My Daughters Were Killed in a Yogurt Shop, but When the Police Brought Their Belongings, the Investigator’s Face Changed

On December 6, 1991, a policeman called me and told me that my two daughters were no longer at the yogurt shop. At that moment I still did not know that that same night the lives of four girls had ended.

It was nearly eleven o’clock at night. Small Christmas lights were blinking in the house, and the smell of cinnamon stood in the kitchen. Jennifer, seventeen years old, was supposed to go with Sarah to her friend Elisa after work. Thirteen-year-old Amy was waiting for them at the shop so that all four could go together to the night party.

The telephone rang.

“Are you Mrs. Garrison?” the man’s voice was tense. “I am calling from the Austin police. Please stay at home. An officer will come to you.”

“Where is Jennifer? Where is Sarah?”

Instead of an answer, I heard only heavy breathing.

“Ma’am, please do not lock the doors.”

Then the line went dead.

I realized that something terrible was happening, but my mind refused to accept it. Jennifer’s white sneakers stood in the hallway. One of them had a silver star that I had sewn onto it before she graduated from school. I touched it with my fingers and suddenly felt as if the girl’s foot were still inside it.

Twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door. Two policemen were standing there. One of them was holding a small transparent bag.

“There was a fire at West Anderson Lane,” the senior officer said. “At the Yogurt Corner.”

“My daughters work there.”

The man lowered his eyes.

“We know.”

“Are they alive?”

Both of them fell silent at this question. It was that silence that gave me the answer.

The next morning I stood in the cold corridor of the hospital. The wall clock showed twelve minutes past four. The doctor wiped his hands on his apron and told me that four girls had been found. They had been tied with their own clothes, had cloth taped over their mouths, and then had been killed with a firearm. The criminal had started the fire precisely in order to destroy the traces.

“Four?” I barely said. “Jennifer and Sarah… who else?”

“Elisa Thomas and Amy Ayers.”

Amy’s mother stood at the other end of the corridor. In her hands she held a child’s pink bag and squeezed it as if she expected her daughter to return from it.

That day the city stopped breathing. Flowers were brought to the shop, while journalists stood in our yard. The police told me that everyone who knew the girls had to be questioned.

“We will see this through to the end,” Investigator Dale Hart promised me.

“Please do not kill my daughters a second time,” I told him. “Do not turn them into case numbers.”

But the investigation soon turned into chaos. More than two hundred people were considered suspects. Some confessed to the murders as if they wanted to see their own name in the newspaper. Others were not allowed to go home for hours during questioning.

Eight years later, in December 1999, Hart came to me again. He was holding a folder.

“We arrested two young men,” he told me.

“Are they really the ones?”

He did not answer me immediately.

“They confessed.”

On the edge of the folder I saw a small plastic clip. It was shaped like an elephant, pink, with a scratch on one ear. It had been in Sarah’s hair that evening. I thought the police had never seen it.

Hart reached toward the folder and told me:

“Mrs. Garrison, before you read this, there is one thing you need to know…”

Hart’s hand stopped on the folder, but I was already shouting.

“A confession is not evidence if they did not commit them!”

“They knew details,” he said.

“What details?”

“The kind that only the murderer would know.”

He opened the folder. Inside were statements, but the sentences did not match one another. One boy said that there had been four women in the shop. The other described a door that had not existed at all that night.

“Their testimonies were copied from one another,” I said.

Hart looked at me with tired eyes.

“The court will decide that.”

“No, you must decide.”

That night I returned home and entered Sarah’s room. Her small music box stood on the windowsill. I opened the lid, but no melody sounded anymore. The mechanism had stopped.

Within a few weeks both boys were tried. One was sentenced to death, the other to life imprisonment. I sat in the courtroom and watched the color drain from their faces.

I told their mothers:

“I am not the enemy of your sons. I also want the truth.”

Years passed. The lawyers said that the confessions had been forced, that the interrogations had rested on violence and fear. The case was reopened. Then the investigator called me and said that they had found a tiny sample preserved under Sarah’s fingernails.

“Twenty-nine years have passed,” I whispered.

“But the sample still speaks.”

We went to the laboratory. The specialist turned on a small screen and said that the sample belonged to neither of the convicted men. Then he mentioned another name, one that had never appeared in the old case…

The specialist displayed the surname on the screen: Brashers.

Only the sound of the computer fan could be heard in the room. Raindrops struck the windowpane, and each one seemed to count the hours of that night that had been taken from us.

“Robert Eugene Brashers,” the head of the laboratory said. “The genetic profile matches the sample that remained under Sarah’s fingernails.”

I gripped the chair with both hands.

“Are you sure?”

“We checked the result several times. This is not a random match.”

David Coleman stood beside me, one of the two men who had been arrested eight years later. He had been nineteen then. Now he had a white beard and held a folded hat so tightly in his hands as if he drew strength from it.

“I told you I didn’t do it,” he said quietly. “But no one listened to me.”

“Now I am listening to you,” I told him.

Tears appeared in his eyes.

“It is too late.”

“It is too late for my daughters, David. But not yet for you.”

The lawyer for the second convicted man, Mark Hall, contacted us by video call. Mark was sitting in a small room in the prison. The white paint on the wall had peeled.

“Is this the end?” he asked.

“No,” the lawyer answered. “This is the beginning of having the truth officially recognized.”

“How can twenty-nine years be a beginning?”

No one could answer that question.

The police retrieved Brashers’s old cases. It turned out that he had lived in several states, worked under different names, and died in 1999. Among the things kept at his house they found photographs and notes that matched the route of that night. He was no longer alive, but for the first time there was an answer.

“Why didn’t you check him then?” I asked Hart.

He was already old. He slowly tapped his fingers on the table.

“Because then we had a confession, and we no longer searched for the truth.”

Those words stayed with me most of all.

That same evening David received a call from his lawyer. The court was preparing a motion for release. But while he was speaking, my telephone rang sharply. An unknown number was displayed on the screen.

“Marian Garrison?” a woman’s voice asked. “I am the owner of Brashers’s old house. I found something in the basement that is connected to your daughters.”

My breath caught.

“What thing?”

“A small silver recorder. There is one recording inside. And your daughter’s voice can be heard there…”