Four men wrongly accused of the 1991 yogurt shop murders won the settlement case against the city of Austin. If the Austin city council approves the settlement, then the three men and the family of the fourth will be paid $35 million.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn, and Maurice Pierce were accused of murdering four teenage girls at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store. After the arrests in 1999, one of the accused was initially sentenced to life in prison, and another one was waiting for years on death row.
The conviction of Springsteen and Scott was overturned in the mid-2000s; however, the prosecutors wanted to put them on trial again. The judge dismissed the case in 2009, considering the results of DNA evidence. Pierce was sent to prison for three years while on trial, and later on, his charges were also dismissed. He died in 2010 during a traffic stop confrontation with the police.
The city of Austin plans to pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused in Austin’s yogurt shop murders case, according to two city officials.
If approved, the settlement would mark the largest payout in city history.https://t.co/6EIOtrAKRy pic.twitter.com/pnnlWIdzrY
— Austin Statesman (@statesman) May 12, 2026
Welborn was charged in the case; however, he was never tried as two grand juries refused to do so. Before the four men were arrested, the investigators followed leads and were deceived by several false confessions.
The real culprit was a serial killer, Robert Eugene Brashers, who was linked to the crime in 2025 with advanced DNA testing. Brashers killed himself in 1999 in a police standoff with the same gun he used to kill Amy Ayers in 1991. Apart from ballistic samples, DNA evidence played a huge role in solving the case.
Over the last two decades, 13 different labs worked on the DNA samples to collect more information. They referred to hundreds of samples to find a suspect in the case. As the technology advanced, they were able to find the unique DNA markers of the killer.
Men exonerated in Yogurt Shop Murders expected to receive $35M settlement https://t.co/5Z8VVl3cgB
— KXAN News (@KXAN_News) May 12, 2026
Later on, a DNA test and genetic genealogy with the rare Y-STR profile connected him to the murder. Only 0.12 percent of Americans have this unique profile in their DNA. The DNA sample was collected from Ayers’ fingernail. Brashers made it extremely difficult for the investigators to collect proof as he set the shop on fire.
The bodies of four girls, Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were found in the building. The serial killer was also connected to a 1990 strangulation death of a South Carolina woman, the 1997 strangulation death of a 14-year-old girl, in 1997, and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
