AUSTIN, TX — A Texas judge on Thursday will consider a formal declaration of innocence for the four men wrongly accused in a 1991 Austin race. The Yogurt Shop Murdersincluding a man initially convicted and sent to death row for the murders of four teenagers in a crime that has haunted the city for decades.
An acquittal would close a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that has been rocked by the brutality of the crime and the inability of investigators to solve it for decades.
Cold case investigators announced last year that they had done just that Linking the killings A suspect died in a police encounter in Missouri in 1999.
That led to a hearing Thursday before District Judge Dina Blasi, which two of the four original suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Wilburn, are expected to attend. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, was not expected to attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“It has been more than twenty-five years since the four wrongly accused men have been waiting for the criminal justice system to clear their names,” Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said when the hearing was scheduled.
A declaration of “actual innocence” will also be an essential step for men and their families to obtain financial compensation for the years they have spent in prison or prison.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; 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 burned.
Investigators pursued thousands of leads and numerous false confessions before arresting the four men in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Wilburn was indicted but never tried after the grand jury declined to indict him. Pierce spent three years in prison before the charges were dropped and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dropped in 2009 when new DNA tests that had not been available in 1991 revealed another male suspect.
The case remained cold until 2025. It received new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and new reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities have used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the 1990 strangulation death of a South Carolina woman, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee, and the 1998 shooting death of a mother and daughter in Missouri.
The connection to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brasher’s from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers was arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killing. In his stolen car was a gun of the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to other Brashers crimes: victims were tied to their own clothing, sexually assaulted, and some of the crime scenes were set on fire.
Reckless people He died in 1999 When he shot himself during an hours-long standoff with police at a hotel in Kennett, Missouri.