Dan Jackson Solves Yogurt Shop Murders After 34 Years
Dan Jackson helped solve the yogurt shop murders after 34 years, using a single.380 shell casing and an incomplete DNA profile to identify Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer of four teenage girls in Austin, Texas. The case had already become the subject of Margaret Brown’s four-part HBO series before the break came.
Dan Jackson and the database search
Jackson, an Austin Police Department cold case detective, plugged the evidence into national databases and tied the murders to Brashers, a serial killer whose crimes were uncovered years after his suicide in 1999. That identification ends a search that had outlasted the man it points to.
The fifth episode of the series, titled “The End of Wondering,” premieres May 22 on HBO. Brown spoke to Jackson before leaving Austin and asked, “I can leave, right? Because you’re acting really fidgety. I’m about to start another film, and we’re shooting, so you need to tell me. I can change it.” Jackson’s answer came back: “No, no, no. If there’s anything, it’ll take months.”
Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott
Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were convicted on the basis of coerced confessions, then had their convictions overturned and the charges against them dropped in 2009. In February, a Texas judge ruled that Springsteen, Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn were entirely innocent of the crime.
That ruling also cleared the two men who had already spent years under the cloud of the case, while Pierce was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in 2010. The city later agreed to pay $35 million in restitution to the men unjustly accused of the murders and pledged to ban unsupervised interrogations of underage suspects.
Four girls, one solved case
Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison, and Sarah Harbison were the four teenage girls killed in the Austin yogurt shop murders. The documentary examined both the crime and the effect it had on the victims’ families and the wrongfully accused, which is why the Brashers identification lands as more than a cold-case update: it changes the legal and historical record attached to the story Brown put on screen.
For viewers, the new fact to carry forward is simple. The documentary arrived while the mystery still stood, but the case itself did not stay frozen there.
