Beverly Lowry

TRUE CRIME
Beverly Lowry
Who Killed These Girls?: Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover, 978-0-3075-9411-2 (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 400 pgs., $27.95
October 2016

Every Austinite, every Texan, knows the basic facts of this horrific crime. On Friday, December 6, 1991, the Austin Fire Department responded to a report of a fire at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in northwest Austin. Inside the shop, they discovered the bodies of Eliza Hope Thomas show more (17), sisters Jennifer Ann Harbison (17) and Sarah Louise Harbison (15), and Amy Leigh Ayers (13).

Finally, in 1999, four young men (“three aimless dudes, one troublemaker with firepower and wheels”) were arrested, despite the complete lack of physical evidence. Two were never brought to trial because the case against one was dismissed, and a grand jury twice refused to indict the other; but two confessed, later recanting confessions that ultimately turned out to be false (“I’m scared I have information and don’t know I have information”). They were convicted, but those convictions were reversed and the cases remanded by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In 2008, DNA results, thanks to more sophisticated testing than was previously available, excluded all four suspects.

Accordingly, the most confounding and fascinating aspects of Who Killed These Girls? is a discussion of interrogation techniques and an exploration of the nature and processes of memory and the phenomenon of false confessions. How do we know what we think we know?

Who Killed These Girls?: Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders by Beverly Lowry is the latest entry in a recent spate of high-profile narrative nonfiction titles on Texas true crime. Who Killed These Girls? is a dramatic story told in dramatic fashion. Lowry writes in lively first-person, her personality apparent on every page. This is an effective and engaging technique, informal and colloquial, that only occasionally strays into the purple. Lowry’s account grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let up.

Lowry conducted prodigious research, attended court hearings, watched the recorded interrogations, and interviewed the principals. She even got her hands on Judge Mike Lynch’s personal journal. Her recreations of the police interrogations are harrowing, even frightening. Lowry does an outstanding job of invoking the girls as human beings. They are quite real and very present in these pages. Her portrayal of detective John Jones is likeable and sympathetic.

Lowry’s writing is atmospheric, sometimes spooky (“by Thursday the air had turned sulky, with an unnatural stillness that makes people testy as they wait for whatever’s about to happen next”), sometimes an assault (“Jennifer … wore a Timex wristwatch with a big face and a sturdy black band. She will die wearing the watch, it will stop at 11:48”), sometimes startlingly snarky (“Robert Ayers, who once again told tender stories about his daughter”), sometimes, but infrequently, seemingly gratuitously graphic.

There’s an unexpected, sardonic humor to Lowry’s narrative. “With its big-time celebration of Eeyore’s birthday, its dog parades, costumes and flummery, Austin was Slackerville,” she writes, with “rock music, goofball pot smokers and drunken legislators … While Houstonians liked to say Austin was hoping to become a grown-up city, too, someday, nobody here took offense. Who wanted to be like Houston?”

Twenty-five years later, we still don’t know who killed these girls. “Yogurt Shop jurors did their job, so did the lawyers and the judge. But in the end, nobody was satisfied with how things turned out. Nobody at all.”

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. show less

Examining this unsolved murder, Lowry goes into detail about what we know versus what we thought we knew. No one really knows exactly what happened in the 40-something minutes between the 11 o’clock closing time to the first report of fire at 11:48. In a masterful stroke, Lowry’s storytelling lets the mind do what it naturally wants to: fill in the narrative gaps. I have a great admiration for people who write about unsolved cases. At the heart of this narrative is the suspicion that show more professional pride hindered the investigation and is potentially keeping a dangerous killer at large to this day. From the slain young girls to the defendants and suspects, victims included everybody who counts on a functional criminal justice system. “Who killed these girls?” is only the first of the unanswered questions about this case. But until we can definitively answer the “who,” there is no possible way there will ever be an answer to ultimately more challenging “why.” show less

Usually I don't care for books where the case is not resolved, but this was well-written and did offer theories at the end of the book of what it is thought may have happened. This case was messed up from the beginning because evidence was destroyed in the fire, in addition to firemen walking through the crime scene. Evidence was also lost because it was not taken care of properly. Several young men were railroaded into confessing and served years in prison, for a crime that DNA later proved show more they did not commit. There is a lot of hype about this case lately, due to the documentary on HBO. I hope as DNA advances they solve this case. These young girls deserve justice. show less

A solid, thorough book about the Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin, Texas that has some aspirations to be something bigger than that but doesn't quite make it. In 1991, four teenage girls - two employees closing the store and the younger sister and friend of one of the employees - were murdered in an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! store in Austin, Texas, and the store set on fire. It was 1999 before any arrests were made: police zeroed in on a group of four young men, teenage boys at the time of show more the crime, who they believed were guilty. Of the four, three were indicted, two were tried and found guilty, and both of those convictions have been thrown out. DNA evidence later available doesn't match any of the accused, but police continue to insist that they had the right guys and that the indictments still stand - although it's been sixteen years since the original trials. The story of the Austin Yogurt Shop Murders is another frustrating entry in the ever-growing catalog of police incompetence (and over-focus) rendering tragedies unsolvable. (Content note: this book contains some fairly graphic descriptions of what happened to the girls, including sexual assault, gunshot wounds, and postmortem fire damage.) show less