AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — For more than three decades, the four men and their families had insisted they were innocent of one of Austin’s most gruesome and notorious crimes: the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop that was set on fire.

No one listened. Not when Robert Springsteen was sent to death row. Not when Michael Scott was sentenced to life in prison. Or when Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce, though never convicted, struggled through life under dark clouds of suspicion that they were murderers.

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