In Austin, officials have reached a tentative agreement to settle claims tied to the 1991 “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” murders, a case that for years sent two men to prison and one into death row before a judge overturned the convictions and found the defendants innocent. Under the agreement announced Tuesday, the city will pay $35 million to Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and the family of Maurice Pierce, with the payments subject to later approval by the Austin City Council. Prosecutors, investigators and courts spent decades trying to resolve who killed four teenage girls after the case initially relied on confessions and other evidence later called into question.
Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement that the settlement “closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” and he said the city was “pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case” and hoped it would bring “a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.” The AP reported that the settlement’s terms include payments to three men and to Pierce’s family, but the details of those payments were not released.
The case dates to the killing of Amy Ayers, 13, and Eliza Thomas, 17, and the deaths of sisters Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15. According to the report, the girls were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the yogurt shop where two of them worked, and the building was set on fire. Investigators pursued thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men—who were teenagers when the girls were killed—were arrested in late 1999.
Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott were convicted based largely on confessions that they insisted were coerced by police, the AP reported. Their convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s, and the case later moved through new rulings tied to scientific testing and a different suspect. Forrest Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him, while Pierce spent three years in jail before prosecutors dismissed charges; Pierce later died in 2010 after a confrontation with police that began with a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 after new DNA tests unavailable in 1991 and the results from the earlier trials pointed to another male suspect. In 2025, investigators determined that new DNA science and a review of old ballistics evidence identified Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer, AP reported. The investigative link, according to the report, came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail matched Brashers, whose other cases had been connected to authorities’ advanced DNA work starting in 2018.
The report said that since 2018, authorities used advanced DNA evidence to connect Brashers to a 1990 strangulation death of a South Carolina woman, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee, and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998. Brashers died in 1999, after he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
In a joint statement, Scott and his attorney Tony Diaz said they are hopeful the settlement will help improve investigation practices and safeguards against wrongful convictions. They added that “Discussions and negotiations are ongoing regarding police reforms that would help ensure that nothing like what occurred in this case ever happens again,” according to the report. The tentative settlement does not conclude those efforts, but it formalizes the city’s agreement to provide compensation while the legal process moves next to city council review.