Police appointed a death on Friday as a new suspect in the unresolved murders of 1991 of four teenage girls in a Austin yogurt store, saying that DNA evidence led to a “important breakthrough” in brutal crime that haunted the capital of Texas and the investigators perplexed for decades.
In a statement, Austin police said that DNA tests had led investigators to Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 during an dead end with the police. Since then, it has been linked to several murders and rape in other states.
The announcement came in the middle of the renewed attention to the case with the release last month of The murders of the yogurt storeAn HBO documentary series. The police said that the case remains open and has planned a press conference on Monday to detail its conclusions.
The murders amazed the capital of Texas and became known as one of the most notorious crimes in the region. Austin police investigators and police prosecutors have tripped the case for years when they have traveled thousands of tracks, several false confessions and damaged evidence of the exhausted crime scene.
“Our team has never given up working on this case,” said Austin police.
Amy Ayers, 13 years old; Eliza Thomas, 17 years old; And the sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, 17 and 15, were linked, gagged and pulled in the head of the store “I cannot believe that it is yogurt” where two of them operated. The building was then burnt down.
Investigators said that along the closure, someone entered the store through the back door, attacked the girls and set fire. The bodies were found when the firefighters were still fighting the fire.
The autopsy report offered glimpse of the life of teenagers sisters and friends: Ayers wore small white earrings. Sarah Harbison wore a gold necklace and a Mickey Mouse watch. Jennifer Harbison wore a ring in high school and a Timex watch.
This also suggested horror: their hands were attached with underwear and the mouth was gagged with fabric. Ayers was shot dead twice.
In 1999, the authorities arrested four men for murder. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were adolescents at the time of the murders. They first confessed and got involved. But the two men quickly recovered and said their statements were made under pressure by the police.
Both have always been tried and convicted. Initially, Springsteen was sent in the death corridor, but his sentence was then reduced to life imprisonment.
Their convictions were canceled and they were ready to rest a decade later.
A judge ordered the two men released in 2009 when the prosecutors said that new DNA tests were not available in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
In 2018, the Missouri authorities said that DNA had highlighted accidents in Balahers to the strangle of a woman from South Carolina in 1990 and to the shooting of a mother and a daughter in Missouri in 1998. Evidence also linked her to the rape in 1997 of a 14 -year -old girl in Tennessee.
Brashers died in 1999 when he fell in a dead end of several hours with the police in a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
