A Resolution but No Closure to the Yogurt Shop Murders

The last place on Earth that Austin filmmaker Margaret Brown expected to be on Sept. 29 of last year was in the city of Austin Council chambers. She was supposed to be heading to the set of her next project, having recently wrapped the press cycle for her four-part true-crime HBO documentary series, The Yogurt Shop Murders. Like everyone else, she thought it was a story without resolution: that the December 6, 1991, murder of four teenagers – Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison, and Sarah Harbison – at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt store on Anderson Lane would never be solved. Then the city announced that Robert Eugene Brashers, a suspected serial killer, had been proven responsible through a combination of new DNA evidence and a bullet casing.

Brown recalled the day of the announcement as “very surreal, but I was so focused on getting the story.”

As a result of that new finding, Brown’s original four episodes will be joined by a fifth, debuting on HBO on May 22, focusing on the new finding and how it affects those who lived in the shadow of the crime for decades.

While it only made sense for HBO to bring back Brown to give the show its new ending, she was an unexpected choice to make the original series. Her films are about communities, like her birthplace of Mobile, Alabama (The Order of Myths and Descendant) or the Gulf of Mexico (The Great Invisible). “I’m interested in people and the way they think,” she said, and that applied to The Yogurt Shop Murders. Eschewing true crime tropes, it explores how an unsolved crime affected the family members; the four men – Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn – who spent decades under suspicion; the cops; and even the late Brashers’ daughter, Deborah. While Brown understood why some people didn’t want her to be included, she explained, “I wanted a chance for her to say her thing because what she had to say was so interesting.”

Filming the original episodes was a three-and-a-half-year process, and now Brown was back in the story, questioning people she had come to know intimately while retaining her own filmmaking distance. “It’s the hardest thing,” she said. “It’s not just difficult for me. It’s difficult for the whole crew. I’m the face of it but the sound guy has to listen to it, and he’s taking the mics off the characters. The DP has it. We all have these relationships that you don’t see.”

Even though Brown had forged deep connections with members of the cold-case unit investigating the murders, she had no idea the announcement was coming. She was originally heading out of town for her next project, with her dog waiting in the car, when she happened to go for coffee with Det. Daniel Jackson. “He was being really fidgety, and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘Nothing,’ and I go, ‘Yes, there is.’ There’s been all these things where he’s gone, ‘We have something.’ So you don’t trust it because there’s been so many ‘We have somethings.’ But there was something different.” Four days later, she got word there had been a breakthrough. “I left my dog at the parents’ house in Alabama, flew back to Austin, and three days later we’re shooting with three camera crews at the press conference.”

Episode one of Brown’s series debuted at South by Southwest on March 10, 2025, before launching on HBO on August 3 of that year. Then, barely a month after the fourth episode dropped, the city made its announcement. It’s hard not to see that the series had become part of the renewed momentum behind solving the crimes: Indeed, at one point in episode five, Jackson states that he mentioned to an out-of-state detective that he was working on the case from that TV show he may have seen. Brown said she found the reference funny. “You couldn’t ignore it, but there’s more of it that we couldn’t put in, because everyone was referencing the series because that’s where people get a lot of their information. … But you’re right, the series is part of the story now.”

Many have said that, beyond finally proving who committed these horrific murders and giving definitive exoneration to the four men wrongfully accused, the announcement gives the families and the broader community a sense of closure.

Brown disagrees.

“I don’t use the C-word,” she said. Instead, she quoted what Amy Ayers’ brother, Shawn, told her about processing this new situation. “‘I haven’t gotten to that yet.’ … The crime happened; it was solved 34 years later. What they have been through has been extraordinary, and I don’t think anyone should have any judgment about what stage of grief they are in.”

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