Police name suspect in 'The Yogurt Shop Murders' 33 YEARS after four teens are killed

Police have today named a suspect in the killings of four teenage girls at a yoghurt shop - more than 30 years ago.

DNA evidence led officers to the "significant breakthrough" in the case of the murders of Amy Ayers, 13, Eliza Thomas, 17 and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, aged 17 and 15 respectively. They identified in a statement Robert Eugene Brashers as the sudpect, however he died of suicide in 1999, eight years after the killings.

Communities in Austin, Texas have been haunted by the murders in the 33 years since, but investigators had been stumped. Attention on the case was renewed this year after the documentary series 'The Yogurt Shop Murders' gripped audiences across the US - and it was so called because the killings happened in a yogurt shop in the city. Two of the victims worked at I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, where the youngsters were bound, gagged and shot in the head.

Brashers has also been linked to several killings and rape in other states since the tragedies in Austin. He shot himself during a standoff with law enforcement in 1999.

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Speaking today, police in Austin said the case remains open and added further information on the breakthrough will be disclosed at a press conference on Monday. The statement continued: "Our team never gave up working this case."

'The Yogurt Shop Murders' became known as one of Texas' capital city's most notorious crimes. police investigators and prosecutors had stumbled over the case for years as they waded through thousands of leads, several false confessions and badly damaged evidence from the remains of the shop. It was set on fire after the murders on December 6, 1991.

In 1999, authorities arrested four men on murder charges. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were teenagers at the time of the murders. They initially confessed and implicated each other. But both men quickly recanted and said their statements were made under pressure by police.

Still, both were tried and convicted. Initially Springsteen was sent to death row, but his sentence was then reduced to life in prison. Their convictions were overturned and they were set for retrial a decade later.

A judge ordered both men freed in 2009 when prosecutors said new DNA tests that weren't available in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.

In 2018, Missouri authorities said DNA evidenced linked Brashers to the strangulation of a South Carolina woman in 1990, and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998. The evidence also connected him to the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee.