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A Texas judge formally declared four men innocent Thursday in the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders, closing a decades-long legal nightmare that nearly sent one to execution and left families branded as killers for years.
District Judge Dayna Blazey delivered the ruling before a packed courtroom, closing a dark chapter for the men, their families and a city long haunted by the brutality of the crime.
“You are innocent,” Blazey said.
She called the order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
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Blazey’s ruling comes months after cold case detectives announced they had connected the killings to Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial offender who died during a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the four original suspects – Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn – sat in the packed courtroom alongside family members as prosecutors told the judge they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was convicted and spent years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010 following a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
“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 at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
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An official finding of “actual innocence” may open the door for the men and their families to seek restitution for the years lost to prison and the lasting toll of being publicly labeled as killers.
“My son’s name has finally been cleared after more than 25 years of being called the monster, the murderer and everything else,” Scott’s father, Phil Scott, said. “Son, be proud.”
When firefighters arrived at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt shop on Dec. 6, 1991, to battle a blaze, they instead uncovered a gruesome scene – the bodies of Eliza Thomas, 17; sisters Jennifer, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15; and Sarah’s best friend Amy Ayers, 13.
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Each girl had been shot in the head. Investigators believe they were bound, some sexually assaulted and that the fire was deliberately set in an attempt to destroy evidence.
After chasing thousands of leads and pursuing several false confessions, investigators arrested the four men in 1999. They were teenagers when the girls were killed.
Springsteen and Scott were sent to prison after juries relied heavily on confessions they long maintained were extracted under pressure from investigators. Appellate courts later threw out both convictions in the mid-2000s.
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Welborn was arrested and charged but never stood trial after two separate grand juries declined to indict him. Pierce spent three years behind bars before prosecutors dismissed the charges, and he was released.
Authorities later sought to retry Springsteen and Scott, but in 2009 a judge dismissed the charges after advances in DNA testing – technology unavailable at the time of the murders – identified another male suspect.
“Let us not forget that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the start of the hearing, where several family members described lives upended by incarceration and years of scrutiny from investigators.
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Welborn’s attorney read a statement saying his client lost friends, struggled to keep jobs and at one point was homeless.
Scott told the court that the years he spent fighting the charges cost him his marriage and the life he had just begun building.
“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.”
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Pierce’s daughter, Marisa Pierce, directed her remarks at former investigators and prosecutors, accusing them of continuing to pursue and pressure her father even after his release – scrutiny she said preceded the confrontation in which he was killed.
“Daddy, you have your name back,” she said. “The world knows what you were trying to say all along.”
Once Scott and Springsteen were released from prison, the case went cold until renewed attention in 2025 brought fresh scrutiny to the unsolved killings.
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Last September, the Austin Police Department announced that new DNA testing and a review of ballistics evidence linked Brashers to the murders of the four teenage girls.
“After 34 years, the Austin Police have made a significant breakthrough in one of the most devastating cases in our city’s history,” Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis said at the time. “This unthinkable crime has weighed heavily on the hearts of our community, the families of the victims and our detectives who have tirelessly pursued justice.”
Authorities said advanced forensic testing determined that DNA recovered from beneath Ayers’ fingernails matched Brashers, directly tying him to the 1991 killings.
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Brashers, who died by suicide during the 1999 Missouri standoff, had already been linked through DNA evidence to the 1990 strangulation of a woman in South Carolina, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the 1998 fatal shootings of a mother and daughter in Missouri.
Investigators also reexamined ballistics evidence from the Austin crime scene, submitting data from a .380-caliber shell casing into a federal database. The entry matched an unsolved 1998 case in Kentucky that authorities said shared similarities with the Austin murders, though additional details were not disclosed.
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Police are still working to determine why Brashers was in Austin the night of the killings, but records show he was stopped near El Paso two days later while driving a stolen truck from Georgia to Arizona. A .380-caliber handgun recovered during that stop was confiscated and later returned to his father. Investigators said the weapon was the same make and model Brashers used when he died by suicide in Missouri.
Fox News Digital’s Stepheny Price and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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