Robert Brashers murdered eight people in the Southern US during the 1990s and was implicated in various other crimes. In the end, he never faced justice for the murders. Brashers was born in Newport News, Virginia on March 13, 1958, one of four children of Doulis and Nellie Brashers. The family moved to Huntsville, Alabama when Robert was a small child and he grew up there. They later moved to South Bend, Indiana where he graduated high school in 1976. Robert's childhood and teen years were unremarkable and gave no indication of what was to come. He enlisted in the Army after high school and served for five years. Brashers left the service in 1981 and moved to New Orleans, and then to Fort Meyers, Florida in 1985. He had one child, a daughter born in 1991.Brashers's first run-in with the law happened on November 22, 1985 when he picked up a 24 year old woman named Michelle Wilkerson and took her to a Fort Pierce bar. The couple then drove to a secluded spot near an orange grove and consumed several beers, after which Brashers propositioned Wilkerson for sex. She refused, so they got into an argument that culiminated in Brashers shooting her in the head and neck. Wilkerson nonetheless was able to escape his car and hide in a culvert near the road. Realizing she'd gotten away and was probably going to report him to police, Brashers went down to the beach and tossed his gun into the water.
His truck got stuck in the beach sand while trying to drive away, so he got out to find help. Wilkerson meanwhile managed to reach an apartment complex and tell what had happened. The apartment manager called an ambulance and she was able to describe her assailant. Brashers was quickly arrested on the beach and charged with first degree murder, aggravated battery, and use of a deadly weapon to commit a crime. He was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Brashers only served four years of his sentence and was paroled for good behavior on May 4, 1989.Brashers spent the next several years moving around the South. On December 6, 1991, the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas was preparing to close for the evening. Inside were two employees, Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both 17, Jennifer's 15 year old sister Sarah, and a friend of hers, 13 year old Amy Ayers. Jennifer was planning to give the younger girls, who weren't yet old enough to drive, a lift home once the shop closed at 11:00 PM.
At about midnight, an Austin patrol officer radioed for the fire department after noticing a fire at the yogurt shop. Firefighters found the four teenage girls inside, dead. They were shot execution-style in the head and three of them were also raped. Two different weapons had been used, a .22 firearm and a .380 pistol. The perpetrator probably escaped through an unlocked back door. The girls were all nude, Sarah, Eliza, and Jennifer gagged and bound with their own underwear and all badly burned from the fire. Amy, the youngest of the four, was found in a separate part of the shop. She had second and third degree burns but wasn't charred like the others. A cloth was tied around her neck and she was also shot in the head, but the bullet did not penetrate her brain. Another gunshot wound had cut through the brain before exiting out the left side of her face. Investigators believed the crime had to be committed by experienced adults and not teenage boys.On December 8, less than 48 hours after the yogurt shop murders, Brashers was stopped by border patrol along I-10 between El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico. The border patrol agents found that his truck matched a report of a vehicle stolen from Marietta, Georgia on November 29. Inside the vehicle they found a .380 AMT Backup, the same type of gun used in the yogurt shop murders. Brashers then floored it and fled the border patrol agents but was caught after a mile-long car chase. He was charged with vehicle theft and unlawful firearm possession. The gun was registered to Brashers's father and later returned to him.
On February 18, 1992, Brashers was arrested outside Marietta for car theft, unlawful firearm possession, and larceny. Inside his vehicle and apartment, police found a radio scanner, police jacket, lock-picking tools, and a phony Tennessee driver's license. He pled guilty to the car theft charges and received five years in prison. Brashers served his sentence, was paroled February 12, 1997, and moved to Paragould, Arkansas. Within weeks of getting out of prison, he was back to his same old tricks. On March 11, Brashers knocked on the door of a residence in Memphis, Tennessee and when the occupants opened it he forced his way inside with a revolver, tied up the occupants, and raped a 14 year old girl.On March 28, 1998, Brashers broke into a home in Portageville, Missouri, tied up 38 year old Sherri Scherer and her 12 year old daughter Megan, raped the latter, and shot both with a .22 weapon. Two hours later, he broke into a home in Dyersburg, Tennessee and tried to rape a 25 year old woman he found inside, but she fought him aggressively so he abandoned the assault and fled. Police were able to determine that the gun used in the attack was the same one used to kill the Scherers; no useful biological evidence was found at the crime scene.
On August 16, he was arrested in Paragould for burglary, fleeing the scene of an accident with property damage, public drunkenness, and presenting a false identity. Brashers had been caught driving erratically on H-412 when he drove his van through a fence, struck a parked car, and fled the scene. He sustained bruises and abrasions in the incident; a motorist gave him a ride to H-412 and called police afterward. The officers found him a short time later, when he gave them a fake name and account of what had happened. They also found that he'd stolen cash and jewelry from his next-door neighbor's house. Two months later, an arrest warrant was put out for Brashers as the new charged caused the bail in his March case to be revoked. Additional arrest warrants were put out after he failed to appear in court on November 12.In the early morning of November 7, the Lexington, Kentucky Fire Department received a report of a fire at the Nixon Hearing Aid Center on Malabu Drive. Firefighters arrived and saw thick smoke coming from the building. They entered and quickly put out the blaze. Inside was a dead woman in the back hallway. She was identified as Linda Rutledge, 43, and she had not died of smoke inhalation but from being shot several times in the head after being raped.
On January 13, 1999, police discovered a stolen car in the parking lot of the Super 8 motel in Kennett, Missouri. They questioned motel staff and learned that Brashers and his family had arrived in the car a few days ago. Officers busted down the door to his room and found him hiding under a bed with a loaded gun. They ordered him to give himself up, but instead Brashers pointed the weapon at the side of his head and threatened to kill himself. The officers were forced to retreat and call for backup. Additional police units soon surrounded the motel while Brashers took his wife, daughter, and two stepdaughters hostage. After four hours of negotiations, Brashers let all of them free and then shot himself. He was taken to a hospital and lingered for six days before dying on January 19.In 2018, twenty years after his death, Brashers was linked through DNA analysis as a suspect in three murders and several rapes. Missouri authorities received permission to exhume his body for further testing. The corpse was disinterred on September 27 and DNA samples collected. These found that he'd also been responsible for the murder of 28 year old Genevieve "Jenny" Zitricki, who was beaten, raped, and strangled with her own pantyhose in her Greenville, South Carolina apartment on April 5, 1990. After Zitricki was dead, her killer placed her body in a bathtub filled with water and wrote "Don't fuck with my family" on the mirror. It was also established that Brashers lived near her apartment when the murder took place.
After years and numerous suspects investigated in the yogurt shop murders, collection of semen from the victims and testing of a spent bullet casing would link Brashers to the crime. In December 2025, the Travis County DA's office filed a motion to clear four men previous accused of the murders. A few months before that, Brashers was also linked to the murder of Linda Rutledge.Brashers's daughter Debbie, now 27, was interviewed in February 2019. She said that after his release from prison in 1997, when she was 6 years old, he lived with her, her mother, and two step-sisters for the next two years. Brashers was sometimes aggressive; he once fought her stepfather and injured his head with a drill bit, and also tape recorded himself making cuts to his neck and army with a saw to see how much pain he could tolerate. Debbie assumed her mother Dorothy, who had died a year before her interview, knew of Brashers's past, telling them to call him by a different name and keep him inside the house. She also said his mental health had deteriorated in the spring of 1998 and his job at a construction firm led to him being frequently absent from home.
>>18471374>>18471373>>18471365tf man. why couldn't boomers help themselves with killing people?
>>18471398Leaded gasoline Why do you think all the countries they run are absolutely insaneBoomers should not be allowed to vote let alone hold office
>>18471362>>18471365>>18471373Another case of "give the guy 5 years in prison and let him out, he's totes learned his lesson and won't do it again."
>>18471365>and charged with first degree murder*should read attempted murder, obviously the woman didn't die
>>18471365those are the most haggard-looking teenage girls i've ever seen. the middle two look at least 35.
>>18471398Boomers and Gen X were the most violent and degenerate generations of all time.
>>18471410It's called systematic white privilege. There are numerous sociological studies on this. It's a well established idea in academia that you guys seem to ignore in these discussions. Seriously look it up.
>>18471362he's white, we don't care. if he was black this thread would have 95 replies by now.
>>18471369I hate boomers, I really do.
>>18471362>Brashers's first run-in with the law happened on November 22, 1985 when he picked up a 24 year old woman named Michelle Wilkerson and took her to a Fort Pierce bar. The couple then drove to a secluded spot near an orange grove and consumed several beers, after which Brashers propositioned Wilkerson for sex. She refused, so they got into an argument that culiminated in Brashers shooting her in the head and neck.Why did she get into a strange man's car drunk if she didn't intend or expect that to happen?
>>18471432I'm glad they banned indoor smoking. Everyone looked like a leather sofa back in the day.
Why are white people so evil?
>>18471765>>18471432it's more likely the Texas sun that turns you into a leather purse
>>184714682013 called, they want their throwaway ideology back.
>>18471468>muh white privilegecheck rape cases in the UK where the culprit was a groid or a mudslime or crime in general in Canada
>>18471767The majority of serial killers are black and have been since the 90s. Even before that they were disproportionately black. Of course if you trusted the media you would never know that.
>>18471935more often than not their victims were black so they attract little attention (Samuel Little was the most prolific serial killer in American history and not very well known since most of his victims weren't white).
>>18471410all prison likely did for him was teach him how to be a better criminal
>>18471935>The majority of serial killers are black[citation needed]
>>18471983Look it up yourself fag.
man there's a lot of photos of this bitch
>>18472086Son of a gun, is that an R-body Chrysler New Yorker behind her? The photo is obviously around the time of her death and you can see a J-body LeBaron in the background. That New Yorker was a decade or close to it old by then and I'd be literally amazed any were still on the road by 1990 given the sorry reputation those things had.
I used to live near where the yogurt shop murders in Austin happened and it aiways creeped me out to drive by there. The cops followed so many false leads and blamed the wrong people forever. I hope this really was the right guy though he should have suffered on death row and died a miserable death courtesy of the state.
>>18472091the car was in the South so there wasn't any road salt which would improve its survival odds but yeah these were pathetically bad crap wagons from the time when Chrysler was almost dead. the mayor of Detroit actually test-drove one off the assembly line and they couldn't get it to start.
>>18471468>sociological studiesoh wow, a bunch of leftist """experts""" wrote some stuff? I'll duly look into it.
>>18472086Also youngest-looking 27 year old ever, I'd have guessed 37.
>>18472091clearly belonged to an 80 year old woman who drove it to church and the store once a week
>>18472120i bet it's now the location of some hipster craft beer bar. i mean it is Austin.
>>18472120if the whole Dean Corll thing was any indication, Texas cops have always had the IQ of a garden slug.
What a jerk
>>18471740A drunk woman can consent to driving drunk, but not sex here. It's completely retarded. It's the reason why most sane men don't take women seriously. They are treated like children in so many scenarios. All these attitudes and laws manage to do is show that women are incapable of being strong independent women or else they would take responsibility.
