In 1991, four teenage girls were murdered at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt store in Austin, Texas. Despite years of investigation and court cases, the crime is still unsolved, partly because seven weeks after Austin PD homicide office Hector Polanco took the lead, he was accused of eliciting false confessions from two suspects (six months later, he was fired). Documentary filmmaker Claire Huie began making a movie about the murders in 2009. She interviewed the victims’ family members, detectives, and Robert Springsteen, one of the men who sat on death row for the crime after falsely confessing to participating in the murders. The case consumed Claire so much that she never finished the film. She quit filmmaking entirely and is now a meditation teacher.
Years later, Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCary, who used to live in Austin, brought the idea for a docuseries about the unsolved crime to A24. Margaret Brown moved to Austin in the late 90s and was familiar with the case because there were still billboards with the girls’ faces and people still theorized about who killed them. Brown spent over three years interviewing the crime’s investigative teams and the victims’ parents and siblings. She tracked down interrogation room footage of four teenage boys who served time for the crime and was also able to incorporate the interviews conducted by Claire Huie.
Although the four part docuseries includes crime scene photos, Brown chose not to use any that showed the victims. Her editorial team warned her not to look at all of the crime scene photos because they would haunt her for the rest of her life. A24 paid for the film team to go to trauma therapy because “it was hard to live in that darkness for such a long time.” Brown said many of the staff were having nightmares.
48 Hours update on the case in 2022