{"id":172609,"date":"2026-02-20T07:50:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T07:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/172609\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T07:50:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T07:50:14","slug":"men-once-wrongfully-accused-of-austin-yogurt-shop-murders-seek-exoneration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/172609\/","title":{"rendered":"Men once wrongfully accused of Austin yogurt shop murders seek exoneration"},"content":{"rendered":"

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) \u2014 A Texas prosecutor on Thursday asked a judge for a formal declaration of innocence for the four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders<\/a>, including one man who was initially convicted and sent to death row in the killing of four teenagers in a crime that haunted the city for decades.<\/p>\n

An exoneration ruling would close a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators\u2019 inability to solve it for decades.<\/p>\n

Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings<\/a> to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.<\/p>\n

That led to Thursday\u2019s hearing before state District Judge Dayna Blazey. Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors declare that they are innocent.<\/p>\n

Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, was not expected to attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men … (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,\u201d Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. \u201cWe could not have been more wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

A declaration of \u201cactual innocence\u201d would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,\u201d Strassburger said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,\u201d Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.<\/p>\n

Connection to a new suspect revealed<\/p>\n

The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.<\/p>\n

Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years<\/p>\n

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 \u201cI Can\u2019t Believe It\u2019s Yogurt\u201d store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.<\/p>\n

Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.<\/p>\n

Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.<\/p>\n

Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.<\/p>\n

The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers\u2019 fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.<\/p>\n

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 same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.<\/p>\n

Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers\u2019 other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.<\/p>\n

Brashers died in 1999<\/a> when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUSTIN, Texas (AP) \u2014 A Texas prosecutor on Thursday asked a judge for a formal declaration of innocence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[2041,69755,69756,2042,132,134,133,69757,819,2046,2047,2048,27],"class_list":{"0":"post-172609","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-15-abc","9":"tag-1991-yogurt-shop-murder-suspects","10":"tag-1991-yogurt-shop-murders","11":"tag-25-news","12":"tag-austin","13":"tag-austin-headlines","14":"tag-austin-news","15":"tag-austin-yogurt-shop-murders","16":"tag-in-your-neighborhood","17":"tag-krhd","18":"tag-kxxv","19":"tag-local-news-in-my-area","20":"tag-texas"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}