‘Yogurt Shop Murders’ Director on Making Episode 5 After the Murders Were Solved

On September 27, 2025, a month after the fourth episode of HBO’s docuseries “The Yogurt Shop Murders” aired, Austin police announced that they had finally solved the 1991 cold case. Robert Eugene Brashers was responsible for the brutal rape and murders of teenagers Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas and sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison.

That same day, Margaret Brown, director of “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” got on a plane to Austin, where the murders happened, to film the fifth episode of the series. Titled, “The End of Wondering,” the episode examines how DNA evidence led to Brashers’ conviction.

The murders had mystified police and haunted the victims’ families for more than three decades.

Brown had spent over three years interviewing the crime’s investigative teams and the victims’ parents and siblings for the first four installments of the docuseries. She says that she was “scared” to return to Austin to film another episode after police discovered that Brashers, a serial killer who died in 1999, was responsible for the crime.

“I was worried that the families were going to be more traumatized about police figuring out that Brashers did it,” Brown says. But the director quickly realized that the families were more relieved than traumatized by the discovery.

In the first four episodes of “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” Brown and her producing team tracked down interrogation room footage of four teenage boys, Forrest Welborn, Maurice Pierce, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, who were originally accused of committing the crime. 

Scott and Springsteen were both charged and convicted of murder in 1999. That conviction was later thrown out. Welborn’s charges were dropped in 2000. Pierce was held for years on a charge, before being released in 2003. Pierce was fatally shot by Austin police after a traffic stop in 2010.  All four men were formally exonerated in February 2026.

On May 13, the city of Austin agreed to pay Welborn, Springsteen, Scott and Pierce’s family a total of $35 million in restitution.

Welborn and Pierce’s widow and daughter, who did not agree to speak to Brown when she filmed the first four episodes, were interviewed for the fifth episode. Brashers’ daughter Deborah Brashers also agreed to be interviewed.

The latest installment of the HBO series reveals that, in addition to four innocent girls losing their lives in 1991, Brashers killed at least four other people.

Variety spoke with Brown about the fifth episode of “The Yogurt Shop Murders” ahead of the series’ May 22 release.

Were you shocked when the Austin Police Department announced that Robert Eugene Brashers was responsible for the murders? Did you have any inkling that they were on the verge of solving this case?

I had an inkling, because I am close with the cold case detective [Dan Jackson], and I could just tell something was going on.

Was that after you had finished filming the series?

I did the interview with Detective Jackson, which you see in the fourth installment of the series, about a year before they announced that they had figured out who did it. At that point, he wasn’t close to solving the case.

Do you regret not filming for another year, or did you think that the series helped the police solve the case?

I was definitely not thinking that I should have waited another year, because it was really, really hard to be in that world with those families for me, for that long. I felt for them so deeply. Everyone around the case just had so much trauma. So I was happy to move on, even though it hadn’t been solved.

I never went into the show thinking, “I’m going to solve this case,” because I’m not that kind of filmmaker I am. I hoped they would solve it, but I wanted to make something that was about how you deal with the most unimaginable thing.

Do you feel like the series lit a fire under the Austin Police Department to do more DNA work on this case?

The whole cold case unit came to the SXSW screening of the first episode, which was before the series came out. So, I wonder. I think when you are making an HBO show about something, people pay attention.

Was there any hesitation then about going back into that world and making a fifth episode?

At the end of the fourth episode, everyone felt like there was a sense of not completion, because it wasn’t solved, and there was so much despair. I just thought, “How can I not do it for the families and for the continuation of the story?” The families were all like, “You are coming back, right?”

So, HBO was automatically on board?

HBO, at first, was like, “It’s a coda.” And I was like, it’s not a coda — it could be another series. I didn’t really want to go back into it that much, but I immediately was like, now that we know who did it, what about those boys who were accused? What are their lives like now? It was something I always wanted to talk to them about, and I thought, maybe now they will talk to me about it.

How did you feel when most of the victims’ families didn’t express any sympathy for the wrongly accused men?

I was like, “Wait. Why don’t you care?” But all I can think of is, when you go through something like that, there is just no room for anything else. I felt I had to put their feelings about that into the episode to make people think about what they would be like if they were in the same situation. Because I don’t even know if you can imagine what it’s like to go through what they went through. So I would caution people against judging that too much.

How did you convince Deborah Brashers, the daughter of Robert Eugene Brashers, to sit down for an interview?

She wanted to apologize, because she feels like someone in her family should say sorry to the families. It was the craziest interview I’ve ever done in my entire life. I thought I was going to throw up. That woman has been through so much.

This interview has been edited and condensed.