‘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 murder of teenagers Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas and sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison.

That same day, Margaret Brown, director of “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” boarded a plane to Austin, where the murders took place, to film the fifth episode of the series. The episode, titled “The End of Wondering,” explores how DNA evidence led to Brashers’ conviction.

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

Brown had spent more than three years interviewing crime investigation teams and the victims’ parents and siblings for the first four episodes of the docuseries. She says 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 afraid the families would be even more traumatized if the police found out Brashers had done it,” Brown said. But the director soon 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 production team tracked down interrogation room images 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 overturned. Welborn’s charges were dropped in 2000. Pierce was held for years on charges before being released in 2003. Pierce was fatally shot by Austin police after a traffic stop in 2010. All four men were formally acquitted in February 2026.

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

Welborn and Pierce’s widow and daughter, who did not agree to talk 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 final part of the HBO series shows that Brashers, in addition to the four innocent girls who lost their lives in 1991, murdered 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 Austin police announced that Robert Eugene Brashers was responsible for the murders? Did you have any idea they were about to solve this case?

I had a suspicion because I’m in close contact with the cold case detective [Dan Jackson]and I could just tell that something was going on.

Was that after you finished filming the series?

I did the interview with Detective Jackson that you see in the fourth part of the series, about a year before they announced that they had discovered who did it. At that time, he was not close to solving the case.

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

I definitely didn’t think I should have waited another year because it was really hard for me to be in that world with those families for that long. I felt for them so deeply. Everyone in the case had so much trauma. So I was happy to move on even though it wasn’t resolved yet.

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

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

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

Was there any hesitation at the time about going back to that world and making a fifth installment?

At the end of the fourth episode, everyone felt like it wasn’t completed because it wasn’t resolved and there was so much despair. I just thought, “How can I not do this for the families and for the continuation of the story?” The families all said, “You’ll be back, right?”

So HBO was automatically included?

HBO initially thought, “It’s a coda.” And I thought, it’s not a coda – it could be a different series. I didn’t really want to go into it much more, but I immediately thought: Now that we know who did it, what about those guys who were accused? What is their life 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 did not express any sympathy for the wrongly accused men?

I thought, “Wait. Why don’t you care?” But all I can think of is that when you go through something like that, there’s just no room for anything else. I felt I should incorporate 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. That’s why I want to warn people not to judge it too much.

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

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

This interview has been edited and condensed.