John Jones was out of options and low on cash. The Austin homicide detective was at a Shepler's near Highland Mall in 1991 looking for a new shirt. He was going be on TV, but he didn't want to spend $50 or $60. The bargain rack would have to do. Jones found an option for just $20, an almost DayGlo green and white-striped shirt.
"I just have to assume that whoever designed it was colorblind," Jones, now retired, said with a laugh. "The truth can be told now. I mean, I didn't have a lot of money back then, and it was on the sale rack for some reason."
Jones was gearing up for his shift, where he was going to be followed by a TV crew. He didn't think this new shirt would become something much bigger than an impulse buy. It would be a sort of totem, a living reminder of something senseless.
That night, Jones got a call from the Austin Fire Department saying he needed to get to the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop off Anderson Lane, where crews had responded to a blaze.
"It was just a lot of blacks and browns and grays from the smoke, and it was overwhelming," he said. "Then in the midst of all of that was four dead kids."
The night of the murders, Jones described the scene to reporters as first responders removed the bodies of four teenagers, Eliza Thomas, Amy Ayers, and Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, from the back of the shop.
The next day, Jones spoke with the families. He'd been up all night, and he hadn't changed his shirt. The night before, it had been tucked away under his deep blue and crimson Austin Police homicide unit jacket.
As he consoled families and told them what to expect from the investigation, they couldn't help but notice the shirt. They asked Jones where he got it. It was a moment of levity at a low point for everyone involved.
That was when Jones made a promise.
"So, I said, 'next time you see this shirt, it'll be because ... the case is solved,'" he said.
'Where's the evidence?'
By the time Jones arrived at the yogurt shop, the fire had compromised much of the crime scene. Putting out the fire compromised it even more. In the intervening years, the crime had become a monolith, and the lack of resolution loomed over the city. Then, in 1999, four suspects were arrested.
Then-Mayor Kirk Watson told reporters that Austin "lost our innocence" after the murders but that the city could "hopefully finally begin the process of healing" after the arrests of the four suspects.
During KVUE's wall-to-wall coverage, anchor Judy Maggio took a moment to reflect. The case was personal to her. KVUE's studios were right down the street. She remembered being pregnant and going to the yogurt shop, where she'd been served by Eliza and Jennifer.
In 1999, after the arrests, she described the killings as "a tragic wake-up call" and said covering the deaths was a "story like no other."
Then came years of prosecution that ultimately ended in two wrongful convictions. John Jones describes it as a rollercoaster in the dark.
"You're going to be dropping into oblivion, but you don't know when you're going to come out of it," Jones said. "You [go] up and down, up and down. And then you come back into the station, the lights come on, and you figure this is over. Nope."
Austin's infamous yogurt shop murders went unsolved for a generation. The case shaped the city in some ways: It pushed Austin to start a forensics lab that, ultimately, helped solve the murders of the four girls. Jones said Austin Police ultimately got six confessions over the years, but he never signed off on them.
"That's a tired phrase, but I stuck to my guns," he said. "Where's the evidence? In the old days, it was, where's the gun? And then with DNA's advent ... where's the DNA?"
Jones was eventually transferred out of homicide, and prosecutors went ahead with charging Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott. They were convicted of capital murder. Springsteen was sentenced to death, and Scott was sentenced to life without parole.
But the prosecution was sloppy; the confessions, coerced. Scott and Springsteen's sentences were thrown out by the state's highest criminal court in 2006 and 2007, shortly after Jones retired. Travis County begrudgingly dismissed those charges in 2009.
Looking back, Maggio thinks the families, police, prosecutors — everyone in Austin — just wanted to make sense of a senseless thing.
"We didn't realize the type of coerced confessions that have now been brought to light that put those guys behind bars, one of them on death row," Maggio said. "And it's really sad because in essence, we took away a lot of their lives, too ... by convicting the wrong people."
'Cautious relief'
In the decades since the murders, John Jones said he's experienced insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, a few weeks ago, Jones got a call from Dan Jackson, APD's lead detective on the case.
"He said, 'hey, Jones, this is Detective Jackson. Do you still have the green and white shirt?'" Jones said. "That was one detective to another, telling him, 'We got this.'"
Jackson told Jones they'd found the answer to the simple question he'd been asking for years: Where's the evidence?
Police identified Robert Brashers as a new suspect. His DNA from the scene was linked to another case. A shell casing from the yogurt shop was retested and matched a gun tied to another crime.
Mayor Watson reflected on the development after a press conference last week. After a generation of uncertainty, he said this case was solved.
"As I said in '99, it haunted our soul," Watson said. "No one was prepared for anything like that, you know? There was a sense of innocence and a haunting of our souls that occurred when that happened."
For Maggio, the moment made sense, though she said it still felt like "another shoe is going to drop."
"There is a sense of collective relief, but I think we're all still so sad about it that it doesn't feel as good as it should, if that makes any sense at all," she said. "It's kind of this cautious relief."
Jones feels like he can finally, after decades of insomnia, get some sleep. The rollercoaster is back in the station. Last week, he hugged Eliza's sister, Sonora, when he got to Austin City Hall. Jones unzipped his jacket and showed her that hideous shirt, the one from the bargain rack at Shepler's.
"I'd fulfilled my promise," Jones said.
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