The Yogurt Shop Murders

The best documentaries, including nonfiction series such as “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” can be based on great stories, or be told in brilliant ways, or, in the case of this Margaret Brown-directed epic, both.

Brown’s series is less preoccupied with cracking a long-unsolved case than it is with gently probing the wounds that have never been allowed to heal, and what happens when the overwhelming desire for closure overshadows the likelihood of a definitive solution.

The makers of The Yogurt Shop Murders are not just curious about the case but how deeply the case affected Austin and the people who were intimately involved with it over the past three decades, an approach that we wish we saw more often in true crime docs.

Brown’s docuseries doesn’t end on that note of frustration or on anything to do with developments in the case, really, and instead leaves us with a more human moment, of Thomas and Ayres-Wilson holding hands from across the table (as seen in the still above) and silently bonding over a pain that only they can understand.