Austin, Texas officials have agreed to a $35 million settlement with four men who were falsely charged in connection with the brutal 1991 slayings of four teenage girls at a local yogurt shop, one of the city’s most infamous unsolved cases that eventually sent one defendant to death row and another to life imprisonment.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had consistently maintained their innocence in the heinous crime. A judge formally cleared their names in February following an investigation that identified the actual perpetrator as someone who had been dead since 1999.
The proposed settlement requires approval from Austin’s city council before becoming final. Officials have not disclosed how the compensation will be distributed among the men and their relatives.
“This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.”
Legal representatives for Springsteen and Scott have not yet responded to media inquiries about the agreement.
The victims – Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15 – were restrained, gagged and executed at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” shop where two were employed. The perpetrator then burned down the building.
Law enforcement pursued thousands of tips and multiple false admissions before apprehending the four suspects, all teenagers at the time of the murders, in late 1999.
Both Springsteen and Scott received convictions primarily based on confessions they claimed were forced by investigators. Appeals courts reversed both verdicts during the mid-2000s.
While Welborn faced charges, he never went to trial after two separate grand juries declined to issue indictments. Pierce remained incarcerated for three years before prosecutors dropped the case. He was killed in 2010 during a police encounter following a traffic violation.
Although prosecutors sought new trials for Springsteen and Scott, a judge dismissed all charges in 2009 when advanced DNA testing unavailable during the original investigation identified a different male perpetrator.
In 2025, investigators concluded that cutting-edge DNA analysis and reexamination of ballistics evidence confirmed Robert Eugene Brashers as the lone gunman.
Beginning in 2018, law enforcement had connected Brashers through sophisticated DNA methods to multiple violent crimes: the 1990 strangulation murder of a South Carolina woman, the 1997 sexual assault of a 14-year-old Tennessee girl, and the 1998 shooting deaths of a mother and daughter in Missouri.
The breakthrough in the Austin case occurred when DNA recovered from beneath Ayers’ fingernail matched Brashers’ genetic profile from the 1990 homicide.
Brashers took his own life in 1999 during an extended police standoff at a Kennett, Missouri motel.
