Texas police linked the serial killer who died at the 1991 Yogurt store murders of 4 teenagers girls

Texas police described on Monday at a press conference on how they linked a man linked to homicides in other states with unresolved murders of four teenage girls in a Austin yogurt store, saying that DNA evidence led to a “important breakthrough” in brutal crime that haunted the state capital and chased the investigators.

Austin police said the DNA tests submitted in June led the investigators to Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999 during a dead end from the Missouri with the police. Since then, it has been linked to several murders and rape in other states.

The murders amazed the capital of Texas and became known as one of the most notorious crimes in the region. Austin police investigators and police prosecutors have tripped the case for years when they have traveled thousands of tracks, several false confessions and damaged evidence of the exhausted crime scene.

The bond of the accidents of Babyrs to the crimes was announced on Friday.

Amy Ayers, 13 years old; Eliza Thomas, 17 years old; And the sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, 17 and 15 years old, were linked, gagged and pulled in the head of the ID Can’t Believe store that it is a yogurt store where two of them operated. The building was then burnt down in crime of December 6, 1991.

“I’m full of gratitude. It’s been so long,” said Barbara Wilson, Harbison’s daughters, at the press conference on Monday.

Investigators said that along the closure, someone entered the store through the back door, attacked the girls and set fire. The bodies were found when the firefighters were still fighting the fire.

The autopsy report suggested that the horror of the attack: their hands were attached with underwear and the mouth was tagged with fabric. Ayers was shot dead twice.

Daniel Jackson, detective from Cold Case, said that there was evidence that Ayers retaliated, with DNA collected under his full nails in the salt salt.

“Amy’s last moments on this land were to resolve this affair for us,” said Jackson. “It is because of his fight.”

Sonora Thomas, Eliza’s sister, expressed thanks for the “millions of kind” of the members of the Austin community, but said that “our reality has not changed” in the middle of this week’s revelation.

“We have been deprived of a life of nieces and nephews and grandchildren, and with sisters to age,” she said.

In 1999, the authorities arrested four men for murder, who had all had 15 to 17 years at the time of the homicides. Two of them, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, initially admitted the interrogations after hours and were involved.

But the two men quickly recovered and said their statements were made under pressure by the police.

However, the two were judged and convicted. Initially, Springsteen was sent in the death corridor, but his sentence was then reduced to life imprisonment.

Their convictions were canceled and they were ready to rest a decade later.

There was no physical evidence connecting any of the four young men to the store, and a judge ordered Springsteen and Scott released in 2009 when prosecutors said that new DNA tests were not available in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.

Violent crimes in several states

Brashers was sentenced during the shooting of a woman in Florida in 1985, serving four years with a sentence of 10 years in prison. After committing a series of crimes in Georgia, he was sentenced to a four -year term but was released after a year, shortly before the Austin assassinations.

After his body was exhumed, the Missouri authorities in 2018 involved accidents of B decities in the murder in 1998 of Sherri Scherer and his daughter, Megan, in their house near Portageville, about 250 kilometers south-east of Saint-Louis. In this case, the police said that Barshers had sexually assaulted the 12 -year -old victim.

The police investigation also linked him to the murder in 1990 of Geneviève Zitricki, a 28 -year -old woman found beaten and strangled in her bathtub in Greenville, SC, as well as the rape of a 14 -year -old girl in Memphis, Tenn., In 1997.

Jackson said his story was a dangerous and armed person who had committed his crimes alone. There is no evidence to this day that he had an accomplice in Austin, he said.

The officials said on Monday that they did not know why Brashers was in Austin, but they said that he had been arrested by customs and the border patrol in El Paso 48 hours after the murders of the yogurt store. He was in possession of the firearm which later was later linked to the four homicides.

They also said that an .380 caliber housing of their crime scene also corresponds to the bullet fragments of a homicide not resolved in Kentucky. Kentucky officials have not yet concluded their investigation in this murder.

Brashers’ daughter, in interviews with local news stations, expressed her surprise and pain when he learned of the last deaths linked to her father.

Deborah Bruhers-Claunch told Kvue-TV that she was only a baby when Austin’s murders had occurred. She told Kxan-TV that she did not know why he found himself in Austin, except that he was working in construction.

“I’m really sorry for every family my father has injured,” Bashers-Claunch told Austin station.

The announcement came in the middle of the renewed attention to the case with the release last month of The murders of the yogurt storeAn HBO documentary series.