HBO Docu-series "The Yogurt Shop Murders" is Getting a New Episode Airing May 22nd

[JamesG]

The Yogurt Shop Murders Director on Revisiting the Tragic Case after More Than 30 Years: “It Was Just Such a World of Darkness”
by Katie Campione
August 3, 2025


More than 30 years after Austin police found four teenage girls brutally murdered inside a local yogurt shop, HBO is re-examining the case in its upcoming documentary series The Yogurt Shop Murders.

Often described as the case that stripped Austin of its innocence, the tragic 1991 killings sent shockwaves through the community for years as the investigation dragged on. To this day, the affected families seek answers about what truly happened to Amy Ayers, sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas.

“I was in Austin in the late 90s, and the billboards were up everywhere, and you would go to parties, and people would talk about their theories about what happened,” director Margaret Brown, an Alabama native, tells Deadline.




Through a combination of archival footage and recent interviews with the investigative teams, the victims’ parents and siblings, and the two men who served time for the crime, the series raises important questions about law enforcement practices and the power of public perception as well as offers a poignant observation about the endurance of grief.




I understand you live in Austin, so what was your understanding of this case before you took on this documentary?

I was in Austin in the late 90s, and the billboards were up everywhere, and you would go to parties, and people would talk about their theories about what happened. I have a lot of friends who are reporters, and they would all talk about it. My best friend is a reporter, and when I told her I was considering doing this project, she was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the craziest unsolved crime in Texas, and there’s so many twists and turns…’

In Austin, people talk about it and have for years. I just have this memory of seeing those billboards everywhere and just them being really haunting.




Once you were on board, how did you start to figure out the best way to tell this story, which as you mentioned is already very infamous?

I didn’t want to do the project until I saw the archival footage, because, to me, it’s so much about that time period. Austin was really different. I mean, I wasn’t there then in the early 90s. I was there in the late 90s, [and] it was different enough then. So I really wanted to make sure I had the material to kind of capture that feeling.

They sent me what they had, and it was pretty evocative. I immediately felt a transportive kind of feeling to the past. I could hear the music that would go with those images, and even how I would light it. It was such a specific vibe. There was something uncanny about it. Then I met the families, and it really shifted, and I realized I couldn’t go as stylized as I wanted to, because I didn’t want to take away from the emotional connection.

I thought if I go too far in that direction, it sort of strips away some of feelings I got when I was just sitting with them. So I still stylized it, but I definitely scaled it back.




The documentary is sort of telling two stories, because you’re explaining the years-long investigation while also underscoring all of the trauma the families have gone through over the last three decades.

How do you find the correct balance there?

I mean, I just tried to go in and emotionally respond without judgment as much as I could to whatever the person in front of me was saying. I was really taken by how affected people were by this specific event. Claire Huey, who made the the film that never got finished, she was one of the first people I met. She gave us all that. She gave the production all this footage and and it completely changed her life.

She was a filmmaker like me, and she stopped making movies after that, and that was how much the story impacted her. She just couldn’t get her head around it. I think that the power of what happened really hit people. I just tried to go in and listen and not judge.




Speaking of Claire, we do hear from her in the documentary. What do you think her perspective adds to this story?

I mean, I think it’s a parallel to my experience. A lot of times I would watch her footage and I would be like, ‘Oh my God, that’s exactly how I feel. This is so overwhelming.’ It was a really hard series to make, and it was just such a world of darkness. I think like knowing there was someone else who knew what that was like — often, I would just call her to talk about it, because she lives around the corner. Now she’s like a meditation teacher.

I’m trying to encourage her to make movies, because I think she’s amazing, and she’s such a empath, and she’s she cares about people so deeply. That’s what made it hard for her, was because she cared so much. I think, also, just being a young filmmaker, she was making it so many years ago, having the confidence to know you can put it all together, because it’s overwhelming story, there’s so many twists and turns, and you end up sort of back where you started a lot of the time when you’re trying to piece it together.

I have a whole team helping me. She was a former student. I just can’t even imagine. It would be so hard.




You go very deeply into the ways that this case has traumatized the families and others involved and, for the most part, avoid any conspiracy theories about what may have happened.

What made you take that route? And how did working with these families shape your perception of true crime in general?

To be honest, I don’t watch a whole lot of true crime…I didn’t really want to cloud my head by a formula. I did listen to some podcasts, and I was so put off by the tone of most true crime. Not all of them, but most true crime podcasts seemed to forget that these were people.

When you meet the families, I don’t understand how you could. It’s just so painful to sit with people who’ve gone through this. It really takes a toll on you. Maybe it’s because they don’t have to meet the people when they’re making them, they can just listen. People like to feel like they’re figuring out things. I mean, me too. I’m not trying to say that’s not interesting to me, because, of course, it is interesting to try to figure out a puzzle, but in this specific series, I didn’t feel like that. It is impossible, if you meet these people, to make it that way. You feel for them so much.




There is a very affecting moment in the final episode where they dig up the time capsule for Amy Ayers. How was that for you to witness?

Probably how it was for you to watch. I just so felt for the Ayers family and, I mean, we really consolidated that scene. They were trying so hard to find it. We knew it was there. It became like this sort of bonding experience that day, because so many people showed up to help.

It was actually really moving how many people just really cared about the Ayers family and them just getting this ode to their daughter up to the surface.




As you put together this story, what emerged as the most frustrating part of the case for you?

What I’m interested in is an exploration of what it means to be a human and go through grief, and how different people grieve. Then there’s this insane story of all these twists and turns and rabbit holes, which the true crime audience is interested in. I’m not as interested in that, but I am interested in it. You need a story to hang your hat on, right? So this film would not exist without that crazy story.

There’s multiple threads on my phone with the producers and the editorial department and everyone talking through theories. We were all trying to crack it in some way, or follow a different theory, or follow a different rabbit hole, but it’s balancing that search to solve the crime — which, for me to think I can solve the crime when hundreds of police departments and DNA specialists and all these people are trying to solve this crime, for me to think I can do that is a little hubristic, I think. But of course, we still wanted to.

I think, as I made it, what pulled me through the three and a half years of making it was really just sitting with people who I think had a lot of wisdom around pain and living life with pain, which we all have to do. We all suffer. These people have gone through some really ****ing extreme suffering, and I felt like I got a lot out of just listening to these families talk and listening to Claire talk, and listening to some of the investigators who gave their life and ruined their marriages to this case.




Since the case remains unsolved, the story is still ongoing. How do you find a natural conclusion for the story you are trying to tell?

Well, because I was interested in memory and grief… I mean, without again giving a spoiler, there are some things that happen in the fourth episode.

I would never call it closure, because the families will never have closure. But there are things that approximate that.

https://deadline.com/2025/08/the-yog...bo-1236476815/

[Street Novelist]

I saw the first episode; not bad. I love seeing all of the old news footage from that era; no social media, no texting, not even an Internet. They managed to interview the original cops on the case, as well as the girls' families and friends. It was crazy seeing how "small" Austin used to be. It's completely changed now.

[Street Novelist]

Last night's episode was infuriating! The cops basically got the kids to lie and say they committed the murders, except for Pierce. I hate when cops say the interviews are voluntary and they can leave at any time. But then they put the suspect in a corner and surround them on both sides with cops, leaning forward, blocking them from leaving and yelling in their face. If that's not intimidation and coercion, I don't know what is. Just shameful behavior all around by the Austin police department.

[Street Novelist]

Did anyone else watch the series? I'll admit, I was disappointed at the ending. They probably could have done this whole thing in 2 hours; didn't need 4 shows. Basically, the boys they convicted and sent to jail didn't have any of their DNA found at the crime scene. Only one unidentified male's showed up. No justice for anyone really...and if not those boys, then who? I really feel for the victims' families. Now, they have no answers.

[JamesG]

"The Yogurt Shop Murders" Director & Cold Case’s Lead Detective on Enduring Tragedy of 1991 Murders as New Developments Signal Hope
by Katie Campione
August 24, 2025


Who killed these girls? That’s the question that accompanied the photos of Amy Ayers, sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas on billboards around Austin, Texas, asking the public for help solving their brutal 1991 murders inside of a local yogurt shop.

The final episode of HBO‘s four-part docuseries The Yogurt Shop Murders wrestles with the enduring tragedy of the case as, more than three decades later, investigators are still seeking to answer the same question.



Over the course of four episodes, director Margaret Brown has simultaneously dug into the twists and turns of the 34-year-old cold case while also primarily focusing on the lasting trauma felt by the surviving family members who have tried to make peace with such an unimaginable loss.

Certainly, the details of the case are gripping but, ultimately, she wanted the series to be about “dealing with trauma in our lives, and how we can and can’t hold on to memory and all its facets.”



To accomplish that involved in-depth interviews with those most affected by the deaths of Amy, Jennifer, Sarah and Eliza — their parents and siblings.

“It’s really hard because you don’t know what’s going to trigger people, and really, really different things triggered everybody….you start to think, ‘Oh, I can predict this.’ You can’t,” Brown mused. “One thing I learned is, grief is different for everybody.”






The more that Brown let go of her expectations and gave into the discomfort of that process, she realized that the most important part of the process was leading with the proper intentions.

“You have to do it anyway. So you might upset someone. They might yell at you. You might say the wrong thing,” she explained. “As long as you’re coming from a place of genuine curiosity and care, that’s the best you can do, but it was really hard because I did walk in fear of re-traumatizing people. I think often, if I did say something and it was a misstep…I would just say, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. This is my intention.’ That usually diffused it, in a way. Not always.”



When it came to encouraging the families to participate, Brown adds that she didn’t push them as much as she has prior subjects, especially Barbara Ayres-Wilson, mother of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison.

Though she eventually did get Ayres-Wilson to participate, Brown says she treaded particularly lightly as she came to learn all that she and the other surviving family members had suffered.



“I had talked to Barbara for a long time, and I just thought I’d never be able to get her to do it, because she was just done with media. She told me once that whenever she talks to the media now, it took her weeks to recover, and she would just lay in bed,” Brown said.

“When she told me that…my producers were like, ‘Are you gonna ask Barbara?’ And I would feel like, ‘****, no, I’m not gonna ask Barbara. Barbara’s been through enough.’ It was both her children.”






If there’s one thing that everyone can agree upon in this convoluted case it’s that these families have been through enough. Throughout the years, there have been countless breakthroughs that seemed promising only to lead to a dead end. A decade after the murders, two men went to prison for the crimes only to be released in 2009 when those convictions were overturned.

“I make it a point to keep the families as updated as I can. I think, more than you would a normal case, just because I think after these 34 years, they deserve to know that this case is not sitting in a basement somewhere, and that’s actively being worked,” Austin Detective Dan Jackson tells Deadline.



“I work on this case just about every day of my life.”

Jackson says the families “know that I can’t tell them everything,” but anything he can share, he does. He’s as open as he can be in press interviews, too, admitting that there are “other avenues that we’re attacking on this case” that he won’t be able to share, but he does give details on the one avenue that he can: DNA evidence.




Among the leads that Jackson continues to pursue involves a very small sample of DNA from a vaginal swab of one of the victims, which remains unidentified. Y-STR tests performed on that small amount of DNA were instrumental in overturning the convictions against the prior suspects and does not match anyone known to have been at the crime scene, including investigators.

To this day, those working the case remain hopeful it will one day be able to help actually solve it.




DNA testing technology has rapidly advanced since 1991 and, soon, Jackson says it could be possible to build a much more vivid DNA profile with the amount that they have left from that swab. At the time of the murders, that would not have even been fathomable.

“The amounts of DNA that you need are minuscule compared to what they were just a couple of years ago,” he said. Around the time of the murders, investigators would have needed “a pool of blood” to extract a workable amount of DNA to build a profile.

“Now we’re down to a few cells, and we can even do it with mixtures that we couldn’t do even a year ago,” he added. “We’re cautiously optimistic about what we can do.”






For all the frustrations of the Yogurt Shop case, detectives have exhibited quite an incredible amount of foresight regarding the DNA component of the case.

The documentary details how, upon discovering the grisly scene, the first investigators at the scene convinced the coroner not to move the bodies until they’d been swabbed for DNA, even though it went against conventional wisdom at the time.

Added Brown: “The fact that [the detectives] convinced them to stay and swab the bodies was — thank God, because there would be nothing now, if that hadn’t happened.”




That’s why, though there may be reasons to feel discouraged about the case given there are so few answers after 34 years, Jackson says he remains hopeful and confident that there is more to uncover in the Yogurt Shop investigation.

“We have come so far that there is hope that we can progress the case. If there wasn’t any hope or nothing that could be done, then why even work on it anyway?” he said. “I feel good about it. There’s something we can get done here.”



Detectives are still seeking details on The Yogurt Shop Murders. Anyone with information is encourages to reach out at www.austincrimestoppers.org or at yogurtshop@austintexas.gov.

https://deadline.com/2025/08/yogurt-...se-1236496256/

[IBMcginty]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suspect...case-48-hours/

48 Hours
Exclusive
Bullet casing in drain at Texas yogurt shop links serial killer to the infamous murders, says original investigator
48-hours
By Stephanie Slifer
Updated on: September 26, 2025 / 7:05 PM EDT / CBS News

"48 Hours" correspondent Erin Moriarty has learned a suspect has been identified in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls in an Austin, Texas, yogurt shop. This is according to one of the original investigators who worked the case.

That suspect is Robert Eugene Brashers, who is deceased, says retired Austin detective John Jones."

[Street Novelist]

Crazy update! Just pisses me off even more how corrupt those Austin cops were

[JamesG]

HBO’s "The Yogurt Shop Murders" is Returning with One Final Episode (Exclusive)
by Tony Maglio
May 7, 2026





HBO‘s "The Yogurt Shop Murders" isn’t over yet, even if the case is now closed.

On Friday, May 22 (at 9 p.m. ET/PT) the documentary series will launch a surprise fifth episode, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.




The new series finale, titled “The End of Wondering” and directed by Margaret Brown, will document what happened in the weeks following the events of episode four. The original cutoff was… pretty unfortunate timing.

Or perhaps it was the popularity of the docuseries that put a little giddy-up into the investigation. Three weeks after it concluded on HBO, the 34-year-old cold case was finally solved. The Austin Police Department (APD) said they know the real murderer: serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers who committed suicide in 1999.




Using DNA evidence, Brashers was identified as the killer after the Austin PD got the wrong man — er, men. Well, really they were teens at the time: at various points, the police got confessions from Forrest Welborn, Maurice Pierce, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott.

The confessions are now believed to have been coerced through intensive interview techniques. Springsteen served three years on death row and a decade overall in prison before being exonerated; Scott had previously received a life sentence.




“The End of Wondering” opens with the APD convening a sudden press conference to announce the big break in the quadruple homicide, which took the life of four teenage girls way back in 1991.

It features cold case detective Dan Jackson, APD lead investigator (1991-1994) John Jones, APD lead investigator (1997-2002) Paul Johnson, genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, filmmaker Claire Huie, falsely accused suspect Forrest Welborn, and the widow and daughter of another falsely accused suspect Maurice Pierce.

The families of each of the four murdered teenage girls also participate.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...de-1236588235/

[JamesG]

"The Yogurt Shop Murders" Director on Completing the Story and Interviewing the Killer’s Daughter After the Case was Solved: "I Thought I Was Going to Throw Up"
by Addie Morfoot
May 23, 2026


On September 27, 2025, a month after the fourth episode of HBO’s docuseries “The Yogurt Shop Murders” aired, Austin police announced that they had finally solved the 1991 cold case. Robert Eugene Brashers was responsible for the brutal rape and murders of teenagers Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas and sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison.

That same day, Margaret Brown, director of “The Yogurt Shop Murders”, got on a plane to Austin, where the murders happened, to film the fifth episode of the series. Titled, “The End of Wondering,” the episode examines how DNA evidence led to Brashers’ conviction.

The murders had mystified police and haunted the victims’ families for more than three decades.




Brown had spent over three years interviewing the crime’s investigative teams and the victims’ parents and siblings for the first four installments of the docuseries. She says that she was “scared” to return to Austin to film another episode after police discovered that Brashers, a serial killer who died in 1999, was responsible for the crime.

“I was worried that the families were going to be more traumatized about police figuring out that Brashers did it,” Brown says. But the director quickly realized that the families were more relieved than traumatized by the discovery.




Welborn and Pierce’s widow and daughter, who did not agree to speak to Brown when she filmed the first four episodes, were interviewed for the fifth episode. Brashers’ daughter Deborah Brashers also agreed to be interviewed.

The latest installment of the HBO series reveals that, in addition to four innocent girls losing their lives in 1991, Brashers killed at least four other people.






Were you shocked when the Austin Police Department announced that Robert Eugene Brashers was responsible for the murders?

Did you have any inkling that they were on the verge of solving this case?

I had an inkling, because I am close with the cold case detective [Dan Jackson], and I could just tell something was going on.





Was that after you had finished filming the series?

I did the interview with Detective Jackson, which you see in the fourth installment of the series, about a year before they announced that they had figured out who did it.

At that point, he wasn’t close to solving the case.





Do you regret not filming for another year, or did you think that the series helped the police solve the case?

I was definitely not thinking that I should have waited another year, because it was really, really hard to be in that world with those families for me, for that long. I felt for them so deeply. Everyone around the case just had so much trauma. So I was happy to move on, even though it hadn’t been solved.

I never went into the show thinking, “I’m going to solve this case,” because I’m not that kind of filmmaker I am. I hoped they would solve it, but I wanted to make something that was about how you deal with the most unimaginable thing.





Do you feel like the series lit a fire under the Austin Police Department to do more DNA work on this case?

The whole cold case unit came to the SXSW screening of the first episode, which was before the series came out. So, I wonder. I think when you are making an HBO show about something, people pay attention.





Was there any hesitation then about going back into that world and making a fifth episode?

At the end of the fourth episode, everyone felt like there was a sense of not completion, because it wasn’t solved, and there was so much despair. I just thought, “How can I not do it for the families and for the continuation of the story?”

The families were all like, “You are coming back, right?”





So, HBO was automatically on board?

HBO, at first, was like, “It’s a coda.” And I was like, it’s not a coda — it could be another series. I didn’t really want to go back into it that much, but I immediately was like, now that we know who did it, what about those boys who were accused? What are their lives like now?

It was something I always wanted to talk to them about, and I thought, maybe now they will talk to me about it.





How did you feel when most of the victims’ families didn’t express any sympathy for the wrongly accused men?

I was like, “Wait. Why don’t you care?” But all I can think of is, when you go through something like that, there is just no room for anything else. I felt I had to put their feelings about that into the episode to make people think about what they would be like if they were in the same situation.

Because I don’t even know if you can imagine what it’s like to go through what they went through. So I would caution people against judging that too much.





How did you convince Deborah Brashers, the daughter of Robert Eugene Brashers, to sit down for an interview?

She wanted to apologize, because she feels like someone in her family should say sorry to the families. It was the craziest interview I’ve ever done in my entire life.

I thought I was going to throw up. That woman has been through so much.

https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/yog...ed-1236757379/