1991 Austin yogurt shop murders

On the night of December 6, 1991, four teenage girls were killed inside a yogurt shop in Austin, Texas: 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison, and Jennifer's 15-year-old sister, Sarah Harbison. Jennifer and Eliza worked at the shop; Sarah and Amy had come for a ride home when it closed at 11 p.m. About an hour earlier, a man had used the shop's restroom and may have propped open a rear door. Shortly before midnight, a patrolman reported a fire at the shop, and firefighters found the four bodies afterward. Each girl had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber weapon; three were gagged, bound with their own underwear, and severely burned. Amy's body was found in a separate part of the shop, showing burns as well as two gunshot wounds, the second of which was fatal. At least three of the four girls had been raped, and the perpetrator likely left through a rear door that was found unlocked.

In the years that followed, Austin police have said more than 50 people — including one man executed for unrelated crimes — confessed to the murders over time, and a 1992 confession by two Mexican nationals was later ruled false. Years later, a detective focused on four men who had been teenagers in 1991: Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn. Interrogations by various detectives produced confessions in which each implicated the others; because no record existed of the original 1991 interviews, it was unclear whether detectives had supplied details suspects later repeated back. One interrogating detective, Hector Polanco, had previously been accused of coercing false confessions in an unrelated case involving Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger, who were later exonerated.

Springsteen and Scott were arrested in 1999; their trials were held in 2001 and 2002, respectively, and the prosecution presented no hard evidence beyond the confessions. Both were convicted of capital murder — Springsteen was sentenced to death, and Scott to life imprisonment. In 2005, Governor Rick Perry commuted Springsteen's sentence to life in prison under Roper v. Simmons, because he was 17 at the time of the murders. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Springsteen's conviction in 2006, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reinstate it in February 2007; in 2008, the court overturned both men's convictions, ruling that prosecutors had violated the Confrontation Clause by introducing co-defendants' confessions that could not be cross-examined at trial.

New Y-STR DNA testing then showed the male DNA recovered from the case belonged to one unidentified man who matched neither Springsteen, Scott, nor the other implicated suspects. In June 2009, both men were released on bond; Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said she remained confident in their guilt but could not responsibly proceed to trial without identifying the unknown DNA donor, and all charges were dismissed that October. Maurice Pierce, one of the four implicated men, was fatally shot by Austin police officer Frank Wilson in December 2010 after stabbing Wilson during a traffic stop; Wilson survived.

In September 2025, Austin police announced that the previously unidentified male DNA had been matched to Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial killer and serial rapist who died by suicide during a standoff with police in 1999. Further testing matched Brashers' DNA to material recovered from under Amy Ayers' fingernails, and a bullet casing from the scene was consistent with the gun Brashers used in 1999. On February 19, 2026, Judge Dayna Blazey formally exonerated Springsteen, Scott, Pierce, and Welborn, declaring all four factually innocent and dismissing their charges with prejudice.