Doc Watch: The Yogurt Shop Murders - Part 5 (2026)

Watched:  05/24/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Margaret Brown

Last year we watched the documentary series The Yogurt Shop Murders (2025), a multi-part doc that covered the unsolved murder of four teenage girls in a yogurt shop in Austin, Texas in 1991 and the 34 years of nightmare that followed for the families and for some of the accused.  

I'll let you read that post and why the doc was impactful.  And maybe a bit of why, as a local, it hit home.

Ironically - within about five weeks of the airing of the fourth and final episode, the City of Austin announced a positive ID on the murderer - Robert Eugene Brashers.  Brashers was a drifter of sorts and is best described as a serial killer.  Based on DNA evidence and ballistics evidence, it is pretty clear who committed the crime.

After three decades, the identification of Brashers exonerated the four teenagers identified by APD.  And I raised an eyebrow at the timing of the doc's release as even just two weeks ago, the City agreed to a $35 million dollar payout to the three surviving boys and to the family of the fourth.  I doubt this will mean a sixth episode, but you never know.

Personally, I didn't believe we'd ever hear of a final answer regarding the culprit.  The case had been so bungled and so much time had passed with investigators refusing to change their focus from the four suspects, I thought it a distinct possibility that APD just wouldn't place any credence on any other answers.  Which is harsh, but.

Director Margaret Brown seems to have fired up all the engines again - which can't have been easy - and made her way back to Austin to continue the story she started.  We revisit many of the subjects from the first four episodes and visit with one of the four suspects.

What spills out is strange and maybe not altogether surprising.  And deeply human.

There is a sense of closure for the victim's families.  Absolutely.  At the time of filming, they didn't yet seem to have entirely grasped what the positive identity of the killer actually meant for the four suspects and how their lives had been ruined - not because of any horrific actions, but because of horrendous police work.  But, still, you're glad for parents and siblings who can at last feel they know what happened, no matter how utterly strange.  But it's clear, justice has become utterly muddied over the past few decades.

Brasher's life is looked into, and he committed similar crimes that we *know of* across the southern United States.  It seems abundantly clear he was the guy - there's far too many details from DNA to timing of his placement in Texas to even witness testimony at the time of the murders that should have always pointed at a real, lone culprit.

The investigating detective who doggedly pursued the four teens *still* refuses to believe they weren't part of the murders.  Like - the denial he's living in says nothing good for what he's like as a person, and if I were in jail because of this guy, I'd absolutely tell my lawyers to use this doc as exhibit A for a retrial.

Powerfully, one of the suspects, Forrest Welborn, speaks to Brown and we see what the real fallout is for him.  This isn't resolving anything.  His entire adult life has been shaped by something he didn't do, never falsely confessed to, never agreed to.  It was all what other people said.  

Sure, the payout will help.  I guess.  It's a cataclysmic miscarriage of justice, and that the city is willing to the payout is sort of surprising in and of itself.  

But that's the thing - this is only over in that a single question is now answered.  But how this went so wrong with the investigation, what could have been done correctly to find Brashers - an unknown who was mostly passing through town - is impossible to know.  How and why the police refused to look elsewhere when even the coerced confessions make little logical sense is crazy.

Anyway - I was glad to get this closing chapter.  I suspect my desire to get a check in three years from now - once some of the subjects get a chance to see the doc - is just exploitation.  

But credit to APD for never really letting go, and letting someone entirely new pick up the investigation with none of the old prejudices and actually solve the fucking thing.