Yogurt Shop Murders: A City That Needed Someone to Punish
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 908 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
When a community spends eight years with an open wound, it stops looking for the right answer and starts looking for any answer. That’s what happened in Austin after the yogurt shop murders. Four teenagers were pulled into the investigation in 1991, released for lack of evidence, and then pulled back in eight years later by new detectives who found their names in an old file and decided they were worth another shot.
The detective who shaped the early investigation, Hector Polanco, had already been found responsible for at least seven false confessions in other cases. One of his previous victims suffered permanent brain damage from a prison beating after being wrongfully convicted on a manufactured confession. The city paid millions in settlements. And then the system kept running, using the same playbook, pointed at new targets.
Part 2 of this Hidden Killers series examines the investigation from 1991 to 1999 — the contaminated information, the institutional momentum, and the psychological dynamics that turned four innocent teenagers into the most blamed men in Austin’s history. What happens when the system can’t find the killer through evidence? It finds someone through convenience. And the people who fit that profile are almost never the ones with resources to fight back.
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Transcript
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| 1:01.8 | Hi, it's Joe and Zoe here from Digget and we're currently sponsored by QVC. If you're thinking about giving your garden a bit of a refresh, This is very good timing. My garden scape at |
| 1:12.0 | QVC is basically like having a whole garden centre, but at the touch of a button. Everything's there. |
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| 1:28.1 | colours, striped sofas, loungers, it is giving proper 70s revival. And my garden escape is, |
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... |
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