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Investigators have identified a suspect in a Texas quadruple murder cold case more than three decades old.
Police in Austin said on Friday that they had linked Robert Eugene Brashers to the murders of four teen girls at a yogurt shop in 1991 through DNA.
Brashers, who committed suicide in 1999, was also suspected of being a serial predator at the time, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
He was convicted of attempted murder after shooting a woman in the head in 1985, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was released in 1989 after only serving three years in prison, the Statesman reported.
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He fatally shot himself following a police standoff at a motel where he had been hiding with his wife, daughter and two stepdaughters, after releasing them from the motel.
DNA evidence also linked Brashers after his death to three rapes and murders in Missouri and South Carolina – including a mother and daughter – and a rape in Tennessee.
Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, who were teenagers at the time of the murders, were charged and convicted of the killings in 2001 and 2002.
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They were sentenced to death and life in prison respectively, but their convictions were overturned on appeal, one of the reasons being that there was no DNA evidence linking them to the crimes.
Investigators say more than 1,200 people were considered potential suspects over the years, and false confessions were common. In 1992, a biker gang leader in Mexico was briefly suspected but later cleared after revealing his confession had been extracted through torture.
Later becoming known as the “Yogurt Shop Murders,” the violent case remains infamous in Austin and is still open. HBO premiered a docuseries about the murders last month.
The crime shocked Austin, a city that “lost its innocence” that night, a Texas lawmaker said.
“I remember at the time how shocking it was because I think Austin, at that time, was still a relatively small town in Texas that kind of lost its innocence on that day,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas previously told Fox News.
McCaul, former Texas deputy attorney general and former federal prosecutor, passed legislation giving the families of cold case victims the opportunity to petition the federal government to reexamine cases older than three years.
The legislation, known as The Homicide Victim Families’ Rights Act, requires the federal government to inform family members of cold-case victims of their right to do so, the congressman explained.
“This brutal murder of four teenage girls, and the way it was done … that may happen in other cities, but not Austin. It was very shocking, and part of it is because the families never got a resolution to the case.”
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. Some of the victims were sexually assaulted. The building was then set on fire.
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“Our team never gave up working this case,” Austin police said in a statement on Friday.
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The department has a conference planned on Monday to discuss the new evidence in the case.
Fox News’ Stepheny Price and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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