“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.
In a statement his attorney read in court, Welborn said he lost friends, struggled to keep jobs and was at one time homeless. 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.”
The formal declaration of 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.”
Connection to 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.
“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. “We could not have been more wrong.”