The Yogurt Shop Murders Unpacks “The Craziest Crime in Texas”

Margaret Brown doesn’t want you to binge her first full TV series. The director of the new HBO true-crime docuseries The Yogurt Shop Murders shudders when I tell her I watched all of its hour-long episodes in one sitting. “Yeah, I don’t recommend that,” she says. “When we were showing it to the families, we were like, ‘Please don’t watch all four in a row.’ It was like a trigger warning.”

The series, which premieres on HBO and streams on HBO Max on Sunday, August 3, explores a quadruple homicide that a friend of Brown’s characterizes as “the craziest crime in Texas.” On December 6, 1991, the bodies of 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison, and 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, Jennifer’s sister, were found inside the burning remains of a strip mall frozen yogurt shop. All four had been bound, gagged, and shot, investigators later said, before an unknown suspect, or suspects, set fire to the business—burning their remains and much of the crime scene in the process.

Jennifer and Eliza worked at the business, an outpost of the national chain I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! Sarah and Amy, who had been spotted at a nearby mall earlier that day, had stopped by near closing time to get a ride home with the older girls, assisting with cleanup as the place closed for the night. It’s not an uncommon scene, as any young fast-food worker knows: That same year, my friends often hung out as I finished my closing duties at a small-town TCBY, a similar 1990s-era frozen dessert chain. Many of you reading likely have similar memories, from one side of the counter or the other.

The crime’s relatable circumstances are one of the reasons so many people have been absorbed by the case—but its twists and turns are wholly unique. The Austin Police Department’s work on the case was damaged—perhaps irreparably—by one of its star cops, according to his fellow investigators.

Former Austin Police Department homicide investigator John Jones.

Courtesy: HBO

Texas Monthly described onetime APD homicide cop Hector Polanco as having been a “legend” on the force, a man with a magic touch in the interrogation room. But seven weeks after he was tapped to lead a team tasked with investigating the ICBIY homicides, per the magazine, he was booted due to allegedly eliciting false confessions from two suspects. Six months later, as misconduct allegations against Polanco continued to build, he was kicked off the force completely. (Polanco could not be reached for comment.)

Polanco refused to speak with Brown for The Yogurt Shop Murders, but his former colleagues Mike Huckabay and John Jones did. “They’re really angry about how he messed up the case,” Brown says of the former detectives, both of whom have since retired. In the years after the crime, the missteps mounted. Additional suspects confessed, then their confessions were found to be false, with suspicions that some had been coerced. In 1999, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were arrested for the slayings and subsequently convicted in the early 2000s. Springsteen and Scott eventually had their convictions overturned on appeal due to a constitutional rights violation during trial; they were released on bond in June 2009 and had their charges dismissed later that year, following new testing of DNA evidence that appeared to link an unknown suspect to the crime. Like some of the suspects who came before, they said their confessions had been coerced.

Those rabbit holes are partly why a few interviewees in the series describe the case as “cursed.” Another reason? It’s been surprisingly difficult to make a true-crime project about this case.

Brown moved to Austin in the late 1990s, when tip-seeking billboards bearing photos of the victims were still standing across town. “It’s part of the drinking water in Austin,” Brown says. “You’d go to a party, and people would have theories about what happened.”

An opportunity to collaborate with film studio A24 on a project about the case arose. Brown leapt at the chance, but “didn’t think about how this might be extremely traumatic to make,” she says.

“A24 paid for our crew to have trauma therapy when we were making it, because our editorial team was having crazy nightmares,” Brown explains. “My cinematographer collapsed twice while we were shooting.”

Claire Huie, Brown’s Austin neighbor, had attempted to make a documentary about the case in 2009, after Springsteen and Scott had been released. It was never completed. “The story consumed her,” Brown says. “I was always afraid this was going to consume me too.”

Documentarian Claire Huie, whose footage from an attempted film on the case appears in “The Yogurt Shop Murders.”

Courtesy: HBO

She adds: “I was afraid for a long time that this project was just cursed, and the curse was going to get me. I’m not kidding.”

But it didn’t—and Brown incorporates a significant amount of Huie’s footage into the series, interviewing Huie in the process. Those interactions give a sometimes unsettling behind-the-scenes look at how true crime’s sausage is made, with Huie occasionally grimacing at questions her younger self asked of surviving family members like Barbara Ayres-Wilson, Jennifer and Sarah’s mother. In 2009, Ayres-Wilson recounted how she learned that her daughters had been killed. Her interview is presented almost without interruption, an unflinching long take that forces us to live in a mother’s still-recent pain. It’s one of the most powerful moments of television I have ever watched; I never want to see it again.

Those layers of footage keep The Yogurt Shop Murders grounded in a way that few projects of this nature are, and—even though the investigation into the case continues—they also provide a strange sense of hope. Grainy footage from 1991 shows a community raw with grief. Huie’s interviews from 16 years ago show people grappling with their pain. Brown’s conversations from the present day reveal how—even when faced with an unimaginable loss—people continue on.

Sure, this series provides the standard case details that will satisfy those captivated by true crime. But Brown is less interested in that aspect and more focused on the emotional hole this case has left in everyone who has touched it. “There’s a whole other show to be made about all the twists and turns of the case, some of which we don’t go into, but I’m sure many podcasts do.”

She chose to show the life experiences of the girls’ families and how those loved ones have evolved over the years. “As it progressed, it was this idea about how there’s joy in life and there’s grief in life, and there’s always going to be grief in life. We’re all going to die,” Brown says.

“This particular group of people went through this unspeakable thing, but I do think there’s something in that that we all have experienced,” she adds. It’s an unexpected angle for a series based on true crime, a genre that often relies on the viewer’s comfort in their distance from the tragedy. But Brown seems confident that even in this era of second-screen-ready true crime, The Yogurt Shop Murders will resonate. “I think audiences will be able to sit with it,” Brown says. “But it’s not a binge. I don’t recommend that.”

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