Texas judge declares 4 men innocent in 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders

Officially a Texas judge Four men were declared innocent Thursday’s 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders ended a decades-long legal nightmare that nearly sent someone to death row and left families labeled as killers for years.

District Judge Dina Blasi handed down the sentence 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’re innocent,” Blaze said.

She described the order as “a commitment to the rule of law and a commitment to the dignity of the individual.”

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Photos of the victims of the “Yogurt Shop Murders”, who were killed in a horrific attack in 1991 that remain unsolved. (Fox 7 Austin)

Blazey’s ruling comes months after cold case investigators announced they had linked the killings to Robert Eugene Brashers, a serial criminal who died during a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.

Two of the four original suspects — Michael Scott and Forrest Wilburn — sat in the crowded courtroom alongside family members as prosecutors told the judge they were innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was convicted and spent years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010 after a confrontation with police following a traffic stop.

“More than 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men… (for) one of their own Austin’s worst crimes “We’ve never seen anything like this before. We couldn’t have been more wrong,” Travis County First Assistant Prosecutor Trudy Strasberger said at the opening of the hearing.

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Flowers and candles mark the site where Eliza Thomas, Jennifer and Sarah Harbison and Amy Ayers lost their lives. (Brian Preston/Fox News Digital)

An official finding of “actual innocence” could open the door for the men and their families to seek compensation for the years lost in prison and the lasting losses caused by being publicly labeled as killers.

“My son’s name is there Finally it was cleared Scott’s father, Phil Scott, said after more than 25 years of calling him a monster, a killer and everything else. Son, be proud.

When firefighters arrived at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt store on December 6, 1991, to fight the blaze, they instead discovered a horrific 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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A billboard advertising a $125,000 reward for leads in the yogurt store murders in Austin, Texas on December 7, 1993. The billboard was at South Congress Avenue and Ben Wilt Street. (Kevin Verubic Adams/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

Each girl was hit by a bullet in the head. Investigators believe they were tied up, some were sexually assaulted, and the fire was deliberately set in an attempt to destroy evidence.

After pursuing thousands of leads and pursuing numerous false confessions, investigators arrested the four men in 1999. They were teenagers when the girls were murdered.

Springsteen and Scott were sent to prison after the jury relied too heavily on confessions that they always maintained were extracted under pressure from investigators. Courts of appeal later overturned both convictions in the mid-2000s.

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Suspects in yogurt shop murders(Credit: FOX 7 Austin) (Fox 7 Austin)

Wilburn was arrested and charged but never tried after a separate grand jury declined to indict him. Pierce spent three years behind bars before the prosecution rejected the charges against him, and he was released.

Authorities later sought to retry Springsteen and Scott, but in 2009 a judge dropped the charges after advances in DNA testing — a technology that was not available at the time of the murders — led to the identification of another male suspect.

“Let’s not forget that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, being executed by the state of Texas,” Springsteen’s attorney, Amber Farley, said at the beginning of the hearing, as several family members described Robert Springsteen’s life turned upside down by imprisonment and years of scrutiny by investigators.

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Wilburn’s attorney read a statement in which he said his client lost friends, struggled to keep jobs, and at one point became homeless.

Scott told the court that the years he spent fighting the charges had cost him his marriage and the life he had only begun to build.

“I lost my family. I lost my youth. My daughter was 3 years old when I was arrested. We just celebrated our first wedding anniversary. “I lost the opportunity to build a family. Every day I bear the weight of a crime I didn’t commit,” Scott said.

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Pierce’s daughter, Marissa Pierce, directed her statements 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.

“Dad, I got your name back,” she said. “The world knows what you’ve been trying to say all along.”

Once Scott and Springsteen were released from prison, the case went cold even further Renewed interest in 2025 It brought new scrutiny to unsolved killings.

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Shot by Robert Brashers (Missouri State Highway Patrol)

Last September, Austin Police Department He announced that new DNA testing and a review of ballistics evidence linked Brashers to the killings of the four teenage girls.

“After 34 years, Austin Police have made significant progress 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 deeply touched the hearts of our community, the families of the victims, and the investigators who tirelessly pursued justice.”

The authorities said Advanced forensic tests have been identified DNA extracted from under Ayers’ fingernails matched Brasher’s, directly linking him to the 1991 murders.

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Brashers, who died by suicide during a standoff in Missouri in 1999, has already been linked by DNA evidence to the 1990 strangulation of a woman in Missouri. South Carolinathe 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee, and the 1998 fatal shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri.

Investigators also re-examined ballistic evidence from the Austin crime scene, submitting data from a .380-caliber shell casing to a federal database. The entry matches an unsolved case from 1998 in Kentucky, which authorities said had similarities to the Austin murders, though no additional details were released.

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Police are still working to determine why Brashears was in Austin the night of the murder, but records show he was stopped near El Paso two days later while driving a stolen truck from Georgia to Arizona. A .380-caliber pistol found during that stop was confiscated and later returned to his father. Investigators said the weapon was the same make and model that Brashers used when he committed suicide in Missouri.

Stephenie Price of Fox News Digital and the Associated Press contributed to this report.