For more than three decades, Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen and their families said they were innocent of one of Austin’s most notorious crimes: the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop set on fire. On Thursday, a judge formally cleared them and two other men of wrongdoing during an emotional courtroom hearing in which prosecutors apologized and said they were wrongly accused. District Judge Dayna Blazey told Scott and Welborn, “you are innocent,” calling her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
The hearing brought together the four men and their relatives as prosecutors acknowledged the convictions were wrong, and as the court heard statements about the consequences of decades of incarceration and suspicion. Scott and Welborn sat in the courtroom with family members after prosecutors’ concession that investigators had later identified another culprit. Springsteen, who had been sent to death row before his conviction was overturned in the mid-2000s, did not attend.
Marisa Pierce, speaking for her father Maurice Pierce, addressed the court through tears and said her family had been waiting years for the legal and personal recognition of innocence. She said, “Daddy, you have your name back,” adding, “The world knows what you were trying to say all along.” In another statement read in court through Springsteen’s attorney, Welborn’s legal account also described the long-term effects of the accusations, including job loss and homelessness for periods of time.
Austin investigators said the murders involved Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17, 13, 17 and 15, who were found bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of the girls worked. Investigators said the building was set on fire. According to the AP account, investigators pursued thousands of leads and multiple false confessions before arresting four men in late 1999, including Springsteen and Scott, who were convicted largely based on confessions they said were coerced.
Prosecutors said the cases were derailed further as evidence evolved. The AP report said Springsteen and Scott had their convictions overturned in the mid-2000s and that Welborn faced charges but was never tried after grand juries refused to indict him. The report also said Pierce spent three years in jail before charges were dismissed and he was released, and that a judge ordered additional charges dismissed in 2009 after new DNA tests and earlier trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators said the case gained fresh attention after an HBO documentary in 2025, and that the decisive forensic work came after new DNA and a review of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer. Authorities said the DNA link came when a sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail matched Brashers. Investigators also said Austin authorities found Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings, and that a pistol in a stolen car matched the caliber used in the Austin case.
According to prosecutors, investigators later connected Brashers’ broader criminal conduct to the Austin pattern, saying victims were tied up with their own clothing, that prosecutors said the girls were sexually assaulted, and that some scenes were set on fire in his other cases. Brashers died in 1999 after he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri. “Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men … (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said, adding, “We could not have been more wrong.”
The formal declaration of innocence could also carry practical consequences for the men and their families, including potential steps toward financial compensation. Phil Scott, the father of Michael Scott, said in court, “My son’s name has finally been cleared after more than 25 years of being called the monster, the murderer and everything else,” adding, “Son, be proud.” In his testimony, Michael Scott described how his arrest, conviction and prison sentence broke up his family, saying, “Every day I have carried the weight of a crime I did not commit.”