HBO’s ‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ Takes a Different Approach to Documenting True Crime

“I didn't have any kind of ridiculous notion that I could solve it,” Director Margaret Brown tells Jezebel. “I'm much more interested in the untraceability of memory."

By Kady Ruth Ashcraft | August 22, 2025 | 5:29pm

Photo: HBO Max Entertainment Movies

HBO’s ‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ Takes a Different Approach to Documenting True Crime

In episode two of director Margaret Brown’s HBO docuseries The Yogurt Shop Murders, Sonora Thomas describes having to “manage the shame of forgetting.” When a reporter showed up to her freshman dorm in college to ask about her older sister, she was struck by a unique guilt that the reporter knew more details about her sister’s life than she could remember.

Thomas’ sister, Eliza Thomas, was 17 years old when she was murdered alongside three other teenage girls—13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison, and Jennifer’s 15-year-old sister Sarah—in Austin, Texas, in 1991. To be fair, Sonora was only 13 when her sister was murdered, and her family, burdened by grief, never openly talked about what happened to Eliza. Still, memory, as Brown expertly captures in his series, is a really tricky thing.

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True crime is a genre marked by sensationalism and fanaticism, but in Brown’s telling of this horrific case, those traits aren’t inherent as much as they’re scrutinized. Instead, the series focuses on trauma’s impact on memory, our understanding of memory at large, and the reverberations of violent crime —allowing it to eschew the genre’s more exploitative tropes.

“I didn’t have any kind of ridiculous notion that I could solve it,” Brown tells Jezebel in a video call. “I’m much more interested in the untraceability of memory, or how to say what a memory even is.”

Having lived in and out of Austin in her youth, Brown remembers the billboards placed around town offering a $25,000 reward for any information about who killed the four teen girls. At some point around closing time for the yogurt shop where Jennifer and Eliza worked, the four girls were bound in the back kitchen, shot in the head, and the building was set on fire. Their bodies weren’t discovered until after the fire was extinguished, meaning much of the crime scene was either contaminated or washed away. Thirty-four years and over fifty false confessions later, the gruesome quadruple homicide remains unsolved.

Austin, a relatively small town at the time, was rocked by the murders. Billboards went up; neighbors held candlelight vigils; schools buried memory time capsules in the girls’ honor; a camera crew snuck into the private funeral; and local musicians wrote and recorded a song titled, “We Will Not Forget.” The families, feeling like they needed to do whatever it took to keep attention on the case, were thrown into the spotlight.

“I have alternated between disgust for the ongoing fascination and awe that the public continues to be horrified by an event that has shaped every aspect of my life,” Sonora says at the beginning of the second episode.

It’s not uncommon for true crime tales to be told like scary stories around a campfire; but for listeners—especially victims and survivors—the details of these violent crimes are often discussed much too cavalierly. Brown said she’s not a huge true crime connoisseur, but has listened to some podcasts and wondered, “Why are you talking like that? If you ever met these people, could you say that to their face?”

Still, when she agreed to direct the project, she admits she was initially drawn to the captivating archival footage. “It was amazing, like something out of Twin Peaks,” she tells Jezebel. There are plenty of cinematic parallels: a small town rocked by the murder of a teenage girl; the suburban banal made eerily captivating. “I could hear the kind of music I’d want to use, ” she says. “But I wasn’t thinking about real people.”

That changed in her first interviews with the Ayers family. At one point in the series, Bob Ayers, Amy’s father, tells Brown: “It’s been 30 years, 7 months, and 5 days, and I still can’t believe it.” Brown says something changed in her body during that interview, and she realized her approach had to be more than just an eerie Lynchian aesthetic on top of gripping recounts of this terrible event.“What did I agree to do?” Brown says she remembers thinking to herself. “It was such a primal energy and such a primal pain, and I felt so much for him.”

The four-episode series, the last of which premieres Sunday, August 24, incorporates Brown’s interviews with the girls’ families and law enforcement who worked on the case, archival news coverage, and extensive footage from and interviews with Claire Huie, another Austin filmmaker who attempted to make a similar documentary in 2009. “The deeper I got into it, the more incapable I felt of telling the story,” Huie says in the series, explaining how she was only a student filmmaker at the time and felt overwhelmed by the undertaking. Though her inability to finish the film felt less like a lack of skill and more a testament to the complexity and horror of the case.

While grief and trauma have warped the families’ memories, systemic injustice has done the same to many of the men who were forced into false confessions. Brown included Huie’s interviews with the convicted men, their attorneys, and Robert Shomer, “a memory expert,” all of which centered on the men’s false and coerced confessions. Shomer explains that memory is less about playback and more of a construction of inferences, assumptions, and incorporation of information from other people.

In an interview with Huie and in another with 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty, Robert Springsteen, who served five years on death row before his conviction was overturned in 2009, admits to not completely understanding why he confessed to the murders. (No physical evidence ever connected him to the crime.) According to the Innocence Project, “on average, people who falsely confessed were interrogated for up to 16 hours before admitting to a crime they did not commit.” While Brown wasn’t able to interview Springsteen herself, she includes numerous cuts of hours-long Austin Police Department security footage, showing investigators pushing these men to the brink of sanity to edge out a confession. Some of these questionings took place a decade after the murders. A retired police officer brags that he can get someone to admit to a crime they didn’t commit.

This is where the series stands out; Brown doesn’t explicitly suggest there’s a connection between the families’ inability to access their memories and the wrongly convicted men being gaslit into disbelieving their own, but exploring both bucks the true crime stereotype that if you inspect something close enough, or interview enough people ad nauseam, the truth is bound to come to light. Brown’s decision to hone in on the fallibility and malleability of memory instead of indulging in pet theories (like The Staircase’s “Owl Theory,” for example) or trying to figure out who’s guilty is how The Yogurt Shop Murders successfully forgoes the icky pitfalls of sensationalism.

At one point Brown has Huie rewatch an old interview she did with Barbara Ayres-Wilson, the mother of Jennifer and Sarah, where Huie asks Barbara, “Can we start by your telling us how your daughters were murdered?” Huie watches her footage, mortified. In a series as grim as this one, this scene managed to be one of the most excruciating to watch. As family members contend with the horror of their memories, the true crime genre usually asks them to retell and recite everything they remember, as if it’s an easy task. Brown’s interviews, for the most part, focused on the family members’ experiences of the public’s reaction to the tragedy.

“We got a lot of attention early because it was hot news—four white girls got killed,” Barbara Ayres-Wilson says in the final episode. “I would’ve taken a step back a little bit more, but I felt such an obligation to carry this thing out.” But she also describes the strange comfort of remaining close to the pain.

Sonora continues to grapples with her family’s inability to talk about her sister and now works as a psychotherapist specializing in trauma. Shawn and Angie Ayers, Amy’s brother and sister-in-law, are still working with private investigators to help uncover new clues. Bob Ayers’ memory has hyperfixated on the number of days that have ticked away since his daughter’s death. John Jones, the original lead investigator, was reassigned from the case in 1994 and to this day suffers from PTSD. Similar to Sonora’s cloudy memories of her sister, in the first episode, Shawn says, “The thing that sucks is the older I get, the less I can remember.” He continues, “I mean, I try to remember, I don’t know why it’s happening. It bugs me.”

Investigators are still working on solving the killings of the teenage girls. Brown tells Jezebel that it’d be wonderful if the series led to “more clues that come to the surface,” but that wasn’t what she set out to accomplish. As Huie says in the series, when you remove the strong opinions of a frenzied public from these situations, “What you’re reduced to is just people’s experiences of the crime and its effects.” Brown’s Yogurt Shop Murders examines those experiences and effects in a compelling, grounded, and contemplative way.

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