Margaret Brown doesn’t want you to binge her first full TV series. The director of the fresh HBO true-crime docuseries The Yogurt Shop Murders shudde
Margaret Brown doesn’t want you to binge her first full TV series. The director of the fresh HBO true-crime docuseries The Yogurt Shop Murders shudders when I tell her I watched all of its hour-long episodes in one sitting. “Yeah, I don’t recommend that,” she says. “When we were showing it to the families, we were like, ‘Please don’t watch all four in a row.’ It was like a trigger warning.”
The series, which premieres on HBO and streams on HBO Max on Sunday, August 3, explores a quadruple homicide that a friend of Brown’s characterizes as “the craziest crime in Texas.” On December 6, 1991, the bodies of 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison, and 15-year-old Sarah Harbison, Jennifer’s sister, were found inside the burning remains of a strip mall frozen yogurt shop. All four had been bound, gagged, and shot, investigators later said, before an unknown suspect, or suspects, set fire to the business—burning their remains and much of the crime scene in the process.
Jennifer and Eliza worked at the business, an outpost of the national chain I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! Sarah and Amy, who had been spotted at a nearby mall earlier that day, had stopped by near closing time to get a ride home with the older girls, assisting with cleanup as the place closed for the night. It’s not an uncommon scene, as any newborn fast-food worker knows: That same year, my friends often hung out as I finished my closing duties at a small-town TCBY, a similar 1990s-era frozen dessert chain. Many of you reading likely have similar memories, from one side of the counter or the other.
The crime’s relatable circumstances are one of the reasons so many people have been absorbed by the case—but its twists and turns are wholly unique. The Austin Police Department’s work on the case was damaged—perhaps irreparably—by one of its star cops, according to his fellow investigators.
Texas Monthly described onetime APD homicide cop Hector Polanco as having been a “legend” on the force, a man with a magic touch in the interrogation room. But seven weeks after he was tapped to lead a team tasked with investigating the ICBIY homicides, per the magazine, he was booted due to allegedly eliciting false confessions from two suspects. Six months later, as misconduct allegations against Polanco continued to build, he was kicked off the force completely. (Polanco could not be reached for comment.)
Polanco refused to speak with Brown for The Yogurt Shop Murders, but his former colleagues Mike Huckabay and John Jones did. “They’re really angry about how he messed up the case,” Brown says of the former detectives, both of whom have since retired. In the years after the crime, the missteps mounted. Additional suspects confessed, then their confessions were found to be false, with suspicions that some had been coerced. In 1999, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were arrested for the slayings and subsequently convicted in the early 2000s. Springsteen and Scott eventually had their convictions overturned on appeal due to a constitutional rights violation during trial; they were released on bond in June 2009 and had their charges dismissed later that year, following fresh testing of DNA evidence that appeared to link an unknown suspect to the crime. Like some of the suspects who came before, they said their confessions had been coerced.
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