AUSTIN (Nexstar) — After 34 years, Austin Police (APD) finally have a prime suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders.
“This is something that could not have happened until 2025,” APD Detective Daniel Jackson said during a Monday briefing. “I’m sorry that it took 34 years for us to get here, but we’re here now.”
APD identified serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers as the likely sole perpetrator of the murders. However, Brashers wasn’t known as a serial killer during his lifetime, which ended in 1999 when he took his own life.
“After he died, DNA linked multiple unsolved murders and sexual assaults across the country to him between 2006 and 2017. They knew they had a serial killer in these different jurisdictions, but they didn’t know who he was,” Jackson said.
After creating a profile of the identical but unidentified DNA at the various scenes, they reached out to Brashers’ family to see if there was a genetic match.
“In 2018, that DNA testing confirmed that all of those unsolved up there and were all from Mr. Robert Brashers,” Jackson said. “So he’s good for sexual assaults and murders throughout the 90s that he never had to stand trial for.”
Jackson took over the case in 2022 and started looking into the DNA profile of the suspect. It wasn’t until late June 2025 when he experienced a breakthrough when analyzing a bullet casing found on the flood drain after the murders.
“I don’t know what made me go down that rabbit hole that morning, but I’m glad I did,” Jackson said. “What I found was that it had not been submitted into the NIBIN (National Integrated Ballistic Information Network) system in years.”
After consulting with colleagues, Jackson reuploaded the casing to the NIBIN system, and got a hit out of an undisclosed Kentucky location on July 2. After flying with Mindy Montford, who works in the cold case unit for the Texas Attorney General’s Office, to Kentucky to meet with law enforcement there, Jackson says they learned their cases had similar details.
Outside of a similar modus operandi and a ballistics match, Jackson said the connections dried up. Jackson said they had access to the Y-STR profile of DNA swabbed from the scene, which they had manually asked all labs in the nation to check for about a half dozen years ago. However, the technology then was less widely adopted, so Jackson tried again.
“We got a hit. Only one. The South Carolina State lab was the long lab in the country that responded that they have a match,” Jackson said. “I got on the phone with Greenville, South Carolina… he said he didn’t know anything about the [Yogurt Shop Murders] case. He didn’t know what it was and he said, ‘one of your victims, were they bound with their own clothing?’ and the hair stood on the back of my neck.”
Y-STR testing only works for males, and only isolates down the family tree (assuming no mutations, a father and a son will have identical Y-STR profiles). Jackson says they matched Brashers’ profile to a familiar record, and noted his profile is only shared by 0.12% of the U.S. population. They then tested against DNA found underneath one of the victim’s fingernails, and found a 2,500,000-to-1 match to Brashers.
The information used by Jackson to link Brashers to the murders came about recently. Jackson asked all police departments across the nation to upload their cold case materials to databases to help law enforcement agencies across the country to connect the dots.
One of the victim’s families suggested there should be a federal policy to speed up this process.
“To law enforcement far and near, please hear this. Open the cold case boxes. Please put the evidence in the databases. Run the rape kits. Do not wait, do it today,” Angie Ayers said.
Ayers is the sister-in-law of Amy Ayers, who was killed at 13. “Today, with the technology, we should be solving more cases. Let’s quit letting murders and habitual criminals out of prison. The justice system has failed the girls numerous times over the decades. This system has got to change. We have got to do better for the victims. I would live to ask President [Donald] Trump for conversation to help fix this broken system. I believe that you have the ability to change it.”
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