Who Killed These Girls? Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders

In this taut true-crime account, Texas-based author Lowry (Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life) explores the 1991 murder of four teenage girls in an Austin frozen yogurt shop and the botched investigation of four suspects railroaded into giving false confessions. After recounting the terrible details of the murders, she enumerates the errors of the investigators at the crime scene, the grasping at false leads, and the unethical interrogation practices, including marathon stretches of grilling and threats to two of the suspects. She provides interesting information on how the brain creates memories, “adding, subtracting, removing, revising,” and about the creation of “false or illusory” memory that can lead to a false confession. Nearly a third of the book deals with the defendants’ trials and these sections are meticulous to a fault, providing irrelevant material such as descriptions of testimonies that were ultimately not given and even, ironically, the contents of an attorney’s statement that had “gone on too long.” However, the flaws of the state’s case are well articulated. One of the more compelling parts of the book is the end, where Lowry explores an alternate theory of the crime originally presented by Jordan Smith in the Austin Chronicle on the 20th anniversary of the murders in 2011. The case itself is fascinating, and Lowry covers every angle diligently with first-person interviews and other research, yet the story never takes hold of the reader. (Oct.)