Cold Comfort

My babysitting career ended when I was 15 years old. It was December 1991, and I’d been hired to care for a toddler from my parents’ church. At the end of the night, I was flustered from wrangling the child’s flailing limbs into a onesie he’d clearly outgrown when I finally deposited him into his crib. Exhausted, I plopped onto the couch with the remote and flipped the television on to the local news, where a reporter informed me that the bodies of four girls had been found at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in northwest Austin. The news did not report that the girls had been tied up, shot, and burnt, or that three of the bodies were found stacked on top of each other. That night, I knew only that four dead girls had been found in a yogurt shop a few miles from where I sat. Afterwards, when people asked me to babysit, I said no.

Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, both 17, were employees at the yogurt shop, closing down for the night when they were killed. Jennifer’s 15-year-old sister, Sarah, and Sarah’s friend, Amy Ayers, 13, had walked to the yogurt shop from a nearby mall and were waiting for a ride home. We went to different schools, and the victims’ pictures in the news (lots of hairspray) made them look like conventional girls, while I aspired to be edgy and bookish. But we were all teenagers in northwest Austin, busy with school, first jobs, and first loves. Their murders felt real to me in a way that crime on the news never had before. When I learned about them, I froze—suddenly aware that I was in the dark, in a strange house, alone in my body, which looked like their bodies. Three decades later, I haven’t lost the memory of that feeling.

Austin’s reaction to the crime that would come to be known as the Yogurt Shop Murders was swift and full-throated. “On December 6, 1991, we, as a city, lost our innocence,” said Mayor Kirk Watson. An article in the Austin American-Statesman called the victims “the girls next door,” emphasizing that the younger girls had walked to the yogurt shop from Northcross Mall on a “well-lighted path.” The authorities formed a task force and set up a hotline for tips. There were marches and candlelight vigils. Local musicians wrote a song called “We Will Never Forget,” and pictures of the four victims smiled down from billboards asking, “WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS?” By January, the lead detective, Sergeant John Jones, expressed confidence that the case would end soon, a bit of posturing that he would later blame on advice from the FBI. Three decades and many missteps later, the case remains unsolved. 

Oddities surrounded the crime and its investigation from the beginning. Improbably, on the night of the murders Jones was accompanied in his patrol car by a news team from a local TV station doing a series about crime in Texas. Later, 48 Hours would use the cameraman’s footage of Jones receiving the call about a fire at the yogurt shop, turning on his flashing lights, and speeding to the site. Kenneth McDuff, a killer on parole, was later convicted of abducting and murdering an Austin woman a few weeks after the Yogurt Shop Murders, but he had an alibi on the night of December 6. The yogurt shop victims’ autopsy reports were sealed—an unusual move that prosecutors blamed on the risk that releasing details might jeopardize the investigation, but which also buttressed the collective feeling that the murders were simply too horrific for normal procedures. The police suspected Satanic involvement, at least initially. But all of this was background noise that would come to seem stranger in hindsight. At the time, the thing no one could get over was the identity of the victims, their “beautiful shining faces of innocence,” in the words of a psychiatrist quoted in the news. 

At age 15, I couldn’t lose my innocence fast enough. On Fridays and Saturdays, my friends and I went to Northcross Mall for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Everyone at Rocky was fascinating and vibrant—both the audience who came to yell along with the lines and throw toast at the screen and the live cast of theater kids. Rocky was my introduction to a scene, by which I mean a barely contained, always in-flux combination of people, places, and things that derive their intense value from being inscrutable to the rest of the world. At Rocky, the borders of the daytime world blurred and became meaningless. The difference between boy and girl, audience and star—none of that mattered as long as you were memorable. The scene at Rocky merged with the scenes at downtown dance clubs and on the stretch of Guadalupe Street near the University that we call The Drag. Before long, the scene was part of me and I was part of it.

Black clothing was one thing we all had in common—the fishnetted cast of Rocky, the girl reading Hakim Bey in the smoking section at Captain Quackenbush’s Café on the Drag, the kids downtown with their white makeup and blackberry lipstick. After the Yogurt Shop Murders, the Austin police used the term People in Black, or “PIB,” to describe our subculture, under suspicion because the authorities were looking for people strange enough to carry out an unspeakable crime. Rumors swirled: young people brought in for questioning, shown pictures of brutality that they would never be able to forget. In my world, no one used the term “PIB,” except ironically.

By the summer of 1993, I had graduated high school, left home, and shaved my head. It was the period in my life that I would refer to later as “off the rails” or a “rough patch,” phrases that call to mind a scrubby no-man’s-land, tumbleweeds rolling, a liminal space between neatly delineated plots. I went from the good girl whom neighbors asked to babysit to the bald girl with a nose ring and a neck tattoo. I no longer identified with the wholesome-looking victims of the Yogurt Shop Murders. Now I identified with the people on the margins of society, suspicious to the nine-to-five crowd because we wore black and kept nontraditional hours. 

We were nocturnal, and downtown Austin was our playground. Being broke and underaged, we didn’t restrict ourselves to the clubs on Sixth Street, where bouncers could not be relied upon to let us in for free, even if we flirted. The downtown scene was better on weeknights; Fridays and Saturdays were for tourists and frat boys. On Tuesday nights, we danced at Ohm’s, a club on Seventh Street where a campy bondage show felt like an extension of Rocky. If we wanted to get high, we walked behind the clubs, down to the vortex of darkness on the shores of Waller Creek. Now, Ohm’s is history, and Waller Creek is a well-traveled nexus between the Austin Convention Center and downtown restaurants, its shores the site of a family-friendly holiday light show. I went there last Christmas and saw moms pushing strollers down alleyways that once smelled like skunk weed and piss. None of the places I remember are the same. But I think often about my former life here, now that I am at home and in bed most nights by 9:00 p.m.

Back then, I loved to walk alone at night. After the clubs closed, in the silence of long, dark blocks between Congress Avenue and Lamar Street, I could collect my thoughts before entering the fray at Katz’s Delicatessen, the 24-hour diner on West Sixth Street where my friends and I pooled our money for coffee and French fries and gossiped about the night’s events until morning. This was before teenagers carried digital trackers in their pockets. When I set out to walk alone on those nights, my whereabouts were known only to me. The question of whether I was safe is unknowable, and anyway it doesn’t interest me. I felt safe. I felt safer when I was alone and walking—a body moving through the night—than during the daytime around the normal people who stared. 

I survived my “rough patch,” but it wouldn’t occur to me to describe myself as a survivor for many years. At age 18, I moved away from Austin, and in my new home of Olympia, Washington, I took the first job that I could find: serving frozen yogurt. The idea of working in a yogurt shop creeped me out, but I needed the money, so I tamped down my unease and learned the trade. This was before self-service and tangy flavors were in vogue. Back then, we served customers from behind the counter, and the yogurt was always sweet. My yogurt shop in downtown Olympia always smelled faintly of sour milk, like a baby’s skin. I became vegan.

At night, mopping the floor, my thoughts turned to death and froyo. The frozen treat was a perfect metaphor for the victims’ innocence. During the litigation following the murders, reporters at the courthouse would even ask each other, “You here for yogurt?” Dessert as shorthand for the crime. That perverse juxtaposition of sweetness and violence was irresistible to a certain kind of mind, which is probably why those of us who were young here in the ’90s had to suffer through so many jokes ending in the punchline, “I Can’t Believe It’s a Body.” Now that I’m the mother of a teenage son, I think differently about the feckless boys who told those jokes. Back then, their cruel punchline simply disgusted me. Now I wonder if their crude humor masked deeper fears. 

In the late ’90s, while I attended college in Olympia, police in Austin interrogated four young men who had originally been dismissed as suspects. One of them, Maurice Pierce, had called attention to himself by flaunting a pistol at Northcross Mall days after the murders. In 2001 and 2002, juries convicted two of the young men, based on confessions that were later deemed inadmissible and likely coerced. This wasn’t the first confession: In 1992, a Mexican man who had been in Austin on the night of the murders confessed to killing the girls but later recanted, claiming he had been threatened by Mexican police. In 2009, the year I moved back to Austin with my husband and our three-month-old son, it seemed the case of the Yogurt Shop Murders was even further from a solution than when I left.

I am 47 now, a homeowner in northwest Austin, old enough to use a euphemism when I don’t want to talk about my unruly adolescence. Old enough to identify with a third set of characters in the tragedy-of-errors that is the Yogurt Shop Murders, i.e., the victims’ parents. My son is 15. A fan of Stranger Things, he didn’t believe me when I told him that the D&D hysteria depicted in that show was based on real fears of Satanic influences and “people in black” in the ’80s and ’90s. My son has more awareness than I did at his age about bias against Black people. Black clothing-based bias is laughable to him, and rightly so. His school has an official D&D club. It also holds regular drills to prepare for the potential of an armed intruder. There are many reasons why my son might not understand how I felt when I learned about the murders in 1991.

Do I want my son to walk around this city at night as freely as I did in my adolescence? No, I don’t. But I can’t attribute my caution to the Yogurt Shop Murders. The four girls who died were innocent. But the way people talked about the crime that rocked my hometown—as if Austin itself had lost its innocence—was a product of imagination, much like the notion that eating a comfort food can make you safe. My son is growing up in a world that has been stripped of many comforting illusions. But some things haven’t changed. He wants more freedom to roam, and I am always a tiny bit afraid when he’s not at home with me. I can’t ensure that nothing bad will ever happen to him. It’s important to me that he find pockets of time and space in which he feels safe and free in his body, like I did on those nights when I was young. 

Since 1991, I haven’t stopped thinking about the Yogurt Shop Murders. As I got older and began to write about my life, the crime worked its way into almost everything that I wrote. When I meet others who grew up in Austin around the same time as me—a rare occasion, these days—mention of the crime never fails to create a connection. We all remember where we were when we first heard the news. And yet, it wasn’t until my son was the same age as the youngest yogurt shop victim that I bothered to research the crime, to learn what had really happened with the botched investigation. When I realized how little I actually knew about the victims, I felt guilty. All these years, I had accepted the girls as symbols of lost innocence because of the way they died. I had never even tried to imagine how they lived.

Reading Beverly Lowry’s 2016 book, Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders, I learned that the girls were far more interesting than I assumed in 1991. Sarah played basketball and volleyball at Lanier High School, where she was also a member of Future Farmers of America and on the student council. On the night of the murder, she was excited that her new boyfriend had just given her his senior ring. Jennifer ran varsity track at Lanier. She was helping her dad make payments on a new truck loan with her job at the yogurt shop. Eliza, also a student at Lanier and involved in FFA, was the first to work at the yogurt shop. She’d convinced Jennifer to apply for a job there. Amy attended Burnet Middle School, but she was already a participant in Lanier’s FFA program. She’d been riding horses since she was three years old and often wore a cowboy hat to school.

I thought of the many twists and turns of life that the girls’ parents didn’t get to see them navigate, all the versions of their children that they didn’t get to meet. Eliza had wanted to study veterinary medicine at Texas A&M, but her mother told Lowry that her daughter loved language and might have grown up to be a writer, even a poet. My mother might have said something similar about my love of language when I was 17, but I wouldn’t start taking my writing seriously until my forties. 

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Homicide Victims’ Families’ Rights Act. Inspired by the Austin murders, the Act is designed to allow victims’ families to ask federal agencies to reopen and solve cold cases using new technologies. There is hope that it will rectify the injustice of the uncertainty that these families have had to live with for over thirty years. Other injustices, as we know, can never be rectified: the lives that were robbed from the victims and their families; the false arrests and prison time; the fact that this terrible thing happened in a city operating under the assumption that this kind of thing didn’t happen here.

On a recent afternoon, I stopped by the former location of the yogurt shop, hoping to find the memorial plaque that the victims’ families had placed there. I did not use the GPS on my phone, confident that I would know the way, which I did. I parked my car in the parking lot and walked up to the low brick building. Visually, Hillside Shopping Center is an unremarkable strip mall. On a nail salon window, an anonymous black and gold label marks the former address of the yogurt shop. But I saw no signs of a memorial. I kept walking along the shop entrances and around the back, where a slim strip of asphalt borders a low hill, overgrown with weeds and detritus, leading down to the shallow green waters of Shoal Creek. The back doors are unnumbered; I couldn’t tell which door might correspond to the back door of the former yogurt shop, rumored to have been left unlocked on the night of the murders. I stood there for a while trying to figure out which door to look at, and then I left, disappointed, because I was late to pick up my kid from school. I vowed to come back to the site when I had more time, to try harder to find the girls’ names. It felt like something I owed them, or maybe something I owed my younger self. As I drove away, I couldn’t help but track with my eyes the path that I might have taken to Northcross Mall if I was walking to Rocky at midnight.

On my second visit, I found the memorial in the parking lot in front of the former yogurt shop. On the plaque, the phrases, “IN LOVING MEMORY” and “FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS” frame the four victims’ names, next to a vase of colorful plastic flowers. I might have seen it sooner if I’d allowed my feet to follow my wandering gaze in the direction of the mall. This makes sense to me; I am never at my best when I’m a mom in a hurry. It’s always worthwhile to try and see the world as I used to when I was a wayward teenager, too exhilarated by the freedom of walking alone in my city to think of dangers lurking in the dark.