Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ On HBO, A Docuseries About The 1991 Killings Of 4 Teenage Girls In Austin That Is Still Unsolved

The Yogurt Shop Murders is a four-part docuseries, directed by Margaret Brown, is about the brutal December, 1991 murders of four teenage girls — 13 year-old Amy Ayers, 17 year-old Jennifer Harbison and her 15 year-old sister Sara, and 17 year-old Eliza Thomas — in the Austin strip mall yogurt shop where Jennifer and Eliza worked. To this day, the case remains unsolved, and to many in Texas’ capital city, it was the day that Austin “lost its innocence,” transforming from sleepy college town to a big city with big city problems.

Opening Shot: “Austin, 2009.” A man named Rob Springsteen walks through a mall, and goes into Macy’s looking for a suit. He just got off Death Row and is getting ready for an interview he’s going to do on 48 Hours.

The Gist: In the series, Brown talks to many of the victims’ family members, including Thomas’ sister younger sister Sonora, who considers herself the “fifth victim” because she usually was at the shop when her sister was closing it for the night. Detectives that investigated the case, including Mike Huckabay and lead investigator John Jones, are also interviewed, as well as 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty. Also interviewed is documentary filmmaker Claire Huie, who filmed most of the 2009 footage before the scope of the story led her to not finish her planned documentary on the murders.

Through extensive media footage, as well as what Huie shot in 2009, we learn about the murders, and how the person or people who shot the girls in the head covered their tracks by setting the rear of the shop on fire. But the fire wasn’t the only thing that covered evidence; the copious amount of water that firefighters used to douse the flames also severely degraded the crime scene.

Springsteen is among the people who were initially arrested for the murders: His friend Maurice Pierce, arrested in a mall while carrying a gun, implicated Springsteen along with their friends Forrest Welborn and Michael Scott, but no hard evidence linking them to the murders could be found.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Yogurt Shop Murders reminds us of Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, which takes a more holistic, victim-led view of murders that were splashed all over the media at the time the bodies were found.

Our Take: As we mentioned in the section above, Brown takes a holistic view of the case at the center of The Yogurt Shop Murders. What do we mean by that? It’s an approach that not only examines the nuts and bolts of the crime itself, and the investigation that followed, but takes a real in-depth look at how the case traumatized the families and investigators, and how it continues to reverberate in Austin 34 years later, especially because it was never solved.

It’s an approach that we appreciate, given the sameness of so many true crime docs that are out there. Instead of a flurry of cops being interviewed, Brown mostly talks to the two main investigators, Jones and Huckabay. Both are characters in their own right, and in Jones’ case, his mental health was affected by the decades of frustration with the case not being solved. Both also have no problem throwing another investigator, Hector Polanco, under the bus for extracting confessions from people that didn’t hold up. ISonora Thomas, now a therapist, talks about changing how trauma like what she has had to deal with, lives inside of the people left behind so they can go on with their lives.

Angles like these take The Yogurt Shop Murders beyond just a story about a tragic and frustratingly elusive case and makes it personal. The first episode ends with an eight-minute segment of an interview Huie did with Barbara Ayers-Wilson, mother to Sara and Jennifer Harbison, detailing how she experienced learning about her daughters’ deaths. All of the complex feelings that she felt in 1991 and still felt at the time of the 2009 interview are in that long segment, and it shows just how the scars of tragedies like this never fully heal.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: We mentioned the long segment of Huie’s interview with Ayers-Wilson, which is unusual for a docuseries like this.

Sleeper Star: Huckabay certainly has no problem speaking his mind, especially now that he’s retired.

Most Pilot-y Line: The gentleman who was helping Rob Springsteen at Macy’s seemed accommodating but uncomfortable as Springsteen talks about getting off Death Row. Wonder why he signed the release that allowed him to be shown in that footage?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The makers of The Yogurt Shop Murders are not just curious about the case but how deeply the case affected Austin and the people who were intimately involved with it over the past three decades, an approach that we wish we saw more often in true crime docs.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.