Robert Eugene Brashers stole a truck in Marietta, Georgia, on Nov. 29, 1991, and headed west, probably destined for his father’s residence in Arizona. But somehow, he wound up in Austin along the way. On the night of Dec. 6, he spotted a lit-up, open yogurt shop in the Hillside Center on West Anderson Lane. When he pulled into the center’s parking lot, he would have seen employees Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both 17, behind the counter, two other girls -- Jennifer’s sister Sarah, 15, and Amy Ayers, 13 -- and a few customers inside the store. What happened after that doesn't need retelling.
Less than 48 hours later, a Border Patrol agent stopped Brashers at a checkpoint on I-10 between El Paso and Las Cruces. Officers discovered that he was driving a stolen vehicle and that he was a felon possessing a .380 pistol. It would take 34 years to connect this gun and its owner with Austin’s Yogurt Shop Murders.
For most of Mindy Montford’s childhood, she lived about a mile from the shop, and when the murders happened, she was a UT senior residing near campus. The shock of the initial news and the drama swirling around the crime became part of her life.
In 2017, as First Assistant District Attorney for District Attorney Margaret Moore, Mindy was assigned as lead prosecutor on the investigation after the original suspects, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were convicted, remanded for new trials, and then released after unknown DNA was discovered.
That year, she attended a national legal conference and met Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County DA who had prosecuted the Golden State Killer case. Mindy asked Schubert if they could discuss genealogy tracing because she thought they could use it in the Yogurt Shop Murders case. This initial conversation sparked Mindy’s thinking about how to solve their Austin case and about establishing a national database to link crimes with similar profiles to each other.
In 2020, Amy Ayers’s brother Shawn and his wife, Angie, along with Mindy, pitched the Texas Attorney General’s office on starting a statewide cold case unit to help local agencies with over 20,000 unsolved cases in Texas. The AG’s office agreed and provided funding. Around this time, Jose Garza defeated Moore for the Travis County DA’s post and brought his own assistant into the office, so Mindy started looking for another job. In 2021, she accepted the opportunity to lead the new Cold Case Unit.
Back to square one.
When Austin Police Department Detective Dan Jackson took on the Yogurt Shop Murders cold case in 2022, he inherited 200,000 pages of testimony, leads and follow-up, crime scene analysis, interviews, trial notes, and more. He had only a smattering of evidence from the crime scene, which the firefighters had largely trashed while putting out the blaze.
One thing Jackson decided to try in 2025 was resubmitting the .380 shell casing from the crime scene to the National Ballistics Database. APD investigators had submitted it in 2007 and once before that. But the technology had improved, and he hoped someone might have entered a matching casing in the interim. This time, they obtained a match for a gun used in a 1998 assault/murder of Linda Rutledge in Lexington, Kentucky. This case had been entered into the database in 2024, after the previous requests from Austin. However, the Rutledge case’s assault kit that potentially held Brasher’s DNA had never been tested. APD paid to have it done on a rush basis.
The next step required the generosity of another state’s crime unit. APD had an unidentified male DNA profile from Amy Ayers's body. Matching it to its donor was problematic because it required a crime lab with a male-only DNA database and a manual search. In 2019, APD detectives had made a national request to all public labs that kept this type of data to run such a search. They received no responses. When Jackson made the nationwide request again in 2025, South Carolina responded and agreed to help. After running tests, they identified the DNA as coming from Brashers. It matched a sample that had been collected from the 1990 murder of Genevieve Zitricki in Greenville, SC.
With this evidence now in hand, Mindy and Jackson decided to go for broke. They still had a DNA sample from under Amy Ayers’ fingernails, and they had been holding it back. “We only had one chance to examine it,” Mindy says. They sent the sample to a Florida lab for an autosomal STR profile test, and it matched Brashers.
Soon after that, they received a DNA test result from the Kentucky victim’s body, and it was also a match for Brashers. “It all came full circle together then. I remember that we got the fingernails result and the Kentucky DNA linking Brashers around the same time,” Mindy says.
Amy’s brother Shawn says that in the last minutes of her life, his courageous little sister did something important by clawing her assailant, preserving that DNA. With this evidence in hand, the case was closed. In February 2026, a judge formally declared Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn innocent.
The follow-up
Mindy says investigators are still looking for other cases in which Brashers was the perpetrator. Calls are already coming in. Soon after his photo was made public in 2025, a woman contacted Jackson and reported seeing a man identical to Brashers at a Harlingen coffee/ice cream shop in late 1997. He was so menacing that she called the police and her boyfriend, who arrived first and scared the bad actor away. The lady says that she “froze” when she saw Brashers’ face on her TV screen, 28 years after the encounter.
Mindy has since left the statewide Cold Case Unit to oversee The National Cold Case Center. The Yogurt Shop investigation and the need for a database connecting cases across the country largely inspired its creation. It was founded by Anne Marie Schubert, Mindy, and Shawn and Angie Ayers. It provides much-needed resources to support cold-case investigations that often lose priority to active cases. Funding and manpower for police work are in short supply, and cold-case resources are often the first on the chopping block.
The National Cold Case Center hopes to provide these resources. There are over 300,000 unsolved homicide cases in the US (20,000+ in Texas). The Center also provides family support, which is very important to the Ayers. Mindy urges everyone to check out their nonprofit’s website, www.nationalcoldcasecenter.org. She adds that donations are welcome and are tax-deductible. “We can’t do it without help from the public!”
Of course, Mindy is optimistic about solving more cases. But a veteran from such a unit in Ohio gave her a dose of reality: for every case cracked, thousands will still be out there. “He told us that if you solve one a year, you're doing good,” Mindy says.
A quote from Shawn Ayers, Amy’s brother, at a press conference, Sept. 29, 2025.
“Mindy Montford – last of the Mohicans. Mindy has been there since the beginning, and yes, she told us face-to-face that she would never stop fighting and never stop helping us. Not surprising, she kept her word. We have laughed and cried together. But she never backed away from the fight and always gave us hope, not with her words, but with her actions. I hope that you have an idea of what you mean to us, me and my family. The world needs more Mindy Montfords. Thank you, Mindy.”
Timeline of the Austin crime and aftermath
Dec. 6, 1991—The Yogurt Shop murders.
Sept. 9, 1999—Police revisit the Maurice Pierce tip and interview Michael Scott again.
Sept. 15, 1999—Police interview Robert Springsteen in West Virginia.
Later in 1999 – All four of the original suspects are arrested for capital murder.
May 2001—Springsteen found guilty and sentenced to death.
September 2002—Scott found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
2006-2007—Both Scott and Springsteen are remanded for new trials.
2009—The DA’s office dismisses the charges when an unknown DNA profile was found. Scott and Springsteen are released.
September 2025 -- Robert Eugene Brashers is identified as the sole perpetrator.
February 2026 -- A Texas judge officially declares the four wrongfully accused/convicted men innocent.
Timeline of Robert Eugene Brashers' known crimes
April 4, 1990 -- Murder of Genevieve Zitricki in Greenville, SC.
Dec 6, 1991—Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin.
March 11, 1997—Home intrusion, four women tied up, 14-year-old assaulted in Memphis, TN. (The details of this crime are very similar to the Yogurt Shop murders.)
March 28, 1998—Assault and murder of two women in Portageville, MO. Two hours later, he invaded a woman’s home and shot her, but she fought him off, and he fled. DNA matched with the other assault that night.
Nov. 7, 1998—Murder of Linda Rutledge in Lexington, KY.
Jan. 19, 1999—Brashers commits suicide during a standoff with police, using the .380 pistol that was involved in the Austin murders.
