Robert Eugene Brashers was never charged with killing anyone. When he died in January 1999, after shooting himself in a motel room in Kennett, Missouri, as police waited outside, he was known to the authorities as a thief, a man who used false names, and a felon with a Florida conviction for shooting a woman in 1985. No detective in any of the states where he had lived had his name on a list of suspects.
Nearly two decades later that changed. In October 2018 police in Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee announced that DNA, traced through a public genealogy database and confirmed by exhuming his body, linked him to the 1990 killing of Genevieve Zitricki in Greenville, South Carolina, to the 1998 killings of Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter Megan near Portageville, Missouri, and to two attacks on women and girls in Tennessee who survived. In September 2025 the Austin Police Department named him as the man its evidence pointed to in the December 1991 killings of four teenage girls at an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt shop, a case that had led to the prosecution of four young men who had nothing to do with it. In January 2026 Lexington police in Kentucky closed the 1998 killing of Linda Rutledge after the same evidence trail led to him. Investigators now attribute eight deaths in four states to Brashers. Because he died before any of this was known, none of it has been tested in a courtroom, and this account uses the words of the agencies that made each announcement.
Brashers was born on March 13, 1958, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, and investigators trace his origins to Newport News, Virginia. Reporting by KFVS in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which in 2026 published an 11-part investigative series on him drawn from police files and copies of his records provided by his daughter, says he attended Butler High School in Huntsville, Alabama, and John Adams High School in South Bend, Indiana, and graduated early.
On March 31, 1976, at 18, he enlisted in the Navy in El Paso, Texas. He trained in Memphis, dropped out of a basic electronics course in August 1976 for what the Navy recorded as "lack of motivation," and in September was sent to the USS Lexington at Pensacola, Florida. On December 10, 1976, he was honorably discharged for "inadequate personality disorder," with a note that he could not reenlist. His father was Doulis Brashers, who later lived in Paragould, Arkansas; a brother, Gary, is living and has cooperated with Missouri investigators.
Family members told investigators that after the Navy he tended bar in Huntsville and worked on an oil rig in Louisiana. In November 1980, at about 22 and living in New Orleans, he placed his own obituary in newspapers in Newport News and New Orleans, investigators later found. He was arrested in 1980 and 1981 in the New Orleans area and in Bay City, Texas, got a Texas driver's license around 1981, and was arrested on a weapons charge in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1984. Over the years he used a string of aliases, relatives' names and several Social Security numbers. His daughter has said he worked in construction, and investigators have described him as a contractor with his own business who traveled across the southern states.
In November 1985 Brashers, then 27 and living in Fort Myers, offered a ride to a young woman in St. Lucie County, on Florida's Atlantic coast. He beat her and shot her. She survived, crawled to a telephone at a citrus grove office and called for help, and a deputy traced his truck. Greenville police described the attack in 2018 as a beating and shooting; KFVS reported that he shot her in the head and neck. Her name has not been published and is not given here.
In November 1986 he was convicted in St. Lucie County of attempted second-degree murder. He received 12 years. He was released in May 1989, after serving about three and a half years. The early release was later described by the family of one Austin victim as a missed chance to stop him. This is the only conviction for a violent crime that Brashers ever received.
Within a year of his release Brashers was in Greenville, South Carolina. In the spring of 1990 he took a maintenance job at an apartment complex there, and he lived at an address on Pelham Road, less than a mile from the Hidden Lake apartments, where Genevieve Zitricki lived on the ground floor. Police have said there is no evidence that she knew him.
Genevieve Zitricki was 28. Her family and friends called her Jenny. Very little about her life has been published, and her family has kept largely private; her brother, Phillip Zitricki, said in 2018 that it had been 28 years since Jenny "was taken from us," and described the years of grief and of wondering what her life might have been.
When she did not come to work for two days, maintenance workers entered her apartment on April 6, 1990, and found her body. The coroner's office concluded that she had died about two days earlier, from blunt force injuries to the head and strangulation, and detectives determined that she had been sexually assaulted. Greenville police say the attacker forced his way in through the sliding glass door facing the community pool and attacked her as she slept. He moved her to the bathroom and left a threatening message written on a mirror, which police believe was meant to mislead them. Profilers who later reviewed the case thought it was one of his earliest killings, because of the degree of violence.
The case went unsolved for 28 years. The Greenville Police Department retained the evidence, and it was a DNA profile from that scene that would first tie Greenville to Missouri in 2006.
On the night of Friday, December 6, 1991, two 17-year-olds, Eliza Thomas and Jennifer Harbison, were closing the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt shop at 2949 West Anderson Lane, near Northcross Mall in north Austin. Jennifer's sister Sarah Harbison, 15, and Sarah's friend Amy Ayers, 13, were with them, waiting to go home.
Shortly before midnight a patrol officer saw fire at the shop. Firefighters found the four girls in the back of the store. They had been bound and gagged and shot in the head, and the Austin Police Department says that at least one, and according to later reporting three, had been sexually assaulted. The fire, and water from the sprinklers, destroyed much of the evidence.
The families have kept the girls' memory before the public for more than three decades. Amy's brother, Shawn Ayers, has described her as a girl who saw things in black and white, wore her heart on her sleeve and loved animals, especially horses. The Harbison sisters' mother, Barbara Wilson, and Eliza's sister, Sonora Thomas, have spoken at nearly every turn in the case. Shawn Ayers and his wife Angie pressed investigators for answers for years.
On December 8, 1991, less than 48 hours after the fire, Border Patrol agents stopped Brashers at a westbound checkpoint on Interstate 10 between El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. He was driving a vehicle stolen in Georgia on November 29 and carrying an AMT Back-Up .380 pistol, the same make and model as the weapon used to shoot Amy Ayers, according to the Austin Police Department. He faced a weapons case and, police believe, posted bond with family help and skipped it. The pistol later found its way back to him; KFVS reported that his father retrieved it. The Austin police confirmed by serial number that it was the gun he used to end his life in 1999.
No one at the checkpoint had any reason to connect a man with a stolen car to a fire in Austin, and his name never came up in the yogurt shop investigation.
The Austin case drew thousands of tips and dozens of false confessions. Within a week police arrested Maurice Pierce, a teenager (the police department gives his age as 16; later reports say 15), after he brought a .22 pistol to Northcross Mall. He was questioned for hours and made admissions that, the next morning, a detective found did not match the scene. Ballistic tests on his gun were inconclusive.
In 1999 a police task force revisited the case and questioned Pierce, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, all of whom had been teenagers in 1991. Springsteen and Scott gave statements implicating themselves and each other, which they later said police had coerced. All four were charged with capital murder. A grand jury declined to indict Welborn. The charges against Pierce were dismissed in 2003, after he had spent more than three years in jail awaiting trial. Springsteen and Scott were convicted; Springsteen was sentenced to death, later reduced to life, and Scott to life. No physical evidence from the scene was ever linked to any of the four.
Texas's highest criminal court overturned both convictions in 2006, because each man had been convicted partly on the other's statement without the chance to cross-examine him. Before the retrials, prosecutors obtained a Y-STR DNA profile, a test of the male Y chromosome, from the sexual assault kit swabs. It excluded all four men. In 2009 a judge ordered Springsteen and Scott freed, and the charges were dropped pending further investigation. Pierce was shot and killed by an Austin police officer in 2010 during a struggle after a traffic stop in which the officer was stabbed.
On February 18, 1992, Cobb County, Georgia, detectives arrested Brashers in room 415 of a motel in Marietta in connection with a stolen truck. He gave his name as Jack Anthony McClelland and showed a Tennessee driver's license in that name. In the room officers found a loaded .32 pistol with its serial number scratched off, handcuffs, binoculars, police patches and a police-style coat, a scanner and list of radio frequencies, a slim-jim, surgical gloves and identity documents in other names. He told officers he was a paralegal and private investigator. He pleaded guilty to four of seven counts, including theft, giving a false name and possession of a firearm by a felon, and was then sent to federal prison on the weapons case from the New Mexico border stop. He was released in February 1997.
That summer he settled in Paragould, Arkansas, where his father lived, with his longtime partner, their young daughter Deborah, born in the summer of 1991, and his partner's twin daughters. His daughter later recalled a man who tilled the yard, built a clothesline and took the girls canoeing and camping, but also one who beat one of her sisters and injured her mother in a fight, and whose household ran partly on bad checks and stolen goods.
On March 11, 1997, a man talked his way into a home in Memphis, Tennessee, posing as a husband looking for his wife's purse, according to Missouri State Highway Patrol and KFVS accounts. He pulled a revolver, tied up four women, controlled five people in all, including a baby, and raped a 14-year-old girl. The people in the home described him, and a composite drawing was made, but he was not found. The girl survived. She is not named here. The Memphis Police Department said in 2018 that she was doing well and was thankful for some closure.
The Memphis sexual assault kit was one of thousands the department had left untested for years. It was tested in 2016, and in May 2017 the resulting DNA profile matched, through the national CODIS database, the profile from Missouri and South Carolina.
Sherri Scherer was 38 and lived with her husband, their 15-year-old son Steven and their 12-year-old daughter Megan in a rural home near Portageville, in New Madrid County in Missouri's Bootheel. On Saturday, March 28, 1998, Sherri and Megan were working in the yard while Steven was out with his father. Steven spoke to his mother by phone at about 6:20 p.m. When his father called back about 20 minutes later, no one answered. Father and son drove home, and at about 7 p.m. the father called 911.
Sherri had been shot three times in the head in the living room. Megan's hands had been tied and she had been sexually assaulted and shot. Investigators concluded that the man had used a ruse to get inside and that Megan had been the main target. Missouri State Highway Patrol Sergeant Bud Cooper later estimated that he had a window of about 30 minutes to enter and leave the house. Freddie Hill, a Portageville patrolman who became the town's police chief, was the first officer on the scene. Steven Scherer later said that afterward everyone told him he had to be strong for his father.
About two and a half hours later, near Dyersburg, Tennessee, a man in a van asked a young mother for directions and then tried to force his way into her home, where her children were. She fought him. He fired a handgun, and a bullet struck her in the arm. She survived, gave a description of a slight, graying man in his thirties to fifties, possibly driving a maroon van, and helped produce a composite sketch. Ballistic testing linked the gun to the Scherer killings. Her age is given as 25 by the Highway Patrol and 26 by KFVS. She is not named here.
Two weeks later, at about 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1998, Paragould police arrested Brashers near a parked car on West Main Street while he was trying to break into the home of a woman living alone, for whom he had once done handyman work. Her phone line had been cut. He had wire cutters, gloves, a video camera and a loaded .22 revolver. He was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm and criminal mischief, and Greene County prosecutors added charges including attempted residential burglary. He posted a $5,000 bond and went home.
The revolver was of the same make and model as the one used at the Scherer home, but the caliber had not been made public, and nobody in Paragould had reason to connect the two. In August 1998 he was arrested again after a hit-and-run in which he gave a false name, and police found that he had burglarized a neighbor. Missouri investigators now believe the Paragould revolver may have been the Scherer weapon; the Paragould police can no longer locate it.
Linda Marie Rutledge, 43, worked at her parents' business, the Nixon Hearing Aid Center in the 100 block of Malibu Drive in Lexington, Kentucky. She was probably killed on the evening of Friday, November 6, 1998. At about 7:40 the next morning the Lexington Fire Department was called to a fire at the center. Crews put it out and found her body in a back hallway. The Fayette County coroner ruled that she had died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head, and investigators collected a .380 shell casing, two bullets and a sexual assault kit.
Investigators said Brashers had no known ties to Lexington. Five days after Ms. Rutledge's death he missed a court date in Greene County, Arkansas, and another warrant was issued. Her mother told investigators that she hoped the person responsible was no one who knew her daughter. The family has asked for privacy, and little else about Ms. Rutledge's life has been published. Lexington police said, when they closed the case in 2026, that solving it "does not bring Linda back."
On January 12, 1999, police in Kennett, Missouri, were looking into stolen Indiana license plates on a car at the Super 8 motel. Brashers, in room 323, refused to come out and kept a semiautomatic pistol. Officers learned that he had active warrants from Paragould. According to Greenville police and Missouri officials, he was found hiding under a bed with the gun, and during about four hours of negotiations he let the other people in the room go. Early on January 13 he shot himself in the head with the .380. Officers entering the room at about 4:34 a.m. found him gravely wounded or dead; the Missouri State Highway Patrol's 2018 account, and Greenville police, say he died six days later, on January 19, while KFVS's reconstruction from Kennett records describes him as dead in the room. He was 40. He was buried at Shiloh Cemetery in Paragould.
Officers at the motel collected the .380, a 9mm pistol and about $2,600 in cash. KFVS reported in 2026 that the guns and money can no longer be found and that the original Kennett suicide report is missing; a duplicate report notes that a .380 casing was filed with it. At the time, no one saw the death as anything more than the end of a career criminal's run.
In New Madrid County the Scherer case became, in the words of the sheriff, Terry Stevens, the most heavily investigated case the county had ever seen. The Missouri State Highway Patrol led it, with Sergeant Bud Cooper in charge from the first day, and the case was featured on America's Most Wanted within about two months. Hundreds of leads were run down, in Texas and Michigan among other places. A partial DNA profile recovered in 1998 was too incomplete to enter into CODIS.
In 2004 a Highway Patrol sergeant, Jeff Heath, began reviewing the evidence for newer testing. A Highway Patrol crime lab scientist, Ruth Montgomery, obtained a full profile from a swab collected at Megan Scherer's autopsy. It went into CODIS in March 2006 and, about a month later, matched the unknown profile from Genevieve Zitricki's apartment in Greenville. The two cases, eight years and several hundred miles apart, now had one unknown suspect.
Investigators from South Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri formed a joint team and followed more than 1,200 leads. In 2008 they built a list of more than 300 men who had lived within 100 miles of both the Greenville scene and the Missouri and Tennessee scenes. America's Most Wanted featured the two cases together in 2009. Other men, among them Tommy Lynn Sells, were investigated and excluded by DNA. Brashers's name was never on any list. The Memphis match in May 2017 added a third state and a living witness description, but still no name.
After California investigators used a public genealogy database to identify a suspect in the Golden State case in April 2018, the Missouri-led team sent DNA from the Scherer case to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia company that had begun offering investigative genetic genealogy to police. Parabon produced a SNP profile and uploaded it to GEDmatch, the open database where users share their own test results. The genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, working for Parabon, took the case in the summer of 2018. According to KFVS, the matches were distant cousins, some related through two family lines, and Moore worked through each cousin's family until she reached Robert Eugene Brashers.
His record fit. She found the 1985 Florida attack, a Greenville address 0.7 miles from Ms. Zitricki's apartment, and a photograph of him that resembled the composite sketches from Tennessee. Moore presented her findings to the multi-state team on August 22, 2018. Investigators visited Brashers's partner and daughter in Alabama, and his daughter volunteered a DNA sample. Standard STR testing of relatives' DNA indicated that he was very likely the source. On September 27, 2018, under a court order, his remains were exhumed at Paragould. Testing of the new samples matched the crime scene profiles.
The news conferences came on Friday, October 5, 2018. In New Madrid County the Missouri State Highway Patrol and Sheriff Terry Stevens announced that Brashers was responsible for the Scherer killings and the Dyersburg shooting; Highway Patrol Lieutenant Phil Gregory asked the public to respect the privacy of both the Scherer family and Brashers's family, which had cooperated. In Greenville, Police Chief Ken Miller called the day "bittersweet" and said the department had "finally been able to bring closure" to Jenny Zitricki's family, crediting Parabon, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the FBI and generations of detectives, some of whom returned from retirement to work the case. In Memphis, Deputy Director Mike Ryall said the genealogy technique was too costly for routine use but that he hoped it would become common. At that point police attributed three deaths to Brashers.
Brashers's daughter, Deborah, then 27, learned from the police visit that her father was the man they were looking for. Her mother died in December 2018, four months later. Deborah has since spoken publicly. In 2025 she said she had been an infant at the time of the Austin killings and eight when her father died, and told KXAN: "I am very sorry to every family that my father hurt."
In Austin the case had a new lead detective, Daniel Jackson of the police department's cold case unit, from 2022. He drew up a ranked list of evidence for retesting. In June 2025 he traced a spent .380 cartridge casing that had been found in a drain at the shop and had not been run through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, the federal database of firearm markings, in years. The ATF ran it again with improved software. On July 2, 2025, it matched the casing from Linda Rutledge's killing in Lexington. Kentucky State Police lab comparisons indicated that both casings came from the same firearm.
In August 2025 Jackson asked laboratories across the country to search their Y-STR profiles against the Austin profile. Several gave partial hits; the South Carolina state laboratory reported a full 27-marker match, and on August 22, 2025, it linked the Austin profile to the known profile from the 1990 Greenville case, which by then was attributed to Brashers. That month, retesting of fingernail clippings taken from Amy Ayers at her autopsy produced a DNA profile that matched Brashers. Jackson said Amy had most likely picked up the DNA while fighting back. "Amy's final moments on this earth were to solve this case," he said.
The Austin Police Department told the families on Friday, September 26, 2025, and a leak reached reporters the same night; Austin police issued a short statement naming Brashers that evening. At a news conference at City Hall on Monday, September 29, Chief Lisa Davis said the only physical evidence from the scene matched Brashers and called the case one of the most devastating in the city's history. Mayor Kirk Watson spoke, and the Travis County District Attorney, José Garza, said his office would take responsibility for prosecuting the wrong men: "The overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and the innocence of four." The department said the case remained open.
The Lexington Police Department followed the Austin tip. In September 2025 Ms. Rutledge's sexual assault kit was sent to DNA Labs International, and its profile matched the Austin profile. On January 7, 2026, Lexington police announced that they had closed the case and identified Brashers as the suspect, saying that if he were alive he would be arrested and charged. The department thanked agencies in Austin, Texas and Kentucky, the ATF and the FBI. The Kentucky State Police credited its lab's ballistic work. With Lexington, the number of deaths attributed to Brashers rose to eight.
Áine Cain, a journalist and co-host of the podcast The Murder Sheet, has said she noticed the similarities between the two cases and contacted Lexington police. The police announcements credit the Austin NIBIN match as the source of the link.
In late 2025 the Travis County District Attorney's office moved to clear the four men. On February 19, 2026, Travis County District Judge Dayna Blazey declared Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Forrest Welborn and the late Maurice Pierce innocent and dismissed the charges with prejudice. Detective Jackson testified about the casing and the DNA. An assistant district attorney, Trudy Strassburger, told the court that it was the county's "turn to accept responsibility" and that the evidence showed Brashers alone had committed the crime. Scott read his own statement. Pierce's daughter, Marisa, told the court: "Daddy, you have your name back."
In May 2026 the City of Austin agreed to pay $35 million to the three surviving men and Pierce's family to settle their civil rights claims, and the city council approved the settlement on May 28. Mayor Watson apologized. The men's lawyer said the police department had agreed to ban unsupervised interrogations of juveniles.
The answers came with mixed feelings. Barbara Wilson said she was full of gratitude, and that her family had never wanted anyone charged with something they did not do. Sonora Thomas said that knowing what happened eased her suffering. Shawn and Angie Ayers learned the news in person at a horse show in Bryan, Texas; Angie Ayers has said she wants complete proof before accepting that Brashers acted alone, and urged families in other unsolved cases to keep pushing. The Ayers family and the former prosecutor Mindy Montford, who worked on the Austin case for years with the district attorney's office and the Texas Attorney General's cold case unit, have since helped set up a National Cold Case Center to give families a liaison with investigators.
In Missouri, Sergeant Bud Cooper, who led the Scherer case for about 20 years and lived to see it solved, died in May 2025 at 60. Steven Scherer, who was 15 on the day his mother and sister died, has spoken publicly about the case's effect on his family.
The Brashers identification was one of the early cases solved through investigative genetic genealogy in the months after the Golden State arrest. Investigators in both Missouri and Texas have pointed to the case as an argument for retesting old evidence as methods improve: the 2006 match depended on a swab that a Highway Patrol investigator had collected without knowing it would ever be useful, the 2017 Memphis match on a rape kit that had sat untested for almost 20 years, and the 2025 Austin and Lexington links on a casing and fingernail clippings stored for more than three decades. The Austin investigation also reflects the limits of genealogy: in 2018 Angie Ayers asked Moore to try the yogurt shop Y-DNA profile, but it was too limited to identify anyone.
Proven in court: only the 1986 Florida conviction for attempted second-degree murder and his later theft and weapons convictions. None of the killings attributed to Brashers was ever charged or tried, and he could not answer the evidence. The attributions rest on DNA matches (Greenville, Portageville, Memphis, Austin, Lexington), on firearm comparisons (Dyersburg to Portageville; Austin to Lexington), and on his confirmed possession of an AMT .380 two days after the Austin killings.
Open in Austin: the Austin Police Department has described Brashers as its only suspect but says the case is formally open. Some relatives, including Angie Ayers, have asked whether he acted alone. KFVS reported in 2026 that investigators believe a second weapon may have been used at the shop.
Possible further cases: investigators in Missouri, Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee are reviewing other unsolved cases, and Lexington detective John Davis has urged agencies to recheck cases from 1995 to 1998. The missing Paragould revolver and the missing Kennett pistols cannot be tested against other cases. KFVS reported an active lead in Virginia. No further case had been publicly attributed to him as of October 16, 2026.
Details that differ between sources: the date of the Florida attack (November 11, 1985, in the Missouri State Highway Patrol release; November 22, 1985, in KFVS's reconstruction) and the survivor's age (24 or 25); the age of the Dyersburg survivor (25 or 26) and whether she was hit in the arm or shoulder; Maurice Pierce's age at his 1991 arrest (15 or 16); which of Springsteen and Scott received the death sentence (the Austin police release reverses the two; KUT, the Texas Standard and the AP say Springsteen); and the date of Brashers's death (January 19, 1999, in the 2018 official accounts; January 13 in KFVS's 2026 series). How long he served on the federal weapons case, and whether he was held in Georgia, federal custody or both between 1992 and 1997, is not set out consistently in the sources.
March 13, 1958: Robert Eugene Brashers is born; his origins are traced to Newport News, Virginia.
March 31, 1976: enlists in the Navy in El Paso, Texas.
December 10, 1976: honorably discharged; not eligible to reenlist.
November 1980: places his own obituary in newspapers in Newport News and New Orleans.
November 1985: beats and shoots a woman in St. Lucie County, Florida; she survives; he is arrested.
November 1986: convicted of attempted second-degree murder; sentenced to 12 years.
May 1989: released from Florida prison.
Spring 1990: works as a maintenance man in Greenville, South Carolina.
April 1990: Genevieve Zitricki, 28, is killed in her Greenville apartment; she is found on April 6.
Summer 1991: his daughter Deborah is born.
November 29, 1991: the car he will be stopped in is stolen in Georgia.
December 6, 1991: Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas and Amy Ayers are killed at the yogurt shop in Austin, Texas.
December 8, 1991: stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint on I-10 with a stolen car and an AMT .380 pistol.
February 18, 1992: arrested in Marietta, Georgia, under a false name; pleads guilty to four counts.
February 1997: released from federal custody; moves to Paragould, Arkansas.
March 11, 1997: a 14-year-old girl is raped in a home invasion in Memphis.
March 28, 1998: Sherri Scherer, 38, and Megan Scherer, 12, are killed near Portageville, Missouri; hours later a woman is shot near Dyersburg, Tennessee, and survives.
April 12, 1998: arrested in Paragould trying to break into a woman's home; released on $5,000 bond.
August 1998: arrested after a hit-and-run in Paragould.
November 6 or 7, 1998: Linda Rutledge, 43, is killed at the Nixon Hearing Aid Center in Lexington, Kentucky.
January 12 to 13, 1999: standoff at the Super 8 motel in Kennett, Missouri; he shoots himself.
January 19, 1999: date of death given by the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
1999: four young men are charged in the Austin case; Springsteen and Scott are later convicted.
2003: charges against Maurice Pierce are dismissed.
2006: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturns the Austin convictions; in March and April a DNA profile from the Scherer case is entered in CODIS and matches the Zitricki case.
2009: Springsteen and Scott freed after a Y-STR profile excludes all four men; America's Most Wanted features the Scherer and Zitricki cases together.
2016: the Memphis rape kit is tested.
May 2017: CODIS links the Memphis case to Missouri and South Carolina.
August 22, 2018: CeCe Moore presents her genealogy findings naming Brashers.
September 27, 2018: his remains are exhumed at Paragould.
October 5, 2018: Missouri, Greenville and Memphis authorities announce the DNA identification.
December 2018: his partner, Deborah's mother, dies.
May 2025: Sergeant Bud Cooper dies.
July 2, 2025: NIBIN links the Austin casing to the Lexington case.
August 22, 2025: South Carolina lab links the Austin Y-STR profile to the Greenville case.
September 26 and 29, 2025: Austin police name Brashers in the yogurt shop case.
January 7, 2026: Lexington police close the Rutledge case.
February 19, 2026: Judge Dayna Blazey declares the four men accused in Austin innocent.
May 28, 2026: Austin City Council approves a $35 million settlement with the exonerated men.
October 16, 2026: eight deaths attributed to Brashers; reviews of other cases continue; no new link announced.