Bullet casing in drain at Texas yogurt shop links serial killer to the infamous murders, says original investigator
The “48 hour” correspondent, Erin Moriarty, learned that a suspect had been identified in the 1991 murders of four teenagers in a Austin, Texas, yogurt shop. It is according to one of the original investigators who worked the case.
This suspect is Robert Eugene Brashers, who died, explains the retired detective of Austin John Jones.
Brashers is a serial killer and a rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the States of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by suicide during a dead end with the police. The pistol he used to shoot himself complies with a ball box found in a drain inside the yogurt store, explains Jones.
The link between Brashers and the case was established via DNA, Jones told Moriarty.
Moriarty reportedly reported on the yogurt shop affair from the very beginning.
On December 6, 1991, Eliza Thomas, 17 ,, Amy Ayers, 13, and two sisters, Jennifer Harbison, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15, were found gagged, attached with their own clothes, and fired in the head in a I cannot believe that it is yogurt! Buy in Austin. The responsible person had also set fire to the workshop, compromising a large part of the evidence.
Eliza and Jennifer worked at the yogurt store that evening. They were about to close when Jennifer’s sister Sarah, and their friend, Amy, met them there to go home.
Missouri State Highway Patrol via AP 
Following the crime, the Austin police service developed a working group dedicated solely to the resolution of the case. Government agencies, including the FBI, were called to help, but the case was finally cold until 1999, when four men, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn, were arrested and accused of murders.
Men were only adolescents at the time of the crime. They were interviewed for the first time a few days after the murders when one of them, Maurice Pierce, was arrested in a shopping center not far from the yogurt shop with a caliber pistol .22 – One of the same types of weapons suspected of having been used in the killings.
The four were released at the time for lack of evidence, but in 1999, when a new team of investigators was responsible for taking a new look at the old case, they obtained confessions from two of the four men, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott. These confessions would later be questioned after the two have retracted, saying that they were forced.
The accusations were finally abandoned against Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn due to the lack of evidence, and Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were the only two to be tried. The only evidence against them was their own words. They were both sentenced, but a few years later, their convictions were canceled for constitutional reasons. The sixth amendment gives the defendants the right to confront the accusers and in the Scott and Springsteen trials, their confessions were used against each other, but they were not allowed to question the court.
Rosemary Lehmberg, the county of Travis, Texas, a district prosecutor at the time, intended to try Springsteen and Scott again. But before doing it, his office decided to take advantage of what was a fairly new type of DNA tests called the Y-Str test. It was a way of looking for and extracting male DNA only. The Y-Str tests were ordered on vaginal swabs taken from the victims at the time of the murders. At this stage, the investigators had come to believe that at least one of the victims had been sexually assaulted. Following Y-Str tests, a partial male DNA profile was obtained from one of the girls, but to the surprise of the district prosecutor’s office, the DNA sample corresponded to any of the four arrested men.
However, the prosecutors were determined to try Springsteen and Scott again. But before doing it, they wanted to understand who belonged to this mystery DNA. In 2009, without match, the charges against Springsteen and Scott were abandoned. After almost 10 years behind bars, they were released.
For years, the authorities continued to try to find the source of mystery DNA and finally there was a match this month, according to the original investigator John Jones.
