Detective on 'Yogurt Shop Murders' is 'confident' he'll solve 34-year-old cold case

USA Today

2 days ago

In 1991, four teenage girls were killed at a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, then roughly half the size the booming city is now.
Eliza Thomas, 17, Amy Ayers, 13, and sisters Jennifer Harbison, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15, were fatally shot at I Can't Believe It's Yogurt!, formerly located in North Austin. The girls were then set on fire. Nearly 34 years later, the case remains unsolved, and the person(s) responsible walk free, if they're even alive.
The grizzly crime, its impact on the victims' families and the decades-long search for the perpetrator(s) are chronicled in HBO's four-part docuseries, 'The Yogurt Shop Murders,' that premiered Aug. 3 (weekly Sundays, 10 ET/PT). Academy Award-winning actor Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCary are executive producers of the project directed by Margaret Brown.
Reese Price, the shop's manager recalls the horror of identifying the girls so their families wouldn't have to. Price was just 24 at the time. 'There wasn't anything there to identify,' she remembers in the docuseries. 'Fire is very destructive. It's not forgiving.'
Archival footage puts viewers at the yogurt shop on the night of the killings, and Brown says there are 'characters in our show (who) have never talked to anyone else, and we have some facts in our show that have never been explored.'
She adds, 'These people went through something so specifically awful, but I do think there's something in that for everyone. We're all going to experience pain, and I felt like for me, this was a way to look at this fascinating case, at the same time an exploration of how do people deal with something this hard (and) what can we learn from that?'
Brown remembers when she moved to Austin in the late '90s when she says billboards asking for information on the case plastered the sky. One of the reasons she signed on for the project is 'because a lot of my friends who are crime reporters said this is the most interesting crime that exists,' Brown says in an interview. 'There's not one with more rabbit holes. This is the mothership of interesting crime.'
Rumors linger in the city like Texas summer heat, Brown says. 'Before I talked to you, some woman wrote me on Instagram (saying) she solved it,' Brown says. 'I think that people are obsessed with it.'
In 2022, Detective Dan Jackson was assigned the case on his first day with the Austin Police Department's cold case unit. The 45-year-old who was raised about 30 miles southwest of Austin in San Marcos remembers hearing about the murders as a child.
'It's such a huge case,' Jackson tells USA TODAY. 'I sort of knew at that point I would be with it forever.'
When asked about why the case remains open today Jackson points to the crime scene and potential evidence scorched by fire and drenched by hoses to extinguish the blaze.
Two men were previously found guilty in connection to the crimes. Robert Springsteen received a death sentence in 2001 for killing Ayers, and Michael Scott was sentenced to life for the death of Ayers the following year.
But their convictions were overturned.
Scott and Springsteen declined to be in the docuseries, Brown says. But Springsteen is captured in footage previously filmed for another project around 2009. Springsteen shocks a sales associate helping him find clothes for an interview and court when he says, 'I'm sure you probably think it's really funny, but we're doing a documentary because I just got off death row.'
A DNA sample from the crime scene belongs to neither Scott nor Springsteen. Jackson is hoping to build a profile from the sample that leads him to a suspect.
'One of the things that we want the public to know is that this case is active,' he says. 'It's constantly worked on.'
And Jackson remains optimistic as forensic technology continues to improve.
'If I didn't think I could solve it then why get up every day?' he says. 'I think that with new technology, new information that we have − that I can't go into − even since I've taken the case over, the ability to do more with less when it comes to forensics is light years ahead than it was a few years ago. When I started, we needed a certain amount (of DNA). We weren't even close to it, but that amount that you need is so much less now.'
He adds, 'I am confident that I will solve this.'
He's also hopeful that the docuseries could lead to the tip that cracks open the case.
'Somebody out there knows something,' he says. 'That's one of the things with cold cases is that you do get people overtime that, for whatever reason, may not have been willing to come forward years ago that now feel more comfortable. Or they thought it was something small and didn't ever say anything and they're like well, maybe I should call in this time and mention it. Who knows? It could be the break we need.'
If you have any information about the case, visit austincrimestoppers.org or send an email to [e-mail].