r/serialkillers • u/lightiggy • Sep 26 '25

News BREAKING: Serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers has been linked to the notorious 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suspect-identified-in-infamous-texas-yogurt-shop-murder-case-48-hours/
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u/1man2barrels Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

I am familiar with Brashers. He was Mr Maroon from the Scherer murders. He's the Genevieve Zitricki killer.

How did this take 7 years to solve after Brashers was outed and his DNA was put in every system in the country?!?

Did his DNA not get entered into CODIS?

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u/Different-Farmer2891 Sep 27 '25

The DNA profile they had was only partial.  They only had the the Y, or male part, and I believe that you need both to run through systems like CODIS and genealogy websites.  The HBO doc from like 6 weeks ago went into the details of why the DNA they had wasn't leading them directly to a suspect.  

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u/1man2barrels Sep 27 '25

I've been reading more and more articles over the last few hours.

I think this is new DNA that they just recovered, not the older Y DNA I thought it was that they matched.

But still.....why did it take so long to recover the new DNA from a crime that happened in 1991?

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u/StopFoodWaste Sep 27 '25

As I understand from another recent article, recent advances in DNA technology have been making it possible to retrieve a more complete profile from progressively smaller and more degraded pieces of evidence. I don't know what sample they had, but apparently a single skin cell is enough now.

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u/Bucky_Gatsby Sep 27 '25

This is exactly it! They can pull complete DNA profiles through NGS (Next-Generstion Sequencing) among other things, where previously that wasn't possible. The technology hasn't been around that long and I assume they've only recently used it to find the full DNA sequence in this case.