AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration closed a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the four original suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” could also be a key step for the men and their families if they seek financial compensation for years they spent incarcerated or struggled to live under a cloud of suspicion.
“My son’s name has finally been cleared after more than 25 years of being called the monster, the murderer and everything else,” said Phil Scott, Michael Scott’s father. “Son, be proud.”
Killings shocked Austin and confounded investigators
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the start of an emotional hearing in which several family members spoke of lives ruined by incarceration and years of harassment by investigators.
In a statement his attorney read in court, Welborn said he lost friends, struggled to keep jobs and was at one time homeless. Michael Scott testified that his arrest, conviction and prison sentence ultimately broke up his family.
“I lost my family. I lost my youth. My daughter was 3 years old when I was arrested. We had just celebrated our first wedding anniversary. I lost the chance to build a family,” Scott said. “Every day I have carried the weight of a crime I did not commit.”
Pierce’s daughter, Marisa Pierce, targeted her comments at former police investigators and prosecutors, who she said harassed her father even after he was released, tormenting him until the confrontation when he was killed.
“Daddy, you have your name back,” she said. “The world knows what you were trying to say all along.”
Connection to a new suspect revealed
After Scott and Springsteen were released, the case effectively went cold until 2025, when an HBO documentary series attracted new public attention to the unsolved crime.
Then investigators made a stunning announcement last September: New DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
