Four Men Exonerated After 34 Years in Austin Yogurt Shop Murders

Justice Finally Served After Decades of Wrongful Imprisonment

After 34 years of living under the shadow of one of Austin's most notorious crimes, four men were officially declared innocent Thursday by Travis County Judge Dayna Blazey in the brutal 1991 yogurt shop murders that haunted the city for decades . "You are innocent," the judge said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom , finally closing a dark chapter that nearly sent one man to death row and destroyed four lives.

"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." The exoneration of Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn marks a stunning reversal in a case that captivated and terrorized Austin for over three decades.

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 , creating a crime scene so horrific it would haunt investigators and the community for decades.

A Trail of False Confessions and Coerced Testimony

Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999 . Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police . Scott, who was just 15 years old when arrested, spent years proclaiming his innocence while serving a life sentence.

Scott, the only exoneree who spoke in court, said the police who arrested him, and prosecutors who convinced a jury to give him life in prison, robbed him of his youth — of a full life. "For decades I have carried the burden of wrongful conviction. Every day, I have carried the weight of a crime that I did not commit," he said. "No court ruling can return the years and the love that were taken from me, but it can acknowledge the truth: I am not guilty."

The cases began unraveling in the mid-2000s when both convictions were overturned . 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 had revealed another male suspect .

DNA Evidence Points to Real Killer

The breakthrough came when 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 . 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 . 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 of the one 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 .

Path Forward for the Exonerated

A finding of innocence would entitle the men to compensation of up to $80,000 for each year they were incarcerated. The payments come from the Texas Comptroller's Office using state funds , though neither the men nor the family of Maurice Pierce, who died in 2010, has filed for compensation, with the focus remaining on their exoneration .

The emotional toll extends far beyond financial compensation. Pierce's daughter told her deceased father, "Daddy, you have your name back. The world finally hears what you were trying to say all along." For the survivors, this declaration represents not just legal vindication but the restoration of their dignity and the chance to rebuild lives shattered by wrongful conviction.

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