Inside the Unspeakable Killings That Changed Austin Forever
Margaret Brown explores the tragedy and lingering trauma in four-part series The Yogurt Shop Murders
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., March 7, 2025
Every community has a crime that redefines its image of itself. Whether it’s the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles, or the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, it’s an event so terrible that it becomes seen as an end to innocence.
In Austin, it’s the infamous Yogurt Shop Murders. On December 6, 1991, four teenagers – Amy Ayers (aged 13), Eliza Thomas (17), and the Harbison sisters, Jennifer (17) and Sarah Harbison (15) – were shot and their bodies burned at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! at the corner of Rockwood and Anderson. The slayings remain unsolved, damaging not only the lives of their families and friends, but those of the wrongfully prosecuted suspects, and of investigators haunted by the case they never cracked.
Now Austin-based director Margaret Brown is exploring that seemingly never-ending tragedy in her new four-part series for HBO, The Yogurt Shop Murders. Ahead of the first episode receiving its premiere at South by Southwest, she explained how she almost felt obligated to tell the story. “It haunted the town so much that I felt it had to be an Austin filmmaker telling it.”
But if you’re expecting a traditional true crime drama, replete with reenactments and archive footage, that’s not the kind of documentary that Brown makes – even if she initially thought that was the plan. She explained, “I have a lot of friends who are journalists, and we had talked about the crime, and they had got me interested in something that I ended up not being as interested in, which is the machinations of the crime.” Yet that doesn’t mean she wasn’t still fascinated by the story. “When I met the families, I pivoted,” she said, and as a result “the show is less about true crime and more about trauma. ... To me, the screaming headline was about all the people that it touched.”
It’s also about Austin over the last three and a half decades. Whether exploring her birthplace of Mobile, Alabama, in The Order of Myths, or towns along the Gulf of Mexico in The Great Invisible, or the lives of the residents of Africatown in Descendant, Brown’s documentaries are less forensic than they are holistic depictions of an entire community. “And this film is definitely about Austin,” she said.
Moreover, rather than simply rehashing the bucolic myths of early-Nineties Austin, she tries to be honest about what it was really like to truly contextualize the murders. “Was it really innocent before,” she pondered, “or was it just that crimes were happening in certain neighborhoods?”
While Brown makes films about communities, the theme of trauma is also constant, such as the environmental carnage of an oil spill in The Great Invisible or the legacy of slavery in Descendant. The more she researched the murders, the more she knew that trauma was the subject. “I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. That was the only way in for me.”
It was actually the first day of principal photography that reinforced that conviction, as she sat down with Pam and Bob Ayers, Amy’s parents. “The first thing Bob said to me was the amount of hours and minutes it had been since his daughter had been murdered. It just hit me in this moment that, oh my god, time froze for this family in a way that I can’t even imagine.”
Yet even before that moment, Brown was aware of the weight of the task. When she moved to Austin in the late Nineties, it wasn’t just that the psychic wound of the murders was still fresh. It had left a physical imprint on the city, a billboard at Ben White and South Congress with photos of the girls, pleading for tips that never came. She was also astonished by how many people she met were affected by the crime. “So many of my friends in town have extremely personal connections – or were taken in by the cops. All the weirdos were targeted.”
Those scars have never really healed. Instead, the Yogurt Shop Murders have become a part of Austin’s identity. Brown said that she realized that having lived in Austin on and off over the past 30 years would inform how she told this story. At the same time, having not been here when the murders happened meant it wasn’t as immediately personal to her. She recalled the words of a friend and fellow filmmaker who had been a classmate of the victims: “She told me, ’I could never work on that, but I’m glad that you’re doing it.’”
The Yogurt Shop Murders
TV Premiere, World Premiere
Monday 10, noon, Zach Theatre
