‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ Director on 1991 Case That Haunts Austin

When Margaret Brown moved to Austin in 1996, she was greeted by the smiling faces of four young girls, peering down at her from faded billboards all over town. Highlighted in a shock of red, just underneath their black and white portraits was the question, “WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS?”

In December of 1991, nude the bodies of Eliza Thomas, 17, Amy Ayers, 13, and sisters Jennifer Harbison, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15, were found inside a North Austin yogurt shop. They had been shot, three of them execution-style, and the store had been set ablaze. The efforts to extinguish the fire destroyed much of the physical evidence, leaving behind a crime scene that would haunt and confound the community for years to come. 

The subsequent investigation was marked by twists and turns — false confessions, allegations of intimidation, thousands of tips, two convictions that were later overturned, and DNA evidence that didn’t match any of the four prime suspects. To this day, the case remains unsolved, though investigators are hopeful that advancements in technology will eventually allow them to build a DNA profile and find a match. 

It was the kind of tragedy that changes a city, leaving it scarred long after it fades from the headlines. Now, in The Yogurt Shop Murders, a four-part docuseries that debuted Aug. 3 on HBO, Brown re-examines the murders and their ongoing impact more than 30 years later. 

Brown, the director behind the critically acclaimed 2022 documentary Descendant, centered on descendants of the survivors of the last-known slave ship to arrive in the U.S., takes an atypical approach to this true-crime docuseries. Rather than dive into alternate suspects and theories, it poses a simple yet thorny question: What happens to a community in the aftermath of a crime that has no easy answers?

“I’ve done a lot of films that are about trauma, but with this one, there was a feeling about it, almost as if the story was cursed,” Brown says.

In archival footage and exclusive interviews, the people touched by this case are still pained by its memory. You can see it in the families, forever altered by their losses; in the regrets of investigators traumatized by their failure to provide closure; and in the resignation of suspects who know their overturned convictions won’t be enough to rid people of any nagging doubts about their culpability. 

The series is a vivid meditation on grief and memory, and the power of each of these intangible forces to consume and define us. As Sonora Thomas, the younger sister of Eliza, says in Episode Two: “We’re fascinated by this unsolved crime, but if you interview somebody who survived through it, I think the fascination goes away pretty quickly. This isn’t something that you just overcome or recover from. That’s a story that’s more important than whodunit.” 

Brown spoke with Rolling Stone about the documentary,which airs new episodes each Sunday through Aug. 24, and the three years she spent making it. 

What was your introduction to this case? Do you remember how you first heard about it?
I remember going to parties and hearing drunk friends talk about what happened. Some of them went to school with the girls or with some of the boys who were thought to have done it. It was just sort of in the water in Austin, and I knew so many people who were connected to it. 

You were approached by Fruit Tree, Emma Stone and Dave McCary’s production company with the idea to do a documentary about it. What made you say yes?
My best friend is a reporter who writes about crime; she called it the craziest case in Texas, and she said I had to do it. [Fruit Tree] mentioned that they had archival footage, so I asked to see what they had, and it was just so captivating. Seeing Austin in the early Nineties, there was this almost Lynchian vibe to it. I could immediately hear the music in my head. 

This docuseries isn’t trying to solve the case. Instead, it’s centered around the people who were traumatized by it in their quest for answers. Did you know from the beginning how you wanted to tell this story?
I don’t want to compare films, but with Descendant, that was about dealing with America’s trauma. We went straight from that to filming this, and I did think at first that I would take a more stylized approach, but then I saw the crime scene photos and met the families. Their pain hit me so viscerally. They were processing this trauma like it had just happened, and I didn’t want to ignore that. 

There’s a kind of meta commentary within the series, where the families talk about the pain of having to open up to reporters over the years about the worst moment of their lives. Was that a concern of yours going into these interviews?
There were times that someone agreed to do an interview, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get another shot to talk to them again, so I had to treat it like it was my only shot. The interviews would go on for a really long time, and it was hard for the parents especially, because they’ve been the face of this for so long, and after 30 years, there comes a time where you don’t want to do it anymore. Then here I am, asking them to open up again about something they never want to talk about. I remember learning from [my interviews with] Sonora that it would take her weeks to recover. It’s just really hard to ask people to do it, because it takes a real toll on them. 

Was there anyone that you really had to convince to participate?
Barbara [Ayres-Wilson, Jennifer and Sarah Harbison’s mom]. She’s one of the beating hearts of the show, but she did not want to do an interview. She was just done. It was so hard to convince her, and I felt so bad even asking her. I pushed a little, in congruence with many conversations with Sonora, but I don’t think she’s ever going to watch the show. 

We also hear from Claire Huie, an aspiring filmmaker who previously tried to make her own documentary on the case. The series doesn’t just use some of her footage, it positions her as someone else who got sucked into the fray. Why did you decide to include her in the series?
I remember there was a moment when I went, “Oh, my God, Claire is a proxy [for me].” I identified with her so much, but I also felt this guilt that trying to make this film and tell this story had destroyed her. It was this really interesting relationship we had, where, sometimes, when I couldn’t figure out where to go or what to do, I would interview her again and have her talk about her footage. 

As you’ve said, this case is infamously convoluted — police were inundated with tips, there were more than 50 confessions, and yet, there was no physical evidence tying the four suspects pursued by investigators to the crime scene. There are so many theories out there and rabbit holes to fall down. How did you start wrapping your head around it?
It took a long time, and honestly, I don’t know if my head is completely around it even now. But I started with the facts: What do we know? What can we agree on? And it’s what Beverly Lowery, who wrote the book Who Killed These Girls?, says in the first episode: “The first thing you have to know is the fire and the water.” Those two things made the crime scene so hard to parse. But the second-most important thing is that, in 1991, DNA was new, and it was a really big deal that they got DNA at the crime scene at all. That wasn’t something you normally did in 1991 in Austin, Texas. If that hadn’t happened, who knows where we would be right now.

How did you want to approach some of the conflicting perspectives in this story, whether that was the main suspects or the investigators?
I have my own opinions about what I think happened, but I just tried to lead with compassion for every single person. Sometimes you make things and you think, “This person is a bad-faith actor.” I didn’t feel that way with anyone on this. I think some of the investigators might have gotten tunnel vision, but I don’t know, I thought that these were all good people. 

Episode Three is focused on the slippery, unreliable nature of memory — how it can be a lifeline for the families in their grief, and also a weapon wielded against the suspects. You also dive into the phenomenon of false confessions. Why was that important to you?
A lot of what I’m interested in is how time changes, and how memory can be shifted. Memory is not what we think it is. It’s so shifty. We thought about that a lot during filming. There was Shawn [Ayers, Amy’s brother] talking about his memories of Amy fading, and how that haunts him, versus how the people who interrogated the boys used their memories against them and manipulated them. It was fascinating. I didn’t know any of that stuff. I didn’t know cops could lie to you [as an interrogation tactic]. If I’m a teenager and a cop tells me something happened, I would think, “Oh, my God, is my memory fucked?” Who would you trust?

How did it impact you to live with this story for the last few years?
It was so dark to be in that space with these families for three and a half years. It was tough. At a certain point, my editors were getting weird nightmares, people were threatening to quit. My cinematographer collapsed on set twice, and I was just like, “What is happening?” That was really surprising.

By the end, did your thoughts about the case change? What did you learn that surprised you?
Usually, by the end of a project, I have some kind of coherent takeaway, and I don’t think I have one for this. It just has a different kind of logic to it than other things I’ve made. The families haven’t made peace with it, and I’ve learned that that’s something that just doesn’t happen, but I also learned a lot about suffering and grief, and how to live gracefully alongside something unimaginable.