The Yogurt Shop Murders takes a sensitive look at an unthinkable act

Yahoo

8 hours ago

This is probably anecdotal, but it feels like our collective TV diet is due for a good, HBO-grade true-crime docuseries right about now. Which, as eloquently intimated by an interviewee in The Yogurt Shop Murders (a new four-parter from that aforementioned network and A24 that very much fits that bill), is a pretty gross and callous thought to even have. 'These murders…continue to devastate, puzzle, and fascinate many,' Sonora Thomas, the sister of one of the victims chronicled in the doc, reads from her own writings for the camera. 'As a surviving sibling, I have alternated between disgust for the ongoing fascination and awe that the public continues to be horrified by an event that has shaped every aspect of my life.'
There is a guilt that comes—or at least should come—with wanting to watch these sorts of tragedies unfold and be picked apart over several hours, with casually clicking to the next episode from a couch as if the unthinkable stories that ruined the lives of real people are some sort of entertainment. That the segment above ends with news footage of a young Sonora in 1991, just after the murders, 'hyperventilating while my grief-stricken mother talks to the reporter,' as she puts it years later, underlines this idea and, perhaps, even hints at some of the guilt director Margaret Brown (2022's Descendant) herself had with this project, not to mention the thorny issues that come with documenting such horrors in general.
On a December evening in 1991, four teenage girls—Amy Ayers (13), Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison (both 17), and the latter's sister Sarah (15)—were bound by their underwear and shot in the backs of their heads at strip-mall frozen-yogurt shop where two of them worked before the spot was set aflame. The case shocked the community and became a national story, with Thomas noting, 'These murderers were said to have shattered the innocence of the small city of Austin,' a sentiment echoed almost verbatim by the actual mayor of that city in a news conference when suspects were apprehended nearly a decade after the killings occurred. (Highlighting that small-town-ness, the opening credits are set to a cover of 'Devil Town,' which was also used to great, albeit very different, effect in the Austin-shot show Friday Night Lights.) 48 Hours on CBS did (at least) four episodes on the case and its many twists and turns. And from the get-go of this new docuseries, you get the sense that the relatives of the deceased have had to relive that one night over and over and in front of countless cameras.
Which they have: A decent amount of the footage in The Yogurt Shop Murders is from an unfinished documentary that local filmmaker Claire Huie started shooting in the 2000s. (Huie is a voice throughout, with her at one point embarrassingly showing a clip of her, gracelessly and without a soft transition, asking Barbara Ayres-Wilson, the mother of Jennifer and Sarah—and another steady presence and one of the empathetic beating hearts of the doc—to talk about that night in 1991.) This narrative framing and seeing, say, John Jones, the first lead investigator assigned to the case, on the evening of the murders in front of news cameras, then sifting through the events again in 2009, then talking—with an air of PTSD but still personable—about how he can't shake the case pretty recently, stresses the weight and longevity of these killings.
In the first half of the docuseries, Brown nicely creates a sense of place, showing, for example, Amy Ayers at FFA (Future Farmers Of America) events, riding horses, and helping out on her family's ranch. The director then delves into the flip side of that pastoral beauty, with the cops getting swept up in the '90s satanic panic. 'They start going after goth kids and metalheads and 'PIBs,' people in black—just club kids,' Michael Hall of Texas Monthly explains of the investigation going off the rails (a segment that has flashes of the community's hysteria in the Paradise Lost films).
And in the back half, The Yogurt Shop Murders focuses on false confessions, which was initially the subject of Huie's film—namely, the ones given by four men (teen boys at the time of the murders) who were charged in 1999. Watching these hours-long interrogations (which recall bits of the first season of Making A Murderer) and seeing them break and switch their stories to satisfy investigators and just get out of that room is infuriating. And it's hard not to be left indignant and numb about all of it—the senseless killings, the incarcerations (and the time lost before two men were released years later), and the mystery that has hovered over that stretch of Austin about what happened in 1991 and who was responsible. But Brown's docuseries doesn't end on that note of frustration or on anything to do with developments in the case, really, and instead leaves us with a more human moment, of Thomas and Ayres-Wilson holding hands from across the table (as seen in the still above) and silently bonding over a pain that only they can understand.
The Yogurt Shop Murders premieres August 3 on HBO
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