1991 Austin yogurt shop murders

Shortly before midnight on Friday, December 6, 1991, a patrolling Austin police officer noticed a fire coming from an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop and reported it to his dispatcher. After it was extinguished, firefighters discovered four nude bodies. Each had been shot in the head execution style with a .22 lead bullet. Sarah's hands had been bound behind her with a pair of panties and she had also been gagged and raped. Jennifer was not bound but her hands were behind her back. Eliza had been gagged and her hands were also tied behind her back. All three had been severely charred and shot in the back of the head.[2]

Unlike the others, Amy's body was found in a separate part of the shop. She was not charred but she had received 2nd and "very early" 3rd degree burns on 25-30% of her body. She was found with a "sock-like cloth" around her neck. She had been shot the same as the others however the bullet had missed her brain. She also had a second bullet which did severe damage to her brain. It exited through her lateral cheek and jawline.[3] It is thought that the killers had stacked all 4 bodies on top of another but Amy pulled herself off and managed to crawl to a different part of the store. Sarah's and Eliza's bodies were found stacked on top of each other with Jennifer's body next to them which is theorised to have been stacked on top of them but had been disturbed when Amy crawled away. Autopsy results show high levels of a BTU output which suggests an accelerant may have been used. Initial investigations had produced a large number of persons of interest, among them a 15 year old caught with a .22 (not established to be the murder weapon) in a nearby mall days after the murders. Although he initially gave promising information, after tough questioning detectives decided he was trying to get himself out the gun charge and eliminated him and three petty criminal friends he had implicated, none of who were older than 17 years old at the time.[4] [5]

Several years later a new detective on the case theorized that the four teens from 1991, now in their twenties, were credible suspects. In a string of interrogations conducted by various detectives, confessions were obtained from some of the suspects in which they said all four had participated. No record was kept of what was said to the men in the 1991 interrogations making it impossible to know whether the detectives had supplied information to the suspects in the initial interrogations that could be used to implicate the suspects in the later interrogations if they were to reference it. Two of the four were sent to trial entirely for their self incriminating statements. The prosecution went into a great deal of detail at length about the horrific nature of the crimes against the young victims, but presented no hard evidence other than the confessions. The two were convicted, one being sentenced to death, and other got life because he had been 15 at the time. However, the prosecution's tactic of using excerpts of each one's alleged confessions at the other's trial was ruled to have violated the Confrontation Clause because the co-defendant was non-testifying. Both convictions were overturned on the Confrontation Clause alone, and the men were freed in 2009. The prosecution insisted that they would be re-tried. However, forensic investigation showed that the DNA found in a victim was not theirs, or that of the other two implicated in their confessions, and the prosecution abandoned plans for a retrial.[6] Texas courts later decided that those released were not entitled to compensation because they had not proven that they didn’t commit the crime.[7]

One of the detective in the interrogations, Hector Polanco, had been accused of coercing false confessions in the notorious case of Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger. Both were released after 13 years in prison; Danziger was assaulted in prison which resulted in permanent brain damage.[8][9][10][11] [12] Seven jurors from the trials have stated that they would not have convicted the men had this evidence been available at the time.[13][14]

The murders were the subject of Beverly Lowry's 2016 nonfiction book Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders,[15] Corey Mitchell's 2016 nonfiction book Murdered Innocents[16] and the novel See How Small by Scott Blackwood.[17]

• West Memphis Three

Murders in the Austin area:

• Murder of Jennifer Cave - Also in West Campus
• Murder of John Goosey and Stacy Barnett
• Celeste Beard

• The Yogurt Shop Murders by Former Texas Assistant Attorney General Erik Moebius
• National Organization of Parents Of Murdered Children