Megan McLachlan talks to The Yogurt Shop Murders documentary director Margaret Brown about her gripping five-part docuseries and the crime that haunted a community for three decades.
Director Margaret Brown didn’t have to start from scratch with HBO’s The Yogurt Shop Murders docuseries. She had footage from 15 years ago to work with, courtesy of filmmaker Claire Huie, who started a project on the unsolved crime of four teenage girls being murdered at an Austin yogurt shop in 1991.
“One of the first things [we noticed] was that footage at the end of the first episode of Barbara in that really long take,” said Brown.
If you’ve seen the series, you know what moment she’s talking about.
At the end of the first episode of the five-part docuseries, Claire asks Barbara, a mother who lost two children in the tragedy, to explain what happened to her daughters. It’s a blunt question so soon in the interview, and yet it provides one of the most powerful scenes of the series, as Barbara shares everything she remembers about that day in candid, vulnerable detail.
“Claire’s an incredible filmmaker, and as a young filmmaker, you just don’t really know how to ask questions. And yeah, there were a lot of layers to it.”
Meeting the Yogurt Shop Murders Victims
Brown took Claire’s footage, and with her own interviews, compiled it into a thoughtful examination. The Yogurt Shop Murders not only explores what this true crime did to the victims’ families, but the “small town” of Austin, Texas. At first, Brown wanted to create a stylized Twin Peaks-type of story but realized it would take away from the feeling of talking to the loved ones left behind.
“I was interested in how grief and loss affected the characters that were alive to talk about it. And so I felt like, you know, in the last episode, when Bob [father of victim Amy Akers] talks about Amy, when he thinks about her now he thinks about her cutting a horse and the way he talks about it is so beautiful and you can feel his love. And that’s sort of the way I wanted them to be remembered, not by facts, but by how they lived in other people’s memories.”
And that’s what makes this story especially tragic: These girls were at the beginning of their lives, ranging between the ages of 13 and 17. There’s the challenge of Brown getting to know these victims when they didn’t even know themselves quite yet.
But it wasn’t just the girls and their families who were victims: This case negatively impacted everyone from the four young men who were falsely accused to the investigators and lawyers on the case.
“This case destroyed so many marriages and relationships. It was just corrosive to whoever it touched because people got really obsessed with it and fell into the case. In Episode 2, we talk about Jones and Huck [first cops on case] getting taken off the case because they both had PTSD.”
The Yogurt Shop Murders Solved
And who ruined so many people’s lives in one community? Just weeks after the episodes started airing, the Yogurt Shop Murders were finally solved through DNA identification, pointing to one man: serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brashers. It’s a startling, haunting revelation—that all this time, one random man, with no connection to the girls, had wrecked everyone’s lives.
Brown said she had no idea the case would be solved when she was filming but that lead detective Dan Jackson was acting strange when she met him just days before the news broke.
“He was like, there’s something happening, but I can’t tell you. And I could tell he wanted to tell me, but he was like, if it happens, I have to tell the families first. And then I was like, ‘Dan, I’m leaving town with my dog and driving across the country to start another film. Do I need to stay here?’ He was like, no, you can go. Four days later, I drop the dog with my parents and fly back to Texas. And three days later, three camera crews are shooting him in a press conference.”
This press conference serves as the epicenter of the powerful fifth episode of the series, which was added after the case was solved. Looking around the room at the presser, you see many of the faces who appeared in the previous four episodes, all coming together to find closure on something that had plagued them and their community for more than 30 years. As Jackson tells the story, you can feel the emotion and heaviness dissipate within the room.
“I was just happy people trusted me to tell their story. It’s a profound act of trust, and I feel incredibly grateful.”
All episodes of The Yogurt Shop Murders are available on HBO Max.
