For tried and true Texans, HBO’s newest docuseries might hit close to home. “The Yogurt Shop Murders” digs into a 33-year-old cold case in Austin — a murder so haunting, the then-mayor proclaimed it the day Austin “lost (its) innocence.”
In December 1991, when Austin was still a relatively small college town, not yet on the cusp of the country’s technology boom, firefighters responded to flames at a frozen yogurt shop in north Austin . What they found inside was haunting: the bodies of four local teenage girls, who had been tied up and shot in the shop’s back room. Their bodies were badly burned, and police believed that the fire had been set “in an attempt to cover the slayings,” the Austin-American Statesman reported at the time.
Despite the arrest of two suspects, the case remains unsolved nearly 35 years later. Eight years after the crime, four men were questioned. Charges were dropped against two, but the other two (who confessed, and later recanted) were convicted — but then released after 10 years in prison, exonerated by new DNA testing, according to CBS News.
“The story of the yogurt shop investigation is, in part, about how a police force with a small-town mentality found itself confronted with a big-time urban crime and tried its best to solve it,” Texas Monthly reporter Michael Hall wrote in 2001. “But it’s also a tale of how intense political and social pressures brought out, or merely confirmed, the worst instincts in some officers on a police force that was determined to get convictions.”
“The result: a tragedy with even more victims and a police department reeling from mistakes.
“The Yogurt Shop Murders” focuses on the crime’s aftermath — decades’ worth of trauma, prosecutors’ ongoing quest for justice, and a community’s attempt to reconcile its grief. Director Margaret Brown spent three years interviewing the victims’ families and the crime’s investigative teams, pulling interrogation room footage and archival interviews from an incomplete 2009 documentary from filmmaker Claire Huie (“it consumed her, and she had to quit,” Brown told Variety).
The docuseries premiered in March at the SXSW film festival and is being produced by A24, an independent distribution company known for mega-hits like “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once,” “Midsommar,” and “Moonlight.” The show first pitched by Academy Award-winning actress Emma Stone and her husband, who briefly lived in Austin.
“It’s something you can’t really get away from in Austin,” Brown told Variety.
“I just remember in the 90s and up to this day, just sort of being at parties in Austin and people would just start talking about the yogurt shop murders and theories and what really happened,” she later told CBS Austin. “People remember it so viscerally.”
Brown hasn’t viewed the extent of the crime scene documents herself (“they will haunt you for the rest of your life,” her editorial team said to her) — and the real-life story is so disturbing that A24 actually paid for the team’s therapy, Variety reported.
“I think that there’s just something about the desensitization of crime, how it’s just constant, constant, constant,” she told CBS Austin. “And I really wanted to make something that you really felt the impact of.”
For decades, Austin has carried the impact. 1,500 mourners attended the victims’ mass, in the immediate wake of the murders; six months later, 1,200 marched in front of the state capitol, brandishing a “We Will Not Forget” banner. “Austin reacted to the murders of the four girls with disbelief, and its citizens came together as if they had all known the victims,” Hall wrote in Texas Monthly.
New episodes of the four-part docuseries premiere Sunday evenings on HBO.
