‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ Director Talks New Episode On Killer

When Margaret Brown set out to direct a four-part docuseries about a horrific and then-unsolved quadruple homicide in Austin, Texas, she never expected that — just a few weeks after the final episode aired on HBO — detectives would crack the case.

The Yogurt Shop Murders, which premiered last summer, revisited the 1991 killings of four teenage girls inside a local frozen yogurt shop that sent shockwaves through the community for years as the investigation dragged on. In the original four-part series, the affected families were still searching for closure about what happened to Amy Ayers, sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas. Little did anyone know, by September 2025, they’d have an answer.

On September 26, investigators at the Austin Police Department announced that they had identified Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial killer linked to three other murders throughout the 1990s as well as the rape of a 14-year-old girl in 1997, as their suspect. Brashers died by suicide after a standoff with police over a separate alleged crime in 1999.

Within days, cameras were rolling on a fifth episode of the documentary series, which debuted in May. “HBO wanted it as quickly as we could deliver it,” Brown tells Deadline.

Brown and her crew spent an additional six months documenting the aftermath of this revelation, including new interviews with the families of the victims as well as a sit-down with Brashers’ daughter and one of the men who had, for years, been wrongfully accused of the crime.

In the interview below, she tells Deadline about racing to get the final episode together while processing the new information effectively in real time.

DEADLINE: What were those hours and days like after that announcement was made, for you, just figuring out what to do about that?

MARGARET BROWN: Well, I had met with Dan [Jackson] four days before the announcement, and I was heading out of town to start another project, and he was acting weird. We were having coffee outside…and he was just being weird and fidgety, and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ And he’s like, ‘There’s something I really want to tell you.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ 

He wouldn’t tell me. A million times he had said ‘I have a lead,’ but then it had led to nothing, but this time his body language was very suspect, I guess, or different, and I said, ‘Well, can I leave town? You need to tell me, because Alice, the producer, has to get the crew together. If there’s something, we need money to shoot. I need to know if there’s something I need to stay in town for.’ He was like, ‘No, no, you can go. If it’s anything, it’ll take a while.’ And then he said this thing, he said, ‘But I need to tell the families first,’ and I was like, he’s never said that before. So I left with my dog in the car, and I was just moving to a different place temporarily, and then four days later I got the call, and I had to turn back around and start shooting with three camera crews, two days later.

DEADLINE: How are you, in real time, figuring out who is going to speak with you again? And also how were you booking some of those new interviews?

BROWN: Well, we had to do it really quickly. Three weeks before that we had finished [airing the original docuseries], so HBO wanted it as quickly as we could deliver it. It was tricky, because usually I like to spend time with people, and I didn’t have that option. I had to move quite fast. We knew the world. I mean, I’ve been working on it for three and a half years, so we knew everybody, but we didn’t know the boys, as they’re called. They had never agreed to talk to us. 

I was sort of interested in three things for this episode: How did Dan solve it? How did the families feel going from not knowing to knowing? And what does this mean for these four people that everyone thought did it? Even though I didn’t think so, I didn’t know for sure. It was just sort of 3.7 million to one [that] they didn’t do it. So I really wanted to talk to them, but I didn’t have a lot of time. We started out with the families, because they were just in shock, and I wanted to get Dan right away, because it was so fresh in his mind. Dan didn’t think it would be solved that quickly. I don’t think he would have told me to leave if he really thought that. We’ve been working together so closely. So, yeah, it was sort of like a five alarm fire, like everything’s happening at once. Then when we heard that we could possibly speak to Deborah Brashers, that was another thing I was really interested in, because she had been reaching out to people who her father had killed or assaulted and apologizing, which I thought was fascinating and not a usual thing you hear about. So I was very curious about that as well.

DEADLINE: I assume you’re basically processing kind of in real time with the families, because it’s not been that long since they found out about this before you get them on camera. What was that like just to get kind of their raw thoughts? With the original doc, you’re talking to them about something that happened so long ago, and they’ve had so much time to kind of think about and process everything that’s happened up to that point.

BROWN: I felt really guilty about that. One of the first things I said to Sonora [Thomas, sister of Eliza Thomas], who’s a therapist — and we’re pretty close — was, because she was just rattled, and she was one of the first people I spoke with. I didn’t speak to the Ayers right away, and I didn’t speak to Barbara [Ayres-Wilson, Jennifer and Sarah’s mom] right away, but I spoke to Sonora right away, and because of her therapy background, I said, ‘Is it okay for me to be asking you all these questions right now?’ All these families are used to me. They’re all really nice to me. They all, to varying degrees, trust me — or are letting me into their lives. She sort of was like, ‘No, you should be asking the families all these questions a year from now. We’re not going to be able to really process this for a year.’ And I didn’t have a year. I had that moment. It was four days after [the case was solved]. She said, ‘This is the time when we should just be around family and friends and try to live as much as possible.’ She said a year later is really when the processing starts. 

So I just felt an incredible amount of guilt. I also felt it is interesting what they think right now, but after she said that — I’m always really careful with how I speak to people. I knew that I had to let them lead, not press too hard, because it was something I wondered at that moment. If I interviewed them a year later, would their answers be radically different? Because a lot of people, after the show has come out, they’ve said, ‘I can’t believe the families didn’t have room for the [wrongly accused] boys. That’s so cold.’ I wonder if they would feel different in a year, or even after having watched the episode. I don’t think it’s fair. I really, deeply don’t think it’s fair to judge. I mean, what they went through — I think they were just being super honest with me, because they trust me. Then people watching it are like, ‘How dare they? I don’t feel anything for them now,’ and I’m like, ‘Are you crazy?’ They lost the worst thing, and they’re just being honest.

DEADLINE: It made sense to me that they didn’t have the space to process any of that, because that wasn’t the part of the tragedy that was closest to them… I think it would be hard to hold space for somebody else’s tragedy.

BROWN: I mean, I think people are all different. Beverly Lowry, who lost her son and never found out [who killed him in a hit and run]. She’s the one who wrote Who Killed These Girls?, and she’s in a lot of the series before that, and she makes a cameo in the fifth episode. She was pretty surprised by that. She’s the only person I feel like has any right to say anything about that, because something similar happened to her, but anyone else who makes a judgment, I’m like, ‘Walk a mile in their shoes before you say that.’

DEADLINE: Did you get a sense of what it would mean for them for this to be the answer? For so long, they’ve thought that this could have been somebody connected to their town or who had some sort of connection to these girls. Knowing it was just a serial killer passing through town makes it all the more senseless. 

BROWN: That’s a really good question, and I do think that’s one of the things I wish I could ask again in a year. A lot of my show is about time and memory, and I think time changes how you process things. With Sonora, I was asking right afterward, and with Sean and Pam and Bob and Angie, I was asking, I believe, two months later. The same with Barbara. I’m just curious about what would change if I asked them again later, you know? I probably will ask them myself, but not for the show.

DEADLINE: What was the interview like with Deborah Brashers?

BROWN: It was really hard. She’s been through a lot, and like she says in the show… she’s trying to grapple with the person she knew and loved and who gave her the only stable life she’d had growing up, being a serial killer, and realizing he’s an evil person, as she says, and wanting to apologize. I just think to witness someone in that kind of struggle — I really felt for her. Of course, it’s also super fascinating, if you can even separate yourself that much in the moment. I had a really hard time. I just felt it in my body, so much pain for this person. I mean, I did focus on the interview, it’s my job, but part of this job is having to compartmentalize enough to get your job done. Sometimes it’s really hard, and that one was really hard.

DEADLINE: There is so much pain from all sides of this case. How did that impact you as a filmmaker?

BROWN: I mean, for me that part is actually easy, because it’s obvious that you would feel compassion. The part that’s hard for me is actually not being in that space and compartmentalizing it. It’s really hard to just not be a human and [not] feel for someone. But it’s funny, I’ve talked to other filmmakers about that. There was something that happened when I first started doing press on the fifth episode, and I talked to some other filmmakers, and the same thing happened to them. I think it was my friend Ryan White, who made The Keepers, and we were talking about how starting the press cycle can be — it opens it up in this weird way, and that can be hard. When you’re making the film, you’re just getting through it and you’re compartmentalizing as best you can, but then when you’re doing the press, you’re not interacting with the characters. And for both of us, that was almost harder, to keep talking about it.

DEADLINE: How long was the production process on that fifth episode?

BROWN: Six months.

DEADLINE: So you just had to hit the ground running.

BROWN: Yeah, and I was making two other things at the same time because I didn’t think this was gonna happen. So it was crazy.

DEADLINE: When you were putting it all together in the post-production process after the interviews, what was the most difficult part for you about stitching together what you wanted this final fifth episode to be?

BROWN: Mike [Bloch] — the editor — and I talked about it a lot. It was sort of almost what we thought it was going to be, which was just — it was not like that for the first four episodes. And Justin Zweifach, the main DP, the cinematographer for the whole project, and I, we actually changed more about the look of it than editorially. Going in, I kind of mapped it out, and it sort of was that from the get-go, but we didn’t have time to make it radically different. We sort of had to go with the plan, and it never works like that. This has never happened to me. So it was sort of shocking, but I don’t think it could have gone any other way, because we didn’t have any time.

DEADLINE: Do you see yourself ever revisiting this from a filmmaker standpoint, or do you think you’ve already done what you set out to do with this?

BROWN: I feel like we did what we set out to do. You never know what’s gonna happen, but I feel satisfied with where it is now.

DEADLINE: Is there anything you think I missed, or anything else that you wanted to add?

BROWN: I mean, no, I don’t think so. I think the thing that’s bothered me about the reception has been that people judge the families, and I think that’s inappropriate, and it’s upsetting to me that people are so quick to judge people who’ve gone through so much. But you already hit on that. 

DEADLINE: I really thought that was a radical level of honesty.

BROWN: I can’t believe people are judging that. I put it in because it’s super fascinating, but not to judge.

DEADLINE: I liked hearing your voice, hearing you talk to them in the background. I feel like there was more of that — to kind of hear you asking them about that — and I think that helped aid that scene as well, to hear you not really be able to process that reaction.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah, my voice was definitely in it more in this one, because I think that now the film is part of the story. We didn’t even include as much as people talk about, like, ‘Well, when I watched this episode, I thought this.’ As we were making Episode 5, everyone’s referencing the show, because they’d all just watched it. So that was really meta and interesting. We used Claire Huey in a way to kind of talk about what filmmakers go through in the first four episodes, and here now there’s this new doubling of everyone using the show to process things also. So that part was really interesting.

DEADLINE: I actually have one more question — just curious what it was like to talk to Dan after the announcement was made?

BROWN: Well, it got leaked to me, and I just sent him a bunch of texts, a bunch of exclamation points, and of course he knew that I knew, and he was like, ‘How did you find out?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m turning back around now.’ We had just talked! I think he was driving to tell the families when I heard.