4 Teen Killed, a Search for justice - MURDER AT THE YOGURT SHOP

DOZENS OF PEOPLE HAVE CONFESSED TO THE BRUTAL CRIMES THAT JOLTED AUSTIN BUT 31 YEARS LATER THE CASE IS UNSOLVED. INSIDE THE ENDURING MYSTERY

- EMILY PALMER

It was a typical Friday night for Bob and Pam Ayers on Dec. 6, 1991. Their 13-year-old Amy, an eighth grader at Burnet Middle School, was getting ready to meet up with friends from a local chapter of the Future Farmers of America. "She really loved animals, especially horses," says her older brother Shawn, then 19, who had planned to go to a party that night. Soon, friends of Amy's picked her up, and they headed to a neighborhood yogurt shop to hang out before a sleepover.

Nothing was out of the ordinary as the Ayers kids headed into that December weekend more than three decades ago-until the next morning, when Shawn woke to the sound of his mother screaming. "What's wrong?" he asked as he stumbled into the kitchen and found Pam Ayers talking to a policeman. He can still feel the shock of her reply: "Amy's dead." Shortly before midnight firefighters had responded to a blaze at the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt shop in North Austin. Although it took just minutes to quell the fire, what they discovered inside would devastate three local families and haunt the larger community for decades to come. The bodies of three teenage girls, naked and badly burned, were heaped together in a storage room, and a fourth body was found 10 ft. away. The four victims-Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, 17, and sisters Sarah, 15, and Jennifer Harbison, 17-had been shot in the head, apparently before the fire was set to destroy the evidence, and there were signs of sexual assaults. "It felt like a dream," says Shawn Ayers, now 50, about learning what had happened to his sister. "But the next morning, I woke up and went into Amy's room and she wasn't there, and I realized it wasn't a dream. She was gone."