Robert Eugene Brashers

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Eugene Brashers died in January 1999, and while he lived, no investigator ever named him as a suspect in any of his murders. Investigators now link him to at least eight murders in Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas between 1990 and 1998. He was not unknown to the law. He had been convicted of attempted murder for a shooting in 1985, and of various offenses from a 1992 case in which he stole a vehicle. Even so, he lived in relative obscurity. Then, in 2025, police in Austin, Texas, announced that he was the man behind the 1991 yogurt shop murders, in which four teenaged girls were killed. How does a man with a prison record move through several states without suspicion? What can a dead man leave behind that investigators are still able to read decades later? And what did the people closest to him see, or decide not to see?

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• 2. Florida, 1985

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  Robert Eugene Brashers was born on the 13th of March 1958 in Newport News, Virginia. He was the youngest of four children born to Doulis and Nellie Brashers. The family later moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he spent his childhood and youth. Reports say he committed no offenses as a teenager and did not abuse substances. He attended S. R. Butler High School in Huntsville and John Adams High School in South Bend, Indiana. After graduating he enlisted in the United States Army. He is also described as serving about ten months in the United States Navy, from which he was discharged because of personality disorders. In the early 1980s he settled in New Orleans, Louisiana, and by the mid-1980s he had moved on to Fort Myers, Florida.

  On the 22nd of November 1985, police in Port St. Lucie, Florida, arrested Brashers after an attack on a 24-year-old woman named Michelle Wilkerson. Investigators said he met her in Fort Pierce and persuaded her to go with him to a bar. After their evening there, he drove her to a dark alley near a citrus grove. The two drank six Budweisers, and he made sexual advances. Wilkerson refused and tried to leave his vehicle. A fight followed, and Brashers shot her twice, in the neck and the head.

  Wilkerson stayed conscious. She got out of the car and hid in a culvert beneath the road. Brashers lost track of her, went to the beach and threw his gun into the sea. His truck then stuck in the sand, so he began walking the streets looking for help. Wilkerson, meanwhile, reached a nearby apartment building and received medical attention. Before she was driven to Lawnwood Hospital, she gave police officers a detailed description of her attacker and his car.

  A few minutes later, officers found Brashers wandering the beach. He was charged with attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery, and using a firearm during the commission of a crime. He was convicted the following year and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Under the more lenient laws of the time, he was released for good conduct on the 4th of May 1989. Afterward he drifted between South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, rarely staying in one place.

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• 3. Evidence in the Bones

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  In 2018, a genealogist named CeCe Moore, working with Parabon NanoLabs, used investigative genetic genealogy to name Brashers as a suspect in three murders and several rapes going back to 1990. By then he had been dead for almost two decades. Prosecutors in New Madrid County and Pemiscot County, Missouri, filed a motion to exhume his remains so that further testing could be done.

  On the 27th of September 2018, his casket was exhumed from a cemetery in Paragould, Arkansas. Technicians extracted DNA from the bones. The results showed a perfect match between his genetic profile and the killer of 28-year-old Genevieve "Jenny" Zitricki.

  Zitricki died in her apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, on the 5th of April 1990. She had been bludgeoned, raped and strangled with pantyhose. At the time, investigators established that the killer dragged her body from the bedroom into the bathtub and submerged it. He then wrote a profane warning about his family on the bathroom mirror. A DNA sample from the perpetrator was isolated in 1995 and uploaded to CODIS, the national DNA database, where it waited for a match. Investigators later established that Brashers had been living in Greenville when she was killed, not far from her home.

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• 4. The Yogurt Shop Night

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  On the night of the 6th of December 1991, an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas, became the scene of four murders. The victims were Amy Ayers, 13, Eliza Thomas, 17, Jennifer Harbison, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15. Two of the girls worked at the shop. Their killer tied them up and killed them, and then the bodies and the interior were set on fire. At least three of the victims were raped.

  The evidence that later pointed to Brashers came in layers. Scientists developed a Y-STR DNA profile from vaginal swabs taken from three of the victims. It matched none of the earlier suspects. It did match the Y-STR profile of Brashers. Further testing showed that an autosomal STR profile found under the fingernails of the youngest victim also matched him. A bullet casing found in a drain at the scene was consistent with patterns produced by the gun he used in his standoff with police in 1999.

  The case had a long life in print and on screen. In 2016, Beverly Lowry published a nonfiction book, Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders. Corey Mitchell published Murdered Innocents the same year. Scott Blackwood's 2015 novel, See How Small, drew on the crime. People Magazine Investigates covered it in 2023 in an episode titled "Who Killed Our Girls?" In August 2025, HBO released a five-part documentary, The Yogurt Shop Murders.

  In December 2025, the Travis County District Attorney's office filed a motion to exonerate four men who had previously been accused of the murders. The new evidence pointed to Brashers instead.

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• 5. Two Days Later

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  On the 8th of December 1991, less than 48 hours after the fire in Austin, a United States Border Patrol agent stopped Brashers at an interior checkpoint on Interstate 10. He was travelling westbound between El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. The agent discovered that the truck he was driving had been reported stolen in Marietta, Georgia, on the 29th of November. A search turned up a .380 AMT Backup pistol, the same make and model as the weapon used in the yogurt shop murders. Brashers drove off and fled for about a mile before he surrendered. He was charged with auto theft and with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

  On the 18th of February 1992, he was arrested in Cobb County, Georgia, for grand theft auto, unlawful possession of a weapon, and theft. Police searched his vehicle and his apartment. They found a radio scanner, a police jacket, lock-picking tools and a fake Tennessee driver's license. Fearing another prison sentence, he made a plea deal and pleaded guilty to the most serious charge, which let the rest be dropped. He received an additional five years in prison and served all of it. He was released in February 1997 and moved to Paragould, Arkansas.

  The pistol from the checkpoint stop had a second life. After his sentencing it was released to Brashers' father. Years later it would be used in the November 1998 murder of Linda Rutledge, and again in Brashers' own death in January 1999.

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• 6. The Final Years

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  On the 11th of March 1997, Brashers raped a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee. She and four other people were inside a home when he knocked on the door and then forced his way in, armed with a revolver. Once inside, he tied up the occupants.

  On the 28th of March 1998, in Portageville, Missouri, 38-year-old Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan were found shot to death at home. Both had been tied up, and Megan had been raped before he killed them with a .22 caliber gun. About two hours later, he broke into a home in Dyersburg, Tennessee, and tried to assault a 25-year-old woman. She resisted fiercely, and he fled. No useful biological evidence was left behind, but forensic ballistics showed that the same gun had been used in both attacks. In June 2019, the television series On the Case with Paula Zahn profiled the Zitricki and Scherer murders.

  On the 12th of April 1998, Brashers was arrested in Paragould while trying to break into the home of a woman who had once employed him. He had cut the phone line to her house and was armed. Officers seized a video camera and locksmithing tools. He was released after posting bail.

  On the 16th of August 1998, he was arrested in Greene County, Arkansas, on charges including residential burglary, leaving the scene of an accident, public intoxication and second-degree criminal impersonation. He had driven erratically on U.S. Highway 412, crashed his van through a fence, hit a parked vehicle and fled. A motorist who gave an injured Brashers a ride then contacted police. When officers found him, he gave a false identity and a fictitious story. Investigators also learned that he had burglarized his neighbor's home and taken cash and jewelry. In October, Arkansas authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, because the new charges revoked the bond in his April case.

  At around 7:40 am on the 7th of November 1998, the Lexington Fire Department in Kentucky was sent to the Nixon Hearing Aid Center in the 100 block of Malabu Drive. Crews found heavy smoke, went in, and quickly put out the fire. In the back hallway they found a woman dead. The Fayette County Coroner's Office identified her as 43-year-old Linda Marie Rutledge, and she had died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head. She had also been raped.

  The link to Brashers came in July 2025, when the Austin Police Department contacted Lexington detectives. A search of the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network had matched the .380 shell casing from the hearing aid center to one found in Austin after the yogurt shop murders in December 1991. DNA evidence from the two cases also matched. In September 2025, a sexual assault kit from Rutledge was sent to DNA Labs International. It matched the Austin profile, and Brashers was announced as the perpetrator.

  Back in Arkansas, two more arrest warrants were issued in November 1998. The second was for his failure to appear in court on the 12th of November.

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• 7. Inside the Household

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  In February 2019, Brashers' 27-year-old daughter Deborah spoke to reporters about the father she barely knew. She said she first saw him in early 1997, just after his release from prison. For the next two years he lived with her, her mother and her half-sisters. She described him as sometimes aggressive. By her account, he once fought her stepfather and injured his head with a drill.

  She also described a tape recording that she found perhaps the most disturbing detail. On it, Brashers recorded himself making small cuts on his neck and arm with a saw, to see whether he could endure the pain. Deborah said that his mental health sharply deteriorated around April 1998. His job with a construction firm kept him away from home for weeks at a time.

  Her mother, Dorothy, died in December 2018 at the age of 53. Deborah was inclined to believe that Dorothy knew about her father's past activities. She said her mother told the children to call him by a different name and to keep him inside the house.

  Deborah later appeared on television. In June 2020, she featured in an episode of the ABC series The Genetic Detective, in which CeCe Moore recounted how she identified Brashers. In September 2021, Deborah was interviewed about her father on an episode of Evil Lives Here. By then, the household she described was only days away, in time, from its final confrontation with the police in Missouri, in a story that began in a hotel parking lot.

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• 8. The Standoff

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  On the 13th of January 1999, police officers noticed a stolen vehicle in the parking lot of the Super 8 hotel in Kennett, Missouri. Hotel staff told them that Brashers and his family had arrived in that vehicle just days earlier. Officers broke down the door of the room and found him hiding under a bed with a loaded gun. When they tried to arrest him, he put the gun to his own head and threatened to kill himself. The officers retreated and called for backup.

  Within minutes, police cars surrounded the motel grounds. Brashers took his wife, his daughter and his two stepdaughters hostage. He later released his family. After four hours of negotiations, he shot himself in the head.

  He stayed alive for six more days. Brashers died of complications from his injuries on the 19th of January 1999, and his death was ruled a suicide. The woman killed in Lexington would not be publicly identified in connection with his crimes until the 7th of January 2026, when she was named as 43-year-old Linda Rutledge.

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