Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
The HBO documentary “The Yogurt Shop Murders” hit home with me. The 1991 crime, unsolved for nearly 34 years, was bold headline news and woven into the local zeitgeist not long after I relocated to Austin, Texas, from New York City. What is a now hot major metro locale was in many ways back then a somewhat sleepy backwater, a small town of a city.
Hence the murder of four young teenage girls at a strip mall frozen yogurt store one winter evening had an effect that strongly rippled through the community then and in the many years to follow. It was more than just a horrifying crime, becoming a benchmark local event. Billboards with pictures of the four girls that hoped to elicit leads about the murders appeared over major thoroughfares.
The Austin that I moved to was a mix of small city urbanity and down-home Texas life with a robust bohemian tradition, the seat of state government and home to the University of Texas. It was only beginning to foster a high-tech industry that would help propel it into becoming a 21st century boomtown.
The Austin that once was is familiar ground to Margaret Brown, the award-winning director of this four-part series. Her debut doc, “Be Here to Love Me,” is an insightful account of the turbulent life of the brilliant and troubled Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who lived here for a spell and was a frequent local presence, revered as a near-Dylaneque talent by roots music cognoscente.
Brown skillfully sets the scene in which the four girls were all shot dead, and then a fire was set, which led authorities to the gruesome scene. The fire and then water used by firefighters to extinguish it largely wiped almost any evidence that might lead police to the perpetrators and their conviction.
The film deep dives into the vast complexity of the crime’s aftermath with skillful clarity as well as empathy for the families of the victims, the series of police detectives who tried over the years to solve the crime, and even the varied suspects, two of them local teens at the time of the crime who were tried nearly 10 years later and convicted for the murders. The verdicts were later overturned and they were released from prison.
One sub-theme throughout is how this crime felt like a loss of a certain innocence, as if major metro area crime had now come to a locality reputed as a laidback semi-paradise. Though it should be noted that Austin is, in a way, one of the places where modern mass murder first arose in 1966 when sniper Charles Whitman went on a rampage from atop the Texas Tower at the university, killing 15 people and wounding 31 others.
Director Brown richly depicts the backdrop context of the murdered girls and the suspects, and captures the frustrations of the police and the families immediately. It explores other possible avenues of investigation beyond the initial teenage suspects after one of them was caught at a local mall with a .38 caliber pistol – the same type of weapon used to murder the teens.
The investigation was muddied by coerced false confessions. Despite the Austin Police Department’s mishaps, its cold case squad continued to pursue the case. The film ends with the prospects of solving the murders looking slim at best.
Then, in what is almost miraculous fortuity, some two months after the doc debuted on HBO in August, advances in DNA technology were able to identify the perpetrator – an itinerant murderer and rapist who apparently had been passing through Austin when he happened upon the girls in the yogurt shop. The solution provided a fitting footnote to this superbly rich and detailed example of a true crime TV series, which is available on HBO Max.
Populist Pick
TV Documentary: “Operation Landslide: The Crash of an Internet Porn King” – This hour-long feature streaming on Prime examines the investigation into an equally horrifying crime: an online child pornography service, also based in Texas, in the late 1990s. A self-taught web programmer launched what was first a small fumbling attempt at purveying legal-age content, then started raking in millions when it switched to distributing sexual images of underaged children. What almost stuns is how the service was started and run by what was seemingly non-criminal regular people, yet had international reach and then impact and repercussions once law enforcement busted the operation and obtained its database of providers and subscribers. And it shows how pervasive sexual lust for minors sadly courses throughout society.
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.
