In addition to being very TL;DR, this post was difficult to write as this documentary covers horrific, very real deaths, and the aftermath, which - decades on - has no closure. There is a lot of human pain involved, a lack of justice and no easy answers. I don't have any particular insight into the events other than knowing North Austin in the 80's and 90's. And my own opinions regarding several elements is probably bubbling over in the post.
Like all cities, Austin is home to some notable crimes.
In the 1880's, we were home to a serial killer known as The Servant Girl Annihilator. I grew up and attended college in the shadow of the University of Texas Tower, from which Charles Whitman killed 15 people and injured more than 30 more.
My sophomore year of high school I was living in North Houston/ Spring. However, as a kid I spent six years living in Austin, from 1984 to 1990. Formative years - 4th through 9th grade.
I retained friendships despite the move, and one evening - more than a year after I'd moved away - a friend called. Without much prior chit-chat, she dove in and started telling me about four girls murdered in the Northcross area, a street of strip malls and a one-story shopping mall. I had never been in that yogurt store, but I knew the area, certainly.
Not to be too callous - but the murder rate of Austin was and is a fraction of what Houston sees any year., so at first I wasn't paying much attention. But she began describing what occurred, and she wasn't sensationalizing anything. The facts were enough, and required no dramatic flair. I didn't know if she was scared or sad or both. Or something else. But she was affected. And, of course, she was a teenage girl who worked in a shop, sometimes by herself.
And that's how I found out that four girls around my age had been murdered in the back of a yogurt shop in Austin.
