The most obvious way to approach “The Yogurt Shop Murders” would’ve involved dimly lit rooms and interviews in isolation to convey the devastation caused by the horrific deaths of four teenage girls at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt in Austin in 1991 and the dark nature of those that perpetrated the crime. However, Margaret Brown knew that was no way to get at a real story.
“We had a rule where if anyone had a dog they had to be in the shot,” said Brown of the many pets that make unexpected cameos in the series that may be rarely the focus, but give rise to revelations when conjuring an airiness to speak about grim subjects rather than claustrophobia of tucking them away. “I wanted people to feel relaxed and interviews to feel lived in, so anytime there was a dog, we pretty much gravitated toward the dog.”
In situations for which there are no words, Brown has long had the ability to elicit them, excavating histories that can be difficult to talk about for reasons of memory or trauma, whether it was the fresh round of recriminations to surface along with the newly discovered remains of the slave ship Clotilda in “Descendent” or returning to her hometown in Alabama in “The Order of Myths” to find the roots of its segregated Mardi Gras celebrations as a holdover from antebellum times. Ironically, her latest might defy description as well when it’s bound to be a high watermark of the popular true crime genre – and in fact, makes a fine pairing with the first season of “True Detective” on HBO with its Texas setting and colorful characters – yet eludes such easy categorization when the director elegantly quantifies the psychic toll the unsolved murders had on the city of Austin since they were committed 30 years ago…