders and sexual assaults across the country during the ’90s, for which he never faced trial.
Tragically, Brashers ended his life in 1999 during a standoff with law enforcement.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis described the yogurt shop murders as one of the most daunting and sorrowful cases frozen in the city’s history.
Barbara Ayres-Wilson, the mother of victims Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, expressed her deep sense of gratitude during the press conference.
“It has been so long, and all we ever wanted for this case was the truth.
We never sought vengeance against anyone who did not commit this crime,” she stated.
Travis County District Attorney José Garza addressed the 1999 suspects during the conference, indicating that further investigative steps were ongoing.
“The overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and the innocence of four,” he concluded.
Garza vowed that if the investigation’s conclusions are confirmed, the district attorney’s office would take responsibility for the flawed prosecutions that resulted in wrongful convictions.
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