1991 Austin yogurt shop killings information

The 1991 Austin yogurt shop killings are an unsolved quadruple homicide which took place at an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas, United States on Friday, December 6, 1991. The victims were four teenage girls: 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison and Jennifer's 15-year-old sister Sarah. Jennifer and Eliza were employees of the shop, while Sarah and her friend Amy were in the shop to get a ride home with Jennifer after it closed at 11:00 pm. Approximately one hour before closing time, a man who had tried to hustle customers in his queue was permitted to use the toilet in back, took a very long time and may have jammed a rear door open. A couple who left the shop just before 11:00 pm, when Jennifer locked the front door to prevent more customers entering, reported seeing two men at a table acting furtively.

Around midnight, a police patrolman reported a fire in the shop, and first responders discovered the bodies of the girls inside. The victims had been shot in the head; at least one of them had been raped. A .22 and a .380 pistol were used to commit the murders, and the perpetrator probably exited out through a back door that was found unlocked. The organized method of operation, ability to control the victims, and destruction of evidence by arson pointed to an adult experienced in crime rather than teenagers, according to one of the original detectives on the case. Austin Police Department has DNA from an unknown male as a result of one of the rapes.^[1] A Y-chromosome match for the perpetrator DNA has been found in a research database of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but it has declined to reveal the identity of the man in accordance with the law of anonymity for donors, and because thousands of men could bear this fragment of DNA, which is unable to identify individuals.