AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — DNA proof has helped to establish a person who died many years in the past as a brand new suspect within the 1991 killing of 4 teenage ladies, after authorities linked him to a number of killings in different states, police stated Friday.
In an announcement, police stated that they had made a “important breakthrough” and that DNA assessments have led investigators to Robert Eugene Brashers. The announcement got here amid renewed consideration on the case with the discharge final month of “The Yogurt Store Murders,” an HBO documentary sequence.
Police stated the case referred to as the “Yogurt Store Murders” stays open and scheduled a Monday information convention to element their findings.
“Our workforce by no means gave up working this case,” Austin police stated.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, have been certain, gagged and shot within the head on the “I Can’t Imagine It’s Yogurt” retailer the place two of them labored. The constructing was then set on fireplace.
The murders shocked Texas’ capital metropolis and have become referred to as one of many space’s most infamous crimes. Austin police investigators and prosecutors had stumbled over the case for years as they waded by way of 1000’s of leads, a number of false confessions and badly broken proof from the burned-out crime scene.
In 1999, authorities arrested 4 males on homicide expenses. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, have been youngsters on the time of the murders. They initially confessed and implicated one another. However each males rapidly recanted and stated their statements have been made below stress by police.
Stillm each have been tried and convicted. Initially Springsteen was despatched to dying row, however his sentence was then decreased to life in jail.
Their convictions have been overturned and so they have been set for retrial a decade later.
A choose ordered each males freed in 2009 when prosecutors stated new DNA assessments that weren’t out there in 1991 had revealed one other male suspect.
In 2018, Missouri authorities stated DNA evidenced linked Brashers to the strangulation of a South Carolina lady in 1990, and the taking pictures of a mom and daughter in Missouri in 1998. The proof additionally linked him to the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old lady in Tennessee.
Brashers had died in 1999 when he shot himself throughout an hours-long standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.