‘Yogurt Shop Murders’ Director on the Ending That Surprised Even Her

It’s rare that a 35-year-old previously unsolvable case is solved shortly after an HBO documentary is released about it. But that’s exactly what happened with The Yogurt Shop Murders, which chronicled the 1991 rapes and murders of four girls in an Austin yogurt shop.

Four teenage boys — Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn, some of whom falsely confessed due to coercion — were accused, with Springsteen and Scott tried and convicted. They have since been declared innocent; on Sept. 26, 2025, just a month after the finale of the documentary aired, Austin police announced that Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial killer who died by suicide in 1999, was identified as the killer through DNA evidence.

Director Margaret Brown (Descendant) and her crew went right back into production to shoot a new finale episode given the developments. The fifth episode of the doc, now Emmy-nominated, aired May 22.

Brown discusses with THR how she dove into the infamous case, the challenges of making a documentary about it and what it was like when the case was finally solved.

You live in Austin now. Is that how you learned about the case?

It’s like the story that haunts Texas. My best friend, who works in true crime ­— she’s a journalist ­— she had been like, “Oh, you have to do that story. It’s the craziest true-crime story in Texas.” She told me that there were so many rabbit holes, and no one really knew what had happened, and people would talk about it at parties here. But true crime had not been what I had worked on before. I hadn’t been opposed to it, but most of my stories were more just about the American South, but because I lived in Austin and because I’m roughly the same age as the girls — and I had friends who went to school with them and were cheerleaders with them, or knew the boys who were accused of the crime — it was something that just permeated Austin.

Did you jump at the chance to tell this story, or did you feel any hesitation given the notoriety of the case?

I was really a naive idiot. I didn’t understand how hard it would be to work on true crime and how hard it would be on my crew. I was traveling with my previous feature doing publicity at the time, and I looked at the archival footage [of the case], and it was incredible. That was the pull: It looked like Twin Peaks or something. It was like a window into this place I had nostalgia for, of a place I had never even been. But the first day of production, I was like, “Oh fuck! This is going to be so hard,” because you meet the parents of the victims and you realize what you signed up for.

This happened 35 years ago, and up until eight months ago it was unsolved. Was that daunting to think you wouldn’t really have answers to your questions?

It was at first, but then we would go down this rabbit hole. It leads nowhere. There’s no answer, and I’ll just be in the editing room with my editor, and we would be like, “What’s next? Another rabbit hole!” I guess I felt something underneath that, thinking about something that’s going to affect us all, which is grief. The older I get, the more I think about death. And death came so early for these girls, and I was also really struck by the grace of all the families who were just normal people, and they were such heroes to me. I guess I wondered, would all people be like this? The families that were involved in this, I found something to admire in everyone. Just the grace with which they dealt with this, and I felt like that would be a good thing to put out into the world, to show how they made it out of such incredible pain.

Where did your research begin?

I went straight to the source. I spoke to the people whom it impacted. I spoke to the families around them. I spoke to the investigators.

Can you talk about who you didn’t get to speak with? Of course, Maurice Pierce died in 2010. (He was shot after stabbing a police officer following a routine traffic stop.)

We never got Robert Springsteen [who was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the crimes and, along with Scott, served 10 years before being exonerated]. We got Claire Huie’s footage of Robert, but I think he was just so shell-shocked. Three weeks after the show came out, the case was solved. I had to go straight back into production, and I’d already started on another film, and I was driving there and had to turn back around and go to Austin and shoot for another four months and edit in two. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. It was absolutely what we had to do: It was a chance to look at what happens when something like this actually gets solved, and it was just mind-blowing.

While you were shooting, did you have any inclination that the case was about to be solved?

When we started making the show, the police department assigned Detective Dan Jackson to our case, and he’s someone who’s known for solving cases. Perhaps an HBO documentary being made pushed them to actually get his eyes on it, and he was very confident. We would meet for breakfast from time to time, and he would be like, “I have a new lead, and I’m flying to this place, and I’m checking on this,” but it never panned out. But four days before I left Austin to start a new film, I met him for coffee and his body language was weird. He was acting different, and he was kind of shifty. I noticed, and I was like, “What’s up, man? You’re acting weird.” He was like, “There’s something I want to tell you, but I can’t.” And I was like, “OK, cool, but can I leave? Do I need to call my producer and tell her we need to get more money from HBO?” And he was like, “No, no, you should go. It’s not going to happen overnight.” But then it did happen overnight. What he said was, “I have to tell the families first.”

What was that call with HBO like?

They were excited. I think they knew this was a huge deal, and this never happens. … Everyone dropped everything and just came to Austin and shot. We were very happy that the families got some kind of closure. My first thought was for the families, but my very quick second thought was for these boys. What are they going to say? And I knew I had so little time to get them to talk to me, so I was super grateful that all but Robert eventually did. Maurice is dead, but his family spoke to me. I was honestly nervous about filming the families too because I felt like it was a little bit unfair to interview them when they’re still in shock — like this guy, Robert Eugene Brashers, who just comes out of nowhere and turns out to have been involved and being told for so long that someone else was responsible and this guy was on no one’s radar.

What was the most challenging aspect of making this documentary?

We all had therapy. It was like dealing with this secondary trauma. I think people who make these kinds of shows, they should have therapy to deal with it, because you feel guilty for feeling bad because you’re around these people that went through some of the worst things. You need to go somewhere to process it. My cinematographer and I, he would always stay with me when we were shooting in Austin, and at night, we would sometimes look at footage, but other times we would just order food and stare at the wall and not say anything because it’s so heavy, and you just want to be there for the people you’re talking to. But you can’t live in trauma all the time, and you want to make something that adds value to the world and is also entertaining to watch and interesting and thought-provoking. So it’s a crazy balancing act because you want to be respectful to the families, but in order to get people to pay attention to their case, it also has to be really good, right? I know some of the family members were really upset that we wanted to focus at all on Deborah Brashers [daughter of Robert Eugene Brashers]. They thought he was a demon. They didn’t want to focus on him. And I had to be like, “He’s the murderer. We can’t ignore him.” I know that might sound crazy to you, but this is who murdered and raped their children. They don’t want that guy to get attention; they fucking hate that guy. You’d have to have conversations like that where it just breaks your heart to see a mother who is crying because her daughter was raped and murdered, and you’re having to explain to her why you need to focus on that person. Am I making the right decision? There has to be some space for processing so you can just go to sleep at night thinking, “Oh, I wasn’t a terrible person in the world today.”

View this article at The Hollywood Reporter.