Austin Yogurt Shop Pt. One

They had just released a new documentary on HBO Max about the Austin yogurt shop murders from nineteen ninety one, and I had covered it on The Trail Went Cold two years ago, did a long two part episode. So I was thinking, we need to tackle this on The Path Went Chilly because we can maybe get three four episodes talking about this, and then all of a sudden,

it wound up being solved. So that changed everything. So instead of following our usual format where we talk about with Ashley, we're going to spend a couple episodes where I share the details with Jewles and she will give off her reactions. So, Jules, I know you told me before that you haven't watched the recent documentary, but how familiar are you with the case in general?

on the evening of December sixth. Took place at a shop called I Can't Believe It's Yogurt, which was a frozen yogurt establishment located at a strip mall called the Hillside Center, and at around eleven forty seven pm, a patrolman from the Austin Police Department noticed that there was a fire inside the yogurt shop and called for assistance.

It looked like it was closed, so they didn't think anyone would be in there, but when they arrived, they noticed the shop's lights were off, the closed sign was facing outward, and the front door was locked, but oddly, a key was still inside the lock on the inside, so the firefighters used a crowbar to bust open the door and entered the back room, and then they discovered that there was a small fire burning in there, so they were able to extinguish the flames relatively quickly and

initially just looked like a routine fire, but then they were horrified to discover that there were four dead bodies lying in the area, and even more tragically, they all belonged to teenage girls. One of them was seventeen year old Eliza Thomas, seventeen year old Jennifer Harveson, her younger fifteen year old sister, Sarah Harveson, and Sarah's thirteen year

old best friend, Amy Ayres, and Eliza. Jennifer and Sarah's bodies were all stacked on top of each other, and they were burned so badly that they could not be recognized. They had to be identified via dental records, and Amy's body was located a few feet away from the pile. It's possible she may have actually still been alive when the killer left, and then crawled a little bit before

she passed away right before the firefighter showed up. But everyone was totally shell shocked when they realized that four girls have been murdered in there.

the community this is going to be. This is going to reverberate outwards everybody at their high school, their families, their friends, their loved ones. This is going to be felt so deeply by everybody.

Barbara Harbison. They had since gotten divorced, but they had still close relationships with their daughters, and Sarah and Jennifer were their only children and they had to lose both of them in one night. What's extra tragic is that the only employees at the yogre shop were Eliza and Jennifer, but Amy was planning a sleepover with the Harbisons, so

they had been spending the night hanging out. I know that Sarah and Amy have been dropped off at a mall and then Jennifer picked them up at nine o'clock and then took them back to the ogre chop and say, after we're done closing, you can help me out and then I'll drive you back home for the sleepover. So these two youngest girls were just in the wrong place

at the wrong time. They weren't even supposed to be there and just happened to get murdered because they were working alongside Jennifer and Eliza.

even supposed to be there. So the Harvestins have such an incredible loss here, to have two daughters struck down in such a horrific way, to have their bodies burned, to not be able to do I mean, I don't know what they did as far as a funeral, but I would think when the bodies are burned like that, it would be very difficult to do an open casket.

And for a lot of people that need to say goodbye and that need to be able to see their loved one that one last time in their coffin that would have been taken away from them, and that is truly sad if that was the path that they were going to be taking.

And it'll be a sharp contrast because as we're going to talk about, four people would later be arrested in charge with their murders who were the polar opposite. They were kind of considered to be juvenile delinquents who did not do very well in school and were known for causing trouble. But everyone said, like, why these four girls. It's just like they never harmed anyone, and it's been suspected. Maybe we will probably never know the motive for this crime.

That there were signs that it was a robbery because some money was taken from the till, and it's possible that whoever did it was only expecting two employees to be in there and then was just completely thrown off when they discovered two additional girls who are just hanging out in the back, and that might have just caused them to lose it and commit this quadruple murder. So they discovered that all four girls have been shot in the back of the head, execute style with a twenty

two caliber weapon. Like I said, Amy's body was found a few feet away from the others, and even though she was also shot in the head with a twenty two caliber weapon, it turned out she had a second gun shot wound from a three eighty automatic cold pistol, possibly because the bullet from the first shot missed her brain. And it also turned out that she had a cloth ligature around her neck to suggest that someone attempted to

strangle her. So it was just major overkill, and they're guessing that maybe Amy just took a long time to die and that's why there were multiple bullets fired into her and she was also strangled. It's been theorized, like I said, that she may have and still been alive when the firefighters first arrived at the scene and tried to crawl away from the rest of the victims, but

passed away before the fire was put out. And even what's more horrific is that all victims had their clothing remove, likely after being ordered to undress a gunpoint, and some other articles of clothing were found neatly stacked on the floor near the bodies, but other articles were used to bite and gag the victims. And it would turn out that at least some of the girls, though not all

of them, have been raped. So at the outset, they suspected that there were two perpetrators involved in this crime, just because it would have been very difficult to handle all four girls, and also the fact that two separate guns were used to fire the shots.

with each other. So you're saying, if you run or you do something, I'm going to shoot her in the head. And they're all going to be petrified, and they don't want their friends to get hurt or sister to get hurt. So I would think it would be pretty easy to control these girls based on their relationships, even if you had a solo perpetrator who was in the middle of

a rate. If he's raping, say one of the sisters or the best friend, then you're not going to have somebody making a rash decision like to try to run away if they think that that's going to get that person killed. So it is possible, but I can see how they jump to their had to have been at least two perpetrators.

and hopefully we'll get out of this alive. But unfortunately that turned out not to be the case.

So this was a pretty protracted thing, Like it's possible the perpetrator could have been in there for as long as forty five minutes or so, so they took their time what they were doing and probably used a lot of fear to control these girls. Yeah, that makes sense, so I mentioned that the keys to the front door were found in the lock. So it was speculated that the girl ros were planning to close, and that whoever the killer was may have been the last customer or

customers inside the store. But they also saw that the shop's back door was broken. They couldn't determine at the time whether the perpetrator had broken and through the back or broke the door when they left, but they suspected that they fled the scene through the back door when

they were finished. The cash register was empty, and an automate later showed that five hundred and forty dollars was missing from the register, which seemed to point to robbery being the motive, But surprisingly, an open bank bag containing additional money was left behind under the register. Ivy never

disclosed how much money was in this bag. I don't know if it was a lot, but it's possible maybe the killer didn't even notice it, or maybe they just wanted to kill someone and the money was of secondary importance.

The register's log showed that someone had used the no sale button to open the till at eleven oh three pm, three minutes after closing time, and an unopened coke can in an empty st irofoam cup were found next to the register, so this led to speculation that whoever this was was the last customer in the store before closing may have gone to the counter to buy a coke, but then suddenly pulled out a gun and forced Jennifer or alies it empty the register and then forced all

four of the girls into the back room in order to kill them.

cash register. Because if you're in a hurry after you've done that and maybe you started the fire, maybe you've got all these things already in motion, and you're in a huge rush trying to get everything done, you might

overlook something like a bank bag. But I feel like if you did that first, you would be a little more methodical and a little more organized, because you're not going to be operating under the gun in such a way that you would be after you've already taken all the time to get them undressed and to rape one or more of the girls, and then then you go to rob do you know what I mean?

like caused them to freak out. Maybe they lost control because they weren't expecting these additional witnesses, and that's why they decided to just go so overboard with raping them, tying them up, killing them, and then setting them on fire.

was secondary. So the artist investigator would come to the scene and believe that the fire had been started on some steel shelves located on a corner in the storage room because it contained a bunch of combustible items like styrofoam cups, so when they set them on fire, that caused this fire to spread really quickly and cause them to burn so badly. But unfortunately, this would be a

recurring theme here. Some of the key pieces of evidence would go missing over the years, such as the metal shelves, then the ladder that have been used on there, and also the broken lock from the back door also went missing, even though it could have contained fingerprints or the killer's DNA.

And this is not anyone's fault, but unfortunately, because the firefighters when they instantly went in there, they had to use the water to put the fire out and didn't even realize at the time that there were four bodies under there, And of course this could have also compromised potential forensic evidence. I mean, you can't blame the firefighters. Obviously they have to put the fire out immediately, but I'm sure it was so frustrating to know that they could have compromised a crime scene.

quickly as possible. But in those first moments, when you know they just want to put out the fire, they don't know that there's four bodies. I'm sure that there was a huge amount of destruction of evidence.

that fire and water was used over the bodies. So what makes a story even sadder is that throughout the course of the evening some of the girl's parents would even stop by the store before closing, just to check on their daughters and just everything seemed completely normal at the time. I know that Eliza's mother, Maria stopped by it around nine point thirty and said that everything was fine, and that Eliza's father stopped by at a different time,

and nobody saw anything out of the ordinary. And of course, by today's perspective, it probably seemed shocking that these two seventeen year old girls were working alone to close a store in like a downtown area. And I'm sure you're going to ask this, but no, there were no security cameras there, so they didn't get any footage of the crime.

And later on, the victims' families would actually file a lawsuit against the yogurt shop's parent company, Bryce Foods, as well as the property Morrison Properties, who owned the Hillside Center Strip mall, because it turned out there had been some robberies at some of the other shops at the malls in the months prior to the yogurt shop murders, and I don't think any of the families knew about that, And they're saying to themselves, if we had known that

there was crime going on here, robberies, we never would have allowed these two teenage girls to close this shop by their own and they would after they filed the lawsuit. The two sides would reach a twelve million dollar settlement. But the good news is that the families would use the money to start a nonprofit organization about crime prevention and workplace safety, which was called We Will Not Forget SAJE, which was the first name initials of the four victims.

And of course this would use this would be used to help implement a lot of new safety procedures to protect workers who had to work in this environment. So if there's a silver lining to this whole case, at least the families used the lawsuit money they earned to do some good.

account for as many as possible. There were a couple who couldn't be identified who were picked out by other customers, Like there were a pair of teenage boys who were in there between eight fifteen and eight thirty who had long on camp hare seemed to be staring at their girls a lot. Sometime between nine thirty and ten, there was like a guy who was described as being in his twenties, as a fidgety young man who went into

the bathroom for a while. And I know that one of the customers got a weird feeling about the guy, so he decided to wait around for a few minutes after ordering his yogurt, but wound up leaving before the

young man emerged from the back. But the most intriguing lead was provided by a couple named Tim Striker and Margaret Shean, who bought some yogurt at ten forty two pm, eighteen minutes before closing, and they noticed two young men sitting at a table which was the closest to the register, who appeared to be in their late twenties early thirties, very generic like around five foot six, with a skinny

frame and lighter brown, dirty blonde hair. But what was interesting is that when the fire department arrived an hour later, they noticed that these were the only tables in the store which did not have the chairs stacked up, which is usually what happens when you're closing up and eating establishment before closing, and it also did not have the

napkin dispenser filled. So they began to theorize that because the key was in the front lock, that maybe these guys were still around at closing time, and that at around eleven they finally performed the robbery and then took the four girls into the back and then committed the murders. And they tried as hard as they could, and they

could not track down or identify these guys. So for the longest time there was speculation that these may be the killers, and it just seemed to fit the scenario so perfectly.

involved where they're the killers. So the investigation initially was headed up by a veteran Austin police detective named John Jones. And this is a case where you're going to see the best and the worst of police work, and John Jones actually represents the best. Ironically enough, he was actually filming like a ride along on the night of the murders where he invited a camera crew from a TV station to watch him on duty. It was kind of

going to be like an episode of Cops. He thought it was just going to be a routine night, and he got like a radio call that there's a fire at a yogret shop, and he said, well, let's go over and see what happens. They just expected to be like a routine fire, and the camera crew just had no idea that when we walk in there, we're going to find four bodies and find yourself right in the middle of one of the worst homicides of the nineteen nineties.

So they still have some of the original footage from Jones's ride along in the documentary and on the forty eight Hours episodes, because this camera crew did not know that they were going to be a part of history and have to witness one of the worst crimes you've ever heard about.

victims' families, kept them informed at every opportunity. But unfortunately, because he was working on it so passionately, like I said, he started to develop PTSD, he started to develop depression and it deprived him from being around his own family because he was married, he had kids of his own, but because he was working on it so hard, he barely saw them anymore, and it eventually ended with him being divorced, and a couple of years later, unfortunately, he

would be moved off the investigation transferred to another division, and he pretty much said that at the time, this was the best thing for my mental health. But he's always felt guilty about it because unfortunately, once he left the investigation, it started getting screwed up in a huge way. And if he had been on it the entire time, I think things would have turned out differently.

as well. And so you can understand why the divorce rates of cops are so high because they pour so much energy and so much of themselves into wanting to solve these cases and caring so much about the family members who are left bereft because they don't have their loved ones anymore, and that idea of wanting to get some kind of justice and even at the expense of

their own relationships and their own mental health. So I think it's probably a good thing that he got transferred, because who knows what could have happened to him from a mental health perspective if he kept going down the rabbit hole. But it is unfortunate that the investigation got really screwed up after he was gone.

for his own well being. So the first major lead would occur on December the fourteenth, eight days after the murder, when they got a tip about a sixteen year old kid named Maurice Pearce who was arrested at the North Cross Mall and charged with unlawful possession of a weapon because another kid noticed a guy sticking out of the back of his waistband and notified the police, and it turned out he was carrying a loaded twenty two caliber pistol, which was the same type of weapon used in the

yogurt shop murder. So this obviously peaud the Austin Police Department's interest. So Maurice was taken into custody and arrested, and he was also accompanied by a fifteen year old friend of his named Forrest Wellborn, who just happened to be with him at the time, and they wound up being interviewed by another detective named Hector Polanco, who would

turn out to be a very controversial figure. So Maurice claimed that Forrest had lent him the gun and that it had likely been used in the yogurt shop murders, and along with Forrest, Maurice implicated two other individuals, seventeen year old Robert Springsteen and seventeen year old Michael Scott, which is a name which always makes people chuckle because they think of Steve Carell's character in the Office, but

this was many years before that. But like all four of these kids were known for kind of being juvenile delinquents, they dropped out of high school, for being aimless drifters who spent a lot of the time partying and drinking and smoking marijuana. But even though they committed a few petty crimes, they didn't seem to have any real history of violence. But I know that Maurice's story is that Robert Michael and Forrest had committed the murders and that

he had functioned simply as the getaway driver. Maurice said that he stayed in the car the entire time, and that afterwards, after they committed the crime, they fled Austin and spent some time in San Antonio in order to avoid the authorities. Well, Hector Polanco, the guy who had interrogated Maurice and got this confession, he seemed to buy

hook line and sinker. But John Jones, he was pretty skeptical because Maurice kept telling all these stories of that contraddicted each other, and when he tried to press Maurice to share in criminating details about the crime, he didn't

say anything that was not already public knowledge. He did not seem to have any inside details about the yogurt shot murders, and Jones came up with the idea of putting a wire on Maurice so that he could have a secret conversation with Force Wellborn to see if maybe he revealed anything incriminating. But after listening to the secret conversation, Jones says that Forrest clearly doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. I seriously doubt that he's involved in

the murders. And hey did ballistic tests on Maurice's twenty two caliber gun and compare them to the bullets in the murder scene, and the results were inconclusive. But John Jones still thought, I don't think these guys are involved in the murders. And they were technically dismissed as suspects at the time, but not completely ruled out. They were just pretty much put on the back burner. But from day one, John Jones felt, I don't believe any of

these four guys are involved in the murders. But unfortunately, many years later other detectives would have a differing view.

technique being employed, and investigators really just didn't know. The literature wasn't there like it is today to support that false and confessions are very much a thing, and that certain personality types are more susceptible, and that sometimes detectives don't even realize when they're leading people. And the fact that Jones was able to go, yeah, these guys, they didn't do it. They don't have the information. Just because

they're confessing doesn't mean that they're good for it. That is not a take that we typically hear in nineties cases.

attention or just wanted to control the police. But pretty much he had the mindset that if anyone makes a confess, I am not going to take it seriously unless I can find other corroborating evidence, and he never did. He just said that most of the people who confess, all they did was share details that had already been leaked

to the public. But unfortunately, as we're going to talk about, there were other people in the Austin PD you had a different mindset who felt, well, some one confesses, I'm going to pin it on him no matter what, even if there is no other evidence. That is wild.

that case. And I just I can't understand what the motivation would be other than you're dealing with a mental health crisis, unless somebody thinks that they would gain some type of notoriety. But I would think that if you were trying to get notoriety from the murders of four teenage girls, there's something not right.

want attention. But I don't know the mindset of someone who's a free person and then just walks into the police and decides to confess to the murders of four teenage girls.

out to be false. He even got a few confessions and the yogurt shop murders that wound up not sticking. I want to know more details about this person, but they were described as a drug dealer slash drag queen named Sean Buddha Smith, who claimed that the yoga shop murders took place because Eliza was targeted because she's supposedly ripped off two hundred dollars worth of weed from Buddha and his friends, which was one hundred percent at not true.

But he then said that, oh, the only reason I confessed is because Detective Polonco lied to me and said that they had a videotape of me at the yogurt shop, so that's why I decided to confess even though there were no security cameras there. He was just kind of calling his bluff. So after he learned there were no cameras,

he recanted his confession. There was another suspect named Alex Brianus who had been arrested for another murder, so he definitely was a dangerous person and claimed that the yogurt shop murders were committed alongside an accomplice and that it was a robbery gone wrong. But a story fell apart when he was asked to pick out his accomplice from a photo lineup, and it turned out he picked out a suspect who was in prison when the murders took place,

so obviously he could not have done it. And the big turning point for Hector Polanco was on an unrelated case where they were trying to assault the murder of a Travis County Sheriff's deputy named William Redman, and he got a confession from a suspect named John Salazar and Bragg that he saw the case of the murder of

a fellow police officer. Well, what he did know is that the real killers were confessing to a completely different investigator at the exact same time, and it turned out that Salazar was already in police custody for another crime on the night that the murder took place, so it couldn't have been him. So they started going into Polongo's background, found out that he had a history of getting false

confessions from people. So he was finally removed from the yogurt chop investigation and then fired from the Austin Police Department.

or the innocence of the people. And the problem with putting people who are innocent behind bars is the person who is actually guilty of committing that crime is still out there on the streets. So that idea that oh, they're probably guilty of something, or this person had a pattern of recidivism or a pattern of a certain type of crimes that they were committing. It falls flat when you have the actual killer or the person who's guilty of committing whatever crime still out on the street. There's

no way to justify that. And I just I don't understand that mentality, and I think it just it has to come down to people are more concerned about their careers and they probably go into law enforcement with this idealized view that they're going to make a difference. But as we know, like just the way politicians go into politics thinking that they're going to change things, and you end up compromising bits of yourself along the way in

order to get the job done. And then at the end, I'm sure a lot of people look at themselves in the mirror and they're like, whow me, Like, how many deals have I had to make to get here? Am I the person that I thought that I was going to be? And can I make that type of difference? And I think it's probably no different with a lot of detectives. Not all detectives are going to be able to look at the evidence and go, oh, well, maybe this person is innocent and I should let them go.

They're going to go, oh well, it could be another case that I'm closing.

and that's how he got caught. I mean, Planco would not be responsible for the wrongful conviction and the yogurt shot murder's case because he was long gone when this happened years later. But he was technically the one who put these four suspects on the map, because he was the one who got Maurice Pierce to confess when they found him in the mall carrying the twenty two, to talk about how he and these three other guys committed

the murders. And because their names wound up in the files, we'll find out that some different detectives will go back to them years later, and that's when they would finally build a case that was strong enough for them to be charged. That brings an end to part one of our series of the Austin Yogurt Chot Murders. Join us again next week for part two.

ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsolved miss where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was

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