Brashers, who died in 1999, was a serial killer whose DNA has been connected to numerous crimes across the U.S., including the 1991 quadruple murder in Austin.
AUSTIN, Texas — Law enforcement sources confirmed to KVUE on Friday that investigators believe the Yogurt Shop Murders have been solved.
Robert Eugene Brashers has been identified as the man who killed 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas and 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt Shop in North Austin on Dec. 6, 1991.
Law enforcement sources say Brashers was identified as the suspect as a result of genetic genealogy technology applied to a DNA profile. But this isn’t the first time Brashers’s DNA has been tied to a grisly crime.
Robert Eugene Brashers’s history of murder
On March 28, 1998, the bodies of 38-year-old Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter, Megan Scherer, were found in their home in Portageville, Missouri. Missouri officials said both of the Scherers had been murdered, and Megan Scherer had been sexually assaulted.
A partial DNA profile was developed from evidence at the crime scene, but the profile didn’t have enough markers to be entered into the Combined DNA Index System, commonly known as CODIS.
In 1999, Brashers died by suicide. But his death was far from the end of his story.
In the years that followed the Scherer murders, Missouri officials said investigators conducted numerous interviews and followed hundreds of leads. The case was also featured on “America’s Most Wanted.”
Then, in 2006, significant advances in DNA testing led evidence from the Scherer murders to be resubmitted to the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Crime Library. A full suspect DNA profile was developed and entered into CODIS.
That resulted in a match to the April 1990 murder of 28-year-old Genevieve Zitricki in Greenville, South Carolina.
Missouri officials said following that match, investigators from South Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri worked together to investigate more than 1,200 leads and the cases were again featured on “America’s Most Wanted.”
More years passed. In 2017, the investigation yielded a CODIS match to the March 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee.
In 2018, investigators contacted a private company called Parabon NanoLabs. Using genetic genealogy technology, Parabon was able to identify Robert Eugene Brashers as a possible suspect in the cases.
Investigators obtained DNA samples from Brashers’s surviving family members. Missouri officials said traditional forensic tests results indicated Brashers “was, with very little doubt, responsible for the crimes.”
The same year, Brashers remains were exhumed in order to confirm the DNA in the profile was his. Additional DNA samples were collected, and lab tests confirmed Brashers’s DNA matched the suspect DNA in the cases.