MINDY MONTFORD
The Austin Yogurt Shop Murders: The Cross-Country Search for a Serial Killer
Mindy Montford, Senior Counsel, Office of the Texas Attorney General
The Austin Yogurt Shop murders took place in December 1991 in a quiet neighborhood shopping center in Austin, Texas.
The bodies of four young girls were found by firefighters who responded to the scene of a reported fire coming from the store. The girls were found naked, bound with their own clothing, and each victim had been shot in the head.
Years later, two men confessed to the murders and were ultimately convicted of the crimes. After a series of appellate legal rulings, the men were eventually granted new trials. While the state prepared to retry the cases, a DNA profile was developed from evidence recovered from one of the victims using new technology. The newly obtained DNA profile, however, did not match the suspects. The cases were subsequently dismissed pending further investigation.
Law enforcement spent the next 15 years testing hundreds of individuals trying to identify the source of the unknown DNA profile. The murders would remain unsolved until 2025 when additional DNA testing linked the crime to a serial killer from across the country. This presentation will go through the initial investigation, the confessions, the subsequent court proceedings, and how technology combined with good police work ultimately solved the case. It will also cover how a separate investigation hundreds of miles away from Austin, Texas was the key to finding the killer.
Mindy Montford has spent 30 years working in the criminal justice system. She earned her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas before beginning her legal career in Houston at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, one of the largest in the country. She then returned to her hometown of Austin where she served as an Assistant District Attorney for ten years, handling felony crimes including sexual assault, child abuse, aggravated offenses, public integrity, domestic violence, and capital murder cases. While serving in the Travis County DA’s office, Montford co-founded the prosecution internship program at the University of Texas School of Law and served as an Adjunct Professor teaching law students about the criminal justice system.
After leaving the DA’s Office in 2008, she started her own law practice with a focus on criminal defense work. She was one of only a handful of female attorneys at the time selected to be on the “A-list” of attorneys who were qualified to represent indigent clients charged with the most serious felony offenses. In 2016, Montford was asked to return to the Travis County DA’s Office to serve as the First Assistant District Attorney for the then-newly elected DA, Margaret Moore. In this role, she managed an office of approximately 230 employees, including over 90 attorneys, with an annual budget of over $24 million dollars. As First Assistant, she started a collaboration with the Austin Police Department Cold Case Unit, assigning prosecutors to work with detectives on cold cases from investigation through prosecution. During this time, Montford started working on the widely known “Yogurt Shop Murders” investigation, which became a career highlight for her as she continued to work with law enforcement on the case for the next eight years until it was solved in 2025.
In 2021, Montford followed her passion for working cold cases and embarked on a new career path, starting a statewide cold case and missing persons unit in the Texas Attorney General’s Office. Mindy served as Senior Counsel for the unit assisting law enforcement agencies with their unsolved homicide investigations and overseeing the daily operations of the unit. During her time with the unit, she developed standard operating procedures and protocols, coordinated roundtable case reviews with outside partner agencies, communicated regularly with forensic labs around the country to develop testing plans, designed annual statewide trainings, created a Retired Homicide Investigators Task Force, established an internship partnership program with Texas State University, and applied for and received state and federal grant funding for the unit. In just a short period of time, the unit has worked with dozens of local police departments to break open and solve multiple cold cases, including the highly publicized “Baby Holly” case that drew international attention in 2022 when the unit located Holly Miller alive and well 42 years after she went missing as an infant following the murders of her parents.
Throughout her career, Montford has tried over 100 jury trials, testified as a resource witness before legislative committees on criminal justice reform, and has helped draft key pieces of criminal justice legislation. She has presented as a lecturer on various criminal law topics at trainings and seminars and has appeared on news and radio shows as an analyst providing legal commentary on court cases.