abc news coverage highlights a decades long investigation in Austin that used advanced DNA testing and ballistics to identify Robert Eugene Brashers as the probable killer in the yogurt shop murders, the Austin Police Department announced.
Detective Dan Jackson led the renewed effort and submitted a spent .380 shell casing to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which produced a match to another unsolved case, Austin police said.
Investigators also reexamined Y chromosome DNA recovered from a victim’s fingernails. A South Carolina laboratory reported a match to a profile tied to Brashers, and Austin police directly compared the recovered profile to Brashers’ profile, the department said.
Authorities said the DNA work and the ballistic link produced a combined forensic picture that pointed to Brashers, who had a prior violent criminal record and died by suicide after a police standoff, according to reporting included in the ABC News special.
Impact And Reactions
Families of the four victims welcomed the announcement as long sought truth, saying they sought only the facts, while Travis County District Attorney José Garza pursued formal exonerations of four men once accused in the case, the news reports said.
Garza apologized to Maurice Pierce, Forrest Welborn, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen and the families of those men after the state declared them innocent, the coverage reported.
Victim relatives described the lasting damage from the investigation and its long arc, and Pam Ayers said investigators were right to check fingernails because she believed her daughter fought back, ABC News reported.
The ABC News special includes interviews with family members of the victims, the daughter of Brashers, law enforcement officials and genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, whose work is cited as critical in linking Brashers to several unsolved crimes across states, the reports say.
Coverage noted prior investigative efforts, including earlier confessions that were later recanted, trials that produced convictions then were overturned, and decades of preserved evidence that enabled new laboratory techniques to be applied, the reporting said.
The renewed findings also followed publicity that renewed public interest, including a documentary series, and led officials to say that improved forensic tools made the resolution possible after many years, according to the ABC pieces.
