♪ (TENSE STRING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER CONTINUES)
Yeah, this has really been a long-standing nightmare
for the Austin community,
especially for individuals who have lived with this
for such a very long time, and...
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
♪ (TENSE STRING MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
KIRK WATSON: Good morning, everyone.
Thank you to all of you that are here with us this morning.
Over three decades
after a horrible crime took the lives of four teenage girls,
and changed Austin forever, our hearts haven't healed.
They're still broken for the precious girls we lost.
More than a quarter-century ago,
in a circumstance much like this today,
I said that Austin lost its innocence
the night those young souls became victims.
Time has passed.
We are different people and a different city.
And while there's no change to the horror,
no diminishing the grief,
we can finally express a deep sigh...
a release that comes from knowing.
Today, finally, we have an answer.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
♪ ("DEVIL TOWN" BY ALLEGRA KRIEGER PLAYING) ♪
♪ I was living in a devil town ♪
♪ Didn't know It was a devil town ♪
♪ Oh Lord It really brings me down ♪
♪ About the devil town ♪
♪ I was living in a devil town ♪
♪ Didn't know It was a devil town ♪
♪ Oh Lord It really brings me down ♪
♪ About the devil town ♪
♪ (SONG CONCLUDES) ♪
♪ (ETHEREAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
SONORA THOMAS: I used to babysit this family
on this street, and I've always tried to remember
which house it is.
And there's a street on the right side
called Sonora Street.
I think we might have passed it already.
I don't quite know this neighborhood
as well as I used to.
♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
SONORA: When the detective called me on Friday,
just within minutes,
I couldn't hear what he was saying.
I need to, like, hear this again ten times
before I know enough to even ask a question.
(TURN SIGNAL CLICKING)
SONORA: And I can just feel my mind racing.
I mean, it's only been three or four days
since I've had this new piece of information,
so I know this will settle. But right now, I just feel...
Yeah, I definitely don't feel my body.
I thought it was always farther down.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
-Yeah, I'm not really sure. -MARGARET BROWN: Yeah.
I remember there being a big tree, but...
now I'm sort of disoriented.
I thought there was a vase that was sticking up. Okay.
-(BIRDS CHIRPING) -(SONORA SIGHS)
MARGARET:
Yeah, that'd be good.
Just a few minutes. We can leave in a minute.
(SIGHS)
(INSECTS CHIRPING)
♪ (SONORA HUMMING SOFT MELODY) ♪
♪ (CONTINUES HUMMING) ♪
♪ Surround you... ♪
-♪ (CONTINUES SINGING INDISTINCTLY) ♪ -♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC OVERLAPPING) ♪
♪ (SONORA CONTINUES HUMMING) ♪
-(KIDS SHOUTING, LAUGHING) -♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
BOB AYERS: They drove all the way from Austin to tell us.
♪ (SONORA CONTINUES HUMMING) ♪
PAM AYERS: I feel kind of numb in a way.
I think it's 'cause it's still so new to us.
SHAWN AYERS: In one sentence, it went from
thirty-something years of thinking one thing to...
"No, it's totally something else."
BARBARA AYRES-WILSON: When they explained it to us, I just felt bad,
'cause they had already had to talk to every other parent.
It's a lot of people to have to repeat this story to.
BOB: He was looking at us and said, "I've got some good news."
And then there was a long pause.
I'll never forget that. He said...
"I know who killed your daughter."
♪ (SONORA HUMMING SOFT MELODY) ♪
♪ (CONTINUES HUMMING) ♪
♪ (DAN JACKSON HUMMING) ♪
(MUTTERS INDISTINCTLY)
When I took the case over in early June of 2022,
we talked about the physical evidence,
how limited it was.
♪ (SOMBER PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: One of the few things we had was
that .380 casing found in the floor drain.
It had been uploaded into the ATF's database,
and it never got any hits.
JOHN JONES: The lands and grooves told us
exactly what kind of gun it was.
We put that on the wire coast-to-coast.
We knew what we were looking for exactly.
DAN: The system's called NIBIN,
National Integrated Ballistics Information Network.
So, think of, like, the national DNA database,
but instead of DNA, it's spent shell casings.
The way the gun holds the casing,
it creates these microscopic little indentions,
and then the software can compare those
if the same gun was used in different crimes.
So, I thought, "Well, you know, it's been a long time.
I assume the data is still in the database,
but let me double check,
and maybe there's something we can do with it now."
For whatever reason, I don't know why,
something told me to go down that rabbit hole.
It had been uploaded at least twice.
'97, and then again in '07, and no matches.
If it's been that long,
the software now is light-years ahead of what it was.
It's like three-dimensional type stuff now.
So, July 2nd, they went and pulled it from evidence.
And that afternoon they called me,
and I was actually... just left town for vacation.
And I was sitting on the beach in Port Aransas,
and they were like, "Hey, are you sitting down?"
I was like, "Yeah, I'm sitting down on the beach.
What's up?" I was like, "Do I need a drink for this?"
And he's like, "Yeah, you need to pour yourself a drink.
We got a hit."
♪ (INTRIGUING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: To another unsolved homicide
in 1998 in Lexington, Kentucky.
REPORTER 1: This is 43-year-old Linda Rutledge.
Police say on November 7th, 1998,
they responded to help the Lexington Fire Department
with a fire at a business.
When they got there, they found a woman dead
inside the back of the store,
later confirmed to be Linda Rutledge.
When they found Linda's body here on 121 Malabu Drive,
they found injuries unrelated to the fire.
We cover all the bases with any fire.
That's what we do anytime we find a body
where it's suspicious in nature.
REPORTER 2: Ms. Rutledge's death
had since been ruled a homicide.
REPORTER 3: No suspect or suspects
have ever been found.
DAN: This woman had been killed
in a strip mall in a retail space,
her parents' hearing aid store.
She would use the hearing aid store
after hours to go change. I think she'd been bartending,
and she was gonna go change clothes,
and go out with friends.
So, she stopped there, and never made it to the bar.
♪ (MUSIC INTENSIFIES) ♪
DAN: Later that night or early next morning,
somebody was driving by and saw the fire.
Just like yogurt shop,
the fire department put the fire out,
and found her body... in the back.
She had been shot in the head with a .380.
Just like yogurt shop, she had been sexually assaulted.
Front door's locked from the inside,
and so, obviously, probably went out the back door, which,
if you look at the back door of that strip mall,
it looks just like yogurt shop. It's like an alley.
Probably most strip malls look the same.
I got back from vacation, met with Lexington PD.
Tried to find any sort of common link.
Their casing had only been uploaded in 2024,
so a year ago.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
DAN: At the end of the week,
we didn't really have any other connection.
♪ (SOMBER STRING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: You know, Lexington wasn't anything
in our radar for our case,
and they didn't have any Texas connections.
Same gun, seven years later, similar MO.
We collaborated on a testing strategy.
One of the things they had was a sexual assault kit.
So, we don't have a DNA profile
that would be good enough for CODIS.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System,
so it's a national database held by the FBI.
♪ (DRAMATIC SYNTH MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
PRESENTER: The CODIS program has had
many success stories since it began.
As the database increases,
so does the number of solved crimes.
DAN: You have to have a certain amount of DNA.
It has to be a certain quality.
You gotta have like a full...
what's called a full CODIS profile
to get it uploaded.
Partial or degraded profiles would get false positives.
♪ (INTRIGUING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: I said, "Well, we don't have a CODIS profile.
All we have is our Y-STR.
Do y'all have a Y-STR?"
And said, no, they don't have one for this case.
REPORTER 1: The prosecution asked for a delay
to sift through recent DNA evidence.
REPORTER 2: A Y-STR profile,
it doesn't match any of your defendants.
REPORTER 3:
There is no database
for this particular type of profile.
This is a Y-only profile.
And there's no database for that.
DAN: Y-STR profiles, the male chromosome DNA
that those tests look for.
There's not an automated searchable database.
It's not like you can just upload it
and search continuously
because the nature of a Y profile is that
they're not unique to an individual.
So, you would get hits that are totally unrelated to your case.
What you can do is a manual search.
Take the profile I have, and physically sit down,
and type it in against other Y profiles
in other cases in your state.
(MOUSE CLICKING)
DAN: So, if this guy is from Kentucky,
you can see if anything matches up
with a known offender there.
That's when I was like, "Well, why don't we just do that
for the whole country?"
Not all labs collect these Y profiles,
but more and more are starting to.
We asked everybody around the country,
and everybody came back with nothing
except South Carolina.
They got a hit. We got 27 for 27 markers.
A Y profile
from a sexual assault and homicide
out of Greenville, South Carolina, from 1990.
♪ (SOMBER PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: They said they wanted to review it.
We got to do some quality assurance,
make sure we typed it in all correctly, 'cause it's a...
you know, it's human error.
We think because we were the first people to ever ask.
They had never gotten a request before.
They had to make sure that this
could be a candidate for our crime
before releasing more information.
I said, "Okay, no problem."
So, that was like a really long two weeks to wait.
When I talked to the detective there,
he didn't know anything about our case.
And I said something about, "Well, our quadruple..."
And he was like, "Quadruple? Like, what?"
♪ (MUSIC TURNS TENSE) ♪
DAN: "Yeah, you can look it up." I was like,
"There's actually a documentary airing right now."
(CHUCKLES) 'Cause this is right when...
I think it was-- episode three was out.
(CHUCKLES) So I was like, "If you wanna get caught up
to speed, there's a really good documentary.
It's on HBO. Uh, I'm in episode four."
And then he said, "Let me ask you something.
Were your victims tied up with their own clothing?"
And I said, "Yeah." And he goes, "Yeah, ours too."
They used some of her pantyhose, I believe.
And that's when I was like,
"All right, we're onto something here."
They sent me a report saying,
"This is an affirmative link to Greenville, South Carolina,
sexual assault and homicide.
Here's the case number and the date of offense."
So, I Googled the date,
and "Greenville, South Carolina,"
and of course, this murder pops up on Google.
A woman was found murdered in Greenville County.
She's Jenny Zitricki,
strangled and raped inside her own apartment.
REPORTER 1: Found dead in a bathtub,
the water still running.
INTERVIEWEE: A violent serial rapist and murderer.
♪ (SINISTER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: So, that manual search, turns out
not only had no one ever asked before,
they got a hit to a serial killer.
REPORTER 2: Investigators across multiple states
are working to see if the killer may be connected to other cases.
DAN: So, again, you gotta understand,
thousands of men may have this matching "Y" profile.
So, you know, for our case,
we can't just say this guy did it.
But I started looking into it.
I got in contact with the Missouri State Police
who had worked on another connected case,
a double murder from I think it was March of '98,
a double homicide in New Madrid.
It's not Muh-drid. It's Mah-drid?
I always say it wrong.
Sherry and Megan Scherer, mother and daughter.
The husband and son had just left
to go into town and do something,
and they came back 30, 40 minutes later.
I don't know how he got in, we don't know because...
he murdered both of them.
And sexually assaulted Megan, the 12-year-old.
♪ (SINISTER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
DAN: Two hours after he does that double murder,
he does an attempted home invasion
in Dyersburg, Tennessee,
which is only, like, 40 miles away. Same guy.
He tries to force his way into the home of a woman.
She's able to, like, keep him out,
but he does shoot through the door,
and puts a bullet in her arm.
The same gun used in the Scherer murders in Missouri.
-♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪ -(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER)
So, he goes, "I've got an entire case file on this guy.
I put everything together because I knew someday,
somebody else would be calling."
♪ (SOFT INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: It's hard to get your hopes up in this case,
because there's been so many letdowns at every turn.
You think this case is gonna go a certain way,
and you follow that rabbit hole,
and you're way off topic of where you started.
So, you've just gotta take a step back,
take it all in objectively.
BARBARA: It's a lot to ask people
to still be interested in a 34-year-old case.
I have a friend, one of the first people
I called that morning after the murders.
Uh, she and her friend go to the yogurt store
about every anniversary since it happened.
For 34 years, they're there. I quit going years ago.
I was like, "It's too much for me.
I think y'all are nuts." But anyway, they do that.
And she said there was a big crowd this year,
bigger than normal.
And I so appreciate...
I do not want anyone to think that I don't appreciate.
It's part of my healing,
it's because of the love they've given me.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
But it's not just us. The community needs to heal.
They need to get past that.
♪ (MOURNERS SINGING INDISTINCTLY) ♪
(CAR WHOOSHING)
NEIL STEGALL: '91, I was in graduate school,
and I was in need of some money,
and I contacted a friend about doing
some reclamation work, which is what the company did.
I got a call from him on December 7th...
and he asked me to meet him here at the, uh,
yogurt shop site.
And explained to me that...
he was going to be overseeing
the reclamation of property here,
and also the clearing out of the yogurt shop,
which included tearing off all the sheetrock,
and stripping the store completely.
♪ (GENTLE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Having a connection to a couple of the girls,
to a sense of connection to the neighborhood...
I decided I could go ahead and do that.
And one thing I stipulated
to the people who were going to work there was
that there was going to be no joking...
no foul language.
There's enough noise tearing the place down.
There's no need for us to add to it.
And it was hard work,
because it wasn't just a store that had burned,
it was a place of tragic death...
which made the work slow in some respects, and...
encouraged us to bring a lot of respect
to doing that work.
And it's a connection to this that I had not anticipated...
but one I stepped into.
And in the end, not reluctantly,
I almost felt like there was something to be done here
that was out of honor.
That it not just be some random...
demo crew come in to do the work thoughtlessly,
but it be done with, again, respect.
And...
it was a very profound experience.
Regrettable but profound.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
♪ (INTRIGUING PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: So, I'll back up a little bit
and explain how this guy gets identified.
Back in the '90s, he was always moving around.
He's not in CODIS, 'cause his felonies were
when they weren't collecting DNA back then.
So, he's just running around
committing sexual assault and murders,
and he's an unknown offender.
In the mid-2000s,
agencies start putting their old crimes into CODIS,
and they all start linking up
to one unknown prolific killer and rapist,
but they still don't know who it is.
So, you've got this 1990 in South Carolina,
pops to the double in Missouri,
which links with ballistics to Tennessee.
And then '97, Memphis, that DNA goes into CODIS.
In the Memphis case, he forces entry into a home.
There's four women.
The women had just gotten home.
They just came in through the door.
So, he saw an opportunity.
(KNOCKING ON DOOR)
REPORTER: Police say the man knocked on a door
with four women
and a nine-month-old baby inside.
He asked for help in finding his wife's purse,
used a gun to force his way inside,
then cut the phone lines.
He's able to tie all four of them up... alone.
This was a key element in the rapist's attack.
He used duct tape to tie up the people in the house,
then he raped his youngest victim,
a 14-year-old girl.
MARGARET:
They all lived. He let them all live.
I-- I don't know why.
They put out a sketch.
But, you know, think about, this is the '90s.
There's no cell phone tower data.
There's no security cameras,
there's no license plate readers.
There's no 24/7 social media coverage
like there is now.
If it was easy, these cases would be solved.
But between 2006 and 2017, they went cold.
JOHN WALSH: This is Jenny Zitricki's actual diary.
Names, places,
lots of things that she was doing.
Until it ends right here, the 4th,
-that's when she was murdered. -♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
And who knows if one of the names in this diary
had anything to do with it?
This is the mirror that was hanging
over Jenny's dresser.
The killer left a message on it.
"Don't 'F' with my family."
It was a personal message to her.
WALSH: So, you think it's somebody she might know.
And you're saying, "Keep an open mind,
this could be a red herring to throw cops off."
That's right.
DAN: And so, 2018, this is right at the advent
of genetic genealogy.
REPORTER 1: An alleged serial killer tracked down
through a genealogy database.
DAN: The Golden State Killer was solved with it
like a year before. So, that's a brand-new thing.
REPORTER 2: Investigators used publicly shared DNA data
to track down the suspected Golden State Killer.
REPORTER 3: Using DNA from crime scenes
decades ago, which they submitted
to a publicly shared genealogy website
-called GEDmatch. -REPORTER 4: Allegedly responsible
for 12 murders, 50 rapes,
and more than 100 burglaries in California.
DAN: The guys from Missouri,
Tennessee, and South Carolina said,
"We have enough DNA, maybe we can do that."
And they reached out to Parabon Labs.
So, I'm gonna build these trees back to great-grandparents.
DAN: They developed a genealogical profile
to get some distant relatives.
And then that's when you start building out those family trees
and seeing where they converge.
And that's your potential suspect.
-♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ -(KEYBOARD CLICKING)
CECE MOORE: This was kind of the start of it all.
This was what opened the door
for the rest of these cases in 2018.
Instead of an exact match
like they're looking for in CODIS,
we are looking for relatives.
And usually, they're very distant relatives.
Partial matches.
These are the potential contributor of this DNA.
When I researched one of these potential matches,
I found this article.
This guy was convicted of attempted murder and rape
in 1985 in Florida.
He immediately jumped out at me. So, I dug more deeply.
I found his daughter's Facebook page.
I saw a man in the picture
who looked so similar to those sketches.
And not only did it look like him, but I thought
he had the same hat and the same glasses.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: So, this is a good candidate
because of his history.
He was sentenced to 12 years but he got paroled in '89.
So, he's out in '90.
But he was deceased.
And he was buried in Arkansas.
And so, they got a judge's order,
and they dug him up...
put it in to CODIS,
and he was a perfect match for all those crimes
we just talked about.
(OVERLAPPING NEWS REPORTS)
REPORTER: Robert Eugene Brashers.
The unknown DNA profile collected from Jenny's body
and from all the others
belonged to the deceased subject,
now confirmed to be Robert Eugene Brashers,
a 40-year-old man from Paragould, Arkansas.
DAN: All these cases were solved in 2018.
-♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ -DAN: Now, for our case,
I get all this information from these guys,
and I'm like, "All right, this is probably our guy."
I mean, Robert Brashers had the same Y-STR, at 27 for 27,
with the same make and model gun as in Kentucky.
And he's a serial killer,
with very similar MO as the yogurt shop.
Like, "All right, this is our guy,
but we're not 100 percent."
♪ (INTRIGUING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: What if this is as good as it gets?
How would I build--
Essentially, at the end of the day,
it's still a circumstantial case.
We need to make sure that we are 100 percent.
Because somebody went to death row, and, you know,
we're basically overturning 34 years of work,
do we have enough to call it?
LISA DAVIS: At this time, I'd like to introduce
Detective Dan Jackson,
the lead investigator of this case.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
Good morning, everyone. My name is Daniel Jackson.
I'm the lead detective, like she said,
and I've been on the case since 2022.
Um...
So, I'm gonna walk y'all through
how we got to where we are today.
I'll start with a brief overview of the history of the case,
and take you back to December 6th, 1991.
♪ (TENSE MUSIC BUILDS) ♪
DAN: As you can see, it appears to be
just your everyday middle America retail space
in a strip mall.
The customers would be there in the front.
And then in the back is where the fire was started,
and the girls' bodies were discovered.
Sarah, Eliza, and Jennifer were together,
and Amy was a little bit closer to the front.
There was evidence of sexual assault.
All four had been shot in the head
with a .22 caliber pistol.
And Amy was also shot with a .380 pistol.
The original ballistics report said
that in all probability, the weapon used
was an AMT-brand Backup model .380.
That's an AMT semi-automatic .380,
and the model is a Backup model.
There was one confession
from a juvenile named Maurice Pierce.
Eight days after the murders,
Pierce was at Northcross Mall
with his friend named Forrest Welborn.
He was carrying a .22 pistol in his waistband.
He was arrested and taken to the homicide office
where he was interrogated by Detective Hector Polanco.
(OVER RECORDING)
In 1999, Pierce, Forrest Welborn,
Robert Springsteen, and Michael Scott
were re-interrogated.
They were able to get confessions
from Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott.
MICHAEL SCOTT:
RON LARA:
DAN: Michael Scott received life without parole,
and Robert Springsteen received the death penalty.
While they're appealing their conviction,
a landmark Supreme Court case comes out.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeal granted
a new trial for Springsteen and Scott.
-(INDISTINCT CHATTER) -No comment right now, please.
DAN: By this time, we had a new DNA technology
called Y-STR testing.
All four of the original suspects
-were excluded from this profile. -(CROWD CHEERING)
-ONLOOKER: Welcome home, guys! -DAN: The charges were dropped.
Then over the next several years,
hundreds of reference samples were collected.
First responders, family, friends, associates.
I think we tested three or four hundred different people
in this case over the years.
Just recently, we reached out to all labs in the country
that do Y-STR typing,
and asked if they could manually search
against our unknown profile.
We got a hit.
A sexual assault and murder from 1990
out of Greenville, South Carolina.
This was the profile that they had.
"Robert Eugene Brashers."
-(AUDIENCE MURMURING) -♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
His Y-STR has been found in the following three places.
This is three sexual assault kits
of those young girls.
It's hard to be 100 percent with just a Y-STR.
So, we're trying to figure out how to get from,
"We're pretty sure it's him" to, "We know it's him."
We start researching Brashers,
figure out what he's doing around this time, where he's at.
December 8th, 1991,
less than 48 hours after yogurt shop,
Robert Brashers is stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint
going westbound on I-10 between El Paso and Las Cruces.
It was a random cold stop,
just like any time you go through a border checkpoint,
except the Border Patrol agent realized something was up.
He didn't like the way Mr. Brashers was answering,
ran his plate, and it showed it
to be a stolen car out of Georgia.
It was-- had been stolen on November 29th.
During this interaction,
he was also in possession of a .380 pistol.
(AUDIENCE MURMURING)
DAN: That .380 pistol was an AMT Backup model.
It was the same make and model identified by ballistics
as the weapon used in the yogurt shop.
So, he was westbound, leaving Texas
with an AMT .380 Backup model
less than 48 hours later.
♪ (SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
So, we took additional items to DNA Labs International.
Now, these items have been previously tested in years past.
They were preserved of,
"Maybe someday we could do something with this,
but we can't today, we'd just be wasting the DNA."
We don't think we're ever gonna be able
to get enough DNA for a CODIS upload.
Well, we don't necessarily need to upload to search.
We just need enough DNA to compare.
So, we need enough STR markers to do a direct comparison
from our crime scene to Robert Brashers.
And this was gonna be it.
We were pushing all of our chips on the table with this.
This was gonna be the last shot effort.
But we were pretty confident with the technology
and the circumstances that this was gonna be pay dirt.
One of the things we retested was Amy's fingernail clippings
from the autopsy.
They were able to get quite a bit of DNA
out of Amy's fingernail clippings,
and it was directly compared to Brashers,
and it matched, so that it's two-and-a-half million to one
that it's likely Robert Brashers'
underneath Amy's fingernails
than it is to an unknown individual.
♪ (SOMBER STRING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: At this point, there's no physical evidence
that links Springsteen, Scott, Pierce, or Welborn
to the yogurt shop crime scene. There's no evidence
that connects the previous four suspects
with Robert Eugene Brashers either.
The surviving victims of Brashers' violence
always reported he was alone when he acted.
He never is known to have an accomplice.
(AUDIENCE MURMURING)
DAN: Now, I just wanna reiterate
that this is a combination of technology,
good police work from multiple agencies
and cooperation, and timing.
This is something that could not have happened until 2025.
And I'm sorry that it took 34 years for us to get here,
but we're here now... and, you know...
Amy's final moments on this Earth
were to solve this case for us.
It's because of her fighting back.
T-- Thank you.
-(AUDIENCE MURMURING) -♪ (SENTIMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Have we been able to explain why Brashers was here in Austin?
No, we don't know why he was in Austin.
We have found no connection.
We're still searching for that answer.
Just about how techniques and technology
has changed since then
to make sure we're not in a situation like this
where four people get wrongly accused early on,
and then we find, you know,
a potential real suspect decades later.
No cases are going to be closed
solely based off of confession. We need other evidence for that.
And so that has changed,
and things have changed since then.
I took the approach of,
"I'm not gonna listen to the confessions."
I've never listened to them.
I've never read 'em, the transcripts.
And the first time I heard any footage
from the confessions was the HBO documentary.
Because my point of view is I don't know,
but I'll go where the evidence leads me.
Are there likely other cases like this in Texas?
I mean, he's already been in South Carolina,
Tennessee, Missouri.
Is it likely, and are you looking for that?
DAN: So, I would say it is likely
there are other victims out there,
because of what we know of him, when he was not in prison,
he was committing heinous crimes.
Last week, we knew of three murders.
This week, we know of eight.
To say there's not a nine or ten,
I'm sure there are, and we will be working on that.
Do you believe that justice has been served,
or there's still some more work to go?
-♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪ -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
MIKE GRAHAM: New analysis saying
the .380 shell casing found at the murder scene
is a big part of this breakthrough.
It's linked to a gun that Brashers had
after a chase with authorities near El Paso.
-(INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE) -GRAHAM: There is no DNA evidence that links
any of those original suspects to the murders.
ERIN MORIARTY: You're feeling pretty good
about putting that shirt back on.
I did. I didn't get it out in 1999.
I heard the words I wanted to hear.
-ERIN: You did? -Yeah, that...
the last four weren't involved.
It ain't about the confessions, it's about the evidence.
But I lived to see this day.
♪ (SOFT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
We are so happy that what we did there...
-Yeah. -...helped you guys,
get you some answers.
What we get coming out of this is,
just like when we solved our cases,
the team that came out of that,
and now, Austin PD is part of that team.
So, when the next one comes up,
-and I think there'll be a next one. -Yeah.
-Yes, there will be. -Good.
And this team will carry forward,
and help those people.
So, it just keeps building momentum.
CARLOS GARCIA: It's a strange feeling.
It's a certain sadness.
The loss never goes away for those families.
You also need to now look at
how does such a horrific investigative failure occur.
These families have suffered because of that.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
CARLOS: My other thought is that
there's actually eight victims here.
There's eight victims, and another one of those
lost his life, Maurice Pierce.
You know, I just hope there's-- a day comes
when there's another press conference
when they put the pictures of those four boys,
and explain how they're gonna compensate them.
(CHATTER FADES)
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
JONES: There's not a whole lot that's the same from 1991.
Jeez, more condos.
Everything's changed.
Well, I feel like...
all of us there at the original crime scene...
our efforts were validated.
We didn't process the scene
according to 2000 or 2010 standards.
We processed it to 1991 standards,
and went beyond that.
We did the best we could do
based on what we had in place then.
(SIGHS)
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
JONES: Turns out, maybe we could have solved it
if Border Patrol had read the teletype we sent out.
We said we were looking for a .22,
and an AMT .380 Backup.
But it just wasn't meant to be, I guess.
-♪ (MUSIC TURNS OMINOUS) ♪ -(INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE)
BOB: I went numb.
It was shocking.
A serial killer, really?
It was...
it was still a little hard to realize.
Pure evil.
He went in there.
His concern was no money.
He was not on drugs. He was not on alcohol.
He was in, more or less, his right mind, and...
he just-- he just liked to kill.
I understood a robbery going bad possibly,
something like that,
but for someone to go in
with that mindset is hard for me to...
to accept...
that we have people like that.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
MIKE WARE: On February the 19th,
the judge has set a hearing.
We'll be filing a motion
that the state will join in
to declare that he is actually innocent,
and that he is exonerated,
and the judge will officially declare that
and sign an order reflecting all that.
Uh, we will support that with evidence,
making it very clear to the world
and for the record, they're innocent,
and that that is true not just beyond a reasonable doubt,
but to a moral certainty.
Um...
I would like for it to be a part of this hearing
of what went wrong.
An airplane crashes, you know, the FFA moves in
and does an extensive investigation.
But I think this is analogous to that.
This whole horrible, tragic scenario, event...
has been like a-- a horrible airplane crash.
There's a huge injustice here that needs to be corrected.
♪ (EMOTIONAL INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
KIMBERLI PIERCE: We met at Lamar Middle School.
We were 13 and 14.
We dated, really, ever since.
You know, we had her young.
We got married when we were 21 and 22.
Shortly after that, that's when all of this happened.
I was 23 and he was 24 when he got picked up.
-(POLICE SIREN WAILING) -(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER)
-(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING) -KIMBERLI: October 6th, 1999.
They had SWAT there.
I was basically in a nightgown when I came out,
'cause I heard all the commotion.
REPORTER 1: After nearly eight years,
police have arrested four suspects.
-KIMBERLI: It just didn't seem real. -REPORTER 2: Maurice Pierce...
You really think that if there's no evidence,
this doesn't happen.
REPORTER 3: Pierce's wife didn't wanna talk.
-REPORTER 4: About your husband? About your husband? -No comment. No comment.
REPORTER 5: Their investigation has ended...
KIMBERLI: I sent her to school.
Her principal called me, because the news showed up
at her school, her elementary school.
So, I knew then I needed to not be sending her to school.
And then everything changed. I had to be available for court.
I couldn't really work.
INTERVIEWEE: We can hopefully finally begin...
KIMBERLI: I really think that he thought he would go,
and they would let him out.
He wouldn't be spending three and a half years in jail
waiting on trial.
♪ (MUSIC TURNS TENSE) ♪
KIMBERLI: They kept him in solitary confinement
for two years.
So, he was out one hour a day,
and that's when he would call me.
He didn't see sunlight
except for when he got to go to court.
The light in his eyes went away.
They changed colors, and they didn't ever go back.
They kind of were a dull gray to me.
He used to have really bright, pretty blue eyes.
It was just not the same. He was not the same.
She lost her childhood
at the age of seven when her dad got picked up.
Even she changed.
REPORTER: Are you excited to see your daughter?
MAURICE PIERCE: When I was arrested,
I proclaimed that I was innocent
of all the charges that were filed against me,
and I am standing here today with that same proclamation.
MARISA PIERCE: He didn't get to see this day.
-♪ (SOMBER PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ -He didn't get to...
let the world know that he was innocent all along.
RONNIE EARLE: We do not have the evidence
to convict him right now,
but life is long.
MARISA: In the news, it's like a blip, "Oh, he was in for three years."
But it was constant darkness,
and then he got out,
and it was just a constant battle of the cloud,
and of overcoming, and...
...ask for dismissal of the cases
pending further investigation.
Our focus continues on our suspects at hand.
There is no question that these suspects
are still the focus of our investigation.
KIMBERLI: To have to live with that,
I mean, that stayed on his record,
pending further investigation for four murders.
♪ (DARK PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I really feel like they went after him,
and just never let up.
(POLICE SIRENS WAILING)
-KIMBERLI: He was always very scared of the police. -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
KIMBERLI: He thought they were always gonna get him
for these murders.
And they did. In the end, they did.
POLICE OFFICER: The officer managed to fire
a single round that did strike the suspect.
-It just doesn't feel like it's real justice. -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
And I wanna be respectful to everybody, but...
my dad will never come back.
It's a little too late... for him.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER, LAUGHTER)
-CHILD: Look, there's Eliza. -(AUCTIONEER BID CALLING RAPIDLY)
...seventy-five, all done. Seven seventy-five, 375.
Three-fifty... (CONTINUES RAPID BID CALLING)
To me, FFA is a place...
Well, it...
♪ (SENTIMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
BOB: Right now, I see her on
her little cutting horse stallion,
cutting a cow...
on a horse.
PAM: Those girls are still with us.
-GIRL: Hi! -MAN: Hi!
-Hi! (BLOWS KISS) -(MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)
BARBARA: My memories of them,
they fade, you know.
They've been gone so long.
But they'll always be little girls to me.
I still laugh about things that they said or did, and...
-they were funny. -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
MARGARET:
-♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪ -(INHALES SHARPLY)
No, I'm not counting the days anymore.
It's-- It's over.
MARGARET:
-(BREATHES SHAKILY) -♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING)
I don't know, it's...
I'm still such in kind of a numb feeling.
I think the certainty, just knowing,
is-- does help me, yes.
Um...
Even... There's evidence, hard evidence,
where before we didn't have all that hard evidence
to work off of.
And to me, that is a big factor, you know?
It's the end.
The end of wondering.
Like, if you're walking around,
like, with your shoulders to your ears
for 30 years, all of a sudden, you get to relax.
That's a different feeling.
I guess the stress or the wonderment,
the "I don't know..."
is no more.
I was still in shock for a day or two,
and it was probably a week later
that I finally dealt with the fact
that my heart was opened up more,
and I didn't know it was closed.
I thought I had done a really good job
of working through this, and getting through this,
but this changed my heart,
and I...
I can't tell you how grateful.
Grateful. So much gratitude.
I wasn't expecting that at all from this--
Uh, but I got that.
That's so good.
Such a good thing to get,
'cause so many people never get that.
But we-- we did. We got the closure.
That terrible "closure" word that nobody likes to use.
And we got it.
We got that and...
That's... My life is good. My life is good.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
Every year, then I've gone out,
and I've taken care of the girls' headstones.
I'm going to this year.
But I'm so at peace that I'm ready...
I'm ready to go on with my life,
and have some fun,
and do some things that I wanna do.
And they're so at peace, it just...
I can just feel Amy...
wanting me to do that.
I may not take care of those gravesites
as much as I used to,
because they're on their own now.
(CLICKS TONGUE) And I feel they're at peace.
I didn't know how angry I was.
And I realized, like, "Damn, I've been...
I've been pissed for a long, long time,
and didn't realize it."
I looked at my kids different, looked at my wife different.
Looked-- Everything I looked at was different.
I guess I'm gonna have to find something else
to worry about. (CHUCKLES)
It's just... (EXHALES)
I-- I just...
You can breathe again...
because we know the truth now.
MARGARET:
Because of the evidence,
and we know...
And we know.
MARGARET:
I don't understand it either... (CHUCKLES) ...to be honest.
MARGARET:
No. I mean... Ooh, that's cold, isn't it?
No, I do that for my own self-protection.
I don't wanna get involved in the emotional trauma
of what they went through.
I've already been through a lot, I don't wanna take that on.
And I mean, that's a horrible thing.
What happened to them was horrible.
MARGARET:
No. They-- I...
They are not part of this case any longer.
I don't go there.
I mean, I know that they suffered, you know?
But my suffering is...
is totally different than theirs,
and I have to deal with my pain, and...
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
I really don't think about it.
I mean, every now and then, it's like, you know,
kinda got a raw deal.
But... two confessed, went to prison.
Two didn't confess, did not go to prison.
So, in my mind, the two that did...
they didn't help themselves.
I don't know, it's just--
I haven't got to them yet.
When it all comes down, and...
that it wasn't them,
and the courts say it wasn't them,
and it's finalized...
they didn't-- Well, I can't say that.
MARGARET:
I was gonna say they didn't put themselves there,
but they kind of did.
♪ (PENSIVE PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
JONES: The original investigators...
Let's see, how'd they put it?
Had some shortcomings in the case, yeah.
We could have went and filed any of those confessions we had.
Got a warrant for arrest,
and then worried about making the case later.
That didn't work out so well for Paul and them.
MARGARET:
Same thing you always ask me. "How you feeling right now?
What would you like to say to Maurice Pierce now?"
Considering that...
I think he made the statement--
I think he made the statement that
he didn't really care whether he was dead or not.
"What are your thoughts now?"
Maurice may be dead, but...
Robert Springsteen is still alive,
and so is Michael Scott, and...
so is Forrest Welborn.
"They're all still alive.
What would you like to say to them?"
And maybe the jury found them guilty,
because of the way evidence was presented to them.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
♪ (SOMBER PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
PAUL JOHNSON: So, I have three horses over here.
They don't get a lot of attention.
I don't really care too much
about what the public thinks about my investigation.
A case like this,
where somebody that we were not investigating
is matched to the crime...
I would expect people that are concerned...
to question the previous investigation
that didn't point to this guy.
But I did watch the press conference
and what they said at the press conference
seems to absolutely indicate
this new guy was there
and was involved.
What I don't think it shows
or anything that they said at the press conference shows
-that other people... -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
...or maybe even the ones that we filed on,
were not there. Just because he was,
I don't think that shows
that our guys or other guys were not.
What kind of shocked me is
that he said he's never listened to the confessions.
ROBERT SPRINGSTEEN:
PAUL: If he would listen to the confessions
or read the investigations
that had to do with the confessions,
there would be things that could not be explained
by our guys not having been there.
MARGARET:
Nobody says that exactly.
The only thing we could figure out
is that the person that they're not identifying
was so bad and scary
that they would rather not.
MARGARET:
And-- Very likely.
That kind of person might scare these little teenagers.
♪ (OMINOUS INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
PAUL: If they all had something to do
with going into the yogurt shop
and they're scared of him to...
point the finger at him or,
"Okay, I'm not going to point the finger at him,
I'll point the finger at Forrest.
He doesn't scare anybody."
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
♪ ("MONA LISA" BY CONWAY TWITTY PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS) ♪
♪ Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa Men have named you ♪
♪ You're so like a lady With a mystic smile ♪
♪ ("MONA LISA" CONTINUES PLAYING) ♪
It's like an old Austin kind of feel to me.
You know, I know that there's a lot
of country music getting played,
but that's not all that gets played.
It just... I don't know,
it just reminds me of the old days, sort of.
♪ (SLOW COUNTRY MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
This is chile rellenos with chicken.
And this is vegetable with pasta.
But this was a repeat request.
MARGARET:
♪ (SINISTER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
SHARON SHIPMAN: We lived not too far away
from Northcross Mall.
I actually had to pick him up at the juvenile center
because he and Maurice were at Northcross Mall.
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
SHARON: When I got there, they told me
that Maurice had a gun with him.
I picked Forrest up and brought him home.
It was later that we found out that they were being questioned
about the yogurt shop murders.
He would be walking to school,
and there would be a car parked outside.
And the detective would get out and say,
"Get in the car. We're going for a ride."
He was 15 years old.
He didn't know he didn't have to get in the car
and go with him.
He didn't have anything to hide.
We knew there were a lot of kids being questioned.
I guess I didn't realize how serious it was.
The detectives brought him to my house and said,
"We have two confessions
and we're going to make the arrest in two weeks.
And Forrest has the opportunity to save himself,
so you need to convince him to confess."
So, every day for two weeks,
I sat at his shop with him
because I wanted to make sure he was safe.
The day I went back to work, they arrested him.
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
FORREST WELBORN: There's no time when it's not there.
I want it to go away.
(INHALES, CLICKS TONGUE)
It's still very difficult to even talk about,
or think about, or...
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC RESUMES) ♪
FORREST: I've had people try to tell me
I should be celebrating,
but it's still not over, you know.
It's not a celebration moment.
I hope everybody believes that,
you know, I wasn't there now, you know.
A lot of people...
think of me as a murderer.
And I've had to deal with that.
Lost jobs, lost relationships,
lost friends. You know.
(CLEARS THROAT) It's been really difficult.
(OVER RECORDING)
MARGARET:
Uh, betrayal, you know?
He was my best friend at the time.
And to have him try to say
that I was there and I had a part of it
was just absolutely insane to me.
That's where I lost...
(INHALES DEEPLY)
...lost a lot of hope in people, you know, especially friends.
I wasn't able to really trust anybody.
Ended up dropping out of eighth grade...
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
...'cause I just couldn't do it.
MARGARET: I'm so sorry.
I went back the next year.
But I only stayed for a couple months and left.
MARGARET:
Yes.
MARGARET:
(CLEARS THROAT) Yeah, um...
(SNIFFLES)
(SOBS HEAVILY)
MARGARET: Wait a minute.
(FORREST SOBS)
-(EXHALES, MUTTERS) -MARGARET: You okay?
-FORREST: I'm good. (SNIFFLES) -MARGARET: Okay.
(FORREST SIGHS)
MARGARET: Just had to take a breath.
(FORREST SNIFFLES, SIGHS)
Yeah, it's very hard.
MARGARET: I know. I'm really sorry.
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Well, they came... they came...
I had a business site in Lockhart
while I was doing automotive repair.
They came, surrounded the place
and arrested me, took me away from my business,
charged me for the crime.
Ended up losing that business.
Thought I was going to prison for the rest of my life
for something I didn't do. Thought it was over.
MARGARET:
-No. -MARGARET: Yeah.
I wasn't going to talk to him ever again,
and I never did.
Now, it's hard for me to really bring somebody
in that close anymore,
and, you know, I have some friends
but not super close.
If I find someone that does like me,
then that's one of the first things
I have to let them know,
is that I've been...
wrapped up in all this
with the yogurt shop murders. And...
-So, it normally doesn't work out very well. -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
MARGARET:
Um, six months.
I've tried, but...
you know, I mean, it's the worst crime in Austin,
you know.
So, to get involved with,
you know... I've never really been cleared.
I've never, you know...
I've never had anybody come out and say,
"Oh, he's innocent," you know, let the world know.
MARGARET:
You know, I'm sad for him and his family.
But still,
I've been angry at him for so long for what...
he said to the detectives
and I thought we were best friends and so...
MARGARET:
I don't care anything about them.
Anybody that can try to say that I was there and did it,
I have no sense in talking to 'em
or have any feelings towards them.
I know it's really bad to say, but...
it doesn't hurt my feelings that they went to jail at all,
because what they tried to do to me,
try to make me sit in there.
I've got pulled over all the time by the police,
once a week.
I've been incarcerated 50 times
for nonsense.
I don't know what's going to change it, but...
maybe one day.
There's...
The four girls,
they weren't the only ones that lost their lives.
No.
♪ (REFLECTIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
MARGARET:
(INHALES DEEPLY)
Well, in our case, the person that killed our daughter,
there's justice because he's no longer here.
MARGARET:
I don't.
I don't think of him as human. It's just...
♪ (REFLECTIVE MUSIC CONTINUES SOFTLY) ♪
He's the reason, and that's it.
Right now he's a monster and I'm okay with that.
I just feel like there's evil people out there.
I don't know what makes them that way.
I don't want to spend too much time
sort of thinking about them or understanding them
or what their backstory is. (CHUCKLES)
MARGARET:
I guess because he's dead.
That's where all the peace comes in.
He's not gonna hurt or do anything else to anybody else.
I just want to know what life he had
that made him this way.
Children are not born evil.
We caused them to be this...
and I want to know what happened.
Was he not held enough?
-Was he not loved enough? -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
Or did he just-- just decided not to care,
not to care about anybody but himself,
somewhere along the way?
♪ (SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CECE: You know, he's one of those serial killers
who didn't want to be famous,
didn't want his crimes to be known.
And so, now that he's infamous,
it is interesting to think about what that means,
how much energy is put into thinking about him
at this point.
It doesn't matter.
What's the use of spending too much time
-and energy thinking about him? -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
Now, I wish I felt that way
because I've been obsessed with him
and I've spent thousands of hours researching him.
♪ (INTRIGUING PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CECE: I've identified lots of serial killers
and they didn't all stick with me.
This guy was incredibly evil, incredibly violent.
He has literally haunted my dreams.
My feeling was that his story wasn't finished
and other people were still waiting for answers.
My years-long obsession
has led me to want to talk to people who knew him.
Because I feel like any little clue could potentially
lead us to another case that he's responsible for.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
I feel like I have more paperwork on my father
than I do anything else.
I have one photo of me and my father,
and that is the family photo that, of course,
is all over the internet.
♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DEBORAH BRASHERS: This picture was taken
the summer of 1997.
The night we moved to Arkansas, this picture was taken.
I didn't know of anything, anything bad about my father.
I had just met him not long before that.
He pulled in the driveway one day
and said, "Hi, I'm your father."
My mother said, "Hey, this is your daddy for real."
And then, that's just my daddy.
And then he's dead. Not long after.
♪ (SUSPENSEFUL STRING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DEBORAH: I was around more people growing up
that were strange than I was normal people.
Criminals, people that...
Like, the weird feelings that you get around certain people,
those were my normal.
My mother was not the greatest person.
So, the people that, you know, you're born from,
if they're that way, then how do you know?
Differentiating that was very hard until I got older.
To me, people being shitty to you is normal.
For a very long time, that's how my life was.
The only part of my life
that I thought was the most normal
was all actually coming out to be a lie now,
because that was the time of my life
-when I was with my father. -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
-MAN: Here you go. Here we go. -(CHILD GIGGLING)
DEBORAH: The little bit of time that I met him until he died,
it was the best time of our entire life.
We didn't have to want for anything.
We didn't have to question anything.
Like, we were never hurt,
never touched by men or anything in that nature.
My mother didn't run off on us.
It was like the white picket fence type family.
Like, you got three girls, a father that goes to work,
a mother that goes to work.
We have cookouts, we have birthday parties,
like... just normal.
A lot of people will tell you,
you would have never thought my father was who he was,
but he was a very evil man.
♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Come to find out he was on the run
for breaking and entering a woman's house
in 1998, over Easter weekend.
It was Easter morning when he was caught in her house.
Why are you not at home?
You have three children at home. It's Easter.
MARGARET:
In 1998, he... Breaking and entering
into someone else's house he used to work in.
He broke in her house and cut her phone line.
He had a kill kit on him. He was going to kill this woman.
Why? I don't know, she didn't do nothing to him.
MARGARET:
-A kill kit. -MARGARET:
He had black gloves, zip ties, a gun.
-He had multiple of those kits. -♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DEBORAH: He left the gun there, got arrested,
called my mother and told my mother where the gun was.
And my mother called my grandpa
and my grandfather went to go pick up the gun.
My mother and grandfather had to have known something.
Like, there's people that,
as long as you don't hurt my family, it's okay.
And that's what I'm afraid of. I'm...
I'm afraid of that being the truth.
(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER)
DEBORAH: Normally,
without him on the run, we called him Robert or Daddy.
But when he was on the run, we were told to call him Mitch.
Like, before we went out to eat, he put a little wig on,
'cause we knew he was "on the run."
So, you know, he couldn't look like hisself.
He used to dress up as a woman and rob Shoney's
and Waffle Houses in the middle of the night.
Would go test drive a car
and then put the key in this little putty,
and remake the key, and he'd go steal that car that night.
Like, he'd done a lot,
but you wouldn't have thought that he murdered people.
I remember when the Scherer murders,
the broadcast come up on the TV and my mother got scared.
And he's like, "Oh, no, that would never happen here,
we're fine."
Yeah, because you done it. But he was nonchalant.
There's no telling how many more crimes that he's done
that no one will ever know about.
That's what I'm coming to terms with.
If I have to live with this every day,
I at least need to know that I've said sorry to these people.
Someone that is a blood kin to him
is sorry for what he's done.
♪ (SOFT REFLECTIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DEBORAH: I don't want to upset anyone
by reaching out to them.
I've never reached out to the Scherer families,
but I've reached out to family members
in South Carolina, and in Austin...
and told them that I'm sorry.
I want to break
all the generational curses as possible.
This was for the two men that were falsely accused
of my father's crimes in Austin, Texas.
"Hi, my name is Deborah Brashers
and I understand the words that I'm about to say
may not mean much to you.
I'm not the one who caused the pain
and hardship you've endured,
but I am a descendant of that person who did.
I cannot begin to imagine
everything you've been through since 1999.
My father's actions took so much from you.
Even though I wasn't involved in his choices,
I still feel deep regret for the pain his actions caused you.
I wanted to reach out and acknowledge what happened
and tell you that
someone recognizes the wrong that was done.
You didn't deserve what happened
and I'm sorry for all you lost because of it.
Sincerely, Deborah Brashers."
And it took me a couple of days to write that,
like write exactly what I wanted to write in it.
I'm gonna have to print it out and send it to them.
This is right before he showed up.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
-CLAIRE HUIE: You wanna try it? -Yep.
CLAIRE: Okay, okay, let's try this one.
I haven't talked to the boys.
There you go.
I hope they are enjoying some kind of peace
as a result of this news.
I can't imagine what it's like to have that kind of weight
where even the people who say they think you're innocent
-maybe don't really believe it. -CHILD: Come up here.
I didn't think they did it.
And then there was the question.
CHILD: Come up here, Mom.
And I... I was really convinced.
-And the question was still there. -CHILD: Mom, I do...
CLAIRE: I spent a lot of time with Robert Springsteen.
He managed that tension with so much grace.
Um...
And now knowing for sure he didn't do it, like,
how is he not the angriest person on earth?
And he's not. He's not angry.
MARGARET:
Because I asked him directly.
-♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪ -I'm not angry, I'm not--
As you guys have seen, I'm not really...
I'm not really that emotional about it,
or that mad about it, or, you know,
I let all that anger and stuff go.
CLAIRE: Rob and I spent a lot of time alone together.
And if I thought he was a murderer,
I wouldn't have done that. (CHUCKLES)
And then with Michael Scott, he says,
"I think I might have had something to do with it."
ROBERT: (OVER VIDEO) They really screwed me over.
He didn't, so it's still...
Even in his own mind, he can't trust himself.
Now, he can tell himself fully, "I didn't."
-Okay, I'm following you. -♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CLAIRE: Nice.
MARGARET:
CLAIRE: If he were still alive, I would be terrified
for everyone.
The force of the evil present is terrifying.
Nice. Boosh!
On the one hand, it's a relief
that it's kind of over and he's done.
But it is anticlimactic that he's dead.
It feels like he was always this unknown
and he remains an unknown.
He just kind of swept through town
and caused a lot of destruction for a lot of people.
♪ (SOMBER PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
CECE: After I identified him in 2018,
I started looking for cold cases in all the places
I knew that he lived.
That's why I was so disappointed
I couldn't have helped solve the yogurt shop case.
They didn't have enough DNA
for us to perform genetic genealogy.
If only I had known that, right here,
should be the stop at the Texas border in December,
things would have been very different.
I would have known immediately
that he was a very strong suspect for yogurt shop.
♪ (LOW TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: So, back to December 8th, 1991, he's getting out of Texas.
He goes to jail that night on the stolen truck
and a felon in possession of a firearm.
Somebody bonds him out five days later.
Someone pays for his bond, I don't know who.
And then fast-forward a couple months,
February of '92, he gets arrested in Cobb County, Georgia
in a stolen vehicle from Tyler, Texas.
So, basically he bonds out, backtracks through Texas,
steals another truck, and ends up in Georgia,
where he gets arrested again.
I think that's when he had burglary tools,
police scanner, a fake police ID.
I think, like, a wig.
The possession of a firearm by a felon is taken federally
and he gets five years in prison.
Once he's sentenced though,
that .380 is given to his father.
His father is able to get it out of police custody.
Talking to an ATF guy,
they're like, "Yeah, that's not an easy thing to do.
You gotta fill out, like, a lot of paperwork. It's kind of a pain."
And we're talking, like, maybe a 75-dollar gun.
So, when he gets out in '97, he gets his gun back.
(SCOFFS) But, at first, we couldn't believe it,
but then that actually led us to help solve
other cases, because he kept the gun.
We would have never linked any of these cases to Kentucky.
We wouldn't have got a NIBIN hit because the gun
would still be sitting in a federal archive.
Completely, like, unforeseen chain of events led to all this.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: And then, January of '99,
police officers driving through the parking lot
of a Super 8 motel in Kennett, Missouri...
sees a car that kind of sticks out.
Plate comes back stolen.
They look in the car, there's like,
some kids' toys or something.
Front desk is like, "Well, the only people staying here with kids
is room number whatever."
-(KNOCKING ON DOOR) -BRASHERS' WIFE: What do you want?
DAN: Brashers' wife, she gives a fake name
of who her husband is.
"He left," you know,
-"I don't know when he's coming back." -(KIDS CLAMORING)
DAN: And they start looking around the room,
and they find him hiding underneath the bed with a gun.
♪ (MUSIC RISES) ♪
DAN: It becomes a police standoff.
DEBORAH: We woke up to guns everywhere.
There are police officers right here to the left.
There's like five to seven of them, guns drawn.
And there's a police officer over here, holding the bed up
and my father's laying underneath the bed
with the gun to his head.
They put my mother in handcuffs,
and then they took us out in the hallway.
And where we were sitting at,
you could look down and you could see the pool,
and you could look up and see the reflection behind you
as to everything that was happening.
As the door opens, you can see, like,
my father's throwing stuff out of the room.
And about that same time, I heard a big boom,
and then I seen police officers go in.
DAN: He throws out a bunch of their clothing and stuff,
and he also throws out a nine-millimeter pistol.
And then he shoots himself in the room.
♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
He had shot himself with an AMT .380 Backup model.
The serial number is the same one he was stopped at
two days after yogurt shop.
So, it was like full circle.
He used that gun to commit his murders
and then he killed himself with it.
He had a nine-millimeter and he had a .380.
If I was going to shoot myself,
I would definitely pick the nine-millimeter.
It's more powerful.
So, he picked that gun for a reason.
Um, that was his trophy.
And that's what he killed himself with.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
They, of course, interrogated us,
asked us all kinds of questions.
And we lied. "That's Mitch. That's Mitch.
I don't know who Robert is. I have no idea who Robert is."
So, on the suicide note,
the outside of it says, "To the police."
And then on the-- He wrote in it,
"In the event you are reading this, I am dead.
Please, I beg you, do not contact my father.
He has just came out of the hospital from cancer surgery
and it will kill him if the cops tell him. Thank you."
Like the "Thank you" on the bottom of this note,
just it's...
Like, why?
He was dead for 20 years before anybody knew anything.
I don't think he ever thought he would get caught.
♪ (LOW TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: How he got into the shop, we don't know.
He had a different line each time, it seems like,
different ruses he would use.
So, this was-- The actual tip was taken on
December 8th of 1991, so just two days later.
The caller, Mr. Croft, worked for Longhorn Security,
and he had been a customer that night at the yogurt shop.
♪ (SUSPENSEFUL STRING MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: Said he was in the store till 10:15 p.m.
and noticed a White male in his late twenties,
acted strange.
"When I entered the store,
I saw a couple eating at one of the booths
and another couple ordering from one of the girls.
The Thomas girl was at the register.
There was a White male subject standing between the place
where you order at the counter
and the register where the Thomas girl was.
All of a sudden, the subject nudged me
and I turned to him and he said,
'Are you driving that car with the lights on top?'
He was talking about my work car,
which has overheads on it.
I said it was my car and then he asked me,
'Are you a cop, or security, or what are you?'
The girl asked what he wanted, and he hesitated for a minute
and then said, 'I want a cold drink.'
And this stuck me as funny,
because why would you just want a cold drink
if you're in a yogurt shop?
While he was at the register paying,
he asked the Thomas girl if they had a restroom.
She told him that it was in the back,
and he picked up his Sprite
and walked behind the counter to the back.
I stood there and talked to the Thomas girl
for a good ten to 15 minutes,
mostly to see if the subject was going to come back out.
I kind of had a bad feeling about him anyway.
But he never did.
After a while, my yogurt started to melt
and I said goodbye and left.
He was a White male.
He was about 5'9'', and had a medium build.
After that, I went to the football game in Houston
and then we got back to Austin on Sunday
and I heard about the news of the murders."
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
And that's when it ends.
We'll never know for sure if that was Brashers,
but it definitely fits the storyline
of maybe he got in there,
used the restroom, and didn't come out.
Or went up and propped open the back door.
(SIREN WAILING)
♪ (MELANCHOLIC INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I was sitting here and there was a sea of red.
(SIGHS) Fire trucks with lights flashing.
Patrol units with their lights flashing.
There was smoke. I could still see smoke...
coming out where they vented the roof.
♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
-(INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER) -(RADIO BEEPS)
So, I come in here and...
(SIREN WAILING)
...I knew enough not to go around this way,
and this is where I park.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
JONES: The fingernails made it for me.
There could be no cross-contamination
with what's under her fingernails, and...
That is investigator 101
that on sexual assaults where the victims live,
-you always scrape the fingernails. -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
-You know, bag it up and send it off. -MARGARET: Who is that?
I'm sorry?
MARGARET:
Huh?
-Jeez. -SONORA: Mm-hmm.
-JONES: Jeez, Sonora. -(SONORA SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
JONES: I don't know what to say about this. (LAUGHS)
SONORA: (LAUGHS) I know.
Well, and I wouldn't... I don't usually come here.
-You know, it's a little challenging, obviously. -♪ (SENTIMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
But this friend that I had breakfast with said,
"I wanted to buy flowers
and bring them over to the yogurt shop.
I don't know if you're up for it."
And I said, well, you know, I'm pr--
you know, practicing saying yes to everything.
And I said, "Sure, let's-- lemme try it."
-How about this, huh? -JONES: Yeah.
-(SONORA SIGHS) -Thirty-four years.
I mean, it's so heartening to see all these flowers here.
It's like so many people still think about it.
-Please, go ahead. -JONES: Oh, yes.
♪ (EMOTIONAL PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
MOURNER 1:
-Oh, wow. -MOURNER 1:
MOURNER 1:
SONORA:
MOURNER 1:
SONORA: Mm-hmm.
MOURNER 1: All right, I'll let y'all go.
-Yeah. Thanks for coming by. -MOURNER 1: Yeah. It was nice meeting you.
♪ (MELANCHOLIC INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
ARNE ASTAD: We were cleaning the dining room
because at that time, Gatti's had a buffet.
I was back doing dishes
and Dave was vacuuming and he goes,
"Oh, look out there,
there's fire trucks out in the parking lot."
From this shopping center,
to the end of that shopping center,
to the wallpaper place, we all shared the same attic.
So, smoke started coming in.
You know, we really didn't know at that time
until like after 3:00, 4:00 in the morning.
Then we heard, like, the tragic news.
Well, thank you.
-Yeah, thank you so much. -Thank you.
(SIGHS)
Gosh, if we stay here long enough,
we're gonna meet all kinds of people.
I can't believe he was here that night.
MOURNER 2:
SONORA: Right.
And I feel sorry for those boys that got sent to prison too
because of the police work then.
Right.
They thought they did it, but they didn't really.
And it was like, "Oh my goodness."
SONORA: Yeah.
(JONES SIGHS)
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
-Oh, we lived to see this. -This is... This is...
-Yeah. -(SIGHS)
It's all the work you did that night.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
SONORA: To me, it's so sweet that people remember.
And at the same time, I hope people forget.
(SCOFFS)
Let's all create new stories.
Life has to be generative.
We can't keep holding on to the past.
I think that's why I'm starting to think...
about, "What's it going to be like a year from now?"
I mean, this story will always be with me.
-Gimme a kiss, Sonora. -(KISSES)
SONORA: But again, it's not like I'm living in the mystery
and the angst of it.
Yeah, there's the creek.
I feel like this whole thing is almost over.
And at some point this is just gonna be history.
It'll be something we remember,
but it's not something we're living through anymore.
It's like now we have the answers and we can...
put the question behind us.
Maybe that's the part we can put behind us.
BARBARA: So many memories and so many...
Y'all have seen everything... The world has seen so much.
Yeah, that was Sarah's.
But there's not too many left.
Now, it's taken over with my new grandkids.
Who is this from? Maddie. She made me a hat.
By the way, I think y'all are all nuts
for being in this business.
It's so... it's such a weird business.
-(LAUGHS) Just... -(MARGARET LAUGHS)
I don't mean to be disrespectful in any way to anybody
over all these years who's interviewed me.
No disrespect.
But I'm so glad that's over with.
What a blessing, I wasn't...
I didn't know this would ever happen,
but this will be my last interview.
You're supposed to let this shit go,
'cause this eats you up.
♪ (GENTLE EMOTIONAL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
(BIRDS CHIRPING)
-Hold on to that plate. -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
SHAWN: Our fight for this case is over with.
Our fight is not done for other people.
ANGIE AYERS: Trying to make a place where we can
include forensic experts,
DNA experts, genealogists, geneticists,
victims' advocates, all wrapped into one.
So, if people had questions, they can reach out to one place.
A nonprofit.
What we put our energy forward now is towards that.
ANGIE: Trying to help other families
with whatever they're going through
'cause everybody's journey is different.
SHAWN: Hopefully to solve some more cases.
And get some more answers for people,
so they don't have to wonder no more.
-♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪ -(BIRDS CHIRPING)
MARGARET:
If it turns out that they had nothing at all to do with it,
I would feel like I had been fooled.
If they just happened to make up the body positions,
I would just have been fooled.
I was acting on this stuff and that didn't happen,
who knows?
Then I was wrong.
If the investigators get something wrong or gets fooled,
it's not his decision that puts them in prison,
it's the decision of these 12...
MARGARET:
Well, I still don't think... (CHUCKLES) ...it's wrong myself.
♪ (SOMBER PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
WARE: I've never seen a case quite like this
where so many people, so many professionals,
were so absolutely sure that they were right,
all along, tragically, very, very wrong.
REPORTER:
WARE: There's a whole area of study
that professors write about, et cetera,
called innocence deniers,
and it's often police, prosecutors, et cetera,
will contort in their own mind,
"Well, okay, there's this new evidence,
but the original guy's still guilty," and why?
PHOTOGRAPHER: Two, one.
WARE: The evidence is so overwhelming now
that I think probably, everybody pretty much accepts it.
I expect that they will get a judicial declaration
that they are actually innocent and that they are exonerated.
♪ (SOMBER PIANO MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
JOSÉ P. GARZA: I don't think we've ever been here before.
We have a situation where
their convictions were thrown out.
No one has been convicted of a crime.
Yet the burden and weight of the allegation
has clung to them for 30 years,
and they carry it with them everywhere they go.
(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING)
JOSÉ: The interrogations that led
to these so-called confessions were flawed,
they were unlawful, they were unjust.
DETECTIVE:
JOSÉ: Unfortunately,
there were many Hector Polancos during that time.
There was a culture that he didn't start
and he certainly wasn't the last of.
It was a moment in our history
that we have an obligation to understand
and to do everything we can to make right.
There needs to be a reckoning.
♪ (MUSIC TURNS TENSE) ♪
(INDISTINCT MURMURING)
BAILIFF: All rise.
JUDGE DAYNA BLAZEY: Please be seated.
Good morning, everybody.
TRUDY STRASSBURGER: Every day in this courthouse,
the state asks people to take responsibility
for harm they've caused to another.
And then we do what we can to assist in repairing the harm.
♪ (SOLEMN MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Today, it's our turn to accept responsibility
and to use the truth to mitigate harm,
so we can help all involved heal and move forward.
Over 25 years ago,
the state prosecuted four innocent men,
teenage boys at the time of the crime,
in what is known as the 1991 yogurt shop murders.
The wrongful prosecutions caused harm to Amy Ayers,
Eliza Thomas, and sisters, Jennifer and Sarah Harbison.
They deserve justice.
There was harm to the families of the girls.
They were asked to trust us
when we told them we had the perpetrators.
And now they've been asked to put away the thoughts
and feelings that festered for decades
with eyes on the wrong people,
uncertainty, and a lack of finality.
There was harm caused to this community.
Believing that teenagers were capable of these acts
changed our perception of humanity.
It goes without saying that harm was caused
to the four wrongfully prosecuted.
Today, we are going to take the first step
in righting that harm by shining a light on the truth.
♪ (REFLECTIVE PIANO MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
JUDGE DAYNA: Please have a seat on the witness stand.
TRUDY: Did your investigation uncover
any forensic or physical evidence
connecting any of the four to the murders?
No.
TRUDY: Did your investigation uncover any evidence
connecting the four to Robert Brashers in any way?
No.
TRUDY: And in the confessions,
there were confessions to the sexual assaults.
Based on what you knew about the exclusions of the four
from the vaginal swabs, is that possible?
DAN: No.
MICHAEL SCOTT: My name is Michael James Scott.
On December 6th, 1999,
when the yogurt shop murders occurred, I was 17 years old.
I did not commit those crimes. I had no involvement in them,
and I have maintained my innocence every day since.
I was accused, tried, and wrongfully convicted.
I lost my family. I lost my youth.
I lost my early adulthood.
No court ruling can return the years
and the love that were taken from me,
but it can acknowledge the truth.
I am not guilty.
Statement of Robert Springsteen IV.
This is the statement of Forrest Brook Welborn.
My name is Phil Scott. Michael Scott is my son.
My name is Janine Casey.
I am Michael Scott's former wife.
Death by cop is not how I envisioned
my husband's life ending.
I'm so proud of Forrest for never wavering
on his innocence in this horrible crime.
To the Austin Police Department, the DA's office,
and to Paul Johnson... (VOICE BREAKS)
(SNIFFLES)
...your tunnel vision...
stole my daddy's future.
JUDGE DAYNA: Today's decision is not an act of generosity.
It is an act of obligation.
No ruling can restore the time taken from you.
No judgment can fully remedy
the burden that you have carried.
But the court can and does...
state without qualification or hesitation
-that you are cleared... -♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
...and that your innocence is affirmed.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Three, two, one.
Today's testimony centered on loss,
the pain of losing families and losing youth,
as the four men wrongfully accused
in the yogurt shop murders
waited to have their names cleared.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Mm-hmm.
And, um...
(INDISTINCT CHATTER CONTINUES)
I just want you to know that.
-Okay? -Thank you.
Yes.
♪ (SOFT PENSIVE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
DAN: Can you get it up there without moving the...
SGT. MELANIE RODRIGUEZ: The story has been updated
with a new ending.
DAN: Same spot, but just updated.
That actually looks good.
Yeah. Looks pretty even.
Yeah.
♪ (SOFT PENSIVE MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
♪ (GENTLE PIANO MELODY PLAYS) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪