Who Killed These Girls?

July 18, 2016
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.

July 15, 2016
An exhaustive examination of an unsolved 1991 murder of four teenage girls at a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas.The girls had all been shot, their bodies were incinerated at the back of the shop, and one or more of them was raped. For years, Austin police and prosecutors investigated relentlessly without arrests, while the families of the four victims (two of them sisters) mourned, journalists broadcast and published multiple new twists as well as speculation, and four teenage boys feared they would become defendants because one of them had stupidly talked aloud, implicating himself and three acquaintances--maybe truthfully or maybe falsely. Lowry (Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life, 2007, etc.) painstakingly explains why the original homicide detective never felt confident enough about the evidence to arrest anybody but how a later investigator believed in the guilt of the four males and manipulated evidence to fit his theory. Prosecutors eventually accepted enough of the shaky evidence to charge two of the males. In separate jury trials, they obtained convictions. A third suspect was arrested but never tried. The fourth suspect, the alleged ringleader who had spoken out, sat in jail for years without being tried and eventually won release on a legal technicality but died a decade later while trying to escape police after a traffic stop that escalated. Lowry did not begin studying the case until 2009, but she immersed herself so deeply that she produces an encyclopedic book. She examines countless imperfect theories about the crime without reaching a definitive answer. Along the way, the author explains various phenomena related to wrongful convictions in hundreds of other cases, including why some suspects confess to crimes they never committed. In the yogurt shop case, two of the male suspects did confess after high-pressure interrogations by police detectives, then later recanted their confessions and sought acquittal at their trials. A grisly primer on criminal justice in the byzantine American system--will appeal to true-crime aficionados but likely not a larger audience.

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September 15, 2016

On December 6, 1991, the city of Austin, TX, was rocked by the brutal murder of four teenage girls in the back of a frozen yogurt shop, which was then burned to cover the killings. Owing to the inexperience of the crime scene investigators, the case stalled until 1999, when a pair of young men confessed and implicated two others. Two of the men were never put on trial; the trials of the other duo resulted in convictions, which were overturned on appeal when DNA evidence exonerated all four suspects and left the authorities back at square one. Lowry (Crossed Over) began following the retrial hearings, expecting insight into the notorious crimes, but instead discovered a gross miscarriage of justice, with a complete lack of physical evidence and only coerced confessions to tie the young men to the crime. Lowry researches the case through records and interviews, showing the psychology behind false confessions and the desperation of the city to solve these crimes, which resulted in the destruction of lives. The killer(s) still walk free. VERDICT This shocking example of justice denied as a result of questionable law enforcement practices is essential for regional holdings and a useful addition to true crime and criminal psychology collections.--Deirdre Bray Root, MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH

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