Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 511 - The 1991 Austin Yogurt Shop Murders

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

On a December night in 1991, four teenage girls gathered at an Austin frozen yogurt shop for what should have been an ordinary evening of work, pizza, friendship, and weekend plans. Instead, they became the victims of one of the most brutal and baffling crimes in Texas history - a case that shattered Austin's sense of safety and led to further tragedy.    Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In 1991, Austin, Texas was right on the verge of becoming what it is today, a bustling hub of arts and culture. But the secret of just how cool Austin was hadn't quite yet got out nationally. The go-to Texas cities in 91 were Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, centers of business, commerce, arts, and important historical sites, like the Alamo, and Daly Plaza, where JFK was assassinated. Austin, by comparison, didn't seem like much to many. With its citywide celebration of E. Orr's birthday, dog parades, costumes, and other quirky local traditions, Austin was seen as a stoner and slacker's paradise, a place where it felt far more likely to see 60s-style hippies and university students smoking weed and tripping balls than some sort of violent, crazy, or high-profile incident. Austin was seen largely by its inhabitants as a place that was really safe. Still, Austin was actually not a stranger to some high-profile homicides.

decades earlier in 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas Tower at the University of Texas, and having already murdered his wife and mother, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others, with his deer rifle before police managed to shoot and kill him. At the time, the violence was inexplicable, but later, people began to connect the dots. Whitman, a former Eagle Scout, Marine, had started to suffer very serious mental health problems after his mother left his father in March of 66, culminating in an incident on March 29th when he told a psychiatrist

that he was thinking about going to the tower and shooting people. When all of this came to light, it seemed like an understandable, if unsettling story. A mentally ill guy snapped. If only someone, like his doctor, had alerted the authorities, something could have been done to prevent it.

Plus, there was the fact that the crime he had committed had been in broad daylight. There was no secrecy about it, no mystery. And when he was shot by the police, it was over. Austinites did not have to worry about Whitman ever killing anyone else ever again. It was horrific? Yes, incredibly tragic, terrifying even. But it also felt like an aberration, a one-off.

Clearly when it comes to mass shootings in America, that has decidedly not been true, unfortunately. Nearly three decades later, the yogurt shop murders in Austin would surpass the massacre at the University of Texas and become the city's most high-profile crime, even though far less people were killed. It was very different, and for many, far more upsetting because it felt like it could happen again, that it might not be an aberration, but rather the start of something. After all, the killer was still out there. Nobody knew who came into the I Can't Believe its yogurt that fateful night around 11 p.m. Just as its two teenage workers, Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, were closing up.

Nobody knew what the person or people had said to the girls before they'd killed them. had they joked around with them, made them feel comfortable, blended in, had they flashed a badge or an ID, something that made the girls think that the person or people they were dealing with were regular law-abiding citizens or law enforcement officials. Nobody knew if or how they'd approached the other two girls in the store that night either, 13-year-old Amy Ayers, and 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, Jennifer's younger sister. What people did know was how the bodies were found. Just before midnight on December 6, 1991, a call came in that reported a fire at the ICBY store. When firemen arrived, they found a wall of smoke, ash, and flames thick enough to make speaking or even gesturing to communicate impossible. As the firefighter stumbled in, still thinking that a stove, which the ICBY did not have, had been left on, they saw something. A foot connected to a body.

But there wasn't just one body at the yogurt shop and not just two either. the bodies of four young girls would be found in the yogurt shop's back room, naked, bound, and burn beyond recognition. Even more horrifying in the condition of the bodies was the fact that the scene seemingly gave no clues as to what its perpetrator wanted outside of sex. They didn't take any money. They didn't leave behind a manifesto.

They didn't seem like Charles Whitman intent on blowing up their lives in one last storm of violence. No, for all anyone knew, the perpetrator had gone back to their life or to their lives. They could still be attending barbecues, going to see live music on 6th Street, celebrating birthdays, checking you out at the grocery store, looking for the next group of girls to destroy, all while Austin was left reeling. It seemed like the city's days of innocence were over,

that if something like this could happen in Austin, with its charming, quirky, offbeat businesses and local, friendly, generally, peace and drugs, and good time, love and weirdos, it could happen anywhere. As Barbara Ayers Wilson, then Barbara Sarasi, the mother of two of the victims, told People magazine in 1992, what did we do wrong here? We moved to a nice house and a good neighborhood.

We did all the middle-class American things that you do to protect your family and make it wholesome and right. If this can happen to us, it can happen to anyone. The yogurt shop murders. Right now, on another true crime, another, what in the actual fuck is wrong with so many of our fellow meat sacks edition of TimeSuck?

This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening. to time suck. Happy Monday. Welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Cummins. Suck nasty. Probably autistic.

Definitely neurodivergent. Maybe insane. And you are listening to TimeSuck. Hail Nimrod. Hail Lusufina. Praise me to Good Boy Bojangles and Glory B to Triple M. Charity announcement time. And then we're off into the episode this June, this Pride Month.

We are making a donation to modern military, a nonprofit advocating for our LGBT QIA plus military members and their families. Their work includes advocacy, public policy, and more to ensure that all service members and veterans are cared for no matter who they love. And that is exactly why we love them. We love our veterans. We love our pride members. And here we are.

We have donated $10,230 to modern military on behalf of our space lizards who support us on Patreon and also put another $1,130 into the scholarship fund. If you'd like to learn more about what modern military, you know, is doing or want to get involved, please visit modern military.org. And also next week, we will be covering the Stonewall riots, which is both a fascinating topic, some important history, and perfect for this month. Hail Nimrod. And now this week's topic time. Not much setup needed for this episode.

If you're a true crime fan, you've likely heard of the Austin Yogurt Shop Murders. Indeed, a five-episode documentary on the case titled Appley, The Yogurt Shop Murders, debuted in March of 20. on HBO to critical acclaim. I haven't seen it, but only due to time. I've heard it's very good. I do watch True Crime docu-series about our topics here when time allows on occasion, but since I can read a lot faster than I can watch and digest more information more effectively that way,

for whatever reason, I tend to lean more on written sources like I did this week. Hopefully, like we usually seem to do, we can provide additional info here more than what that series presented for any of you who have seen it. The yogurt shop murders were not the only big true crime case of the 90s, of course. That decade was actually huge for highly publicized true crime tales. 1991 brought us Pee-Wee Herman being arrested for jerking off Little Peewee in a Sarasel to Florida adult movie theater. And arrested was part of a very important sting operation where a lot of taxpayer dollars were dedicated to stopping perverts from ruining the otherwise wholesome family fun experience of watching porn in a dark room with strangers. detectives would periodically visit pornographic theaters in the area

and observe the audience four hours, doing solid, immensely important detective work and definitely not getting turned on ever, keeping the public very safe and arresting those engaged in what these detectives considered indecent exposure in a normally wildly decent place. Three other men were also arrested that night on similar charges.

Good. Part of Operation Make America Limp again. I don't know if the operation had a name, but I'm proud of that one. And then there was the one time in 1997, when definitely 100% straight, 36-year-old comic, an actor Eddie Murphy, was pulled over by the police early in the morning of May 2nd and West Hollywood, after being observed, pulling over and talking to a 22-year-old transgender sex worker,

Shalimar Seuli, who then got into Murphy's car. Murphy claimed he was just being helpful to someone who might have needed a ride. Okay, sounds good to me, happens a lot. A lot of very sexy women and men dressed in high hills and very little else in West Hollywood with late at night and very early in the morning, are lost. And they just happen

to be wandering around in the same area, looking for a ride to somewhere. Murphy later said in a 1997 interview with People Magazine, I saw this Hawaiian-looking woman and said, What are you doing out here? She said, I'm working. And he was shocked. Murphy claimed he then offered

Sayuli a ride and even tried to convince her to leave sex work. He said, I said, you shouldn't be doing that. And ba-da-bing, I'm never giving anyone a lift again. Cool story, bro. Totally believable. Murphy also told journalists the only reason he was driving past a known sex worker hotspot at 4.45 in the morning was because he had insomnia. And he felt like driving around to, uh, I don't know, uh, help himself fall back asleep, but at the wheel. Uh, Seule told a story that was very different from Murphy's. She alleged that

Murphy put $200 bills on her leg and asked her if she'd like wearing lingerie. She also said that he asked if he could see her in that lingerie, and what kind of sex she liked before the authorities approached. Hmm. Does her story seem more believable to you than his? I don't know. In the 1997, we found out that a 34-year-old Seattle area elementary school teacher, Mary Kay Leiturno, a married mother of four,

was seven months pregnant with a child of one of her recent sixth grade students, 13-year-old Vili Flau. She would go to prison for six months. Then immediately violate her parole, get pregnant again with another one of Fowl's babies. Then go back to prison until 2004. Then get out again and start seeing Fulau once more, then marry him in 2005. Their two daughters would serve as flower girls to a wedding that had to have been attended mostly by people or by people who really like to watch complete fucking train wrecks. Wait.

I guess all those cases were more torrid scandals than hardcore true crime cases. But there were definitely, you know, highly public. sized murder cases in the 90s as well. 1993 through 96 brought us the Menendez Brothers trials, 1-800 business baby. 1994 brought us the O.J. Simpson trial, while the murders of Tupac Shakur and the notorious B.I.G.

Captivated the nation in 1996 and 1997. There was a disappearance and murder of John Bonnet Ramsey in 1996, perhaps the most infamous U.S. true crime case of all time. All covered here previously, except for P.B. Herman, Eddie Murphy, and Mary Kay Lapido. up against these national stories, many of them involving wealthy people, celebrities or a murdered little girl

whose face was splashed across magazines for many, many years, it seems unlikely that the yogurt shop murders would have attracted as much dedicated attention as they did and as they sustained over decades. But a few things made the yogurt shop murder stand out in the worst way amongst even those crimes for those who were paying attention.

For one thing, there was the sheer brutality of it combined with the ages of the victims. 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison, and Jennifer's 15-year-old sister, Sarah. We're all found to have been tied up and shot execution style in the backs of their heads before their bodies had been burned to the point of being unrecognizable. One was definitely raped as well. All of them may have been sexually assaulted. The scene painted a horrific story of these girls' last minutes, minutes that should have been spent laughing and chatting, closing up the shop, and then heading home. Instead, they'd been herded up, probably at gunpoint, taken to the back room, likely sexually assaulted in front of each other, then killed one by one while their friends listened to one another's final moments. Seemed unlikely that one person could have been capable of keeping all these girls, you know, controlled in this scenario, which meant most people assumed that multiple perpetrators were involved.

But how would those people have found each other? Had they murdered together before? How did they decide on that yogurt shop? had they been, you know, staking it out, stalking one or more of the girls for a while. Perhaps most importantly, would they try to kill again? Would more brutal rapes and murders soon follow? For a long, long time, Austinites wouldn't get any answers. The investigation stumbled and was dragged down by political infighting within the APD,

the Austin Police Department, and the burnout and PTSD of the investigators who are following every lead into a never-ending series of dead ends. What little evidence that survived the fire was not very helpful in a time when forensic testing not nearly as powerful as it is today. So in the absence of that, police had to rely on witnesses' descriptions of what they had seen that night. Indeed, every customer at the yogurt shop spoken to seemed to remember some suspicious person that night. And a few names would come up that took precedence over the others. Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Wellborn.

And soon some of them would confess. For a moment the APD held its breath. was this it? Was this the final piece in the puzzle? Today, we'll go over the last day that the four victims were alive, December 6, 1991, jumping around between how they spent their days in general and learning who they were so we can try and understand what brought them to the yogurt shop and why it seemed like just another ordinary day until it didn't. We'll cover the initial horrific discovery made by the police and how the investigation was immediately compromised by the water that firefighters had to douse the shop with.

And we'll also cover how battles within the Austin, police department left the detectives looking into the case burnout, exhausted, and traumatized, and how that led to even more tragedy. Let's begin. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-sunk timeline. December 6, 1991 was a Friday. For public school kids, it was the next to last week of the fall semester.

But the weather that day didn't seem to promise a lot of fun and leisure. It was gray, overcast. A little humid. Fifteen-year-old Sarah Harbison didn't seem to mind, though. It was warmer than the past few days had been, and the temperature would rise into the low 70s. Maybe a little cool for Austin, but damn near ideal for most places in the world.

As a sophomore at Lanier High, a school known as Juan Navarro Early College High School since 2019, apparently, Sarah played basketball and volleyball and was a member of the FFA, Future Farmers of America, and a member of the Student Council, very busy kid. For an FFA project, she and Jennifer, her 17-year-old sister,

were raising lambs to show at the annual Austin Livestock Show and rodeo the next spring. And that meant waking up early. After a quick breakfast, the sisters went to the Ag Barn, a place some three miles away where FFA kids raised their animals to feed the lambs and muck out their stall. After that, they went home to shower and change before Jennifer then drove them to school in her 1991 dark blue Chevy S-10 pickup truck. After school, they do the same thing.

head back to the ag barn, then home, where Jennifer let her sister out and then drove off to visit her boyfriend. After that, Jennifer went to a friend's house to retrieve her wallet and then back to school to pick up a form she needed to fill out to run for Queen of the local chapter of the FFA. Hardworking, ambitious kid. Meanwhile, Sarah hung out at home. At 4.30 that afternoon, as she peeled an orange, Sarah Harbans's mother, Barbara Sarasi, came home from work as a credit officer at Team Bank. Barbara soon noticed that Sarah was in a good mood, and she knew why. Sarah had a new boyfriend who had recently given her his senior ring, and she didn't have basketball or volleyball practice the next day.

So she planned to go out that night, most likely to hit up North Cross Mall. Man, senior rings. We called them class rings, I think. I guess some schools still offer them, but I don't think they're very popular anymore. This feels so 90s to me, especially the part about him giving her a senior ring, is a kind of promise ring. and my high school dudes would do that with their letterman's jackets too. I remember looking at a bunch of options for my class ringing in a catalog,

just fucking big gaudy rings, and actually really wanting one. Some ring with a huge ruby on it. That's so random. Even though they are so fucking cringy to me now, not a big jewelry person, just personally. I think the only thing that stopped me from getting and wearing one, though, was just not having the money.

Sorry, a little nostalgia blast there. Weekend nights, kids from all over the city, either drove to or were dropped off at that North Cross Mall, to window shop, eat some pizza, smoke some cigarettes, flirt, play pranks, laugh, drink, sodas, maybe go to a movie or even ice skate on the only rink within 200 miles. When the mall it opened in the 1970s, it was a pretty straight and narrow scene, but by 1991, most of the kids who hung out at the mall were distinctly alternative. I mean, fucking most cool teenagers, I guess, were alternative in 1991, right?

They're dropping LSD, they have mohawks. They, you know, came to see midnight movies like heavy metal, pink. Floyd's The Wall, the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fucking love it. And Barbara wasn't worried about her kids being around kids doing shit like that. She wanted her kids to enjoy being young. To have fun, to rack up various memorable life experiences. In fact, that was exactly why she'd moved to Austin.

Barbara had grown up in New Boston, a small town in East Texas, near the Arkansas line that has pretty much zero in common with regular Boston and Massachusetts. New Boston is 156 miles east of Dallas, only 22 miles west of Texarkana, a little over 46, people living in a place known mostly for its pioneer days festival and rodeo and kicking out a couple high school football stars who went on to playing the NFL. New Boston doesn't quite have the Boston equivalent of the Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins, Harvard, focal point of the Revolutionary War, Puritan Stronghold, birthplace of America's first public school, public park, or subway system, or, you know, living in a metro area with nearly five million people, slightly different

energies. One might say that New Boston is a wee bit sleepier than regular Boston. probably not getting the same bands coming through definitely not getting the same bands as Austin either man fuck that scene crushes with live music spoon white denim dye spits oh on and on and on anyway have you married her high school sweetheart Barbara had been young when she had her babies

then when her husband decided to enroll in graduate divinity courses at the university they all moved to Austin where Barbara worked to support the family until he got his degree and they could go back home but the city life opened her mind to new possibilities and when the girls were five and two and a half, she left both Mike Harbison and new Boston

and set off in her little hatchback, figuring that she and her two daughters could lead much more interesting lives in Austin. A funky artistic city of over two million in the metro area now, a little less than half that many living there then. Soon after arriving back in Austin, Barbara met Frank Sarasi, a technician at Dell Computers, whom she married in 1980. Oh man, fucking Dell Computers. I didn't realize they were still around. About a decade after all this happened, they had a wildly popular ad campaign based around a stoner character named Steve, played by Ben Curtis with a catchphrase, everybody seemed to know, dude, you're getting to Dell. Just call or go online. Tell them what you want, and right to your front door comes America's favorite PC. Thanks, Stephen.

Now you can get a Dell desktop with an Intel Pentium 4 processor, which delivers performance where you need it most. And six months of Dellnet by MSN internet access for just $899. I'm going to go online today and get a free CD burner or DVD upgrades. CD burner notebooks too. Dude, you're getting a Dell. Easy to buy, easy to own, easy as Dell. Man, that little doong, doon, doon, doon, do. I just heard that so many times.

Six months of dial-up internet access. For Barbara Frank, who went by Skip, was exotic. Italian, Catholic, sexy, and bringing home that Dell bacon. she threw herself in their new relationship, even deciding to send her daughters to a Catholic middle school and weekly mass so Barbara and Skip could exchange vows in a church. The girls liked going, but made it clear to their mom

they were looking forward to attending a public high school when the time came. Barbara was fully supportive of that, and Frank didn't try and intervene. Didn't try and stop them. In 1990, Barbara would move from their small house in a dicey neighborhood into a roomy barn-like structure west of Mopac, one of the city's main expressways,

on a street called Tammer. Marac Trail seven miles from the school. Her eldest daughter, Sarah's sister Jennifer Harbison, 17 and a senior, though she could have passed for younger. Only 86 pounds and five feet tall, Jennifer was a relay runner on the Sydney Lanier High School varsity track team. She loved running, loved her sister and her compact, preppy little, or peppy little S-10 pickup, even though she'd had to get a job so she could make payments on the loan for it. At first, she'd worked at a nearby Albertsons, sack and groceries, and despite her size, hauling him across the parking lot, into customers' cars. But then in July of 91, her friend Eliza Thomas had told her that working for

the I Can't Believe its yogurt was fucking way better than that grocery store grind. And yes, ICBY was for sure a direct competitor to TCBY, the country's best yogurt, their main competitor for a few years. They actually predated TCBY by three years, haven't been found in 1978. The two were in quite the Froyo War. TCBY originally stood for this camp yogurt until ICBY successfully sued them for copyright infringement and made them change the meaning of the acronym since it was clearly a knockoff of theirs. Let's now shift gears and meet Eliza. Like the Harbison Girls, Eliza Thomas, also deeply involved in FFA. For her project, which she had also attended to that morning at the Ag Barn, she was raising a pig.

She raised a pig for last year's show as well. And she'd actually won. She was hoping to win again, of course. But her 254-pound pig Stoney seemed like he was sick this year. too sick to properly fatten up. The vet had prescribed shots that Eliza had to give him twice a day on the morning of December 6th. Eliza asked her mother to go with her to the Ag barn and help her give Stoney an injection. And her mother Maria agreed.

Eliza drove her bright green 1971 Volkswagen, Carmen Gia, very cute retro car to Lanier, parked it next to the barn where she waited for her mom to pick her up. Within a few minutes, Stoney got his injection, and Eliza got another taste of what she hoped would be a long career in veterinary medicine. For a couple of years, she had kept a bowl of crawfish, then some white rats, as the work of keeping animals grew more complicated involving farming equipment and repairs, she kept up, learning how to weld, how to do auto repairs. For Christmas that year, just a few weeks away, she had asked for car parts, dreaming of driving around in her sporty, stylish car, as she made vet calls to farms across Texas. But for now, it was time to head off to school,

and then to work. Eliza had taken the $4.35 an hour job. job at the ICBY shop in January to supplement the money she made from her other job, escorted a nine-year-old boy to gym lessons twice a week. At 4.35 an hour, I remember those days well. Made the same amount for a couple years when I was bagging groceries in Idaho at Paul's grocery store in the 90s. Guessing these girls at least also got some tips, though. A lot of what Eliza made went to maintain the Volkswagen.

One friend would later tell news sources that Maria, Eliza's mom, didn't make much money as she cycle through different career paths, and Eliza didn't want to have to ask her mom for help. She was a great fucking kid. Jennifer loved her job at ICBY. It was perfect just like Eliza had told her it would be. A couple shifts on the weekends allowed her to make money, see any friends that might drop in, and friends and cute boys always seem to drop in. When Eliza got ready for her shift with Jennifer that evening, Sarah Harbison was thinking about her own evening plans. Like she had told her mom, Barbara. She wanted to go to the mall, but she didn't want to go alone. So she decided to call up her friend, 13-year-old Amy Ayers. Amy attended Burnett Middle School. And unlike Jennifer and Eliza,

who were popular older girls, Amy was still the quiet, reserved kid she had always been. 13, such a kid, just starting to transition into a big high school kid and leave that little kiddum era fully behind. Having spent a good part of her childhood on a ranch, Amy had been riding horses since she was three. She could ride all day without getting tired or bored, tough-ass kid. In Austin, she often wore a cowboy hat to school, and sometimes after or before school, she leashed up one of her two pigs that she was raising and would take for a walk. Like Eliza and a lot of other adolescent girls, she wanted to grow to be a veterinarian, and had even gotten special permission from the FFA to be a junior member.

Once her dad would be asked in the wake of this tragedy, if Amy was something of a cowgirl. and Bob would respond emphatically that she was quote all cowgirl and this cowgirl despite the age difference which can be pretty big you know when one person's 13 and one person's 15 you know at that age it two years mean a lot she was still sarah's best friend because he went to different schools they hardly got to see each other during the week though so the weekend for when they really prioritized hanging out and this fateful day sarah called amy whose parents were going christmas shopping Pamela Ayres had seen a watch she wanted to buy for her son, Sean at Sheppler's. She and her husband Bob were also planning to buy some Western-style clothes for Amy.

Since her daughter was still again, truly just a kid, neither Pamela nor Bob often let Amy very far out of their sight, which Sarah knew and was not bothered by. In fact, she had planned the whole thing out so that the Ayers would feel really comfortable. She proposed that Jennifer on her way to ICBY, dropped the younger girls off at the mall, then Jennifer could duck out of work a few hours later real quick. pick them up, bring them back to the ICBY to wait for Jennifer to be done with her shift. Then when her shift was over, Jennifer would drive both younger girls home to have a big sleepover. And the heirs agreed. It was supposed to have been such an incredibly wholesome night. It fucking should have been that night.

99,999 times out of a million it would have been that night. When Jennifer got home around 7.30, she agreed to Sarah's plan, hustled upstairs to get dressed in her work uniform, an open-necked knit pole. shirt tucked into dark jeans just like the company required. ICBY couldn't start slacking, letting TCBY show them up. They would lose the yogurt war. Actually, they would definitely lose the yogurt war anyway. TCBY still has over 125 locations worldwide. Way down from its peak of nearly 2,000 locations back in 2001, but they are still

hanging on. ICBY now has exactly zero shops left from what I can tell. When I searched for ICBY locations, my web browser literally kicked back with, Are you sure you don't mean TCBY locations? These murders, I'm guessing, went a long ways towards killing this franchise. Once Jennifer had changed into her work clothes, she tied up her black high top rebox. Fuck yeah. Put on a jacket, grabbed her purse, went downstairs.

As Jennifer chatted with her mother, Barbara noticed that Jennifer seemed a little evasive. Was she keeping a secret? Was she maybe having sex with her boyfriend Sammy? As the girls rushed around, getting ready for their evenings, Barbara decided not to press the issue. She figured there would always be more time to get into it later. Meanwhile, the first yogurt shop girl,

as she would unfortunately come to be known in the press, was arriving at ICBY. And more on how her day began, right after today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please send up to be a space on Patreon, help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad-free episodes,

three days early, and more. Thanks for listen to our sponsors. now let's return to the evening of December 6, 1991, when Eliza Thomas was opening the shop for the evening. As Eliza walked into the yogurt shop's unassuming strip mall facade, she took the office keys from the cash register's ledge and walked to the end of the counter, through an open door on her left and into the storage area. Past two bathrooms, the mop sink and the walk-in cooler, she swung to the right and unlocked the ICBY office door. Inside, she set down her jacket, car keys, purse, and maroon and white backpack on a filing cabinet. then locked the door behind her and retraced her steps. Following the shop's parent company, Bryce's rules,

she put the keys back on the cash register, settled in for what seemed like another predictable night. How was this place only open for a couple hours at night, by the way? Very interesting business model. Maybe that's why they lost the Yogurt Wars. They were the Froyo Wars. Not open enough. Because Eliza arrived first, she would run the cash register

while Jennifer took orders. The tape in the machine, an old-fashioned paper roll, would record every transaction Eliza rang up, including the last one of the night, a no sale at 11.03 p.m. Some 13 minutes after the front door was locked and three minutes after the shop was officially closed. But Eliza didn't know that quite yet. All she knew was that she and Jennifer would work until 11, at which point they would lock the front door from the inside, turn the open sign over to closed, leave the key in the lock, even if any last minute customers were still inside. They would then deposit the night's proceeds in a floor safe in the office and clean up according to Bryce's

precise closing instructions. When they were finished, they would remove the key and lock the door again from the outside, then put the key in an envelope, slide it under the door where the manager would retrieve it the following morning. And then the whole cycle of dispensing swirls of delicious frozen yogurt, frequently covered in sauces and syrups and various candy toppings, would start over again. I actually tried to get my daughter Monroe to work in a frozen yogurt shop at one point. Lindsay and I and the kids have gone to grab frozen yogurt here and there,

especially in the summer since back before Monroe was even in kindergarten. I thought a Froyo shop would be almost an ideal spot for a teen to work. Seems easier than working in an ice cream shop, right? You don't have to scoop that shit for hours, but you still get tips. And the Froyo shops around here always seem to be gathering spots for high school kids, right? Employees and customers. And in Austin, with that hot, humid weather year round, man, that's a perfect city for Froyo. Outside of this terrible night, I bet it really was a damn near a perfect job for these high school kids.

Right? Work with your friends, have other friends. friends visit you, meet lots of people, enjoy some delicious treats in an air-conditioned shop down the street from the mall. As Eliza started working, dispensing Froyo and ringing up transactions, Sarah Harbison was on her way to the mall. For her big adventures, Sarah had donned a black denim jacket with an Aztec style lightning bolt across the front. Fuck yeah, bro. She hopped in the car with Jennifer, and the two sped off to Amy's house where minutes earlier, Bob and Pamela Ayers had left to go shopping after kissing their daughter

a good night and telling her that they loved her. When the S-10 pulled up, Amy hopped in, and like Sarah, she decided to have some fun getting dressed up to. She was wearing a bomber jacket. Oh, man, bomber jackets. Those were in for a little while in the 90s. Her turquoise wranglers and black lace-up boots, as well as her watch, a pair of shrimp-style earrings, a little shrimp, shrimp figures, I guess.

The three-string friendship bracelets. She never took off. Aw, man, friendship bracelets. And around her waist, a wide leather belt threaded with multicolored lacing and fastened with a large heart-shaped buckle she'd borrowed from her mom. Adorable. Ready to turn boys' heads at the mall. After a few minutes of driving, Jennifer pulled up to the North Cross Mall

and the three girls coordinated a time for her to pick them up, and the two younger girls went off. A few minutes later, Jennifer arrived at ICBY to begin her 8 to 11 shift, just three hours for the evening rush, and now let's find out what some of her customers would notice that fateful evening. between 815 and 830, 51-year-old Lucella Jones parked to one of the ICBY spots and got out. A resident of nearby Allendale,

she had come to get a quick yogurt for her husband, who just had some dental surgery and could only eat soft foods. Heading inside, Lucela noticed only two other vehicles in the lot, Eliza's V-dub and Jennifer's S-10. She was a bit slow at the moment. She entered the ICBY to find the yogurt shop's familiar interior, southwestern inspired with dark red Mexican tile floors and walls lined with light oak-toned wood paneling. Along the north wall, there were three booths covered in forest green vinyl, each with the blonde wooden chair at the end.

There were five more boots against the south wall, and in the middle of the room, there were three small tables. The serving counter extended from the cash register on Lucela's left to within five feet of the other wall, where there was a freezer chest filled with pre-packaged cakes, pies, frozen yogurt sandwiches, and treatise. for special occasions. Froyo sandwiches. Oh, shit. I've never had one of those. Our local Froyo shops.

Fucking slacking. Eliza stood behind the cash register while Jennifer manned the toppings display. Chocolate, hot fudge, caramel, strawberry, cherry, carib chip, chopped nuts, M&M, granola, chunks of syrupy fruit, aerosol cans of whipped cream,

Oreos. They fucking had to have Oreos, didn't they? And gram cracker dust, maybe some butterfinger crumbs, definitely some chocolate chips and some gummy bears or gummy worms. or both, as well as the five large dispenser cans on a shelf behind her, each filled with a different flavor of yogurt.

The chocolate and vanilla cans sat side by side with a common spigot that delivered ICBY's most popular offering the vanilla chocolate squirrel. Of course, best of both worlds. Drizzle that bad boy and some Hershey's chocolate syrup or go fuck yourself. As she went to the counter, Lucela saw that there were only two other customers in the shop, a pair of teenage boys who had taken the table nearest the door, and we're focusing intently on something between them, a small sack of some kind. One side with his back to her, leaning on his elbows,

slumped over the table, while the other stood behind it, facing her. They looked to be somewhere between 14 and 17, not in other words, an uncommon sight for a Froyo shop staffed by some cute high school girls, but still something about them unnerved her. For one thing, neither of them appeared

to actually be eating anything, were they just waiting for somebody, just loitering, and what was in the same? sack. What's in the box? Seven anyone? Moving on. When the standing boy struck his hand into the bag and started around, there was a clicking sound like marble striking one another. Or maybe coins or keys, maybe 10, 20-sided, eight-sided dye, et cetera. Later Lucela would think that it might have been bullets, though. A bag of bullets? Who the fuck brings a bag of bullets to a Froyo shop? I mean, maybe some weird

that was done that, I guess. There are certainly all kinds out there. I've never heard of that one, though. Never heard of that little scenario playing out. Bringing a bag of bullets to Froyo shop. She moved past the boys to the counter where she ordered a fresh strawberry Sunday from Jennifer, then went to the cash register to pay for it. Jennifer and Eliza were chatting happily, which calmed her. If anything really was wrong, Lusela thought the girls would be on a high alert.

When she left the shop, everything seemed fine. For Jennifer, too, the night was proceeding according to plan. At around nine, she ducked out of work, drove back to North Cross to pick up Sarah and Amy back at the strip mall. The two younger girls had went to get takeout pizza from Mr. Gatties before the restaurant closed at 10. Mr. Gatties, a regional pizza chain that started in Austin in 1969. It's supposed to be delicious. COVID hit them hard.

Some of their stores closed, it seems, but back at this time, they were fucking popping. They had buffets, arcade rooms, super popular spots for teens. They were like the Black Angus Steakhouse Club for teens. Meanwhile, Jennifer hustled back into ICBY. There, Eliza was talking to her sister Sonora on the phone as Maria, her mother, stood near the counter with a sandwich she had bought for Eliza. Adorable. Eliza was trying to convince her little sister to ride her bike to the shop to turn the evening into one big sister hangout. But Sonora couldn't leave without dad's permission.

Her dad and her mom had been divorced and she was a toddler, but he didn't want to give permission, so Eliza handed the phone back to her mom. Soon afterward, Sarah and Amy returned with her pizza opening the box on one of the shop's tables. The two young girls shared pizza As Eliza wrapped up her conversation With their mom by the cash register When the phone rang again Jennifer jumped to get it Known it was her boyfriend Sammy

Who wanted to meet for breakfast the next morning And now let's meet another customer Between 9.30 and 10 Darrell Croft A 52-year-old former military police officer And current owner of Longhorn Security Company That is so Texas

Parked his company car A tan Ford Station wagon with a rack of blue warning lights crossed the roof in front of the Froyo shop. After his two companions told him what they wanted, Croft entered the shop alone, surveyed the place, the girls behind the counter, Maria by the cash register, two young people, a boy and a girl, sitting in a booth along the right-hand wall, another couple standing close to the counter, studying a wall menu, and just behind them, a fidgety young man in an Army Green jacket that may have come from a military surplus store. Croft figured that the man was in his early to mid-20s, medium-billed, 155 to 117,000,

70 pounds between 5, 10 and 6 feet tall and white. Croft thought there was something off about this dude. As Croft observed him, the people studying the menu moved forward in order. The jittery young man was next. And when he hesitated, instead of moving to the counter, Croft took a step towards him. At that point, the young man turned around and to Croft's surprise began to casually ask him about his car. Was that his car out there?

He asked Croft, with the lights on top. And Croft said yes, the young man asked if Croft worked for the police or some kind of security detail. Croft shrug said he owned a security company actually. He didn't like the way that the guy asked him that. Jennifer meanwhile asked the young man what he wanted. She had to keep things moving. The young man moved up, asked for a seven-up. When Jennifer said they only had the sprite, he said, fine, okay.

So she put the can in a paper sack, handed it to Eliza to ring up. With that done, Kroft moved to the counter and gave Jennifer his order. But before he got to the cash register to pay, the strange young man had gone around the end of the counter and threw the door to the back room. Croft asked Eliza where he was heading When she said the bathroom He told her he didn't know that they even had one And Eliza laughed

The bathrooms weren't really open to the public She explained But the guy said he really had to go So she let him Later Croft would wonder why Eliza had said that Because ICBY actually had two bathrooms One men's, one women's Like just about any food and beverage business

In the US provides to the public Was the young man someone's boyfriend? Was he making a delivery of some kind drugs or alcohol or other contraband. Croft wondered all of that, but then shrugged it off. He had his own business to get back to, after all. A few minutes after Daryl Croft drove away,

Maria Thomas left as well, and almost immediately afterwards, James Thomas, Eliza's dad, and her stepmom dropped by. So many people dropping by that night. As Amy and Sarah continued to eat their pizza, Eliza told her father and stepmom about an economics class she was taken. They stayed for 15 or 20 minutes before heading out.

Again, a lot of people, lot of people just hanging out. Very weird hours. This is, this yogurt shop is very slow. And so the remaining hour or so of the young women's shift started to tick down now. At 10.42 p.m. 18 minutes before closing time, Eliza rang up the last true sale of the evening. The couple who placed that order, Tim Stryker and Margaret Sheen,

have been out to a movie and we're stopping by for some dessert before heading home. Imagine many of you have done the same thing. Grab some sweet fro, yo, after a nice night out at the movies. I for sure have many times. entering the shop they noticed only two other customers large people in hooded jackets sitting across from each other in the last booth on the left closest to the cash register Margaret couldn't really be sure of their facial features

or even their genders but there was something odd about them she thought when they leaned over to talk to each other she figured they might be gay okay that is a weird combo observation so so what do you think their genders were marge I don't know I'm not sure if they were too men or two women? Or maybe they were one man and one woman. No, no way. No, that's impossible.

No, I'm positive. They were definitely either two men or two women. And what makes you say that? Just their energy. They had a strong, a strong gay energy. They were minutes away from either sucking each other's dicks or licking each other's pussies. I know it. I can feel it, you know? No, March, we don't. Once they got in their yoghards, Margaret and Tim, debated eating them at the store or taking him home, you know, away from the gay energy, as they did, Eliza and Jennifer chatted about the next week's schedule. Eventually the couple decided to head home, eat someplace safe and straight, and with that, it was time to start locking up.

Crazy to think about how if they just would have decided to have eaten their yogurts there, maybe this tragedy would have never occurred. Maybe they would have spooked away, whoever was, you know, whoever committed this tragedy, you know, the person would have, or people would have moved on. the yogurt murders would have never happened. We don't know who did what, but one of the girls probably Jennifer locked the front door

and turned the open sign around to close now. Because she'd already wiped off the tables, she then pulled a stepstool close to the big silver swirl dispensers so she could remove the lids, drain the yogurt, and clean and sanitize each canister. As she did that,

Jennifer's back would be to the front door, close to her behind the cash register. Eliza would be running a rag over the counter, wiping it down. And that's really the last thing we know about what happened for sure, or at least 99% for sure, at ICBY that night. Now let's, uh, before the tragedy. Let's fast forward about an hour.

The call would come in at 1148, just before midnight. The first report was made by Officer Troy Gay, an APD rookie on DWI Patrol that night, who crossing Highway 1 in Anderson Lane was specifically looking for people who seemed gay, as his name suggests. He was on gay DWI patrol. on a mission to arrest fucking anybody who is driving in a way that was both drunk and gay. No, no, he was crossing Highway 1 on Anderson Lane. When he spotted a column of smoke rising from the Hackberry trees lining Shoal Creek and he drove toward it.

When he came to the alleyway behind the strip mall, saw yellow flame shooting out between two steel doors. He steered the car closer. Beyond a blue dumpster, a man appeared in the next set of doors and waved him forward. That man was Jorge Barney. He had seen smoke seeping around the electrical panel in the north wall of his shop, and he had opened the door just in time to see the police car edging towards him. To both men, it seemed pretty clear what was going on. There was a fire in the yogurt shop.

Officer Gay drove to the front of the strip center, called in a general dispatch. Have a fire inside a business, he said. But unfamiliar with the neighborhood, he gave the wrong address. His mistake was soon corrected by another officer, Dennis Strait, who headed to the scene leaving his own patrol, where he was out looking for straight crimes, like, dudes beating off in the bushes while peeping into women's apartments. Definitely just women's apartments. Dudes who were very excited to be doing that.

Dudes definitely not faking any enthusiasm and for sure not wondering if they would be equally happy, if not happier, beaten off in the bushes and peeping into a dude's apartment. Because fuck that. No, this officer's name was Dennis Smith. By then the yogurt shops window and the glass panes in the front doors were completely black and smoke was pouring from the roofs of adjacent. businesses. It looked scary, but also they thought it was probably just an ordinary kitchen fire. Most likely somebody left a burner on, closed up the shop, and went home. Officers had no idea there was not a burner of any kind in the yogurt shop, which is fair, right? Fire and Froyo, or any kind of high heat in fro yo, don't exactly go hand in hand. Station 8 of the Austin Fire Department quickly sent in four units now, an aerial ladder company, an engine company carrying

hoses and water, an emergency medical service ambulance, and a battalion chief's car. The engine company's unit parked closest to the shop so that two of its specialists, Renee Hector Garza and David DeVoe, could quickly connect and charge the hoses. Once they had done that, the two men already dressed in turnouts and equipped with a handypack radio, donned air packs, face masks, and gloves, and it was time to go inside. Garza pulled on the front door, but the lock didn't give, so then he used a crowbar to pop it open, smoke bank to the ceiling, and poured out. He and DeVos dropped to their hands and knees and crept forward.

Man, such a fucking dangerous job. After bumping headfirst into the service counter, they regrouped, crawled into the back room where they stood up and took in the situation. Seemed like the hottest flames were coming from halfway up to south wall of the storage room. So Garza assumed that was where the stove was. Hoping to ventilate that room, Garza had taken a tentative step into the darkness when he felt DeVo's hand on his shoulder. DeVo kind of shook Garza,

and Garza had no idea what that was supposed to mean until he saw the handlight. DeVoe was pointing at the floor. The circle of light illuminated a foot. Both men stepped back and then promptly stumbled over a second body. Both bodies were young women. Girls, actually. Both were naked.

Fuck. Roughly only an hour earlier. Everything had been fine. Those girls were having a great night. Another great night at the yogurt shop. Now this. It really is wild. Just how fast life can go from great to gone.

In the blink of an eye, as the saying goes. Garza told the other firefighter to stay put outside in the staging area where firefighters were climbing ladders and knocking open doors of the other businesses. He told his battalion chief what they'd found. A member of the team immediately volunteered to go in and get them, but Garza shook his head. They shouldn't move them. He said something was off about the scene. Something was very wrong. Garza then went around to the back where the doors swung open easily, pouring smoke and steam.

He looked inside. Contrary to what he'd expected, there was no kitchen, no stove, but there was another body, another girl. That was when Officer Gay called for a hundred. homicide cop reporting two bodies probable arson probable homicide austin police department sergeant john bisexual was the only homicide cop on the street that night he went out trying to solve a recent string of carjackings committed by someone who appeared to be strongly sexually attracted to both men and women based on how the victims uh had referred to a flirty hansy energy uh they winked at drivers of both genders fucking winked at them hard

and everyone said it was not a joking kind of week it was a joking kind of week it was wasn't those kind of winks that, you know, some people just give out of a habit. It wasn't like a fucking facial tick. No, it was an intentional closed eye and then one open bedroom. I won't fuck the shit out of you. No. No, his name was Sergeant John Wilson Jones. And he really was the only homicide cop on the street that night.

May have been bisexual. Maybe not. May have been asexual. Might fuck cats in his free time. I have no fucking idea what he got up into, got up into in the bedroom back then. Or even today. Don't even want to know if he's listening. actually I wouldn't mind knowing

if you are listening maybe right in but anyway when his phone rang the first time close to midnight he was on the other side of town at airport Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard's

following up on an earlier call a guy who had barricaded himself inside of a building and was threatening to kill himself now Jones punched in two fatalities the dispatcher told him suspected arson

suspected homicide looks like gunshot wounds and then the dispatcher gave him the address 2949 West Anderson Lane one of the I can't believe it's yogurt locations. Arson murders at a yogurt shop, he thought. This was very strange, and it had already been somewhat of a strange night for Jones, considering that a reporter and a videographer from KTBC TV, a local CBS affiliate doing a series on homicides in Texas, they were

already in the cruiser with him. So far, the ride-along had been a bust, and the KTBC crew was looking forward to heading to Houston the next day. Ever done a ride-along, by the way? Highly recommend if you haven't. Interesting just to see how it goes down in real time. I got to do one with an officer in Florida years ago, a stand-up fan who I got to know. Hello, Anthony. If you are still listening, hope you and Shell, you're still good. And that was when I learned that one of the reasons a lot of officers on Speed Patrol don't pull over more speeders is because of the paperwork. If they wrote speeding tickets all day long, they'd be buried with it. At least that's what Anthony told me. Maybe he's super fucking lazy. I don't know. My ride along was very slow. Nothing crazy happened. Definitely

wasn't like an episode of cops, which I kind of expected to be for some reason. Thankfully, I think that's how most of them go. And this ride along had been slow until this call came in. But now it seemed like the KTBC crew was going to get their material after all. Boy, were they ever.

Jones revved his unmarked sedan, switched on his lights and siren, and once his riders were fully settled into the backseat, hit the ramp hard leading to the interstate. As he did, the next call came in, they'd found another body. He was inside of Highway 183 when his phone rang, for a third time, Jonesy said a cop on the scene,

Make that four. Okay, Jones said, here we go. He arrived at the scene shortly after midnight. By then, the Hillside Center strip mall, which also included a nail salon, a Goodwill store, and some other eateries, was lit up like a nighttime movie set. Fire trucks, police cars, flashers, crowded the parking lot, harsh generator-powered lights, and the alley bade everything in an eerie white glow.

When he got to the alley, the steel doors to the storage room of the yogurt shop wide open. Joan stepped inside, found pure carnage waiting for him. Three of the girls, their bodies were so melted together that it didn't seem possible to tell where one started and another began. Holy shit. Most of the features that identified them, like hair, eyes, noses, and skin, completely charred away or gone, leaving a craggy blackened mass.

Oof, out of all the burning, though, Jennifer Harbansons was the worst. Jennifer was curled on her side, closest to the melted shelves against the south wall, cans of toppings, paint, and cleaning supplies had exploded around her. But the investigator could still see that her nude body had not been bound. Sarah's body, however, despite his condition, had clearly been bound.

Actually, some sources say that Jennifer's body was also bound, but just the fire just, you know, ruined what may have bound her. Like the others, Sarah was naked and melted. Her hands tied behind her back with a pair of panties. Later investigators would find that she had an abrasion in the upper portion of her vulva

and her vagina. Her wrists were pressed against her spine. Her face obliterated a steel girder between her legs. The curled skin of her top leg peeled back like a stocking. The sisters had both been shot in the head with a 22-caliber bullet. Eliza was lined spread eagle on top of Sarah. The skin of her athletic young legs split apart by the sweeping flames. Like Jennifer, she had been burned, her hair and face completely singed away. But where was Amy? Jones and other investigators didn't see her immediately, but she was there, of course. A pale, shimmering mask lay beyond the worst of the destruction. It wasn't clear why Amy hadn't been grouped with her friends,

but ultimately she had met the same fate. Her skin was burned, raw, but not charred. Joan stepped gingerly around the bodies, having been schooled in evidence collection and processing. He usually felt confident, but arson, that was a different matter. Flames could easily burn away crucial evidence. If they didn't, the water that put out the fire certainly would.

In other words, it was, as he would put in his case notes, Robbery plus sexual assault, plus multiple child victims, plus bondage, plus gunshot wounds, plus fire, heat, smoke, water damage, plus no known witnesses equals to homicide, arson, and DA's worst nightmare. Not knowing what else to do, Jones began snapping black and white Polaroids. By then, longtime AFT arson investigator, Melvin Stahl had arrived and was also taking pictures. In his official report written the next day, Saturday, December 7th, Stahl would estimate that the fire had been set somewhere high along the south wall of the storage room toward the east end of the steel shelves at approximately 1142,

39 minutes after Eliza rang up no-sale. But what exactly had happened in those 39 minutes? That, of course, was the mystery. I mean, their final minutes had been pure hell, but the exact details of that hell, impossible to put together. Taking photos, Stahl noted the large amount of blood on the floor. It seemed to indicate that the girls had almost certainly been dead from gunshot wounds when the fire was lit.

But other things were already becoming difficult to establish. The scene was a mess of water, ash, and rubble. Nobody had thought to create a log to track who was coming in or out. In the chaos, the ICBY's bathrooms would never be dusted for latent fingerprints, and the trash would not be combed proof for evidence. Shit. When the investigators made a snap decision to use the metal shelves in the break room to set aside evidence, they actually degraded that situation further.

Searching through the lingering muck, an investigator found a spent shell casing from a 380 pistol, in a clogged drain under the main sink, not far from Amy's body, though. There have been two guns, so did that mean that there were two perpetrators? It seemed likely that there were at least two perpetrators based on four victims being subdued and raped

and then burnt in such a short amount of time, or likely, possibly raped, as far as the other three. Just after 7 o'clock on Saturday morning, December 7th, Deputy Medical Examiner Les Carpenter instructed his crew to zip the body of Amy Ayers into a body bag and transported to the morgue. Once Amy's body had been delivered, Carpenter's team went back for Elizas. The autopsy of Amy Lee Ayers began that morning at 715.

Eliza Hope Thomas at 9.30. Sarah Louise Harbenson at noon. And Jennifer Ann Harbison at 1.30 that afternoon. Nobody swabbed the bodies, though, for any sign of an accelerant. Since the investigators had not reported smelling any gasoline or harsh chemicals at the scene, that topic had been forgotten. And that would later become a major issue. Meanwhile, news of the carnage was already getting out, thanks in part to the news crew that happened to have literally been along for the ride. Jones had also issued a press release stating that the bodies of four young women had been found, quote, in an area near the back door to the ICBY shop at 2949 West Anderson Lane,

and that each of the victim suffered gunshot wounds to the head and severe burns as a result of the fire. Half an hour later, after the press release, he met with the girls' immediate families at the main police station downtown. The families, of course, were living in a fucking nightmare. Things had just been so great. Their daughters had just been alive, full of life, having such a fun and normal teen girl night. They had no idea how long their daughters had suffered if they had been tortured sexually or otherwise. The second question investigators did not yet know that answer. Two pairs of underwear were missing, along with Amy's bomber jacket.

And, of course, the girls had been naked, which did point to a sexual assault. police did know that the girls most of them at least had died quickly the autopsies would confirm that they had all been shot by a medium caliber weapon in the back of the head amy the thirteen-year-old cowgirl however had also been strangled unlike the others who had only been shot once she had been shot twice with two different guns very strange maybe indicates rage towards her the first had hit her in a sideways trajectory the second from a large caliber gun it had been a through and through a round that had pierced and then extra exited her body. Nobody could offer the families anything close to an answer to their most pressing question. Why did any of this happen? The next day in Austin Police Department spokesman, Mike Huckabay, would go on record speculated about the motive. The first thing that comes to mind, he was quoted as saying, is crack cocaine? I've been in homicide a pretty good time, and this is the worst one I've seen, considering it involved four young ladies at the same time. The fuck? Did the murders have anything to do with crack cocaine? How to four murders? No known money being taken,

likely sexual assaults, and an arson point to crack. I feel like our buddy Mike might not have been a genius. I haven't been in homicide a pretty good time at all. I've never worked in homicide or in any other aspect of police work, but I do still know that crack addiction tends to lead to crimes involving getting more money so you can buy more crack. You know, getting shit to sell to get money to buy crack. We've covered a lot of sexual predators over the course of this podcast, a lot of murders. Not one of them, to the best of my memory, was primarily motivated by crack. Why did you kill all those women and children, Mr. Chiquotillo? What does big deal? I wrestle for crack. I jerk sauce shamcock and corner for crack.

I bother no one except people that rape and kill for crack. Yeah. Let's meet someone else now. On December 8, 1991, less than 48 hours after the Austin Yogurt Shop murder, 33-year-old Robert Eugene Brasher's was stopped by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Back on March 13, 1958, the youngest of four children, born to Doolis and Nellie Brasher's. Brasher's had grown up in Newport News, Virginia,

and spent his high school years in Huntsville, Alabama, and South Bend, Indiana. After graduating high school, he had first enlisted in the Army and then somehow ended up serving in the Navy for 10 months instead of the Army before being discharged due to personality disorders. As a civilian, he would move to New Orleans, Louisiana, then Fort Myers, Florida, a couple years later. We don't know much about his childhood or those early adult years, but we do know that down in Florida, old Bobby, old Bobby Brash got himself into some trouble.

On November 22nd, 975, Brasher's, then 27 years old, was arrested in Port St. Lucie, Florida, on charges of assaulting a 24-year-old woman named Michelle Wilkerson. They'd met in Fort Pierce. Brasher's had convinced Michelle to go to a bar with him. spent a couple hours at that bar having a good time and some drinks. Then Brasher's drove Michelle to a dark alley near a citrus grove where he popped a couple of Budwisers for them to keep the party going. But when he tried to make a move, Michelle resisted strongly. She was not having the good time he was.

He was not reading the room. She actually climbed out of the vehicle to escape from him. Brasher's, he didn't like that one fucking bit. In a flash, he grabbed a gun, shot Michelle twice, once in the neck, once in the head. Miraculously, not only he, did those two shots not kill her. She was still conscious and she managed to get away, hiding in a culvert under the road after running. Holy shit. She had the composure to run after

being shot twice in the fucking neck and head, no less. And then she was not only able to find a place to hide, she was able to stay quiet and still while he looked for her. Michelle's survival instincts, beyond impressive. When he couldn't find her, Brasher drove away, threw his gun into the ocean and decided to head home to Port Lucie, Port and St. Lucy, but the then got his car, or got his car stuck in the sand. Excuse me. As he was trying to get it out, Michelle stumbled into a nearby apartment building where concerned residents soon called the police. As an ambulance drove her to the hospital, she gave a detailed description of her attacker and his car.

And as it happened, Brasher's not hard to find. He was still wandering the beach when the cops picked him up, and he would soon be charged with attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery, and using a firearm during the commission of a crime. the next year he would be convicted and sentenced 12 years in prison. But then he would be released early for good behavior May 4th, 1989. A fucking course. We still got people locked up for life for selling wheat.

And this motherfucker shoots some woman in the head and neck who had fled because she didn't want to be raped, and he serves less than four years. How insulting to her and to all victims of violent crime. No one will ever make this shit make sense to me because it doesn't make any fucking sense. I cannot legally encourage anyone to do this. this, but if one of you were able to somehow lead a bloody revolution in top of the government, could you at least consider bringing me on as a consultant when it comes to some serious criminal justice reforming?

Fortunately, once he was released, Brasher's became a model citizen, though. And he never, ever hurt anyone ever again, because that's how that always works. No, no, he was way worse once he got out. That's how that always works when it comes to certain kinds of violent criminal behavior. He would drift between South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. After he got out, never spent in too long in one place. Meanwhile, during those years, the body of 28-year-old Genevieve Jenny Zatrickey was found bludgeoned, raped, and strangled with pantyhose at her apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, April 5th, 1990.

Great job! People who let him out early. Her blood is on your hands, too. After murdering her in the bedroom, her killer, spoiler alert, it was Brasher's, even though he was not caught, dragged her body into a bathtub and submerged it before riding, don't fuck with my family, on the bathroom's mirror. And now on December 8th, 1991, less than 48 hours after the Austin yogurt shop murders,

as he was getting stopped, Brasher's was driving a truck he had stolen from Marietta, Georgia, which Border Patrol soon clocked. While searching the stolen vehicle, the Border Patrol agent found a 380 AMT backup, the exact making model of firearm that had been used in the yogurt shop murders.

But then, Brasher's took off. Got back into a stolen truck, gunned it, but wouldn't make it very far. After an approach, approximately mile long car chase, he surrendered to officials and was charged with auto theft and possession of a firearm. Crimes he would get a slap on the wrist for, despite his record, despite fleeing the police. But nobody looked too hard at the gun, which was later sent back to Brasher's father. And now before we return to Austin, let's take our second and two mid-show sponsor breaks.

Thank you for listening to those sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked. And now let's return to Austin, Texas. Back in Austin on December 9, 1991, just three days after the murders, the girl's funeral was held at St. Louis the King Church. Speaking from behind four matching white caskets, the Reverend Kirby Garner officiated before an estimated 1,000 people as 500 more waited on the lawn outside. Three of the girls would be buried side by side at Capitol Memorial Gardens, while Eliza would be buried in Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, closer to where her family lived. the cops of course were watching wondering if the person or people who are responsible would try to blend into the crowd of mourners who could it be since friday the police had been inundated with tips seemed like everybody knew somebody who had been acting weird lately which makes sense i guess right i see people i think seem weird every fucking day i think a lot of my family members are weird hell i'm weird who isn't weird and in austin texas literally a city known for being weird keep austin weird is an actual popular Austin's slogan that has been printed all over t-shirts and stickers and more for years. Everyone in Austin, it seemed, had a neighbor who liked to set fires, or knew a boy who would come

home that night acting a little suss, or they'd come home with blood on their shirt. You know, somebody, they knew somebody who had came home with blood on their shirt. Every time somebody made a dark joke about how they would have done it, the tip line would ring with another incoming call. Nobody at the funeral appeared suspicious to investigators, though. So that was a dead end. And then another dead end would come on December 14th. That day, APD homicide was called out again when a father and son were found stabbed to death in their South Austin apartment.

Each body pierced by more than a dozen blows. The brutality of that led them to wonder if there was a connection to the yogurt shop murders. But then the killer, an unemployed chemist and housemate would be quickly apprehended, and he had a solid alibi for the night of December 6th. Damn it. But then another incident would come on the police's radar that possibly pointed to the yogurt shop murders. At about 6 o'clock on the evening of Saturday, December 4th,000, 14th, eight days after the murder, 16-year-old Maurice Pierce, tucked a loaded 22 pistol into his left-hand jeaned pocket, yeah, left-side jeans pocket, and jammed 16 extra rounds into the other pocket.

An imaginative boy with flashing blue eyes and spiked hair, Maurice had taken the gun off of a 13-year-old boy named Johnny Holder, who had lifted the gun from his father's collection. With the gun in his jeans now, Maurice picked up his dad's car keys, left his apartment, 15-year-old Forrest Wellborn, a friend to his husband, right behind him. Their destination was North Cross Mall, same mall where Sarah and Amy had hung out on the night they were murdered, just down the street from the yogurt shop. Maris and Forrest walked around and joined how the gun made them feel powerful and mysterious, and then they showed it to the wrong kid, who let security know about it. A security guard confiscated the gun and ammunition, then took the kids to the back office where he arranged for them to be transferred to the juvenile detention center. But somebody would hear about the arrest before the boys made it to Juvie.

a detective named Hector Polanco. Polanco was dark-eyed, handsome, and supremely self-assured, known for both his charisma and interrogation skills. He was beloved by Chief Ronnie Earl for his record. A 100% clearance rate. Dude was a legend at this time on the force. And now he would attempt to work his magic on Maurice. Sure enough, by the next morning,

Marisa told Polanco that the 22 was probably the gun used to kill the ICBY girls. And that Forrest was probably... probably the one who had shot them. They'd been hanging out with some skinheads that night, he said, and Forrest and another guy named Mace had disappeared for a few hours. When Forrest got back with a gun, it had been discharged six times. And he added, Forrest smelled like hairspray, which could have been used as an accelerant to start the fire.

When Polanco asked who else Maris had been hanging out with that night, the teenager eagerly offered up two names, 17-year-olds Rob Springsteen and Mike Scott. Robbie, as he was known, was the fire brand of the group, quick to get angry, Robbie had been assigned to an alternative learning center for disruptive students and protested by wearing weird clothes to get attention. A Nehru jacket one day, this very distinctive hip-length tailored coat first worn in India and popular in the U.S. counterculture in the late 60s and early 70s.

A hip-hop du rag-style bandana around his head the next day. He'd grown up in Chicago but four months before the murders. His father and stepmother had offered him a separate condo to live in Austin if he kept his head down. Robbie had eagerly agreed And after getting to town He registered for the fall semester At Austin's Macallum High School Where he would be a sophomore

Fucking sophomore With his own condo Okay, that must have been fun He got into a few scrapes An argument with his football coach Let him be getting dismissed from the team A fight in a nearby McDonald's Where he pulled out a knife

But administrators at the school Insisted he was not a terrible kid He just needed more time to settle in But then the fights kept coming and soon Robbie was back where he had started in alternative courses courses he barely showed up to. When a cop asked him how long it had been since he had gone to school,

Robbie shrugged and said, I don't know, two weeks, I don't know, probably least a month. In November of 91, Robbie had asked his dad if his friend could live with him. Robbie's dad was skeptical, but Robbie won him over by saying that the friend had a bad situation at home and needed a good place to land. And that friend was Mike Scott.

Born in Micronesia, where his family had immigrated after his granddad served in Guam during World War II, Mike had moved around a lot as a child. But he spent most of his life in Austin struggling through school with the diagnosis of severe dyslexia. He liked his extracurriculars, though. His freshman year, he made the football team, joined the drama department's royal court players, and played viola in the school orchestra. He moved from Boy Scout to Life Scout at 16, showing off his short haircut and uniform in a group photo.

But school kept getting harder. And by a sophomore year, his parents were divorced and his mom was struggling with her own mental health. Mike quit most of his extracurriculars, started skipping school, and began spending most of his nights at friends' houses. He still had academic subjects that engaged him now. He was obsessed with the dress and culture of pre-1840s Native Americans and made himself a Native American dance costume. But he spent most of his time doing what the other boys in his friend group did, smoke a weed, drop an acid, hanging out. On the morning of the murders, he told the detective he had gotten up early, smoked some weed by the swimming pool, then rode the bus to McAllen to see what his friends there were up to.

In particular, he wanted to see a girl, a teenager named Amber. Fair enough. Sounds pretty normal. But detectives noticed the boys' stories about what they had done on December 6 kept changing. The way a lie keeps changing. In later statement, Mike Scott came up with an entirely new and different account. He said, went up to school Friday morning, 8 a.m., talked to Rob in front of school. I don't know how he got there.

I told him I would be at the Bowen alley at lunch, left school at lunch. left school at lunch with Rob and Maurice and Forrest around 2.30. Went to Capitol Bowl. Had lunch, then left 30 minutes later. Amber was at the bowling alley. From the bowling alley went to North Cross, a little after three. These inconsistencies were exactly what the detectives were looking for. Of course, there was another explanation that would explain these inconsistencies outside of the boys trying not to tell the truth, and that was a lot of fucking weed.

The boys have been fucking stoned all day and stoned the whole day before. and stoned the day before that. They've been stoned most of their waking hours for weeks, if not months. Easy way to get shit jumbled up. But the detectives didn't think that was it. No, they knew it was obviously crack cocaine. These boys were fucking crack fiends. When you're a crack fiend, killing and burning four girls at a yogurt shop makes perfect crack sense.

The crack told him to do it. That's some crack logic for you. No. Investigators followed the boy's story closely. They arrived at another figure, Forrest Wellborn. the kid who had been with Maurice when Maurice went to Northcross with a gun. 15-year-old Forrest had come out of Macallum High at lunchtime on Friday, December 6th, to find that his friends were waiting for him.

Among his friends, Forrest was known as the quiet one. And like his friends, he spent a lot of his life moving between parents and step-parents' homes. Currently, Forrest lived with his dad in Austin and spent most of his school days doling in his notebooks, drawn superheroes, weapons, gun blasts, villains, a very normal, common teenage boy thing to do. During Forrest lunch break, Mike, Rob, and Forrest headed to a nearby bowling alley. And near the end of their lunch period, Maurice showed up in his dad's Ford LTD, model a car that earned the nickname of Land Yacht due to being big, heavy, and smooth riding. Sounds sweet.

Forrest had thought he was going to head back to school, but now things were getting interesting. They were driving around when Maurice pulled over, hollered at some nearby Mexican low-level gangsters to come over to the car. Mike thought they were going to buy some weed, but Maurice bought a gun instead, a 38, Mike thought, shiny and black. Then they went up to the big reservoir of Lake Travis, about 20 miles outside of town that afternoon, shot at some trees.

Then they drove back to school. Later that afternoon, Mike, Rob, and Maurice drank some beers, headed over to the North Cross Mall. Soon, Forrest showed up, but then Maurice had to leave to babysit his sister, and he wanted Forrest to come with him. But where had the group been between 8 and midnight? That was, of course, the million-dollar question,

and Rob, Maurice and Mike would all tell different stories. Rob said he snuck in to see the Midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show. as you almost always did on weekend nights. But when Mike tried to, he got kicked out, had to wait until the show was over around 2 a.m. Then they wanted to go to a party but couldn't get the address for the party, so somebody ended up dropping him off at Mike's mother's place. Mike, however, said that Maurice took him down to 6th Street,

where they parted for a few hours before going back to the condo. He said they turned on a movie and fell asleep. But Maurice was the one to give the most compelling version of that night, the story where Forrest had gone off with the skinheads and then came back smelling like hairspray. and there was one more piece of evidence that seemed to link the boys to the murders. On Friday morning, Marisa's father had reported

that his car was stolen and that Maris had taken it to San Antonio. But when this was reported to the APD, the clerk made a mistake. They reported the car theft as taking place on Saturday, December 7th. Altogether, the story seemed to point to a day of crime, drugs, and guns,

after which Maris wanted to suddenly get out of town. Now there's only one thing left to do for Maurice to sign a statement that said that Forrest had used his 22 to kill the girls. Maurice, well, he would do just that. With that signed statement, Detective Joan took him to the apartment where he lived with his father.

They arranged for Maurice to wear a wire while he talked to Forrest. After Maurice picked him up near an Austin laundromat, he started on the questioning. What did you actually do that night? That Friday. Forrest. Pardon?

Maurice. That Friday, when the girls were dead. Forrest. Huh? Maurice. And you said you wanted to use a gun. Forrest When I wanted to use a gun

This general confusion Went on for quite a while Before Maurice finally said You said that you wanted to use the gun And that you had killed the girls Forrest then immediately and adamantly claimed That he'd just been joking around That he'd never killed anybody

And then he got more and more confused As his normally chill easy-going friend Just got anger and insisted that he had killed the girls But Forrest never ever caved He acted like a kid like a kid who did not do it. The cops considered the interview a complete bust, and soon Jones

inactivated the teenagers as suspects. Back to square one. All Detective Hector Palanco's interrogation of Maurice had seemed to elicit was a bunch of bullshit. More disappointments would soon follow. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 29th, Jones followed a hot tip about a black man

named Cornelius, who friends said have been bragging about killing several white girls. Given his history as a reputed drug dealer and former member of the L.A. Crips, Jones had brought him in, or had him brought in. But Cornelius, too, had a solid alibi, another dead end, another dude who had just been talking shit. By January 3rd, 1992, nearly a month after the murders,

numerous promising leads had fizzled into nothing. And not for a lack of effort. Jones and his team had interviewed all the shop owners in the strip mall, all the customers they knew of who were at ICBY between 8 p.m. and closing time, all the area's bus operators, every member of the victim's families, along with their boyfriends. they had inspected phone logs, traffic tickets, videotapes, the girls' funeral service.

At this point, it seemed like the only way of getting a real lead was to go on unsolved mysteries or America's most wanted. Things were fucking bleak, but Jones didn't want the families to feel like the police were given up, and they weren't. What he really wanted was more investigators and better ones. The case that started out with six, two on nights, which left four to pursue the case during the day, and all six of those investigators still had other murders to look into,

along with all of the paperwork that following leads in the yoga shop murders generated. It was a fucking mess. Thankfully, though, he would get what he needed. Soon, Chief Everett made an official announcement that he was given Sergeant John Jones the opportunity to create an officially sanctioned task force, made up of representatives from APD, AFD, BATF, the FBI, Texas DPS intelligence, TCSO, the Travis County Sheriff's Office, and the Travis County DA's office. So many acronyms.

so many investigators. And they would also bring in the exact people that Jones really, really wanted FBI profilers. And the profilers returned a very different view of the crime. Like the police, they agreed that there was likely more than one perpetrator, but they specified that one would have a dominant

personality. They felt they were probably white in their late teens or mid-20s. The one with the dominant personality, the profiler said, had probably not finished high school. He had been an underachiever with less than average grades who resented any attempt to discipline him. As a young man, the suspect would likely have an explosive personality made worse by drinking alcohol or doing drugs. He was probably unemployed or working a menial job.

Maybe to support himself, he lived with a parent or grandparent. They believed he was familiar with the streets and stores around the ICBY and that he had honed in on the yogurt shop because he was drawn to women who were younger and, quote, less adequate. A description of the suspects went out in the new statesman, a local newspaper. It would then soon make its way to the Washington Post as well. but no leads would be generated thanks to it. Eight weeks in, the task force was still interviewing customers and employees, combing through people's faintest memories about what they'd seen on a random Friday night

to establish a definitive timeline. The database of those who had information that might be helpful swell to 600 names, and there were even more that they didn't have time to interview or simply couldn't find. By February of 1992, the shadow of the yogurt shop murders loomed over all of Austin, literally. A massive billboard Show dark-haired Eliza next to Amy Who stood beside Sarah, Jennifer to Sarah's right

Slashed beneath the four girls' photos Was a bolded question Who killed these girls? There was a $25,000 reward For any information that led to the arrest of the murder or murders Before moving forward, I do have to correct myself It loomed over some of Austin Not all of it, literally.

That would be a massive fucking billboard If the shadow was big enough to loom over literally all of the city. And I know you know that. But you know that I know that as well. Austin overall was starting to move on and away from this case, despite this billboard. With no new breaks, it seemed like they had no other choice but to. In the spring, the Laney Air High School, FFA voted in a new president to take Jennifer Harbison's place. Friends of Amy and the Harvison sisters volunteered to show their animals at the livestock show.

Eliza Sister Sonora would show Stoney, her prize pig. Still, the police were not given up, and soon one man thought he had a new credible lead. Hector Polanco, that interrogator, who had a reputation for getting confessions from pretty much fucking everybody he talked to. Polanco had been on early morning duty when a tip came in from the Dell Valley jail where an inmate had reported overhearing a fellow prisoner

named Sean Buda Smith bragging about having done the yogurt shop murders. Polanco had Smith brought downtown that interrogated him alone in a room with no recording device. Six hours later, he emerged with a signed statement, a confession. It was done. With that, Palanco called John John.

Jones, who called their Quantico contact, Jack Barnett, and soon, seemed like this nightmare was going to be over, right? Profiler was like, yeah, this sounds like the guy. Jones even got ADA Terry Keel to initiate indictment procedures, positive that the squad's star interrogator could not be wrong. Then he gave orders for Buda Smith to take a polygraph, but then as the test was about to begin, Smith started to waver. He said, actually, come to think of it, I don't really know what the fuck I was talking about. Maybe I may. Maybe I made it all up. Maybe I was just another dude trying to sound like more of a cold-blooded killer than I actually am.

Maybe I was just trying to shock people. The thing was, however, the confession he had given did have a lot of key details right. Was Bud of the murderer? Or was there a leak in homicide? Was someone distributed information that the police had withheld specifically to catch their predator? Even though Buddha Smith had signed a statement saying he had committed the murders, a polygraph test said he was lying. Even though, as we have learned over and over, polygraphs are not all done.

that reliable, there were enough doubts about his confession that it was tossed out. And once again, the investigation shifts focus. So, with the three-month anniversary of the case coming up fast, Austin PD did what they had been resisting from the very beginning. They turned to TV. Over three days at the end of February, 48 hours. Taped a special about the yogurt shop murders that would air in late March. Like the billboards that loomed over Austin, the special's title was to the point.

Who killed these girls? but the special ended up doing more harm than good. Why? Well, at the time, Austin PD was focused on what would soon become known as one of the biggest red herrings in a history of modern crime in this country, Satanism! Damn you, Satan! Atheist, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Christians, more Christians than anyone else, which only makes sense in a predominantly Christian nation, where the group has the biggest numbers.

They've been raping and molesting and killing motherfuckers left and right in America, going back to the beginning. But it's always a threat of the... the Satanists to get people riled up. So ridiculous. Even if there finally was a huge Satanist murder and or molestation and or sex trafficking scandal, they would still be dead last. And the true crime rankings by fucking miles.

Way behind so many supposedly wholesome other belief groups. And yet the satanic panic continues. What's that boogeyman up to now? I think the only way it'll ever fully go away is if all the Abrahamic religions die off. And that's not happening anytime soon. This particular satanic panic started when some Austin PD officers had started interviewing local teens. Many of them wearing spiky dog collars, black lipstick. Other things that marked them as alternative.

An investigator for some reason thought that if these kids wore black lipstick and painted their fingernails, even the boys would do this and sometimes wear women's clothing. Well, then oh my heck, by golly, holy Moses. Gosh dang, they simply must be killing and raping and burning kids. You know, it starts with black lipstick And it ends with killing And raping kids at a yogurt shop Classic Satanism

And one scene from the special Producers and a cameraman A company Jones, Huckabay, other cops And arrayed on the small home of a reputed High Priestess of Darkness Who called herself Claire LeVay After the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LeVey When the cops entered Claire was naked

And alone in her bed Taking a nap, actually, as it turns out. But still, she was a naked Satanist. So her nudity was obviously evil. Her nap was probably mostly about charging up her evil priestess powers. All the bones in her altar,

actually turned out to be rat and squirrel bones. Now, to those who didn't believe that good, wholesome Americans were being murdered by Satanus, Austin PD looked like fucking idiots. And the cops who were very worried about Satanus in their midst, let's be honest, probably were idiots.

have you ever met someone truly, truly worried about Satanus, being a credible threat to society who didn't seem like an idiot? I have not. Their reward for this focus was tons of tips from those who did believe in the satanic panic. Most of them centered predictably around the occult. Most of them paranoid, imaginative nut jobs, you know, talking crazy, unhelpful fever dream shit. They were further away now from solving the case and ever.

Meanwhile, on February 18, 1992, our old buddy old who anyone with the brain knew was going to get right back to commit in heinous crimes. After only spent a couple years in prison from shooting the woman he wanted to rape in the head and neck, Robert Brasher's old fucking Bobby B, he's arrested in Cobb County, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metro area. All searches his vehicle, which had been stolen, just like the last vehicle he got pulled over in back in December 91. Not even three months earlier. Investigators found a radio scanner, police jacket, lock picking tools, and a Tennessee driver's license. Nothing to see here.

based on all that they arrested him for grand theft auto possession of a weapon and theft uh brasher's now made a plea deal that resulted in a five-year sense which he would serve in full society would have been better off though if he'd had just been thrown into a rattlesnake pit meanwhile we'll check with him later some detectives in austin were following some lead look promising or at least more promising than just a vague sense of satanic panic uh in late march a man left a message saying he had seen the killers put yogurt into the girl's vagina us. What?

Come again? I know who... I know who did it, he whispered. By need protection. We'll talk later. Yeah, totally. This motherfucker seems very stable,

incredible. Definitely not out of his mind or making a stupid joke. After trap trace located the call, Jones and a partner paid this guy visit. He quickly denied

having left the message until he played the tape and heard his voice and then he apologized profusely and said he was only joking. Then a young woman phoned in a report that her boyfriend

told her that he definitely did it. He didn't. Just another fucking weirdo talking shit. Another man said a friend of his had witnessed the girls being cut up into literal pieces. They hadn't. He didn't see that. Somebody else blamed the KKK. All right. And another person swore that he had heard at a party that the girls' heads were all cut off and dropped into a well.

So that's helpful. Someone else even went as far as confessing just like Buddha Smith had. And just like Smith had, he confessed during an interview conducted by none other than APD star detective Hector Palanko. everybody that dude interrogated confessed to something. He would have made a great Spanish inquisitor. Alex Bionis, who had previously been arrested for tying a 60-year-old woman to a chair, raping her and burning her to death,

said he had committed the yogurt shop murders. That dirtbag actually seems like he could have done it, but he said there were three girls, not four. When detectives pressed him, Brioz said that Polanco had pressured him into confessing. What? Palanco, pressuring people? No way. And then he had also confessed because he wanted his family to get the reward money.

He said he had a brother who was dying of AIDS and they could use the cash. Within 10 days of the young man's arrest, Polanco was taking off of the yogurt shop murders case.

Good. He was clearly a lot better at getting confessions out of people than he was at getting the truth out of people. A few months later, Polanco would be fired

on grounds of suspicion of perjury, misuse of authority, what? And witness tampering during a different arrest. The white knight, not so noble after all.

In retaliation, he would immediately sue the city, for discriminatory firing and would be reinstated, but his reputation was fucking toast. All of this, of course, made for more of a messy investigation. But out of all of the chaos, one new piece of information again did seem promising. Around this same time,

investigators on another task force were trying to figure out who had abducted Colleen Reed from an Austin car wash back on December 29th, 1991, just three weeks after the yogurt shop murders. At the time, the Yogurt Shop Murder's Task Force had wanted if Colleen's disappearance had anything to do with the murders of the four girls, but when no new info came,

they put it on the back burner. Now, however, there was new info. A man named Alva Hank Worley confessed that he had driven from Waco to Austin, planning to score some weed, meth, and cocaine. He was fucking ready to party. When he had stopped at the car wash where Colleen was rinsing her sedan.

And Worley had not been alone. He had been with TimeSuck alum and complete and total dirtbag, Kenneth McDuff. Remember the broomstick killer from episode 401? Holy shit that dude was full evil. This is the dude who had kidnapped and raped and killed three teens with an accomplice back in 1966, brutalizing one with the broken off jagged handle of a broomstick while she screamed that he was tearing something inside of her with it

before breaking her neck and choking her to death with the same broomstick. He had gotten the death penalty for that, but then a law changed. His death sentence converted to life with the possibility of parole. and then he was fucking paroled. And he got right back to raping and killing, of course. McDuff had grabbed Colleen Reed by the throat, carried her after getting out of prison, screaming to his car,

at which point he had forced the terrified woman to give warly oral sex while McDuff drove. Once he got back to Waco, McDuff raped Reed repeatedly and brutally, until at one point Reed laid her head on Worley's shoulder, begged him not to let McDuff hurt her anymore. After driving to an open field, McDuff announced that he was going to, quote,

user up. a phrase he had used before when he was ready to kill a woman. He ended up hitting her in the face, knocking her to the ground where her head hit rock just randomly and it killed her. Now Jones and the other investigators

thought that McDuff seemed perfect for the yogurt shop murders and you know what? Not a bad guess. Only problem was, they had no idea where he was. He was still out there in the wind, still killing when he should have already been executed long ago. In April of 1992, Eliza's 254-pound pig, Stoney,

did win the 1992 Grand Champion Prize of the Austin-Travs County Livestock Show. Amy's light heavyweight hog weighing in at 235 pounds, one-fourth in his class. Sarah Harborses' lamb got six, and Jennifer's got night. Stony, the biggest winner, actually in more ways than won, fetching $6,000 at auction, presumably bound for the butcher shop. But the livestock show decided to give him back to the Thomas family, who would then send Stoney to Crow's Nest Farm a pretty place

north of town where unwanted animals lived long, quiet lives being petted and pampered by school kids on field trips. Bojangles loves this. By then, the Yogurt Murders Database had rocketed up to 2,200 names, 800 of which were suspects. 20 more billboards went up, all bearing that same question, who killed these girls? Then 55-year-old police chief, Jim Everett shocked the APD and the city by announcing his retirement, kind of out of nowhere.

Asked if this had anything to do with how, you know, morale on the force was very low, he said no, that he'd been planning for a while to live a peaceful life in the hills of Western Arkansas, but that was not true. In fact, he'd applied for a chief's job in Aurora, Colorado, and District Attorney Ronnie Earle seemed to know that Everett was looking for an easier place to work when he had said that it's, quote, a hard time to be the head of a law enforcement agency. The problems will not diminish with the next chief. A career cop, George Fifer, was now named Acting Chief, and then Fifer would get what looked like a lucky break. In early May, Kenneth Broomstick fucked that guy Forever McDuff, was arrested in Kansas City, Missouri,

working as the city garbage collector under a name he had taken from a stolen security card. But he would not confess to the overshot murders and did, in fact, have a solid alibi for the night of December 6th. Damn it. Another promising lead had went up in smoke. And now the month stretched on with no new information. Over the summer, America's Most Wanted would run a special about the murders, and that would lead to a flurry of new tips. one of them gave a familiar name, a Mexican national named Alberto Cortez,

who was known to travel with two associates, Porfirio Villas, and Ricardo Hernandez. Only two and a half weeks before the yogurt shop murders, these men had raped a woman at gunpoint in a car parked outside a heavy metal bar called the Cavity Club and then driven her to San Antonio and dumped her off.

Could they be the perpetrators of the yogurt shop murders? All three men had fled to Mexico, but in October 9 of 1992, Saavedra and Cortez, be arrested and charged with the cavity club kidnapping and rape as well as drug trafficking and gun smuggling. Both were flown to Mexico City and investigators from Austin, students showed up to interview them. But Deputy Attorney General Jose Luis Romero, a piece, would not agree to extradition. Texas had the highest rate of executions in the U.S. while in Mexico,

the maximum penalty for a rape and murder was 50 years, even if there had been many, many victims, even dumber than our legal system down there when it comes to violent criminals. As Jones tried to work something out, something shocking happened. In front of reporters, Saavedra admitted to killing the girls. When asked why, he shook his head, and it was quickly let away. Later that day, a Mexican investigator announced that Saavedra

had, quote, forced the girls to submit, then he raped them, tied them up, and shot them. Back in Austin, the girls' families were shocked. After so much searching, so much pain, was this how it all ended? Well, no. In his first interview with American

investigators, Saavedra seemed not to know anything about what had actually happened at the ICBY. He said he didn't know how many girls he had killed maybe three, four, five. Afterwards he added

he had mutilated the girls, said he cut up their breasts, arms of vaginas, and tied them up with rope. But of course, none of that happened. They had not been found in that condition.

There was not rope used. Within three days, Saavedra then recanted. More shock value psycho bragging bullshit. So many fucked up people in the story. American investigators would ultimately go back and forth

with three men for over a year before finally coming to the conclusion that they did have nothing to do with the yogurt shop murders. The men would, however, be charged in the cavity club charges, or convicted of the cavity club charges. But that wasn't much comfort, especially for the families who would come to believe that these were the right guys, you know, the families of the Austin yogurt shop murder victims. And then there would even be more bad news for the yogurt shop murders, right? These poor families, when incoming chief Elizabeth Watson was sworn in in November of 1992, she announced that because of recent incidents suggesting possible misconduct amongst investigators,

like in Detective Hector Polanco's cases, all 90 pending homicide cases in Austin would be reviewed. And that would slow down the yogurt shop murders investigation even further. To the police working on the yogurt shop murders and other police, this made no sense. What misconduct was you talking about? Why single out homicide when cops regularly transferred from one unit to another? Still that December, homicide cops received an administrative questionnaire divided into five sections, training, inadequate resources, case preparation and review, management

slash personnel deficiencies, and malfeasance. Comprehensive answers to the questions posed in each was to be submitted by early January, which of course added a lot more paperwork to the huge piles of paperwork investigators were already working on. In a time that was already so, so demoralizing to be an Austin investigator, things were even worse now. And every promising phone call that came in, every hint that someone somewhere knew something about the yogurt shop murders, they just fizzled out. December 6, 1992 was the one-year anniversary of the murders. When the murders had happened, Austin PD had not seemed equipped to handle it. They had few resources, few full-time homicide investigators, few state-of-the-art testing facilities

for forensic evidence. But they didn't seem to lack leadership. But now, with Chief Watson alienating police officers left and right, it seemed like they didn't even have that. And so on May 10th, 1993, nearly a year and six months after the murders, senior sergeant Ron Smith announced the disbanding of the Yogurt Shop Murders Task Force beginning May 21st. Damn it.

John Jones would work exclusively on the case, but only between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday with a team of six patrolmen assigned to him, and that would only happen for the next 90 days. Oh, and most of them were rookies. Jones himself didn't hear about this change in policy until it was officially announced. at which point he fucking blew a gasket. He had given everything to this case. His marriage was in shambles now. He had been diagnosed with depression.

He was seeing a therapist. I think a lot of people forget just how fucking hard many law enforcement officers work towards bringing justice to victims how much they sacrifice. Despite this investigation, royally fucking up his life. He still was not planning on giving up,

still wanted to bring those girls' families closure to victim's justice, get another dirt bag, or several off the street. At home, he stayed up all night writing a strongly worded letter after listing these seven major suspects and some of the numerous tips that he had not had a chance to explore. He went on to write, quote, this case controls us. We don't control it. We can't control it because we never had the resources to control it. When we were getting 700 tips a month, we had to triage them, work on the ones that sounded good

because we only had five full-time investigators. That situation forced us to be in the predicament we're in now, still working tips that are over a year old. Is this case a priority or isn't it? he never got a response. Soon after, when Bob Ayers, Amy's dad told Jones that he looked bad. Jones took the hint and requested a 15-day administrative leave. Unfortunately, Chief Watson refused to approve the request, but authorized a sick leave instead that required medical approval before he could return to work.

It was clear to Jones that she wanted him to fully step aside, but he wouldn't. But then, he made a mistake. As the negotiations with Mexico over Saavedra and Cortez continued, the families of some of the murdered girls were getting impatient, particularly Skip Sarasi, Jennifer and Sarah's stepdad. He asked Jones if there was anything they could do to speed up the process, then went ahead and called the Mexican consul in San Antonio himself.

Skip thought that the conversation with the consul had gone well, so he got the families to write a letter that could be forwarded to the Attorney General's office in Mexico. Jones, fully aware that he was disobeying department rules, faxed that letter to San Antonio, and that was the last straw for his superiors. They accused him of grandstanding of becoming too close to the families, given them police info.

They even implied that Jones had asked the families to write the letter. And on October 29th, Jones received a record of substandard performance. Two days later, his psychologist wrote the APD to say that after carrying the sole responsibility for the investigation for six months, Jones was now exhibiting more than 90% of the symptoms of extreme PTSD, including recurring nightmares, insomnia, difficulties in concentrating, and hypervigilance. and that would get him a one-month medical leave. By mid-November, though, he would be back on the job

and still obsessed with the case. January of 1994 now, Bryce Foods, parent company if I can't believe its yogurt, agrees to pay the victim's families $12 million in a civil suit settlement. The families had accused the yogurt shop's owners of lax security that had contributed to the likelihood of a violent attack.

Meanwhile, Jones kept pursuing new leads. But then soon, he would be removed from the case entirely. On May 10th, 1994, Deputy Chief of Police Bruce Mills told Jones that he and Doug Dukes, who worked the APD's Child Abuse Division, would swap places. Mills was surprised that Jones seemed upset by this. Didn't he want to be off the case? No, Jones said. He wanted a reduction, not a transfer.

And he'd expected to be consulted as part of any changes to the case. Instead, now he just got a week to wrap shit up. Hail Sergeant John Jones and Hail Nimrod. A dude clearly could not have given any more than he did to solve in this case. case. Hope you got the help we needed for that PTSD. The families were heartbroken to see their biggest advocate being removed. In other ways, though, some of them felt like it was time to move on. With the settlement money, the heirs, 13-year-old Amy's parents, they moved out of Austin,

bought a ranch outside the little town of Blanco, some 50 miles away. Maria Thomas, 17-year-old Eliza's mom, bought a house way the hell away from Austin and Oregon. And Barbara and Skip Sarasi, the Harbetsing Girls' mom and stepdad, they bought into a new suburban development closer to Capitol Memorial Gardens where Sarah, Jennifer, and Amy were buried. Skip decided to use the money in another way, too. He hired an attorney to dig further into those previous suspects down in Mexico. Meanwhile, what was now being called Austin's cop wars between the force and Chief Watson, they continued. In October of 1995, Chief Watson enrolled Austin officers into a task force, code named Malisangre, Bad Blood, a federally funded initiative designed to attack organizations. drug trafficking and money laundering.

But the local chapter quickly imploded when undercover informants accused APD officers of protecting several key dealers, excuse me, in exchange for cocaine, sexual favors, and for some and all expenses paid trip to the Super Bowl. Okay. This led to a bunch of allegations, lawsuits, and whistleblower complaints, all of which hampered an already struggling police department. As the APD was being torn apart by infighting and corruption in February of 1997, Robert Eugene Brasher's, old Bobby B, our budget.

old pal was released for prison again. He would now move to Parigold, a little city of about 18,500 people at the time in northeast Arkansas, full of scenic hiking trails and charming little shops, but Brasher's would not be hiking or shopping. Instead, he had moved in with his five-year-old daughter, Deborah, who'd been born in 1991,

her mom, Dorothy, and Dorothy's two other daughters. And it was clear to everyone in the family, some was fucking wrong with Brasher's. At one point, he fought his step-kid's stepdad, his wife's ex-husband's husband and injured him with the drill. Then the family was horrified when they found videos of Brasher's,

evidently self-recorded, making small cuts across his neck and his arm to see how much pain he could withstand. And years later, his daughter, Deborah, would come to believe that her mom knew something about the really evil shit that Brasher's was getting up to when he was off on his own at this time,

which was seemingly confirmed when Dorothy told Deborah that she should call him by a different name and to try and keep him inside the house when he was home. But Brasher's would not be kept inside. Just a month after his latest released from prison, Brasher's raped a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee on March 11, 1997. Instead of sneaking in or grabbing the girl from the street, he did something very different and arguably much more psychologically damaging. He knocked on the door to the home that girl

and four other people were currently inside of, threatened them all with a gun, then tied everybody up and raped her for all to witness. He was very confident, almost like he had done that sort of thing before. Meanwhile, back in Austin, saved face over what was becoming an increasingly embarrassing situation for the APD. Elizabeth Watson announced something surprising. She was reopening the investigation into the ICBY murders. And a detective named Paul Johnson would be in charge of searching for new leads, Mr. Johnson. He was just a kind of squeaky clean person the department needed to show that it was serious about solving crimes. He has been five years in sex crimes, five in homicide. He had won awards for public service, you know, a

several different occasions. Most importantly, Paul liked to work alone, which was exactly what the department wanted. But he wouldn't turn up anything either. Paul's assignment continued until July 31st, 1997, by which time Elizabeth Watson had left Austin for a job with the Department of Justice in D.C., and Bruce Mills was appointed interim chief.

Mills decided he wanted to help Johnson out, so he gave him a new task force. And this time Johnson found something, or rather refound it. He came across the name, of four boys we met earlier. Maurice, Rob, Mike, and Forrest. A lot of changed in the year since the murders.

For one thing, the boys were not teens anymore. They were in their 20s now. Rob now 23 had moved back to West Virginia where he worked for minimum wage at a series of odd jobs and lived with his mom before marrying and moving to a cabin that his wife had inherited. Mike also 23 had hit the road, taking whatever jobs he could find,

including working at an adult video store and as a roofer before he settled down and married a computer technician named Janine Mary Stark. Forrest now 21 had moved to Lockhart to work at a car repair and body shop, where he shared a daughter with a girlfriend and planned to open his own shop someday. And 22-year-old Maurice,

he got married to his high school sweetheart, Kimberly, moved to Dallas to raise their five-year-old daughter, Marissa. None of them still hung out. In fact, they didn't even talk to each other anymore. But Johnson wanted to talk to them. In November of 97, Paul Johnson paid Maurice Pierce a visit. Maurice was friendly and approachable, summing up his early interactions with the police about the murders this way.

I know I made a statement when I was arrested that said that Forrest told me other details about the murders. I don't remember any of that now. I know I was very nervous, and I was trying to say things to help get me out of the police interview, and they were twisting my story up. Johnson then went on to talk to Forrest Wellborn, who denied any involvement in the crime,

a polygraph test would back him up. Both Rob and Mike, too, said that they had been doing normal teenage things on the night of the murder, going to murders, going to parties, sneaking into the movies, drinking beer, driving around,

and so it looked like another dead end. But Johnson still wondered about them, was still suspicious. A few months later, in February of 1998, Johnson again called Mike, Robin Maurice,

who again gave him nothing useful. And then in March, 20 months after its formation, the new yogurt shop murders task force was disbanded. Around and around we go. Paul Johnson was transferred out to work the streets, but like John Jones before him, he could not let go with this case.

He really thought there was something about those boys, something nobody else was seen. As Paul Johnson kept thinking about those four young men, Bobby Brasher's, honed in on his next victims. 38-year-old Sherry Sherer lived with her 12-year-old daughter, Megan, in Portageville, Missouri, little town about 150 miles southeast to St. Louis. On March 28th, Sherry and Megan stayed home to hang laundry while Sherry's husband, Tony, and the couple's son, Stephen, went work on a nearby farm. As they headed home, Tony called Sherry, offered to pick up a pizza for dinner. But when Tony and Stephen came to the gravel road leading to the house, they were delayed by a car accident. So Tony called Sherry again to let her know that they were still on their way. But this time, Sherry did not answer.

And then when Tony and Stephen got home, everything was weirdly quiet. Nobody was, you know, putting clothes in the clothes on the clothes, outside, inside, Sherry and Megan laid dead on the floor. Each gagged with a sock, both shot in the head. Investigators would later discover that Megan had also been sexually assaulted. What an insane sight to come home to. What a horrific bait to experience. While Tony and Stephen were still grieving, 42 miles away in Dyersburg, Tennessee, Brasher's already preparing for another attack. Like some of his other attacks, it would start with breaking into a house. Only this time didn't go as planned. This time, the young woman inside fought back successfully. Sources never publicly identified her, but according to investigators,

she managed to block him from getting in the house. before her fleeing, he shot her in the arm, but she survived. And now she gave police a solid description which they used to produce a composite sketch. Soon, ballistic evidence would show that the bullet fired in Dyersburg had been the same kind as the ones that have been used to kill Sherry and Megan. But still, nobody connected this to Brashers. And on April 12, 1998, he would try his sick shit again. This time his target was a woman in Paragold, Arkansas, somebody he'd actually worked for before. He approached her house, cut the phone lines.

but before he could get inside, the cops showed up and he was arrested. And then he would post bail. Cool. The guy who was convicted of shooting a woman in the head and neck amongst a litany of other crimes, given the chance to post an easy bail. Nice. After getting caught planning a home invasion.

Against a woman, anyone with half a fucking brain should know he had nefarious intentions towards. Excellent work again, justice system. Fantastic. Way to keep it safe. He would show up next on law enforcement's radar nearly six months later in August of 98. On August 16th of that year, Brashers was driving down U.S. Highway 412, but not driving well. He was swerving down the highway, and he veered off the road and crashed his van through a fence, hit a parked car, and then fled the scene.

A couple minutes later, a passing driver picked him up, but once that person had dropped Brasher's off, they began to think, the guy was fucking weird. And then they began to think, no, not just weird, fucked up. They got was creepy. It gave me the hebi-jeebies. Soon after they dropped him off, they called the police who then found Brassher. Brasher's, and officers pretty much immediately clocked that the 40-year-old man was not being truthful about his identity. So they decided to dig in deeper after they'd let him go. During their investigation, they discovered that Brasher's had recently burglarized his neighbor's home and stolen some cash and jewelry.

In the months that followed, Arkansas authorities would issue a warrant for his arrest, which would revoke the bond he had been released on back in April. Failing to appear in court on November 12th, Brasters then racked up another arrest warrant, and Brasters had good reason not to want to go to court. Just a few days before the second arrest warrant, on November 7, 1998, around 7.40 a.m., the Lexington Fire Department in Lexington, Kentucky, was dispatched to the Nixon Hearing Aid Center. When Cruz arrived at the scene, they saw a column of smoke rising from the storefront,

but the smoke was worse than it looked, and the flames quickly went out. That allowed them to make another discovery, the body of a 43-year-old woman in the back room. The investigators would later identify her as Linda Rutledge, she had died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head. Huh, woman shot in the head, and then a fire started to try and burn away evidence. Feels familiar.

Back to Austin now and backing up a little to September of 1998, almost seven years since the yogurt shop murders. That month, Investigator Paul Johnson sent Maurice Pierce's 22 in ammunition to ballistics to be checked again. Still has not ridden him off. Still has not ridden off his friends. But the result was the same. This was not the gun used at ICBY. but still Johnson not yet convinced that he didn't have something to do with it all

these boys didn't these guys now late that fall Johnson once again drove to Louisville where Maurice agreed to undergo hypnosis this time against his lawyer's advice anyone else feel like Maurice as being too helpful at this point he was well within his rights

to tell investigators that enough's enough go fuck yourselves and he should have done that but he didn't luckily even the hypnosis yielded nothing new a few days later Later, Forrest provided a written statement echoing Pierce's account.

The young man had nothing to do with the murders based on all the evidence and years of looking at them. And yet, Johnson still thought, no, no, no, they're my guys. They did it. Undeterred, he asked DPS for even more gun in blood tests. His tenacity must have been impressive because after nine months, Chief Stan Neenow offered Paul Johnson yet another opportunity to organize another yogurt shop murders task force. The fucking third one. And it would continue to focus on Paul Johnson's main suspect, Marie. Pierce.

He specifically instructed his new force to focus in on anything they might have missed in Marisa's story the first time. In their very first meeting, Paul and another investigator showed a 205 slide PowerPoint presentation titled, The Investigative Plan to pursue Maurice Pierce. Johnson had decided who his primary suspect was for sure. Now he just needed to find the evidence to convict him. Problem was, there wasn't any. The detective needed something else, somebody to talk about what those teenagers really got. got up to that fateful night, like maybe a girlfriend.

They would hone in on 24-year-old Kelly Hanna, who had dated Robbie for three weeks in November and early December of 91. Now in her third trimester of her third pregnancy, Kelly first told the detectives that she really didn't remember much about Robbie. She'd only dated him for three weeks, nearly a decade ago. But the detectives asked her to come in anyway, and she agreed. This time they asked her about the day after the murders. When Rob came by her father's trailer, she said he had told her that he had spent the day

before driving around. Did that seem odd to her, they asked. Kelly said that by then she had heard what had happened at the yogurt shop and asked Rob if he had seen fire trucks or anything. And when he said no, yeah, that did seem odd to her. Kelly hurried to say that, you know, it only seemed odd though because they all knew the area and drove past the ICBY all the time. But she'd already used the word odd and the cops really hung on to that.

They had their entry point and now they kept pushing. She tried to tell them that she didn't see Rob on the night of December. number six, the cops pivoted easily, making it sound like he was supposed to be with her, like they had made plans and he hadn't showed up. They wanted to know, did she think that Rob Springsteen was a liar? Kelly could only say that she didn't know. And when she hesitated, the cops told her that she had been identified as part of the group that took the joyride to San Antonio, even though she wasn't in that group and nobody

had actually identified her as being with him. So they lied to her. And that scared her. Based on this false information, Kelly panicked. she worried that somehow she would end up being charged with something, possibly taken away from her two children, not to mention the baby she's about to get birth to. So now she starts to cry,

and the cops take that as another sign of guilt. With that interview done, the investigators decided it was time to talk to another person, somewhat even closer to the case, Mike Scott. And they would interrogate him on Thursday, September 9th, 1998, beginning at 9 in the morning, and Mike was very upfront, and he said, I'll be honest with you guys,

I have a piss poor memory. But the detectives had an answer for that. They were here to help him remember. And Mike believed them. He struggled to keep up as the investigation zigzag between different days and different groups of people, but every time he stepped back, claiming not to remember, the investigators were firm. No, he was doing great. Uh, he was remembering, very specific stuff. He just needed to keep going. And he did. As the pressure to remember mounted, one of the investigators noted, Mike, you seem real wound up, like there's something you're not telling us. You're acting real nervous. Mike responded that he was

scared, which the investigators immediately latched on to. Why was he scared? Was he hiding something? It's like those dudes forgot that a lot of people get nervous when being investigated by the cops, innocent or guilty. I would have been nervous if I was investigated as a suspect's 1991 yogurt shop murders, even though I was only 14 when they happened, split my time between Idaho and Nevada and had literally never been to Austin before my life.

I would have been worried that some investigative mistake or some crooked cops were going to put me in prison for shit I didn't do. by noon, the tenor of the conversation with Mike's got a change. Now the detectives told him that they had talked to everyone. Maurice, Forrest, and Rob, and they knew what had happened. I mean, they didn't, but that's what they said. Now Mike needed to do the right thing, they said, tell the truth. But Mike was still firm.

He's like, I didn't fucking do anything. I don't know anything. So now the investigators changed tactics. They told him that they didn't think he killed any of the girls, of course, but that he knew who did. and if he didn't agree to work with them, he would become the scapegoat for the other suspects. And now Mike was really starting to get nervous. He still wouldn't admit to killing them

or even knowing who killed them, but his mind had begun to turn on itself, doubting his own recollections, as he would put at the interrogation, I'm scared I have information and don't know I have information. This poor bastard, right? The detectives, you know, they then pushed him a little further.

You remember that night, a detective said. You remember the date. You understand that when you first sat down here, you volunteered the day. We didn't bring it up. You brought it up. And now Mike cracked. He said he had seen fire trucks and that he had lied about seeing the red jeep,

a car wanted the boys that been driving that night in the North Cross parking lot. Now he said he hadn't seen it. And this gives detectives an opening. As they continued to question him, wondering why he had lied. Mike started to rock back and forth in his chair, he was holding his head and his hands, as if trying to dislodge the memories the detectives insisted he had inside of him. A little more than four hours into the question.

to detective pointed to the picture of the dead girls again, asked Mike to look at them again. That's it for them, he said, referring to their deaths. And for what? For 12 or 14 bucks, Mike said. Was it worth it? Not for four lives. No, it wasn't worth it.

Whose idea was it to go there? They asked, huh? Here we go again, getting to that non-responsive mode of yours. They said, how long do you think you can keep this up? Wait a minute, he says. You need some time to think real hard, buddy, they say, because the next phase, and then Mike put his head down,

defeated, and just said, yeah, and then they said, it's coming real quick, real quick, and your opportunities are slowly diminishing. But you realize that, don't you? And they asked him again, whose idea was it? And finally, at 1.30 p.m.,

Mike said, Marisa's. Shit. He then proceeded to tell them that they had cased the yogurt shop, noticing that the back door had propped open, had been propped open.

He insisted that he hadn't gone in himself, but he knew that Robbie did and had a gun. But even the way Mike spoke, made it clear that he wasn't remembering so much as visualizing what the detectives were just saying to him. I just told him. He literally said, I keep seeing these girls get shot. I don't know if this is real or not. Or if this is, then he stops. At that point, the detective interrupted him. Michael, it's real. Every time he tried to talk about the shooting, how the girls have been killed, what had been done to them beforehand, he shook his head and said some version of, I can't even remember going inside the place, guys.

I don't remember walking through the doors. Despite that, the task force simply supplied him with the detail. details so intent on creating false memories with that tried and true mixture of asking him leading questions, feeding him crime scene details, applying lots of social pressure and fear of punishment. When Mike said he had tied them up with extension cords, they told him try again. They said, maybe he had used their own clothes. And then he literally repeated, used their own clothes to tie them up. They didn't make me shoot them, did they?

They did this with every detail, supplying him the answer to the question. including about where the girls have been shot. At first, Mike said they were shot behind the counter. They were like, nope, try again. He later stated for the record that the girls were taken to the back of the shop, where they were sexually assaulted, then shot, just like the investigators had told him they were. After his assertion that he shot a girl in the face,

the detective shook their heads. Nope. He then said, forehead, and they were like, nope. And then he said back at the head, and they were like, bingo. By 5.30 p.m., far, far too late. Mike finally said he wanted to speak, you know, have a lawyer with him. him. The detectives immediately took a break. And when they came back, they were like, do you, do you sure? Uh, you sure you want that lawyer? We just need to clear up a couple things. You know, uh, don't you want to work with the guys who have your best interest at heart? The guys that are trying to keep you out of prison? He doesn't get a lawyer now. As the evening wears on, other members of the task force join in, listening as Mike confesses that Rob had called him a pussy, had goaded him into raping one of the girls at night. Mike wavered between several different versions of how the fire started, one where Maurice pulled out a Zippo, another. And he said, headed him and where Maurice instructed him to grab a can of lighter fluid from the car,

another one in which Mike was in the car, not doing shit. Mike was finally released at 10, 22 p.m. After over 12 hours of being interrogated, never did get that fucking lawyer. The next day, after a good night's rest, after, you know, no longer being intimidated and badgered and pressured, Mike unsurprisingly saw things very differently. He went down to the station.

He told investigators he had only been telling them what he thought they wanted to hear. In response, one of the detectives put a full. fucking gun to the back of his head. Not kidding. Put a gun to his head. Oh my god, how is that guy not fucking fired immediately? Rather than make him talk, though, the gun made him shut down. And the next guy, to come in, a Texas ranger named Alibreo, found a completely exhausted, weeping Mike sitting at a cramped table. Al was there, he told Mike to help get the girl screams out of his head. But instead of doing that, whatever that would even supposedly entail, Al painted a much more disturbing picture. He described, quote, little girls tied up on the floor.

They were squirming. Mike was raping them. Was it from the front of the back? And then they were lying on top one another as he squirted lighter fluid on their little bodies. And with that, Mike really broke down. He's like having a fucking psychotic break now. He would no longer resist the detective's caution. On Tuesday, September 14th, after countless hours of interrogation,

he agreed to give a written confession admitting his participation in the murders alongside Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest well-born. Holy shit. Now was time to round up the others. After Mike gave a statement, detectives set out to West Virginia to find Robert Springsteen. When they found him on the morning of September 16th, he had worked back-to-back shifts, had spent his remaining time fixing up his cabin, and had only slept about six hours over the past three nights. Unsurprisingly, his interrogation would go as similarly to Mike's.

Detectives asked him if he was surprised to know that the North Cross Mall wasn't even playing the Rocky Horror Picture Show on the night of the murders, which was his alibi. But that wasn't true. they had been playing that movie. But the way it was phrased, would you be surprised, gave the detectives a loophole to just fucking blatantly lie? Well, Rob said he would be very surprised

to learn that because he remembered being at the fucking movie. The investigators asked, if you weren't at the movie, where were you? What had you been doing? What'd you been doing things with? Rob told him he'd been writing songs

with his uncle Bruce, if you must know. Like this next one, maybe you've heard of it, motherfuckers. Is that enough for you? I was right and fucking born in the USA with my fucking uncle Bruce Springsteak. Now he wasn't doing that. Bruce is not his uncle.

That song came out seven years before the murders. After several more hours of interrogation, Rob finally broke saying that it was possible that he had murdered the four girls. My God. Soon he was given details about the rapes, details he had been fed for hours by investigators, describing what happened as a total cluster fuck. He would lay his head on his arm to recreate

the position of Amy Ayers' body, which prosecutors would later describe as a perfect replica, even though it wasn't. At 7 o'clock, the detectives read him as Miranda rights, and then too late, Rob snapped out of it, said he needed to talk to his wife and a lawyer. But detectives already had what they wanted. Didn't matter that many of the details did not match what Scott had told him at all. They now had two confessions to the yogurt shop murders. Two mismatch confessions, but still. Robert even said that he had put his dick in her pussy, quote, referring to 13-year-old Amy Ayers. And that will not look good for him at trial.

Now the task force only needed one more thing for Maurice peers to confess. A few days after Rob's interrogation, Paul Johnson himself drove to Irving to interview Maurice. Maurice was ready this time. He told the men to meet him in his lawyer's office. They tried to interrogate for us. He too kept his mouth shut. And detectives came back empty-handed. None of the witnesses who had met at the ICBY that night.

Darrell Croft, that guy who had owned a security company or Lucela Jones, the woman who had come to the shop to get her husband and yogurt. could positively identify these boys. Still, detectives not given up. On Friday, October 1st, 1998, the statement's page one headline made it official, arrest likely in yogurt shop killings. Police have suspects in 1991 deaths of 14s. On October 5th, Paul Johnson wrote up separate affidavits,

which were then taken to the 167th District Court judge, Mike Lynch, who issued the arrest warrants for Robert Burns, Springsteen, the fourth, Michael James Scott, Maurice Earl, Pierce and Forest Brook Wellborn. The very next day, all four men would be arrested in a coordinated sweep. Scott was taken to the Travis County Jail, Springsteen to the South Central

Regional Detention Center just outside of Charleston, well-born and Pierce, to the Gardner-Bet's juvenile detention center. For the APD and the city as a whole, it looked like a triumph. As Mayor Kirk Watson would put it, on December 6, 1991, we as a city lost our innocence.

Today, we regain our confidence. all of this confidence was based only on Springsteen and Scott's error-riddled confessions. There was very little forensic evidence, no recovered weapon. The main piece of evidence was their confessions, and since Wellborn and Pierce didn't also confess, there wasn't much that could be done about them. A Travis County grand jury declined to indict well-born.

Prosecutors dropped charges against Pierce due to insufficient evidence, but only after he had sat in jail for three fucking years. What a nightmare. Despite no convictions for two of the four, it was still full steam ahead on Scott and Springsteen. Robert Springsteen would be tried first in 2001. The state's case relied mostly on Springsteen's confession. Springsteen would take the witness stand himself

and claimed the detectives had psychologically broken him down during long interrogations until he had simply repeated whatever he thought they wanted to hear. Prosecutors countered that his confession contained details only a participant would know, but the jury would not hear that most of those details had been fed to him by detectives. Also in both Springsteen and Scott's upcoming trial,

prosecutors used each man's confession against the other, even though neither defendant testified against the other in court. That meant the defense could not cross-examine the accuser, which is typically guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. In the end, the jury, who had watched the family show up day after day, who had heard lengthy descriptions of what bright, beautiful young women their daughters had been before a senseless act took their lives, believed the state's story.

Just a reminder, there is no IQ test. For jurors, you do not have to have any common sense or any critical thinking skills to be a juror. And after a roughly three-week trial, jurors deliberated for 13 hours before convicting Robert Springsteen on capital murder and sentencing him to death. Michael Scott would be tried separately the following year. Like Springsteen's case, the prosecution leaned heavily on Scott's confession and on portions of Springsteen statements. And the result would be the same. In May of 2002, Scott would also be convicted, sentenced to life in prison this time. moving ahead to 2005 now after the U.S. Supreme Court decision

in Roper v. Simmons barred executions for crimes committed under the age of 18 Springsteen's death sentence was automatically converted to life imprisonment because he had been 17 at the time of the murders. Both men still looking at life in prison though, or so it appeared. The next year, however, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Robert Springsteen's conviction, citing that the Sixth Amendment was violated. And the year after that in 2007, Michael Scott's conviction would be similarly overturned. In response, on August 20th, 2008, the defense lawyers for Scott and Springsteen requested DNA testing of alternative suspects.

Why? Because district attorney Rosemary Lemberg had requested that they be tried again. They still wanted to put these innocent men in jail after they had lost years of their lives. Luckily, however, Judge Mike Lynch ruled the defendants would be allowed out on bond pending their upcoming trials. As a result, both men would be released. released in 2009 after nearly a fucking decade in prison. As the prosecutors prepared for the new trials, they ordered new DNA tests, specifically vaginal swabs, and now they had access to a new kind of technology, advanced YSTR testing. And what's that?

Well, it's an improvement on what's called STR testing, which does not always turn up accurate results. During STR testing, male DNA may be masked or in competition with excess amounts of female DNA. Basically, since you are testing all the DNA present and because, because of the DNA testing, and because both men and women have X chromosomes, with men having XY and women having XX, that DNA test can result in a confusing jumble where nobody knows which X chromosomes belong to who.

But YSTR testing specifically targets STR regions on the male Y chromosome that is passed down through paternal lineage, i.e. father to son, by specifically targeting the Y chromosome, a YSTR test leaves out female DNA, leaving the unknown male's profile relatively pristine. earlier testing had revealed the presence of one unknown male's DNA at the scene,

but there were not any hits. And so on October 28, 2009, all charges against Scott and Springsteen are now dismissed. But some still thought they were guilty. Then on December 23rd, 2010, Austin police officer Frank Wilson and his rookie partner Bradley Smith conducted a routine traffic stop. The man in the car was Maurice Pierce, who immediately got out of the car and fled. Unsurprisingly, dude, known. longer felt too safe around the police. After a brief pursuit on foot, Pierce struggled with Wilson

before removing a knife from his belt and stabbing Officer Wilson the neck. Officer Wilson pulled out his gun in response and shot and killed Pierce. Jumping ahead a dozen years now. On February 5th, 2022, it was announced that advanced DNA technology was bringing investigators closer than ever to actually solving the Austin murders. In fact, they had honed in on their suspect back in 2018, but it would take three more years before the public knew who that was. was. Finally, less than a year ago, on September 26, 2025, APD made their announcement. Robert Eugene Brasher's old Bobby B. He had killed Jennifer, Eliza, Sarah, and Amy. But you knew that. DNA testing revealed that his YSTR profile matched specifically to a sample taken from under

13-year-old Amy's fingernails. That kid had fought. She had struggled, and decades later, because of that, she had helped solve her own murder. In addition, testing of the bullet casing that was found in the, that was found at the crime scene, was consistent with patterns produced by a gun that Brasher's owned. So where was Brasher's? Well, he was fucking dead. He killed himself back in 1999. On January 13th of that year after police officer had noticed another stolen vehicle he had taken,

parked in a lot of a Super 8 hotel in Kent, Missouri. They'd broken down his hotel room door, found him hiding under the bed with loaded gun. When they tried to arrest him, he threatened to kill himself. and officers were forced to retreat. Within a few minutes, backup arrived. In the meantime, Brasher's had barricaded himself, his wife, his daughter, and two stepdaughters in the hotel room. During negotiations, he would then release his family,

but then shoot himself in the head. He would remain alive for six more days before dying in the hospital on January 19th. Nearly two decades later, investigators would exhume his body in 2018, and then the real work of connecting him to many, many crimes began. Despite this discovery, Mike Scott and Robert Springsteen still had not been formally declared innocent of the overt shop murders.

Why not? Well, money, it seems. If they were, they would be owed compensation for every year they'd spent in prison, potentially up to 80,000 per year. Their lawyers partnering with the Innocence Project, who we have donated to in the past, kept working towards that. Shame on Texas's legal system for not owning up to their fucked up mistake and not just paying them immediately. It is exactly that kind of shit that erode citizens' faith in government. Just a few months ago, in February, there was some justice. Travis County Judge Dana Blazy stated that all four men, Pierce, Springsteen, Scott, and Wellburn were innocent, clearing their records and formally exonerating them. In his response, Rob Springsteen said in a written statement read by his attorney, Amber Farrely, that his wrongful arrest turned his life into a cycle of chaos and uncertainty. I have been persecuted every day.

I have lived every single day being seen as a monster for something I did not do. Michael Scott would express a similar sentiment in the hearing saying, I enjoy having breakfast in bed. I like waking up to the smell of bacon. Sue me. And since I don't have a butler, I have to do it myself. So most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill.

Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious. It's good for me. It's a perfect way to start the day. Today, I got up, I stepped onto the grill and it clamped down on my foot.

That's it. I don't see what's so hard to believe about that. That of course is the wrong, Michael Scott. That is Michael Scott from the office. No, Michael Scott from this case would say for decades, I've carried the burden of wrongful conviction. Every day, I've carried the weight of a crime that I did not commit. No court ruling can return the years and the love that were taken from me, but it can't acknowledge the truth.

I am not guilty. thankfully Austin law enforcement was ready to admit their mistake now. Austin district attorney Trudy Strausberger said Travis County's wrongful prosecutions left defendants screaming into the wind for decades and that it was our turn to accept responsibility. And then just last month, May 13, 2026, the city of Austin agreed to pay $35 million in compensation to the four falsely accused men, three surviving, one deceased, of course. Austin city manager T.C. Broadnax issued a public statement calling the settlement, the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin's history, and expressed, quote,

hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event. The settlement still needed to be approved by the Austin City Council, though. Fortunately, two weeks later, on May 28th, it was. $8.75 billion will be paid out to each of the three still living men, and another $8.75 million will be paid out to the estate and family of Maurice Pierce, who of course died in 2010, does not make up for what happened, but nice to finally see some real justice in this episode. Almost $9 million does not give you a decade of your freedom back, but it does make the rest of your life a lot easier to enjoy.

Let's now head to the recap. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. The Austin Yogershop Murse, such a horrific story in so many ways. Even though the case was not high profile, like some of the other famous cases of the 90s, it is easy to see how it became such an emblem of modern true crime. Many ways, the yogurt shop murders reflect some of our deepest societal fears

that our most vulnerable young people can be taken from us in an instant without any rhyme or reason, even from a safe place, that in a place where they should be safe, their after-school job in a strip mall in a slow, easy-going city, somebody could barge in, overwhelm them, proceed to hurt and kill them, all without anybody getting a chance to interrupt the brutality or save them. And perhaps our deepest fear that that, the person can then simply slip back into the shadows, melting back into the rest of society as the years march on.

The problem with murders becoming emblems, though, is that the pressure this puts on cities to solve them, to be the heroes who take away that fear. Obviously, there should be certain pressures on police departments to solve murders. That's the nature of the job after all. But when the feeling comes to be that the city cannot move on, that the police need to solve the murder, to prove themselves, or dispel political tension within the city government,

well, people start to look at suspects that, seemed like they could have done it rather than ones the evidence actually points to. Four teenage boys would find this out firsthand. The initial investigation of Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Wellborn didn't go anywhere when the boys' stories were, you know, or while they were, a little suspicious. While none of them could definitively point to where they had been that night on December 6th, it was pretty obvious to the police that this was the result of the boys' unorthodox lifestyles.

How they really went to school? How they smoked a ton of weed? drank a lot, did a bunch of psychedelics, how they didn't need to check in with their parents, that essentially had free run of the city. And so the boys were dismissed to suspects, and they should have been. But nearly 10 years later, the boys, now young men would pop up on the police's radar again. While Paul Johnson perhaps started out with the best of intentions, his investigation quickly zeroed in the four teenage boys who had shift the alibis for the night of December 6th in an unethical way. He kept ignoring evidence. He focused on them what he should not have. Though Forrest and Maurice

would adamantly reject being involved, the investigator's brutal interrogation techniques would lead to both Mike and Robert confessing that they had committed the yogurt shop murders, even though their confessions did not match one another. Over hours of intense interrogations, including one that including, you know, pointing a fucking gun at Mike's head,

how did that detective? Again, not go to prison himself for that shit. The men came to believe, or at least say that they had been the ones to commit those brutal acts. The fact that they quickly recanted that in the end, and didn't mean anything. The investigators just wanted the case solved, even if that meant pinning it on the wrong people,

that's so fucked up. Both men would spend nearly a decade in prison before being released in 2009, pending new trials. But when the DA's office sent samples of DNA away for testing, they found something surprising a new suspect, Robert Eugene Brasher's. Brasher's life, of course, defined by violence. By the time he died of suicide at age 40,

he had victimized at least 19 people in various ways, raping them and or shooting them. Many of the tactics he had used were similar to the ones employed at the yogurt shop murders, including burst into a house with a weapon, which he used to corral the house's inhabitants while he sexually assaulted a young girl in front of them. In another incident, he set a fire in a commercial building in Arkansas where he had murdered a woman, very reminiscent of the yogurt shop murders, and yet Brasher's was never on the police's radar.

Was it possible he was a young man in a green army jacket that a patron of the yogurt shop saw that night, fidgeting, walking into the back to use the employee restroom? Maybe. or did Brasher's come by later at 1103, faking that he was going to buy a yogurt, that no sale that Eliza rang up, before unleashing his destruction on four young lives.

We'll never know exactly what happened that night or how Brasher's managed to subdue all four girls. Maybe they thought that by obeying him, he'd be more likely to let them live. Maybe he promised them that exact thing. In the absence of concrete information, we can only speculate. And speculation is fine,

as long as it does not veer into scapegoating and blame. if you are ever questioned by the police for a serious crime, especially one you did not commit, lawyer up immediately. That does not make you look guilty despite what you may hear and makes you look smart. Even the best cops can get shit wrong.

None of us are all knowing. And staying out of prison by not getting charged for a crime you did not commit is easier than getting back out of prison after being found guilty for a crime you did not commit. Finally, there are a lot better ways to try and win millions of dollars than being falsie in prison for years. Like buying a lottery ticket. Time now for the takeaways.

Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, on the night of December 6, 1991, four young women were murdered at an Austin, Texas strip malls. I can't believe it's yogurt location. They were 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison,

and 15-year-old Sarah Harbenson. The victims were bound and gag, shot in the head with Amy shot twice, and found practically melted together. Number two, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest, Welburn, and Maurice Pierce were initially suspected of the murders when Maurice was found with a 22-caliber pistol at nearby North Cross Mall around a week after the murders. Though Maurice initially implicated Forrest, the teenager would not confess to being involved, and authorities soon moved on to other tips. Later, however, as the APD battled political infighting and accusations of corruption, the yogurt shop murders task force refocused on the young men obtaining confessions from Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen. Both men would be in jail until 2008, and it would take all the way until February of 2026 for them to be officially exonerated, and all the way until a few weeks ago to get paid for being falsely imprisoned.

Number three, the Austin Yogurt Shop murders were particularly challenging to solve, and many police, including Sergeant John Jones, worked tirelessly to solve them, including pouring over hundreds of leads, tips, and other crimes looking at other crimes for connections. While focusing on what the police did wrong, it's easy to write them off as incompetent, and the inventive. investigators who pressured Mike and Rob were definitely wrong to do so, but that does not take away from the many people, both experienced cops and rookies who spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours trying to track down anything they could about who might have truly committed the crimes. Much of police work is skill, but it's also luck and good timing, like many other professions, and police have to work within tremendously complicated systems, including ones where cops who pressure people like Hector Polanco are rewarded for their good clearance rates. In that environment, it is so hard to be a good investment. It is so hard to be a good investigator and yet many still are. Number four, a major breakthrough came decades after the crime when advances in DNA analysis and genetic genealogy identified serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brasher's as the likely perpetrator. Authorities announced the identification in 2025, nearly 35 years after the murders.

Unfortunately, Brasher's had died by suicide decades earlier in 1999, so there was no justice for the families of the victims on that front. Brasher's has, posthumously, been strongly linked to the deaths of at least eight women now. Number five, new info, or I guess a little more new info, more and more we are hearing about people whose DNAs used to solve crimes long after they have happened, like the Golden State Killer, and now Robert Eugene Brasher's. Much of this is thanks to direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits, like the ones from 23 and me and Ancestry.com, though major direct-to-consumer testing companies strictly refuse to voluntarily share customer data with police and generally only handover user

information of forced to do so by a legally binding court order. or search warrant. Other databases like GED match or family tree DNA where users explicitly allow law enforcement to look for matches are often searched before resorting to direct-to-consumer options and even after a DNA match is found, it's not the end of the story. Professional genealogists have to evaluate these matches, compare them against public records, and map a family tree to narrow down the suspect to one individual. These companies are not the only ones at the forefront of this genetic research, though. One of the largest collections of ancestry information belongs to, drum roll please,

the Church of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormons. And they have a very special place for this info. Their Granite Mountain Records Vault is a massive underground archive. It sits hundreds of feet inside solid granite and Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, about 20 miles southeast to downtown Salt Lake City. It was built back in 1965,

equipped with blast-resistant doors to preserve records against fire, natural disasters, nuclear attack, Apocalypse, the vault contains more than 3.5 billion genealogical images, along with other important church records and archive materials. Through cooperation with government archives, churches, and libraries, the LDS Church has created the largest collection of family records in the entire world with information on more than 3 billion deceased people, information that could help solve a lot of cold cases. So why do they have all this information? Well, according to Mormon

doctrine, you spend eternity with your family members after you die, and a lot of Mormons want, unsurprisingly, to know who those family members are, both the ones alive and the ones you'll be meeting on the other side. I wonder how distant the relatives can be to qualify for sharing heaven with them. I mean, an estimated 16 million men, just men alone, roughly 0.5% of the world's male population, or 1 in 200 men, are believed to carry the distinct wide-chromosone lineage traced back directly to Genghis Khan. So who's gangas Khan hanging out with in the afterlife. All of his descendants? At least 32 million people. If he has as many female descendants as male ones, that's a lot of fucking people to hang

with. Attorney will be a never-ending string of social obligations, which sounds more like hell to me than heaven. And if he trace shit back even further, aren't we pretty much all related? I mean, if you follow Christian literalist interpretation all the way back, you end up with Adam and Eve. Wouldn't they then be in the same heaven party with fucking everybody, billions and billions of people? Sounds terrible. Sorry. Probably shouldn't try to apply basic logic to a theological construct. They don't tend to weather that very well. Anyway, you can also do what's called temple work for the dead,

which seems like praying for your dead ancestors, though the church emphasizes that your ancestors can accept or reject this work if they want to. I think that might be another term for like baptism of the dead, or at least there's that also. That's a proxy practice where living Mormons are baptized by immersion on behalf of deceased ancestors. This is rooted in the belief that, baptism is essential for salvation, and it provides an interesting way for billions who have died without the opportunity to receive the LDS gospel to accept or reject it in the afterlife again. So that's interesting. Seems a little complicated, messy for an omnipotic god, but whatever.

Also, maybe this all isn't even the full story. Many super credible, obviously, hatched by geniuses, conspiracy theories, claim the vault contains gold, secret artifacts, suppressed historical documents, and other hidden treasures. though none of that has ever been proven. But they don't let non-Mormons inside the ancient or the fucking hidden archives. So who knows what's in there? Time suck. Top five takeaways. The 1991 Austin Yogurt Shop murders have been sucked.

I'm sorry if I was a little all over the place in moments with this one. Got back from Germany visiting my son Kyler with Lindsay and Monroe. He's studying abroad over there. And holy shit, jet lags been little rough. That 10 hour difference fucked me up.

Just the weirdest waves of just mental fog. Thank you to the bad magic productions team for helping making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode and designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com and thank you to Sophie Evans for her initial research.

Also, thanks to the all-seeing eyes, continuing to moderate the cult of the curious private Facebook page. The Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and everybody over on the time Sucks subreddit and bad magic subreddit. And now let's head over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Starting off with Savvy Sack Matthew Martin,

who sent in a message to Bojangles at Timesug Podcast.com with the subject line of Hanlon's razor slash suggestions. Hey, Dan, this is Matt, long-time listener, first time caller. I was just writing about the Nova Scotia massacre and how at the end it was suggested that since the Mounties fucked up so badly, there might have been some nefarious cover-up going on about motorcycle gang smuggling or whatever. Excuse me. While this was initially very intriguing,

I had to catch myself because this is about as perfect an instance of Hanlon's razor as you can find. Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity, it says. So while it seems like since the cops did such a colossal blunder here, there just had to be a greater conspiracy afoot, but really it's just that they were actually that bad. I think this is true of a lot of.

of conspiracy theories. The incompetence is so galling that there has to be a secret reason. The edits of the internet would be wise to realize that no one knows what's going on and those in the upper echelons are also utterly clueless. Thanks for reading. Wouldn't change a thing.

Best Matt. Matt, yes. I don't think that I've ever heard of Hanlon's razor before, but I have talked about that exact concept numerous times with friends. Yeah, a lot of people are just not great at their jobs. All of us have bad days at our jobs and make mistakes.

Sometimes a lot of people have the same bad day, and collectively a big fuck-up occurs. This makes total sense for most conspiracies. I also apply that logic to people driving a bunch, right? When somebody has been riding my ass in years past, I generally interpreted that as aggression, right? Them being an asshole. That they intentionally just wanted to get too close to my bumper

to give me to move over to fuck with me. Or that they just, you know, always drove like an asshole just because they always were an asshole. But that is not necessarily true. Some people just think that's the way you're supposed to drive. I had to teach both of my kids to stop fucking doing that. Both of them, when they first started driving, would just consistently be just right up on someone's ass

and then be totally shocked when they kept getting flipped off and yelled at. They were just completely clueless. They did not realize, for whatever reason, that that is often interpreted as being aggressive and rude. In short, they were just being stupid kids. And those Nova Scotia law enforcement officers could have just collected. just been being stupid in the days that followed that tragic shooting.

And some of them, perhaps many of them, actually were a little bit stupid all the time. Hanlon's razor never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I will try and remember that. And thanks for two great topic suggestions as well. Next up, Big Dick Sucker, Oscar Nagatia, who temporarily redirected enough blood to his brain to send in a message with the subject line of, I got penis enlargement service. Rurgery wrote, Ha ha, J.K.

Hello, madman Dan, ruler of the suck dungeon, serve it to Bo Jangles and father of the Kyler and the Monroe. Hope I got their names right, you did. I'm from Kenya, and I'm listening to TimeSuck almost every day since mid-last year when I discovered it. Well, thank you. This has been amazing. Naturally, I have a decade-plus worth of content I want to write you about,

but I have enough discipline to write only about three topics today. Well, not really topics. First of all, I have sat in bars thinking, consulted scientists and conducted experiments for months just to understand why the queen of the suck Lindsay does not submit to you with zero luck. That wasn't until I heard you say that you love pineapple on your pizza. And then I understood everything. Scientists have written papers. Plays have been played. Songs have been saying. And they explain that this is a characteristic of a pussy, not genitalia. Baking pineapples on bread, cheese and meats combined have a very specific chemical

reaction and only affects men causing them to lose control over their wives and daughters. Change your pizza habit. Ha-ha, JK. Pineapple on pizza is not bad, just the worst kind of pizza. Second, part of my writing is a little bit weird. Porn. When I was in primary school, 14 years old, I went to a boarding school where we had no access to electronics or any kind of porn.

The naughtiest thing I could find was the definition of sex in the dictionary and a biology textbook. So naturally, my big brain decided to use what I had and what I could make. yes, I did jerk off to the dictionary. I also made crude drawings of two people having sex and did my business, not my proudest moment. The last thing is a confession and a suggestion. I've been a naughty boy who doesn't go pee-p in the potty for a while.

I don't listen to most time-sucker updates. I realize in the newest episodes, that segment is at the end of the show compared to earlier ones where it was at the beginning. That makes it easier for me to skip them immediately after the main part of the show. I haven't found the moment you switch things up and so I have no idea why you did it, but I would love it if you brought them back to the front.

I want to go peeping the potty again. I love you and I hate you, Cumminslaw, and I'll continue sucking you hard until I finish. P.S., I heard you say that you're an idiot sometimes. Please don't sell yourself short. You're an idiot all the time. Thank you, Oscar. Excellent misdirect at the end there, fair, my friend.

Addressing your message in parts. First, pineapple's made for pizza. Have you had it with thin, round hands? ham slices, aka what we call Canadian bacon around here. The Hawaiian pizza. Literally my favorite and both of my kids' favorite pizzas. Please meet with those scientists again and reconsider. Second, I fucking love that you literally jerked off to the actual dictionary definition

of sex. Sexual activity, including specifically sexual intercourse. Just saying that, if you would like to jerk off again, but don't want to have to read it. Finally, the updates have stayed at the end of the show, specifically so people can skip them if they want to just hear the topic like you've been doing. I felt and still feel That's the most conscientious choice So if you're if you want to hear him

You're just gonna have to exert more willpower More self-control don't skip them And thanks for writing in Have not been to Kenya but would love to We'd love to hike Mount Kenya for starters Would also love to hang out on the beach And Mumbasa Looks fucking beautiful

Finally sexually deviant sucker Joseph Leone Wrote in with the subject line of I couldn't get my smog check done Because of Cummins law Dan you son of a bitch I thought I got myself caught up on time suck, but my podcast app let me know that an episode had slipped

through the cracks for me. That being episode 468, the Times Square Killer. So I fired it up while I was in my car running errands. Honestly, I've gotten cocky listening to the podcast thinking, I'll never get hit by the Cummins Law. I'm too smart. Prepared for that. Years of perfectly time pauses at the drive-thru, never having my phone start playing when I put my earbuds away. But hubris is a son of a bitch who comes for us all at some point or another. I'm listening to the episode while running errands with no issue. Sweet treat from Dutch bro. and an oil change without incident, but then I pull up to the smog place

so I can do my car's registration. I pull up, turn off my car, get out so the guy can hook the stuff up under my steering wheel, and everything's all good. Until he turns the car on and my phone immediately connects to Bluetooth and you start screaming, quote,

Oh, fuck! My dick is fucking hard for women right now. I barely had enough time to pull my phone out of my pocket to hit pause right after that sentence, but it was too little, too dittle, pooty. the smog guy immediately unplugged my car, started yelling to me about how I need to find Jesus in my life, he took a picture of my face on my license plate, and told me I was not allowed to come back to that location, ever again.

I was honestly so stunned, I just got my car and left. Luckily, there was another smog place down the street, but I just sat there in my car in silence thinking, I can't fucking believe a common's law just got me. Just goes to show that nobody is safe from you, and that the dildo of consequence rarely arrives looped. but I think I got lucky overall. Hope you got a kick out of my misfortune.

Three out of five stars wouldn't change a thing. Your loyal spaces are Joseph. Joseph, yes, I indeed did enjoy your message. I love that he actually banned you. And I especially love that he apparently thinks that Jesus doesn't like anybody getting their dick hard for women. Does he think that Jesus just doesn't know how making babies works? I mean, traditionally, it has literally started with a hard dick.

If you really want to do even more to entertain us all, please go back to that location, playing something more upsetting, maybe something from like Albert Fish that episode, and see if they remember you. Then immediately report back. Hail Nimrod, thanks for the message, everybody. I'm suckers. I needed that.

We all did. Well, thank you for listening to another bad magic productions podcast. Be sure and rate and review time suck if you haven't already. I'm going to try and get some fucking decent sleep tonight and reset my body so it knows when to be hungry and when to be tired. Please do not take over a Froyo shop and kill everybody this week.

There's supposed to be sacred, safe, delicious spaces, you sadistic fuck. Just grab yourself a cup, pour some of that cold goodness into it, add enough treats on top to destroy your, oh, but it's less calories than ice cream bullshit justification. Fuck off and keep on sucking. While the 1991, Austin Yogurt Shop murders

certainly did not help. I can't believe it's yogurt. When the yogurt wars against TCBY, I think what really killed them was a lack of advertising. ICBY never ran any commercials and I'm aware of. But TCBY?

All kinds of commercials back then. Like this one from 1988. We just said goodbye to high calories thanks to the great taste of TCBY frozen yogurt. And we say goodbye to ice cream thanks to the great taste of TCBY chocolate and vanilla swirl.

Hell you. I say goodbye to high calories because TCBY frozen yogurt tastes just like premium ice cream, but with about half the calories. So much yum. So much yum. All the pleasure, none of the guilt. TCBY. All the pleasure, none of the guilt.

And then, here's one from 1990, where they started to get a little bit sexier to compete. Into shape. It's getting into this shape. TCBY non-fat frozen yogurt T-CB-Weddy lady in a tight fucking aerobics outfit but great taste So try TCBY non-fat frozen yogurt

at your nearby TCBY store And stay goodbye to ice cream After all, what have you got to lose? Oh, she's like essentially rubbing herself Goodbye high calories All of the pleasure None of the Guilt Get your pussy fucked

TCB-T C-B-Wed Bye, yogurt. Something like that. And then they got even sexier again in 1994. You know what I hate? 6 a.m. Never controlling the remote control. What?

Miracle diets. What do I love? Bedroom eyes. This stuff. Oh. Hmm. Oh, yeah. Oh, and this.

Jesus. And hey, I can even get it fat free. Fat free? And right now, TCB. Sunday's are on sale for only a dollar 79. T-CBY Sunday's on sale? I really love that. All of the pleasure,

none of the guilt, get your pussy fuck, T-Cb-Y yogurt. And then just one more. And then in 1995, they really leaned in hard to selling yogurt with sex. January 1991, the start of something in a crick,

a slim movie. Right? Not only at TCBY, you can enjoy ultra-slip-Last. Blended delicious TCB-Y, not fat. Jesus. All of the pleasure, none of the guilt of the guilt. Gilly-puddy-pussy fucked at TCB-Y. A TCBY yogurt.

Okay, maybe that was actually a TCBY commercial from 1991 played while I also played a random YouTube video of a woman orgasming. Maybe.