loading . . . Doc Watch: The Yogurt Shop Murders (2025) In addition to being very TL;DR, this post was difficult to write as this documentary covers horrific, very real deaths, and the aftermath, which - decades on - has no closure. There is a lot of human pain involved, a lack of justice and no easy answers. I don't have any particular insight into the events other than knowing North Austin in the 80's and 90's. And my own opinions regarding several elements is probably bubbling over in the post.
Like all cities, Austin is home to some notable crimes.
In the 1880's, we were home to a serial killer known as The Servant Girl Annihilator. I grew up and attended college in the shadow of the University of Texas Tower, from which Charles Whitman killed 15 people and injured more than 30 more.
My sophomore year of high school I was living in North Houston/ Spring. However, as a kid I spent six years living in Austin, from 1984 to 1990. Formative years - 4th through 9th grade.
I retained friendships despite the move, and one evening - more than a year after I'd moved away - a friend called. Without much prior chit-chat, she dove in and started telling me about four girls murdered in the Northcross area, a street of strip malls and a one-story shopping mall. I had never been in that yogurt store, but I knew the area, certainly.
Not to be too callous - but the murder rate of Austin was and is a fraction of what Houston sees any year., so at first I wasn't paying much attention. But she began describing what occurred, and she wasn't sensationalizing anything. The facts were enough, and required no dramatic flair. I didn't know if she was scared or sad or both. Or something else. But she was affected. And, of course, she was a teenage girl who worked in a shop, sometimes by herself.
And that's how I found out that four girls around my age had been murdered in the back of a yogurt shop in Austin.
Naively, I expected an immediate arrest. The murders had to have some fact, some evidence, something out there... Someone knew something. But that didn't happen, and after the initial story - back when Austin was a backwater - the investigation kind of disappeared from the national conversation, living on in updates on show like 48 Hours and Dateline.
By 1993, I had moved back to Austin for school, and the story was still alive and well in the city. Billboards seeking evidence and tips were still up. The fear that a similar incident would occur had faded, but the ghost of the brutal crime was out there in a constant but passive way - occasionally mentioned on the news, but with no real leads.
And, living in Austin as a student, where most of the people you knew weren't from Austin, often the news of the murders came as a surprise.
Over the years, news trickled out, and nothing ever added up and very little ever made sense. Arrests were made a few times, people went to jail. People were released. And almost 35 years later, the crime goes unsolved, with attempts to do so leaving a trail of frustration and devestation.
I'm a bit disappointed by some of the reactions I've seen online - but isn't that the way? People seem very confused that the documentary is not a 48 Hours or Dateline-style procedural depiction of the case. And, honestly, why would HBO bother with a doc like thatas those shows exist and have been covered the deaths several times over the past 35 years.
They weren't going to solve this terrible crime with this doc. It's primary focus is not sifting through clues and reinforcing the idea that lawmen will always solve the case. Instead, the doc is about the impact of the crime on the people left behind.
I don't really see what's so hard about that, but apparently the goals of the series eluded many.
Episode 1.
The documentary is produced by A24, which is a bit of an eyebrow raiser. But for a company that is willing to go dark and let stories be what they are, maybe it's a good fit.
The narrative is culled from news footage, new interviews and a cache of archival interviews and footage from 2009, when a young documentarian took the subject on before abandoning the project. The why of her decision seems to be she felt the weight of what she was doing, and that she was not sure this is how one builds a career - on the deaths of four people and the trauma of countless others.
The team that did put this doc together does manage to open the docu-series capturing the vibe of Austin in this era - a laidback college town in the downtown, and a fairly quiet city where the shopping mall suburbs melded quickly into rural Texas culture with strong FFA programs. I raised an eyebrow that they pulled a Butthole Surfers song for the intro to Austin, which was appropriate, but also maybe 5 or 6 years early for the time period shown.
But whomever made the doc did make an error by showing Highland Mall interiors rather than the one-story interiors of Northcross - considered dark and dated even when I was in middle-school in the late 1980's. What's odd is that Northcross is still there in a very different form, so a quick walk through would have told them it has no stairs or second floor and their B-roll was not a match.
That's minor - just a bit of a flub that you'd catch if you lived in Austin around this era when we had three malls and you also remembered buying Standing on a Beach at the record store there in 1989.
What's also a reminder of old Austin are the accents - the voices of men and women twang in a way you rarely hear anymore. Like most kids of my era raised on TV, I've a trace of accent, but it comes and goes, and is nothing like how my friend's parents and my teachers sounded (and vaguely explains how several of the streets in Austin have non-standard pronunciations).
The news footage used is from recognizable local news sources. Our CBS affiliate was KTBC (now Fox 7), KXAN 36 our NBC affiliate and KVUE 24, ABC. So seeing an anchor who retired last summer as a fresh-faced face of the 10:00 PM news, in what was a mid-sized market then, sure shows you the years.
New interviews made for this series include the detectives assigned, both still with us, and both police are still living with the case in a way I can't conceive.
The documentarians lay the ground work well for what, those of us who've loosely tracked the case, know is coming. With no immediate motive or suspects, a random and seemingly unrelated crime leads to Austin's disaffected teens getting the attention of cops.
But what people will talk about is the interview that closes out the episode. After seemingly unaffected by her daughter's murder in a way that seems either delusional or heavily medicated, one of the mothers - on tape from a 2009 interview - tells you about the horror of that night, how she found out, and what she had to do - telling people, including her ex-husband. And it is one of the hardest things I've ever watched in a documentary.
Episode 2.
The slow churn of the following months and immediate years after the murders is followed, expanding on the investigation of the ripples of grief and tragedy that stem from the the event, which expand in all directions and through time.
This episode sees the detectives assigned to the case moved off without consultation, and the fraying relationship between the victims' families and APD. The bonehead move of offering $100K for information that would solve the case meant APD got hundreds and hundreds of useless leads as folks sought the reward.
For younger readers or those who don't recall - in the 80's and 90's, law enforcement had multiple publicized occurrences of deciding that people who weren't clean-cut/ they saw engaged in things like dressing goth or like a hesher was grounds enough to drag them into investigations. Because I didn't watch network magazine news shows, I missed the 48 Hours coverage of the Yogurt Shop Murders, but the program took part in an APD raid on a woman's home. The woman's connection? Being maybe a bit corny about the goth angle she'd pursued in life. But that was enough for Texas in the Satanic Panic era (expect that to come roaring back now, by the way). What's odd is that nothing came up, but apparently every time they update the story, they use this footage?
Far more disconcerting is the way APD began disassembling its own investigation. I understand that the detectives on the case maybe needed to rotate off for their own sanity, but the new, less-compassionate take of the next investigator went nowhere, and they didn't even consult with the original detectives. And... everyone was so lathered up about the case, they were coercing innocent people into signing confessions in Austin, as well as in Mexico.
The doc covers what became evident to Austinites - APD was out of its depth and spinning its wheels. If they weren't, you don't get to the point where you're kicking in the door of some vampire-fan's house as your best lead. But, yeah, wearing black shirts was plenty of reason in this era for you to be accused of murder anywhere in the US.
In recent footage, we meet the brother of one of the victims and his wife - and they've turned to true crime enthusiasts who are trying to solve the case as a hobby. And, man, is it a rough watch as they keep hypotheses around. Getting right back to the "it was satanists angle", when maybe that's the *last* thing we should be considering. I know they want to be heroes, but it's weird.
I've always found the obsession with true crime a tad ghoulish as it feels like its consumed mostly by bored people pretending they'd be a great detective given the chance. This doc brings home the reality that murder never begins and ends with a motive, method, perpetrator and victim. It ends the lives of everyone around the death. And that's more or less what this episode illustrates.
The episode begins by interviewing the sister of one of the victims, now living in Massachusetts. And it is very hard to hear how she watched her parents fade away, and the survivor's guilt she carried and likely still carries. It sets up what's to come, and though he says less, a surviving brother is no less racked by his loss.
Episode 3.
The documentary started with Episode 1 telling us that the two people convicted in the Yogurt Shop Murders were released. For those of us who are locals who followed the case, we knew this. And we know some of what the 4th episode will contain.
I'd been dreading the content that came in this episode. It focuses on how APD gathered confessions from Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, which led to their convictions. It also digs into what the cops were looking at during the mid-90's which led eventually to the arrest of Springsteen and Scott.
They show portions of the confessions caught on tape, and it's a hard watch. The two stumble their way through some version of events.
Look, I don't know if Michael Scott or Springsteen were involved. I do know that we're all a lot smarter now about coercion when people feel trapped, are threatened, etc... And why wouldn't a jury in a town like Austin believe a confession, no matter how it was obtained? Who would ever admit to such a thing? (many, many people, as it turns out, if cops threaten them and lie to them)
But the episode is basically an autopsy on the confessions while also looking at evidence in support and against the confessions. What doesn't change is that there is no evidence pointing to any one individual at this point. The only real evidence pinning the two to the crime are the confessions - and the doc certainly notes how the other two possible suspect, the two original suspects, walked free. It also explores some people who were in the neighborhood who find out as adults that they were mentioned, and lets the cops and investigators share how they came to their conclusions, while others question those methods.
What has always been so strange about the case was the absolute lack of motivation. How APD came down on the side of teen troublemakers graduating to performing a 4-person execution that left no evidence has always been truly odd to me.
Look, I don't remember exactly how I knew, but in the 90's, there was a sort of general knowledge if you were a bit younger that APD was still operated a bit like a backwater town's police force, and that they were not exactly the picture of hero cops. As a younger person, you had to watch your back whether it was for getting popped for jaywalking or something serious. A bored cop could make your life hell, just as fast as a bad cop might make up their mind and was going to force the facts to fit a quadruple homicide because they had no other leads and the DA wanted a conviction.
What I think the doc does, that is losing some of the people I've seen online, is that the film don't always connect A to B to C with narration or neon arrows, as this is not a procedural. It's ultimately a doc about the impact of the crime on a number of lives. But when they let cops talk, it's sometimes it's to point out "this guy is not really making any sense, but he sure seems sure of himself". And I'm not sure all viewers were getting that - despite what the doc is really hinting at about the process of police work.
Episode 4.
If there was ever any doubt what this doc was exploring, it's brought the idea home in this last hour.
There's no grand reveal, of course. No closure other than the near-certainty the families and police will go to their graves not knowing what happened. The tragedy will haunt the city until the last person associated passes. In some time, the murders will be re-discovered and will be an interest piece in journals - jut as The Servant Girl Annihilator was rediscovered in the late 90's after being forgotten for decades.
This episode shows how and why Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen were released, but maybe not exonerated - that's not how the law works, I guess. The law couldn't prove their participation, and never tried the other two for lack of evidence (they did not confess no matter the pressure upon them). Neither can Scott or Springsteen prove they weren't there - any more than anyone can prove a negative. Attorney Joe James Sawyer informs his client he needs to move out of state, because APD will harass him until the end of time - and the reality of what it means to be out of jail after seven years sinks in.
What's interesting is how damning the film is of the APD in regards to this case.
In the early 90's, APD operated as a small-town police shop. If you lived here, this was just known. It's clear that when this case happened, they were out of their depth. Believing themselves clever, and far too seldom doubting themselves, they picked a story of their own making - a sort of Xerox of a Xerox of Satanic Panic - and pursued it. Teens with bad haircuts who might boost a car would graduate to executions. (See: The West Memphis Three.)
The doc just lets the cops talk, they really don't need to do much more than that. The original, broken detectives, the lead who dredged up theories based on seeming vapor, and now the cold case officer tasked with the Yogurt Shop Murders. Decades on, the cold case detetcive states that the DNA found in two places doesn't match any of the four suspects, and the theories of DNA contamination are... wrong. Hearing a cop dispute another cop just doesn't happen.
It's worth noting that the city has never presented a fifth suspect. It doesn't seem they've ever even really looked into any other possible scenarios.
Look, I don't know if the four suspects did it or not. Maybe there's something else there we just don't know, but the DA knew, that the judge knew, but they couldn't present as evidence for some reason. If so, it would be negligent to not cover that evidence in the doc. But it sure feels likely that APD spent decades harassing, jailing and wrecking the lives of four people - one of them dying after resisting arrest a minor, jailable offense.
But, again - this is a doc about the devastation of the crime beyond what happened to the four girls. Parents and siblings left behind, who have to live with what happened. Law enforcement trying to solve an unsolvable crime. And the ending of four lives of maybe innocent people accused. The people who see themselves turning up on 48 Hours as APD raids their homes for no reason.
It's the suddenness of the crime - and the not knowing. There's the terror of being a teen who doesn't look quite right or have enough money or has shitty friends, and now you're on death row. Of sitting at home and APD kicks in your door because someone said you were a little weird or made an off-color joke. And, meanwhile, whomever did it - whether it's the four accused or someone else entirely... they're not in jail.
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