After 34 Years, Police Believe They Found the Person Responsible for the Yogurt Shop Murders

In August 2022, President Biden signed a bill into law that could provide enormous emotional relief to the family members of homicide victims. The aptly named Homicide Victims’ Families Rights Act gives family members of cold case victims the ability to request federal investigators revisit these cases using modern technology. It also ensured that investigators who previously worked on a case could not work on it again.

The bill was introduced by Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Eric Swalwell, D-California, and was passed 406-20 in the House and unanimously in the Senate. Senator McCaul cited the 1991 murder of four young girls at a yogurt store in Texas as his reason for co-authoring the bill. That particular crime became known as the Yogurt Shop Murders and was the subject of a 2025 documentary. Nearly two months after its release, an arrest was made in connection with the murders. The case could be solved.

Thanks to DNA testing and dogged police work across multiple agencies, authorities were able to link the Yogurt Shop Murders to a serial killer whose crimes became fully realized after he took his own life in 1999. According to NBC News, Robert Eugene Brashers's DNA was found under the fingernails of one victim and in three of the yogurt shop girls' sexual assault kits.

Austin Police Department Cold Case Detective Daniel Jackson took over the case in 2022. He knew there was evidence of sexual assault; the four girls were tied up using articles of their own clothing, and two guns were used: a .22 caliber pistol and a .380 pistol. Although the building was set on fire before the perpetrator left, authorities were able to collect a decent amount of evidence, including DNA.

The DNA Austin police already had matched DNA from a 1990 sexual assault and murder in Greenville, S.C. In the Greenville and Yogurt Shop Murders, the victims were tied up with their own clothes. After testing members of Brashers's family, a decision was made to exhume his body in 2018. That's when biological evidence linked Brashers to various sexual assaults and murders all over the country, including the Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin, Texas.

Including the four victims of the Yogurt Shop Murders, authorities have confirmed Brashers has killed seven women. He also had a history of rape and assault. On April 6, 1990, Genevieve Zitricki of Greenville, S.C., was strangled to death in her home. Brashers wouldn't be linked to her death for another 16 years, when DNA technology made the identification possible.

Brashers was eventually linked to the rape of a 14-year-old girl in 1997, as well as the murders of a Missouri mother and her daughter in 1998. He also sexually assaulted the little girl. In January 1999, police went to speak with Brashers at a Missouri motel about a stolen license plate; he was not yet a suspect in any assault or murder cases, per NBC News. This resulted in a shootout between Brashers and police, during which the serial killer died by self-inflicted gunshot wound.