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 Yogurt Shop Murders
Courtesy of HBO
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, ‘F*ck, 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 [email protected]. People can also submit tips anonymously via the Crime Stoppers QR code below.