The devastating murder of four teen girls is turned into a thoughtful new series, looking back at the crime and examining the nature of the genre
Four teenage girls were viciously murdered in 1991, their bodies left to burn in a fire – along with so much evidence – that engulfed the Austin yogurt shop where two of them worked.
The memories surrounding this case can be fraught and vivid for anyone who lived in the area at the time, not just because of the devastating nature of the crime, but also the seismic way the surrounding community rallied around the victims’ families. They would march and hold up signs, put up billboards, and make buttons and coffee mugs, the paraphernalia all asking the question left unanswered to this day: “Who killed these girls?” This being Austin, local artists even came up with a song: We Will Not Forget.
“Americans, the way we deal with grief,” observes Barbara Ayres-Wilson, the mother to two of the victims, “we had to make a marketing opportunity out of everything.”
Ayres-Wilson makes those comments in old footage appearing in The Yogurt Shop Murders, somehow seeing the big picture irony from a distance, while still in the throes of her anguish. Margaret Brown’s four-part docuseries largely follows her lead.
