Four teenage girls were killed inside an Austin shop in 1991. Decades of false leads and wrongful accusations followed. Then modern forensic testing pointed investigators toward a man who had been dead for years.
Illustration notice: The hero art is an AI-generated illustration. It is not a photograph, a depiction of the real victims, or case evidence.
The night the shop burned
Shortly before midnight on December 6, 1991, an Austin police officer saw a fire at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop on West Anderson Lane. Firefighters put it out and found four teenage girls inside: Jennifer Harbison, 17; her sister Sarah, 15; Eliza Thomas, 17; and Amy Ayers, 13. Jennifer and Eliza worked at the shop. Sarah and Amy were there as the store closed.
The girls had been bound and shot. Fire and sprinkler water damaged evidence that might have helped investigators reconstruct the crime. Their families were left with a question that would remain unanswered for decades: who had entered the shop that night?
A case built on confessions
Austin police received thousands of tips and dozens of confessions. Most led nowhere. One early confession came from 16-year-old Maurice Pierce, arrested days after the murders for bringing a gun to a nearby mall. The gun was the same make and model as one used in the killings, but ballistics did not establish a match. A detective also recognized that details of Pierce’s confession did not fit the scene.
In 1999, investigators reopened the case and questioned Pierce, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, and Forrest Welborn. Springsteen and Scott confessed and implicated each other. All four were arrested, but none of the physical evidence from the shop linked them to the crime. Scott and Springsteen were later convicted; the charges against Pierce were dropped, and a grand jury declined to indict Welborn.
The convictions did not hold. After a court ruling changed how one person’s confession could be used against another, Scott and Springsteen were granted new trials. Further DNA testing produced an unknown male profile and excluded all four men. The charges were dropped in 2009. That stopped the prosecutions, but it did not formally clear every name or tell Austin who had killed the girls.
The clue that outlived the case
Decades later, better forensic tools gave investigators another way into the evidence. In 2025, Austin police re-examined a .380 cartridge recovered from a drain at the shop. Improved ballistics searching connected it to an unsolved Kentucky murder. A South Carolina laboratory also matched a complete Y-STR profile from the Austin investigation to a profile associated with a 1990 murder there.
The profile belonged to Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial killer who had died in Missouri in 1999. Police found that two days after the Austin murders, Brashers had been stopped near the Texas–New Mexico border in a stolen car with a .380 pistol. Investigators confirmed that the pistol was the same one he later used to kill himself. In September 2025, Austin police named Brashers as a suspect.
An answer, years too late
On February 19, 2026, a Travis County judge formally declared the four men previously accused innocent. The district attorney apologized and said the evidence showed Brashers committed the murders. He could not be tried: he had been dead for more than a quarter-century.
By May 2026, the Austin City Council had also approved execution of a civil settlement agreement of up to $35 million over claims arising from the wrongful arrests and convictions, including claims by the three living men and Maurice Pierce’s family and estate. That agreement addresses legal claims; it cannot restore the decades already lost.
New testing gave investigators an answer, and a judge finally cleared the men who had lived under accusation or wrongful conviction. But no ruling can return the lost years or give the families of Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza, and Amy the future they should have had. The girls deserve to remain at the center of the story—not the confessions, the headlines, or the suspect who was named too late.
What should justice look like when science identifies a suspect who can no longer stand trial? And how can investigators keep a confession from becoming a substitute for evidence? Share your thoughts, and read our story about Asha Degree’s disappearance for another case shaped by questions that lasted for years.
Sources
- Austin Police Department: Significant Breakthrough Made in 1991 I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt Murders (2025)
- Travis County District Attorney: Remarks Following the Judge’s Exoneration (2026)
- Austin City Council: May 28, 2026 action notes on the civil settlement
Story checked against official Austin Police Department and Travis County District Attorney releases; current through September 24, 2026.
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