How DNA Finally Cracked the Yogurt Shop Murders After 34 Years
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
This is the turning point. After 34 years of dead ends, the infamous Yogurt Shop murders in Austin have finally been cracked—not by a tip, not by a confession, but by modern genetic genealogy and DNA testing. In this first segment, I walk you through how investigators resurrected crime scene evidence, plugged it into public DNA databases, built family trees, and landed on Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
It wasn’t easy. The crime scene was ravaged by fire. Early DNA testing had limits. The wrong suspects had been tried. But in 2025, cold‑case teams used new techniques to extract male DNA profiles, cross‑referenced distant relatives, and zeroed in on Brashers. A former detective has even claimed a bullet casing found in a drain matched the firearm Brashers used in his suicide. (That’s not official yet — but it’s a powerful piece of the puzzle.)
Why this matters: naming the suspect doesn’t end the story. It shifts the burden to accountability, record integrity, and transparency. This first part shows how science finally caught up to a case that law enforcement once believed might never be solved. If you thought cold cases were frozen in time—this rewrites that myth.
Tune in to see exactly how the match was made—how one small genetic lead led to the unthinkable: identifying a killer who died 26 years ago. After you see the method, you’ll understand the stakes of what comes next.
#YogurtShopMurders #AustinColdCase #GeneticGenealogy #DNAForensics #RobertBrashers #TrueCrimeBreakthrough #ColdCaseSolved #InvestigativeScience #CrimeDocumentary #SerialKillerÂ
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, True Crime Podcast fans. It's Patrick and Jillian from True Crime Obsessed. |
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| 0:38.2 | So find and subscribe True Crime Obsessed wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:45.6 | Hey there, True Crime Podcasts. It's Patrick and Jillian from True Crime Obsessed. |
| 0:50.0 | Each week on TCO, we recap a true crime documentary everyone's talking about, and we do it with hearts, sass, and just the right amount of humor. So if you like the kind of podcast where two good friends chat about a case in a thoughtful way that centers the victims, you really got to check us out. Yeah, we cover the well-known cases that you hear about in the news and the underreported cases that desperately need more attention. For almost nine years, we've been one of the most popular true crime podcasts out there. |
| 1:13.7 | We have over 30,000 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts, |
| 1:16.7 | and our brand-new YouTube channel has over 50,000 subscribers watching our full length of video episodes, too. |
| 1:22.5 | So find and subscribe, True Crime Obsessed, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:28.3 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brewski. |
| 1:31.7 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 1:34.8 | Well, I bet you didn't expect this over the weekend. |
| 1:39.0 | As we're beginning another week here, |
| 1:41.6 | the yogurt shop murders solved. So we're going to dig into this today. |
| 1:48.6 | If you're unfamiliar with the case, we're going to familiarize you with it and the latest developments |
| 1:54.5 | of what took place. Robin Drake retired FBI special agent is going to join us in just a few moments. And we're going to go |
| 2:02.7 | through what happened here and how we got to the place today and how there were four people, |
| 2:08.2 | in addition to the four murdered children, whose lives were essentially destroyed and ruined in the last 34 years. After 34 years, the infamous |
| 2:21.0 | yogurt shot murders in Austin are now officially solved. The answer came not from a new witness, |
| 2:27.0 | not from a last-minute confession, but from science, advanced DNA testing and genetic genealogy, |
| 2:36.7 | IGG, as you've heard it, talked about in so many cases. They've identified Robert Eugene Bershears as the killer. He was a traveling |
... |
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