How DNA Finally Cracked the Yogurt Shop Murders After 34 Years
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2025
⏱️ 34 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 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brewski. |
| 0:03.2 | Here now, Tony Brewski. |
| 0:06.3 | Well, I bet you didn't expect this over the weekend. |
| 0:10.5 | As we're beginning another week here, |
| 0:13.1 | the yogurt shop murders solved. |
| 0:17.5 | So we're going to dig into this today. |
| 0:20.1 | If you're unfamiliar with the case, we're going to familiarize you with it and the latest developments of what took place. |
| 0:28.4 | Robin Drake retired FBI special agent is going to join us in just a few moments. |
| 0:32.9 | And we're going to go through what happened here and how we got to the place today and how there were four people, in addition to the four murdered children, whose lives were essentially destroyed and ruined in the last 34 years after 34 years. |
| 0:52.1 | The infamous yogurt shot murders in Austin are now officially solved. |
| 0:55.8 | The answer came not from a new witness, not from a last-minute confession, but from science, advanced DNA testing and genetic genealogy. |
| 1:05.7 | IGB, as you've heard it, talked about in so many cases. |
| 1:09.3 | They've identified Robert Eugene Bershears as the killer. |
| 1:13.7 | He was a traveling serial predator back in the 90s, |
| 1:17.9 | already linked to other murders across the country. |
| 1:20.3 | He died by suicide back in 1999. |
| 1:24.3 | Took modern technology to finally close the circle on a case that had haunted Austin for decades. |
| 1:31.5 | But the real story isn't just who did it. |
| 1:35.4 | It's what happened along the way. |
| 1:36.7 | Four innocent young men were dragged through years of suspicion, false confessions, even wrongful convictions, even one ending up on death row, |
| 1:46.5 | because of interrogation tactics and tunnel vision that collapsed under the weight of better |
| 1:52.3 | evidence. Families lived in limbo. Reputations were destroyed, and trust in this system was shaken. |
... |
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