On the morning of December 7, the Austin American-Statesman ran a small, error-ridden story in the “Metro-State” section, getting the number of bodies right but much else wrong. Based on Jones’s middle-of-the-night dispatch and testimony from an EMS shift commander, it described the victims as two white females, one white male, a fourth of unidentifiable race and gender, all “ranging in age from 18 to 30,” and quoted Jones as having said he was handling the incident as a homicide because one of them had been struck on the head.
But word had gotten out fast, and many Austinites already knew far more than was in the paper: that the victims were four young girls, two of them sisters, were naked and bound and had been shot point-blank in the back of the head, then burned, with at least two of the bodies stacked up. What they didn’t know was that one girl had been hit in a sideways trajectory, didn’t die right away and had been shot again with a larger-caliber gun, a fatal shot that was known as a “through-and-through”—a round that pierced and then exited her body.
Early on the morning of December 7, Kate Wallace McClung’s mother heard about the ice scoop when a lawyer friend called. Don’t say anything about this. I’m not supposed to tell you….But one of the EMS guys had told him. Or maybe a cop. And maybe he said an ice-cream scoop.
Jones doesn’t think the killers put the ice scoop between Sarah’s thighs. “No telling how it got there,” he says. “Probably fell off a shelf.” Others blame the high-intensity spray of the fire hoses. But, whatever the truth, for many people the most hellish version of this story is the one that remained fixed in their minds.
In the autopsy reports submitted on Saturday, the cause of death was listed as “shot by another person,” but two days later District Judge Jon Wisser ordered the reports sealed, “because the details [are] essential to [APD’s] investigation.” And, he added, “whenever you arrest someone and they decide to give a confession, you have to have stuff that no one other than the one confessing knows about.” In accordance with this ruling, the DA’s office released a sanitized version to the press, despite knowing full well that in Travis County autopsies are public documents and by law cannot be sealed.
This case was huge, however, the manner of death grisly in the extreme, the victims young white girls. Wisser’s decision harkens back to the days when the names of rape victims, whether girls or boys, were omitted to protect them from shame and ruin. In years to come, Roberto Bayardo will say that in his fourteen years as a medical examiner he’d never heard of a sealed autopsy report. But at the time he remained silent, like everybody else.
By that afternoon, Jones and his colleagues had created a list of thirteen pieces of evidence to be held back, in police terminology, from public notice:
1. How and where the fire was started
2. The key in the front door
3. How much money was taken
4. How the girls’ bodies were arranged
5. What was used to bind the girls
6. That the office was not entered
7. That the office key was still under the cash register
8. The caliber of the weapons [a .22 and a .380]
9. That two pairs of the victims’ underpants were missing
10. Amy’s missing leather bomber jacket
11. Amy’s bruise under her chin from a blow of some kind
12. That Amy was strangled and what she was strangled with
13. That Amy was shot twice with two different-caliber guns
This list will have to be revised several times.
Because the APD had no public information officer, Jones himself issued a press release stating that the bodies of four young women had been found “in an area near the back door to the ICBY shop at 2949 West Anderson Lane” and that “each of the victims suffered gunshot wounds to the head and severe burns as a result of the fire.” Half an hour later, with Huckabay and other APD representatives, he met with the girls’ immediate families at the main police station downtown.
After Jones gave a preliminary outline of what they knew so far, the families wanted to know if their daughters had died fast (yes) and if they had been raped (to be determined). Barbara Suraci also wanted to know if her daughters were close to each other when they were killed and if there was any part of their bodies that hadn’t burned. Jones was straight with them. He hoped the vaginal and rectal swabs would preclude sexual assault but could make no promises. And, no, he regretted to say, there was no part of Jennifer, Sarah or Eliza that was unburned, only Amy.
CEO Bill Brice flew in from Dallas to meet with the families and to announce that Brice Foods was offering a $25,000 reward for evidence leading to a conviction. After declaring the company’s outrage, Buddy Harvey, a vice president based in Austin, turned defensive. Yes, the girls had been alone in the shop after closing, but Brice had two other shops here and hundreds more in other states and countries and these were the first killings in the firm’s fourteen-year history. When asked if Brice would reopen the Hillside shop, Harvey said possibly not, but that they were always on the lookout for new locations.
That Sunday, the Statesman was all Yogurt Shop, featuring photographs of the four girls accompanying a front-page story that began, “Austin police, calling the killings of four teen-age girls in a Northwest Austin yogurt shop among the worst they had ever seen, said Saturday that robbery was the apparent motive.”
As APD spokesman, Mike Huckabay speculated about motive and cause. “The first thing that comes to mind,” he was quoted as saying, “is crack cocaine. I’ve been in homicide a pretty good time and this is the worst one I’ve seen considering it involved four young ladies at the same time.” He also disclosed that firefighters had found the back doors unlocked and that the girls were apparently closing the shop when “I would say they were killed one after another…” and that they probably were left “where they were shot, in the rear of the store.” After giving two call-in numbers, he issued a general plea, asking people who’d been in the store that evening to come forward.
There were interviews with Lanier students and teachers. By that afternoon, flowers and potted plants had been piled on the sidewalk in front of the ICBY shop, festooned with teddy bears and scribbled notes proclaiming love for the victims. Young people carrying candles paraded in front of the crime-scene tape. Girls screamed and cried. Even weather did its part, winter darkness setting in early as El Niño rolled closer.
On Monday, the APD sent out a nationwide dispatch asking other police departments to contact them about similar crimes in their jurisdictions. This described the weapon used as a “small-caliber gun” and noted that the store was set on fire “to cover the crime.” Also revealed was that materials found at the store were used to bind the girls and to set the fire, and that there was no evidence of forced entry. Another front-page Statesman story quoted investigators as saying that some of the victims were tied up and that when firefighters arrived, the front door was locked but the back door was not.
That night, St. Louis the King held a Rosary for Sarah, Jennifer and Eliza, all Catholics. Skip Suraci asked that, in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to either the Lanier chapter of FFA or the Jennifer and Sarah Harbison FFA Scholarship Fund. An Amy Ayers FFA Fund would soon be established, as well.
Searching through the lingering muck, a DPS agent found the spent shell casing from the .380 pistol used to shoot Amy the second time in a clogged drain under the main sink, not far from her body. By then, Chuck Meyer had been in touch with ViCAP, which, after a thorough analysis, had discovered nothing on their database that matched a crime involving four young girls stripped, bound, gagged, arranged and burned. “It’s all yours,” an FBI agent told Jones, adding that if the APD hadn’t solved it in two to three weeks, well, good luck.
On Tuesday, Andy Waters told the Statesman that more than one person was involved in the killings and issued a warning to the perpetrators that while they might have believed that torching the shop would obliterate the evidence, “they were not successful,” a ploy used by all police departments to lure criminals and accomplices out of the woodwork. He also revealed that Amy Ayers had been shot twice; the other girls once, in the back of the head. And that the APD assumed the motive was robbery.
So, little by little, information seeped out and rumors spread, providing those who yearned for notoriety a credible base for a detailed confession and forcing the APD to modify the hold-back list.
Also on Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Todd attended the girls’ funeral, as did Chief of Police Jim Everett and a number of school officials. Speaking from behind four matching white caskets, the Reverend Kirby Garner officiated before an estimated one thousand people inside St. Louis the King, with another five hundred on the lawn outside. “It’s not just Austin,” he declared. “This is happening all over the country….When we point the finger at the culprit, three fingers are pointing back at us…the individual, the community and the society.”
Barbara Suraci—who had worked with Child Inc., an organization that focuses on early childhood education and care—agreed. Whoever did this, she suggested in a remarkable display of compassion, had not been loved enough. “We have to love our children from the first day.”
The funeral procession to Capital Memorial Gardens was said to extend for five miles. Three of the girls were buried side by side. When grief rendered Maria Thomas unable to make a decision, her ex-husband made it for her, and Eliza was buried in Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, closer to where her parents lived. Brice had covered the funeral expenses, but some years later, when Maria expressed regret at not having had her daughter buried with the other girls, Barbara Ayres-Wilson looked into the cost of exhuming Eliza’s body and moving it. But Maria still couldn’t decide, and the idea soon lost immediacy.
The APD videotaped the funeral services in case the criminals showed up, whether out of curiosity, pride or remorse. They also planted a still watch—cops doing surveillance—at the graves.
Within days, the city had gone even crazier, spouting rumors, theories and surefire clues. It seemed everybody knew somebody who’d been acting weird, a kid who came home with blood on his shirt, a boy who liked to set fires, another creepy-looking person at the yogurt shop. A teenage girl came in and explained that her boyfriend had left their apartment at ten-thirty on the night of the killings and didn’t come back until one in the morning, sweating and nervous and anxious to change his clothes. Young people sat around imagining how the thing had gone down. When some boasted how they would’ve done it if they’d had a mind to, others made mental notes and some called the tips line to report the conversation. And when Mike Huckabay made the comment about crack cocaine, everybody knew what that meant—the black man’s drug. To score in Austin, you went to the east side, around Chicon and Twelfth streets, miles away from West Anderson Lane and the ICBY shop.
On Wednesday, a theme was born in another front-page Statesman story: “Austin buried a part of its innocence Tuesday.” The mayor quickly seized upon it. “We think of it,” he told the St. Petersburg Times, “as innocence lost for Austin. Not that we haven’t had violent crimes before, but this took out four young girls in their prime.” And then he rolled out a larger premise: “I think people realized more than anything else that it could happen to them. It could happen in the most innocent place to the most innocent people.”
The battle was between innocent and weird, familiar and suspicious, certainty and mystery. After being hauled in for questioning, one young member of the so-called people in black said, “It was a bizarre crime and so they questioned the most bizarre-looking people in town and I was one.”
On Thursday, December 12, in a telephone survey, the Statesman asked its readers to answer two questions: “Have you changed your habits or lifestyle out of concern about crime?” and “Have you or has someone you know in Austin been a victim of a crime during the last two years?” Participants could help construct a theory, not about who they thought the murderers were but on what effect the killings were having on the city.
To some, the concept of innocence seemed a little too convenient. In Austin in 1983 in the early-morning hours, somebody had doused opposite corners of the first floor of a boardinghouse with an accelerant, probably gasoline, and flicked a match. Four people were killed, all Latinos, as were the other residents. Nobody spoke much English. This happened on the east side, in what was considered the Mexican part of town. The only Spanish-speaking policeman in APD Homicide at the time, Juan Gonzalez, was overwhelmed and eventually gave up looking for the perpetrator. Besides, he said, no families came forward pushing for the case to be solved. “Nobody knew them,” said a neighbor of the victims.
This article had run in the B section of the Statesman, with only one follow-up until a 1993 story contrasted the lack of interest in this arson-murder to the nonstop focus on Yogurt Shop. The boardinghouse was torn down and replaced by an apartment building; the original address no longer exists, and the arsonist has never been found.
As Jones says, “Yogurt Shop wasn’t about innocence. It was about crime comes to West Austin.”