Helen Archer | On 30, Sep 2025

The more true crime content one consumes, the easier it is to become desensitised. Victims are reduced cyphers, ever-present reminders of the violence which exists in society, their stories – the universe their lives represent – lost in the savagery of their untimely deaths. Amateur sleuths and real life detectives distance themselves from the void left behind, to concentrate instead on attempting to bring the perpetrators to justice. This is, perhaps, the most obvious when a crime is unsolved, the culprits unknown and unpunished. Such cases are like a gaping wound, unable to be stitched together or healed in any real sense. Mourners are left in stasis, stuck on the day it happened, a before/after of a life cut in two. Previously normal families suddenly become common property, their pain paraded in a symbiotic relationship with press and public alike. 

There are few such illustrative cases as that of the 1991 ‘Yogurt Shop Murders’ in Austin, Texas, when four teenagers – 17-year-olds Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, Jennifer’s 15-year-old sister, Sarah, and her friend, 13-year-old Amy Ayers, were killed in a local cafe called ‘I Can’t Believe it’s Yogurt!’, a cheerful name that belies the nature of the crime enacted inside. Each girl was killed with gunshots to the head, having being tied up with their own underwear; the shop – and the bodies – were then set alight. Despite the fire and the water which put it out having destroyed much of any remaining crime scene evidence, coroners found signs of sexual assault – a fact even the families were unaware of for many years.

Director Margaret Brown (Descendant, The Great Invisible) takes her time with this engrossing four-part HBO documentary, beginning and ending with the victims’ families and the effect the murders had on them – both in the immediate aftermath, and in the decades which followed. In between, she tracks the Austin police department’s investigations, speaking to the initial homicide detectives John Jones and Mike Huckabay – sympathetic characters whose failure to find the culprits still weigh heavy on their hearts and minds – then to Paul Johnstone, the man who took over their case, and who ultimately relied on flawed confessions to take two initial suspects to trial. Using footage shot by aspiring filmmaker Claire Huie in 2009 – who is also interviewed extensively here – we are also shown interviews with those men, after their convictions had been overturned on appeal. 

Much time is given to the now-almost-obligatory explanations of the shortcomings of official interrogation practices of American law enforcement, the intimidation and leading questions that can – and often do – result in false confessions, and to the effect that being falsely accused and imprisoned had on those who were themselves teenage boys at the time of the murders. But it is indicative of the years wasted on unjust prosecutions, and with the bereaved families always at the forefront of the series. During the court cases, they had something to concentrate their minds on – be it the thought of justice or revenge – and when those cases collapse, almost two decades after the murders, they are back at square one – although advances in forensic DNA analysis suggests the case could yet be solved.

The series asks bigger questions, though. How do you make sense of something so senseless? How do you process it, what effect does it have on the rest of your life? Does anything resemble closure? It’s a question these families grapple with throughout. Sonora Thomas, who was 13-years-old when her sister, Eliza, was killed, says at one point: “When you lose a sibling, you lose your parents too.” She now works as a psychotherapist, her experience allowing her to help others through their own traumas. John Jones, the detective on the scene as the fire was still burning in 1991, cuts a lonely figure as he reads through the symptoms of PTSD, relating personally to each one. Amy Ayers’ older brother, Shawn, now has a teenage daughter of his own, who wonders aloud how her parents, and her grandparents, would have been had none of this ever happened. The ripples of grief widen over time, bleeding from one generation to the next. This affecting documentary asks its viewers to feel that pain too. 

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