Four teenage girls were viciously murdered in 1991, their bodies left to burn in a fire – along with so much evidence – that engulfed the Austin yogurt shop where two of them worked.
The memories surrounding this case can be fraught and vivid for anyone who lived in the area at the time, not just because of the devastating nature of the crime, but also the seismic way the surrounding community rallied around the victims’ families. They would march and hold up signs, put up billboards, and make buttons and coffee mugs, the paraphernalia all asking the question left unanswered to this day: “Who killed these girls?” This being Austin, local artists even came up with a song: We Will Not Forget.
“Americans, the way we deal with grief,” observes Barbara Ayres-Wilson, the mother to two of the victims, “we had to make a marketing opportunity out of everything.”
Ayres-Wilson makes those comments in old footage appearing in The Yogurt Shop Murders, somehow seeing the big picture irony from a distance, while still in the throes of her anguish. Margaret Brown’s four-part docuseries largely follows her lead.
The Yogurt Shop Murders is as intensive and emotionally gutting as the true crime genre gets, especially as it leads with the trauma suffered by the victims, their families and others orbiting too close to the tragedy. But the series also regularly steps back, observing the cultural ironies and phenomena wrapped up in this case, and taking a measure of its broader implications, not just when it comes to the flaws in a justice system that can coerce false confessions – creating a whole other subset of victims – but also the very nature of true crime storytelling that The Yogurt Shop Murders participates in.
Brown essentially made a layered and complex true crime masterpiece, largely by approaching the subject with so much resistance to what that genre typically entails – for instance, the voyeurism and near predatory fixation on the upsetting details.
“I wasn’t really interested in this because of the true crime-iness of it,” says Brown on a Zoom call with the Guardian, thinking back on her initial response to the project when it was brought to her by executive producers Dave McCary and his Oscar-winning wife, Emma Stone. Brown, the empathetic film-maker who took a “community first” approach to her celebrated documentary about the slave ship Clotilda, Descendant, says she was nevertheless drawn to this story because it literally hits close to home.
“It’s part of the fabric of this city,” says the Austin-based film-maker (originally from Mobile, Alabama, where Descendant takes place). The victims – 17-year-olds Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison; the latter’s 15-year-old sister, Sarah, and her 13-year-old friend Amy Ayers – were just a few years younger than Brown at the time of their murder. She has friends who went to school with the girls, knew them, or was on the cheerleading team with them. The tragedy looms large in her circles.
She also saw a way into the story when observing the archival footage and observed what she describes as a David Lynch vibe. “It was like the same hair from Twin Peaks,” Brown explains. “You could see a version of what the film could be immediately from the counterculture in Austin back then, when [Richard Linklater’s] Slacker came out … I was like: ‘Oh, I could make a David Lynch movie that’s a documentary.’”
Lynch has always been obsessed with the darkness lurking beneath pleasant surfaces, and the dividing lines within a locale (whether it’s Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, North Carolina, or Mulholland Drive, flanked by Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley). In his films, people living in alternate worlds violently collide.
So Lynchian makes a fitting adjective for this case, considering how horror erupts in a frozen yogurt parlor, ripping through the innocence in what was a popular hangout spot for teens; or the way outsiders, specifically goth types and those who would hang out in Austin’s hidden crevices, were rounded up as suspects, exposing the social and class divisions permeating throughout the city; and the general cultural milieu of early-90s Austin, where, as Brown says, the “country guys and the counterculture people” co-exist.
“Austin has always been this place where there’s a college town, but it’s also like a cowboy place,” says Brown, lumping both sides together as the Willie Nelson audience. “They all go see Willie.”
But Brown’s approach to the material quickly shifted after the first interview with the victims’ families left her feeling gutted.
“I felt it so deeply, their pain,” she says. “Sean [Amy Ayers’s older brother] was so worried about his memory of his sister fading. I remember that made such an impact. It was so heartbreaking the way he talked about how he couldn’t feel her anymore because these images were leaving his mind; her voice and everything. You just feel this family. I just was like: ‘OK, well, I cannot fuck this up.’
“I knew I couldn’t just make this stylized, slick thing … I got more interested in how people deal with loss. That’s the universal thing that everyone can relate to. Also, the story was so dark. I think to really live in the darkness of it, I needed some kind of redemption to just get me through.”
Throughout the conversations in The Yogurt Shop Murders, a complex and fascinating thread around storytelling emerges, exploring both the healing and harmful functions of constructing a narrative when coping with such trauma. It begins with Ayres-Wilson, who on the night of the murders, doesn’t fully process the weight of her emotions until she has to tell loved ones what happened. Over the years, the victims’ families continue speaking to the media and the community as a way to hold on to the girls’ memories, while also pursuing justice.
Eliza Thomas’s younger sister Sonora – who, as Brown explains, went through life feeling isolated because people can be wary about approaching her with the tragedy always looming – even offers an unexpected validation for the very true crime genre the film-maker was resisting. “This strange genre of crimes shows doesn’t just provide fodder for the curious,” Thomas tells Brown on camera. “It also provides an outlet for victims to tell a story that no one else wants to hear.”
Brown proposes another rationale for true crime, pointing out that the genre’s audience is largely woman, some perhaps processing their own fears. “For some people,” she says, “it’s like: ‘Can I figure it out?’ But I think, for women, there’s something more primal about it.
“You see in the series, there’s all these other ways [storytelling is] exploitative too. I was curious about the wholeness of that. It’s not just one thing.”
As yet another dimension to the storytelling around the case, Brown mentions the detectives who were diagnosed with PTSD after fruitlessly attempting to construct the narrative surrounding the crime scene for years; and Claire Huie, a once aspiring film-maker who made a pass at building a documentary around this story over a decade ago, the severity of it making her walk away from both the film and her career aspirations. So much of Huie’s abandoned footage appears in The Yogurt Shop Murders, including interviews with the families, the detectives and Robert Springsteen, one of the men who sat on death row for the crime.
Springsteen, who did not take part in Brown’s series, was convicted based on a confession that did not hold up on appeal. When it comes to this case, aggressive interrogator tactics led to multiple false confessions.
In The Yogurt Shop Murders, Brown and her editor, Michael Bloch, go full surrealist Lynch when revisiting intense and nightmarish interrogation scenes, where officers constructed narratives for suspects to fill in the gaps. In a series where we see victim families use storytelling to hold onto their memories, these scenes – exposing memory’s elusive, fragile and misleading nature – stand apart in chilling and unsettling contrast.
“You can’t make a show like this and not think about how your own memories about things are shifting,” says Brown. “I can have a memory and think: ‘Well, is that real? Did that really happen? Do I want that to be real?’
“I always am interested in complexity, how something can be positive in one way, and, another way, it can have a dark edge. Memory is a perfect example. It can be used as a trap and also a salve.”