1991 Austin yogurt shop murders

The 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders is an unsolved multiple homicide case in Austin, Texas. On Friday, December 6, 1991, four teenage girls: 13-year-old Amy Ayers (or Ayres), 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison and her 15-year-old sister, Sarah were murdered. Jennifer and Eliza were employees of the store while Sarah and her friend Amy were in the shop to get a ride home with Jennifer after it closed at 10pm. In the last half hour a man who was trying to hustle customers in front of him and asked one if he was a cop, was permitted to use the toilet in back taking a very long time and may have jammed a rear door open. A couple who left the shop just before 10pm, when Jennifer locked the front door to prevent more customers entering, reported seeing two men at a table acting furtively.

Austin yogurt shop murders
LocationAustin, Texas
DateDecember 6, 1991 (1991-12-06)
c. 11:00 p.m. (CST)
Attack type
Mass murder, rape, arson
Deaths4
PerpetratorsUnknown

Around midnight a police patrolman reported a fire in the shop, and responders discovered the bodies of the girls inside. The victims had been shot in the head, some had been raped. A .22 and a .380 pistol were used to commit the murders, and the perpetrator(s) probably exited out a through a backdoor that was found unlocked. The organised method of operation, ability to control the victims, and destruction of evidence by arson indicated an adult experienced in crime rather than teenagers, according to one of the original detectives on the case. Austin Police Department has DNA from an unknown male as a result of one of the rapes.[1] A Y-chromosome match for the perpetrator DNA has been found in a research database of the Federal Bureau of Investigation but it has declined to reveal the identity of the man in accordance with the law of anonymity for donors, and because thousands of men could bear this fragment of DNA, which is unable to identify individuals.

Murders

Shortly before midnight on Friday, December 6, 1991, a patrolling Austin police officer noticed a fire coming from an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop and reported it to his dispatcher. After it was extinguished, firefighters discovered four nude bodies. Each had been shot in the head execution style with a .22 lead bullet. Sarah's hands had been bound behind her with a pair of panties and she had also been gagged and raped. Jennifer was not bound but her hands were behind her back. Eliza had been gagged and her hands were also tied behind her back. All three had been severely charred and shot in the back of the head.[2]

Unlike the others, Amy's body was found in a separate part of the shop. She was not charred but she had received 2nd and "very early" 3rd degree burns on 25-30% of her body. She was found with a "sock-like cloth" around her neck. She had been shot the same as the others however the bullet had missed her brain. She also had a second bullet which did severe damage to her brain. It exited through her lateral cheek and jawline.[3] It is thought that the killers had stacked all 4 bodies on top of another but Amy pulled herself off and managed to crawl to a different part of the store. Sarah's and Eliza's bodies were found stacked on top of each other with Jennifer's body next to them which is theorised to have been stacked on top of them but had been disturbed when Amy crawled away. Autopsy results show high levels of a BTU output which suggests an accelerant may have been used. Initial investigations had produced a large number of persons of interest, among them a 15 year old caught with a .22 (not established to be the murder weapon) in a nearby mall days after the murders. Although he initially gave promising information, after tough questioning detectives decided he was trying to get himself out the gun charge and eliminated him and three petty criminal friends he had implicated, none of who were older than 17 years old at the time.[4] [5]

Several years later a new detective on the case theorized that the four teens from 1991, now in their twenties, were credible suspects. In a string of interrogations conducted by various detectives, confessions were obtained from some of the suspects in which they said all four had participated. No record was kept of what was said to the men in the 1991 interrogations making it impossible to know whether the detectives had supplied information to the suspects in the initial interrogations that could be used to implicate the suspects in the later interrogations if they were to reference it. Two of the four were sent to trial entirely for their self incriminating statements. The prosecution went into a great deal of detail at length about the horrific nature of the crimes against the young victims, but presented no hard evidence other than the confessions. The two were convicted, one being sentenced to death, and other got life because he had been 15 at the time. However, the prosecution's tactic of using excerpts of each one's alleged confessions at the other's trial was ruled to have violated the Confrontation Clause because the co-defendant was non-testifying. Both convictions were overturned on the Confrontation Clause alone, and the men were freed in 2009. The prosecution insisted that they would be re-tried. However, forensic investigation showed that the DNA found in a victim was not theirs, or that of the other two implicated in their confessions, and the prosecution abandoned plans for a retrial.[6] Texas courts later decided that those released were not entitled to compensation because they had not proven that they didn’t commit the crime.[7]


One of the detective in the interrogations, Hector Polanco, had been accused of coercing false confessions in the notorious case of Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger. Both were released after 13 years in prison; Danziger was assaulted in prison which resulted in permanent brain damage.[8][9][10][11] [12] Seven jurors from the trials have stated that they would not have convicted the men had this evidence been available at the time.[13][14]

Book

The murders were the subject of Beverly Lowry's 2016 nonfiction book Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders,[15] Corey Mitchell's 2016 nonfiction book Murdered Innocents[16] and the novel See How Small by Scott Blackwood.[17]

See also

Murders in the Austin area:

References
  1. "25 years later: Murder of 4 Austin teens still unsolved". KXAN.com. December 6, 2016. Retrieved December 1, 2017.
  2. "True Crime Society - The Yogurt Shop Murders". True Crime Society. August 19, 2019. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  3. "True Crime Society - The Yogurt Shop Murders". True Crime Society. August 19, 2019. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  4. González, Christian R. "Prosecution doles out crime scene details". News 8 Austin. Archived from the original on June 29, 2008. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
  5. "More testimony expected in yogurt shop murder trial". Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. May 11, 2001. Archived from the original on March 3, 2012. Retrieved August 25, 2008.
  6. González, Christian R. "Yogurt shop suspects". News 8 Austin. Archived from the original on June 29, 2008. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
  7. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3622#:~:text=Scott%20was%20sentenced%20to%20life,agree%20on%20a%20death%20sentence.
  8. "Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders". Kirkus Reviews. September 2016.
  9. Vargas, Hermelinda (May 26, 2006). "Yogurt shop murder conviction overturned". News 8 Austin. Archived from the original on June 29, 2008. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
  10. "U.S. Supreme Court refuses to reinstate conviction". News 8 Austin. February 27, 2007. Archived from the original on June 29, 2008. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
  11. Kreytak, Steven (August 21, 2008). "Yogurt shop suspects' lawyers want more tests". Austin American-Statesman. Archived from the original on September 10, 2012. Retrieved November 3, 2008.
  12. Kreytak, Steven (September 18, 2008). "Still no DNA match in yogurt shop case". Austin American-Statesman. Retrieved November 3, 2008.
  13. 7 jurors say yogurt shop murder votes would change Archived March 4, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  14. McKinley Jr, James C. (July 1, 2009). "New Evidence Opens Old Wound in 1991 Slaying of 4 Girls". The New York Times.
  15. "Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders". Kirkus Reviews. September 2016. Archived from the original on September 28, 2016.
  16. Mitchell, Corey (December 27, 2016). Murdered Innocents. Pinnacle. ISBN 9780786039920.
  17. Blackwood, Scott (January 20, 2015). See How Small: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316373807.
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