The city of Austin will pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused of raping and killing four teenage girls in 1991. Yogurt shopThis is the case that initially led to one of the two men being sentenced to death and the other to life imprisonment, according to an initial settlement reached on Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Wilburn and Maurice Pearce insisted they were innocent of one of the city’s worst crimes. They were finally Declared innocent By a judge in February after investigators determined the crime was committed by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement must still be approved by the City Council at a later date. Details of the payments to the men and their families were not disclosed.
“This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Austin City Manager TC Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case, and we hope this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.”
Lawyers for Springsteen and Scott did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, 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. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dropped in 2009 when new DNA tests were not available in 1991 and previous trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators determined in 2025 that new DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole 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.
Reckless people He died in 1999 When he shot himself during an hours-long standoff with police at a hotel in Kennett, Missouri.