Outside the Beltway

Evil in Austin: Reflections on the Yogurt Shop Murders

The evil of others rarely brings out our best.

Michael Bailey · Saturday, September 27, 2025 · 1 comment

Yesterday, on September 26, news sources reported that a serial killer, Robert Eugene Brashers, was linked through DNA evidence to the infamous “Yogurt Shop” killings in Austin, Texas. Brashers committed suicide in 1999. It cannot be said conclusively that the murders have been solved, nor do we know whether others were involved. As I understand it, Brashers now is simply the leading suspect. However, Brashers’ death makes it unlikely we’ll ever know with certainty what happened that night.

I was living in Austin at the time, and what follows are my wide-ranging reflections on those murders. (Note: HBO is apparently airing a documentary on the case called The Yogurt Shop Murders, but I haven’t watched it.)

A City Forever Changed

On December 7, 1991, the residents of Austin, Texas woke to the news of a gruesome quadruple homicide in the most unlikely and seemingly anodyne of places: an “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!” shop. Four young girls—Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison—were brutally murdered.

Some facts were released immediately. A fire had been set, which is what brought authorities to the scene. The victims were teenagers ranging from 13 to 17 years old. Other details were kept private to aid the investigation. Inevitably, though, more details trickled out—some released, some leaked, and others entirely fabricated by rumor yet circulated as fact.

Through the fog of speculation and scattered facts, a few truths became obvious. First, the murders were gruesome in a way that felt to many people as palpably evil–even to those of us who don’t often truck in that particular vernacular.  No other word seemed to fit beside evil. The murders didn’t feel like the result of an argument spiraling out of control or a robbery gone wrong. It didn’t appear to be a crime of passion in the usual sense of the word. Even before we knew the facts, the crime felt like a display of calculated cruelty and exploitive power by someone well-experienced in wielding fear.

The city of Austin was both riveted and undone by these murders. For weeks, months, even years, we couldn’t stop thinking or talking about the murders. They terrified us. They unsettled us. They stayed with us. They changed us in subtle and disagreeable ways. 

I can’t pretend to know why some events capture the attention of a city or nation while others–on the face of it equally worthy of our attention–are ignored or immediately fade from our attention. It’s never entirely clear why certain stories “go viral,” seizing the collective imagination. Some events somewhat mysteriously activate our neural circuitry for attention and emotional arousal—tapping into neurotransmitters and engaging core emotion-triggering chemicals–in ways that leave especially vivid, lasting impressions.

I can’t say how the rest of the country perceived these murders, but for me—and for much of Austin, I speculate—it felt like innocence lost. That’s a cliché, of course, and one wonders how many times innocence can be lost. But perhaps the answer turns on how many innocent people there are. In this case, the victims were young, innocent girls, killed in a suburban yogurt shop–a place made for good times, for chatting with friends and indulging in innocent sweets. It’s probably also worth noting that the victims were white and their white faces were everywhere to be seen on billboards across the city and on the news.  It should go without saying that their whiteness in no way adds or detracts from the horror of their deaths, but it may have influenced the city’s (then) majority-white population’s prolonged engagement with the case. The unspoken thought of many may well have been, If this can happen to them, in those suburbs, at that store, then no one is safe. 

And in truth, no one is safe, finally. None of us are finally protected from evil.

The case also revealed the power of rumor. Facts were scarce, but our yearning for knowledge was intense, and the stakes of catching the perpetrators felt enormous. In light of our human nature, it was the perfect recipe for wild speculation.

All of us “knew” someone who had inside information—friends of friends of journalists, police officers, firefighters, or FBI agents who had supposedly been on the scene. I was once told after being offered a tidbit of information, “But you can’t tell anyone else.” Our fear, mixed with morbid fascination, created grounds ripe for fever dreams and unchecked rumormongering.

I heard stories shared by thoughtful and sober individuals that the girls had been forced into a satanic ritual and their hearts consumed.  I also heard that the first responders had been so traumatized they retired within days. Or that Mexican gang members were responsible. Either it was a drug deal gone wrong or, somehow worse, it was connected to a Mexican gang initiation rite. What would come next, we wondered. 

Accusations, Lies, Arrests, Jail Time

In truth, no one knew much of value. Not the public, not even the police. Despite billboards across the city calling for public assistance, and despite countless tips proffered, progress was agonizingly slow. The police even received a jaw-dropping number of confessions. Nothing much seemed to nudge the needle toward justice or resolution. 

Two Mexican nationals were, in fact, initially forced into confessions by Mexican authorities but quickly recanted. They were also interrogated by Austin police detectives, but their testimony did not match known facts.  Later, four other men were arrested and interrogated. Two of them—Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott—were tried and convicted and spent nearly nine years in prison before their convictions were overturned for due process violations. Both claimed their confessions were coerced. Their retrials were postponed indefinitely after DNA evidence failed to connect them to the scene.

Looking back, it’s clear the evidence against the convicted men—the strongest evidence being recanted confessions likely extracted under duress—was flimsy at best. Whether they were involved I cannot know, but at minimum there was reasonable doubt.  And yet they lost nine years of their lives in prison and lived under the wrongly imposed stigma of guilt. 

The tragedy of the murders seemingly ramified without end.

Making Sense of Senselessness

I don’t intend to offer easy conclusions or cheap lessons about this tragic event. For me personally, it was a reminder that despite life’s goodness and the intricate wonders of creation, evil is undeniably part of the equation. Horror does not care whether we find it unthinkable. At moments beyond our reckoning, it intrudes and even snuffs out lives despite our best intentions and precautions. In the blink of an eye, lives are upended or ended and what is normal is revealed to be paper-thin or even illusory.

The urgent need to name, punish, and expel evil is natural, perhaps even necessary. But evil rarely brings out our best. I don’t specifically remember doing so, but I suspect I, too, passed along unsubstantiated rumors as if they were fact. Like everyone else, I wanted to preserve some illusion of control, and perhaps our collective obsession about the case suggests uncomfortable truths about our souls. 

And yet that is precisely why we need to follow our best thoughts and practices when our passions are strongest and our desire for revenge is most blinding. This is not just a 2025 problem; it’s perennial. In the 1830s Lincoln warned of “the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions…in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.”

Even within the practices of our judicial system, men who should not have been convicted lost nine years of their lives to wrongful imprisonment. But it was also due process that freed them.

Evil will always be part of the human story, and we cannot eradicate it. But perhaps at our best we can prevent it from directing our responses and further ramifying in the world beyond its first ugly appearance. Evil will be with us, but it need not have the final word.