Yogurt Shop Murders: A City That Needed Someone to Punish

When a community spends eight years with an open wound, it stops looking for the right answer and starts looking for any answer. That’s what happened in Austin after the yogurt shop murders. Four teenagers were pulled into the investigation in 1991, released for lack of evidence, and then pulled back in eight years later by new detectives who found their names in an old file and decided they were worth another shot.

The detective who shaped the early investigation, Hector Polanco, had already been found responsible for at least seven false confessions in other cases. One of...