AUSTIN (KXAN) — Like many Austinites, longtime area attorney and public servant Margaret Moore remembers learning about the Yogurt Shop Murders.
“It was one of the most horrific crimes that Austin had experienced in during my time in in Austin,” she said. “I was in the DA’s office for four years as Assistant District Attorney — handled a number of murder cases that were pretty high profile — but nothing, nothing matched how horrible this crime was for this community.”
Decades later, as the newly-elected Travis County District Attorney in 2017, Moore created a special team of prosecutors and detectives with Austin Police’s Cold Case Unit to collaborate — with the goal of discovering who murdered those four girls found inside a burning business in 1991.
Moore described the case as a top priority for her and her First Assistant DA, Mindy Montford — who went on to help launch a statewide cold case unit out of the Texas Attorney General’s office.
“We lived with it. Almost every day we were talking about it, you know, ‘What? What? What else can we do? How can we get there?'” she recalls.
So, after learning APD had identified Robert Eugene Brashers as a suspect and linked him to the crime through DNA and ballistics testing, Moore said she was emotional.
She reflected on meeting the families of the four girls, almost immediately after taking office.
“The family was deeply desirous that the district attorney’s office reopened the case and try to get to a resolution of it, that that was a very easy commitment to make,” she said. “I’m a mom and a grandmother. And their pain? It was just as real that day as it had been. So it really was an easy thing to say, ‘Of course, delighted. We want to do this, and we will never give up on it.’ So, they they were so grateful, and we went from there.”
At that point, the families of the victims had been through several trials and years of legal back-and-forth, largely centered on four suspects who had been arrested eight years after the crime.
In 2009, new DNA testing revealed the presence of an unknown man’s genetic profile at the crime scene that did not match those suspects. That person’s identity became a key roadblock in the case and a key focus for Moore’s team.
They assembled all the evidence from the case into one conference room, described by people in the office at the time as a “war room.”
“They started with just sorting it out — figuring out what was still there and what, you know, trying to get all that in order and logged in,” she said. “But the primary objective from the beginning was to identify the source of the Y-profile that had caused the case to be dismissed.”
Listen to the interview above to hear the full conversation with Moore.
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