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Thirty-three years ago, what was meant to be a sweet trip to a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas, turned into a tragedy when four girls were fatally shot on Dec. 6, 1991.
Amy Ayers, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas, all teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, were killed and stripped of their clothing in a room in the back of the shop, before the place was set on fire. The case, which has remained unsolved for decades, is the subject of a new HBO documentary, The Yogurt Shop Murders, directed by Margaret Brown.
In four episodes, premiering Sundays starting Aug. 3, the series explores all of the possible theories about who murdered the girls. It features interviews with investigators—and their interviews with the suspects—the victims’ family members, and rare footage of the suspects filmed by a local Austin documentary filmmaker, Claire Huie. Exactly why these four girls were murdered is still unknown.
“I would be at parties, and people would just start talking about the yogurt shop murders,” Brown, an Austin native, says. “It’s part of the mythos of Austin, part of the collective memory, the fabric of the city. Everyone has a theory.”
Here’s what to know about the first episode of The Yogurt Shop Murders.
A key arrest
The first episode of The Yogurt Shop Murders opens with Huie’s footage of a man named Robert Springsteen going shopping for a suit at a Macy’s. He tells the salesperson he’s just gotten off death row and is looking for sharp clothes for an interview with CBS’s investigative show 48 Hours and various court appearances. The scene teases that viewers will learn how Springsteen became a free man in the next episodes.
He was named about a week after the shooting, when police arrested his friend, Maurice Pierce, 16, who was carrying a loaded pistol in the waistband of his jeans in the Northcross Mall Plaza near the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop. It was the same type of gun that police were looking for…
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