HBO aired a new fifth episode of its documentary series "The Yogurt Shop Murders" on May 22, 2026, following the sudden resolution of a 34-year-old cold case by Austin police.
Cold case detective Dan Jackson identified serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers as the true perpetrator by entering a single shell casing and an incomplete DNA profile into national databases, according to Slate.
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Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999, murdered teenage victims Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison, and Sarah Harbison during a sexual assault and robbery at an Austin yogurt shop in 1991.
Wrongful Convictions Overturned
A Texas judge ruled in February that four previously accused men—Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn—were entirely innocent.
The city of Austin agreed to pay $35 million in restitution to the wrongfully accused individuals and pledged to ban unsupervised interrogations of underage suspects, following decades of police misconduct and overturned convictions.
Documentary director Margaret Brown discussed her sudden return to production with Slate journalist Sam Adams after learning the long-unsolved mystery had unexpectedly been resolved.
"Right before I left Austin, I met up with the cold case detective, Dan Jackson, and I could just tell there was something going on," Brown said.
"We were having coffee, and I was like, 'I can leave, right? Because you're acting really fidgety.'"
Brown noted that her initial four-part project approached the historical crime with the expectation that the perpetrator would likely never be found.
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"I don't even make true-crime documentaries normally. So 'I think I can solve it'?
Please, that would be absurd," she said.
Producer Alice Henty immediately returned to Austin to film the ongoing developments, expanding what was originally intended to be a brief coda into a full feature-length episode.
"HBO was like, 'Make a coda Ext,' but even after the first shoot a few days later, it was clear there was more story than a coda," Brown said.
"I made it in six months, and it's full feature-length."
The final installment details the complex scientific processes used by Austin police to connect the decade-old crime scene evidence to the deceased serial killer.
Brown recalled asking Detective Jackson to explain the science simply. "He's like, 'No, Margaret, you can't explain that simply,'" she said.
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"So then I had to turn around and try to explain it to the design studio."
