The Austin Yogurt Shop Murders

Part Two: Confidence

“On December 6th, 1991, we - as a city - lost our innocence. Today, we regain our confidence.” Those were the words spoken by Austin's mayor Kirk Watson, at a press conference held in October of 1999. In the nearly eight years since four teenage girls had been killed inside of a yogurt shop, the city had rallied behind law enforcement in their desperate pursuit of answers. Now, it appeared like they finally had them…

Listen to "The Austin Yogurt Shop Murders (Part Two: Confidence)" on Spreaker.

On the evening of December 6th, 1991 four teenage girls were murdered inside of a yogurt shop in Austin, Texas. Two of the girls were 17-year-old employees of the yogurt shop, Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, while the other two were Jennifer's 15-year-old sister and her 13-year-old best friend, Sarah Harbison and Amy Ayers.

The bodies of all four were found after a patrolling police officer found smoke coming from the yogurt shop at around midnight. Within minutes, the location was crawling with more than a dozen firefighters, who had quickly killed the flame, but then found the bodies in the back area of the yogurt shop.

Throughout a lengthy investigation, police would determine that the victims had been forced to undress, and were then bound in their own clothing, before being shot in the back of the head. All had been shot at least once, but the youngest victim - Amy Ayers, whose body was found separated from the other three by several feet - had been shot twice. It would later be revealed that at least one .38-caliber shell and slug would be recovered from the crime scene, in addition to four .22-caliber bullets, which were taken from the victims' bodies.

The fire - which alerted officials to the scene - had been started intentionally. The culprit(s) had gathered material from around the store and placed it around the victims before starting the blaze. It is believed that they did so to try and destroy evidence, but that decision ultimately led police to discover the crime scene rather quickly... potentially just minutes after the fire was started.

As you can imagine, this crime would shock the community, with its horrifying and tragic nature leading to a drastic overhaul throughout Austin. Residents became desperate for answers, and the Austin Police Department - who attempted to hit the ground running with their investigation - desperately tried to provide them.

Approximately eight days after the murders, police received one of their first solid leads. It came in the form of a local teenager, 16-year-old Maurice Pierce, who had been arrested at the Northcross Mall for unlawfully carrying a loaded .22-caliber pistol in his waistband (along with more than a dozen rounds in his pocket). Pierce had been arrested alongside his friend, Forrest Welborn, whom he then began to throw under the bus during an extensive police interview.

During an interview with detectives about the loaded weapon that he was found carrying, Maurice Pierce admitted that it was the murder weapon from the crime that had shocked Austin the week prior. However, he admitted this while also confessing that he had loaned the weapon to his friend, Forrest, who had been arrested at the mall alongside him. But in the same interview, Pierce confessed to fleeing Austin the day after the murders, alongside Forrest and two of their other teenaged friends, named Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, whom he claims had stolen a Nissan Pathfinder with them and driven to San Antonio for a weekend getaway.

This interview was conducted by a headstrong and perhaps-overzealous detective named Hector Polanco, who would go on to play a vital role in this case. But, for the time being, Polanco was just an investigator with a hunch, who managed to get a delinquent to talk to him and confess his involvement in the area's most high-profile case. This was seen as a major win for him and the Austin Police Department... for now.

Police would later subject both Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn to polygraph tests (which they passed), as well as in-depth police interviews, grilling them about their involvement in the yogurt shop murders. Pierce was unable to provide much more in the way of proof - offering up little more than his word - while Welborn denied his involvement entirely. Police even arranged for Pierce to wear a wire and attempt to implicate Welborn that way, but Forrest refused to bite. Other than the two admitting to being down the street from the yogurt shop on the night of the murders - at the Northcross Mall, where most of the area's teens hung out on the weekends - police had nothing. Even the .22-caliber pistol that Pierce was found to be carrying was unable to be linked to the murders, with ballistics tests coming back inconclusive.

Detectives would later clear both boys of involvement in the crime, believing that Maurice Pierce - a teenage dropout with a middle school education - had a "mental problem" that caused him to falsely implicate both his friend and himself in the murders.

APD Sergeant John Jones, who had been overseeing the case alongside his partner Mike Huckabay, had been the only homicide detective working on the night of the crime. As such, he was the first detective to arrive at the scene that night and became the de facto lead investigator. In his police report regarding Maurice Pierce's confession, in which Pierce had implicated his friend Forrest Welborn, Sergeant Jones wrote:

"It was obvious to everyone that Pierce was trying to force the issue on Welborn, who appeared to have no idea what Pierce was talking about."

Sergeant Jones also wrote that Pierce:

"... was lying and had just made up the whole story about the gun being used."

So that... seemed to be that. Both Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn were released from custody, cleared of any involvement in this case, and allowed to proceed with their lives. Weeks later, Sergeant Jones would speak to the press about this confession and others, which had started to inundate himself and the other investigators:

"Confessions sound good, but that's not the standard by which charges are filed. If we have the right person, we will charge them. A confession alone isn't enough to get a conviction on.

"The killers have to tell us certain things that only the killers would know. That didn't happen in this case. They started telling us stuff that wasn't true. They were giving information that they had heard off the street."

However, in the years to come, this original confession would go on to cast an incredibly large shadow over this story, and go on to - ultimately - derail the investigation entirely.

This is part two of the Austin Yogurt Shop Murders.

In the weeks after the murders of the four girls in Austin, investigators had hit the pavement, hoping to quickly figure out who had committed this heinous crime. Even though APD's homicide division only had six full-time investigators, four of them were assigned to this case; later being enlisted in a task force aimed solely at cracking this case.

First, police attempted to tie this crime to others that had occurred in the area around it. Then, they began to speculate that it was a drug-related crime - possibly committed by some local drug addicts - but, likewise, that proved to be a dead-end.

Roughly one week after the murders, a call would be received by 911 dispatchers, informing them that the killers of the teenage girls in the yogurt shop had driven a specific type of vehicle. This caller provided the license plate number for the vehicle and even gave police its approximate location. Police would learn the car was owned and driven by a couple of drug dealers from Bertram, a town nearby, but an exhaustive look at these individuals would prove to be fruitless. They had an airtight alibi, validated by several credible witnesses.

Again, investigators went back to the drawing board.

In the immediate aftermath of the crime, police would receive more than a thousand phone calls from people in the area; people who believed that they knew something and tried to help out however they could. One of these calls came from a local teenage girl, who claimed to have been in the vicinity of the yogurt shop on the night of the murders. She implicated her teenage boyfriend in the murders, but police would later claim that her information wasn't credible. The information she reported to them - regarding the crime scene itself - seemed to be based almost entirely on gossip which didn't jive with the facts of the case.

To make matters more complicated, investigators also had to deal with a plethora of false confessions; including the one that I detailed in the episode introduction, which was just one of several (dozens, even). Police would later state that more than 50 people falsely confessed to the yogurt shop murders, but when pressed to provide intimate details of the crime scene, either failed to do so or repeated information that wasn't true. It would later be determined that a potential cause of this was the Austin Police Department itself, as not only were police officers potentially soliciting false confessions - through coercion or intimidation - but they weren't properly trained in interview tactics.

In at least one case, it was found that a detective working on the yogurt shop murders task force, Hector Polanco, was coercing confessions from people he was interviewing (which included 16-year-old Maurice Pierce). He would later be removed from the task force and eventually fired from the APD for this reason but was reinstated through an arduous arbitration process (which generally favors police officers). Regardless, his impact on this case cannot be overstated.

The extreme number of these false confessions - and how police obtained them - would go on to play a major role in this case, but that's something I'll explore later on.

By the end of December, police made it clear that they had no specific suspects in-mind, with everyone that they had investigated thus far either having alibis or providing information that conflicted with the facts. APD's investigation had established a relatively tight window for this crime to have been committed - sometime between 10:50 and 11:30 PM on December 6th, 1991 - and they had interviewed more than 100 people at this point... many of whom provided them with witnesses that were willing to testify to their presence being elsewhere that evening.

In a statement to the press, Lieutenant Andrew Waters, who supervised APD's homicide division at the time, stated:

"I'm sorry to say there's little evidence. It's getting very frustrating. We've run through most of the phone tips we've had. The information has dried up and we haven't gotten anything."

In early January, members of the Austin Police Department began making positive statements to the press, claiming that the investigation was preparing to come to an end.

According to several members of the APD, they had been aided in their investigation by the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, who hadn't pitched in on a case in Austin in over two decades, but had just recently been profiled in the hit movie "The Silence of the Lambs." Now, supposedly, police were ready to make arrests.

On January 3rd, 1992 - the first Friday of the year - Sergeant John Jones told reporters:

"It would be safe to say an apprehension is imminent. We're real confident that this case will come to an end real soon."

However, that claim would be backtracked the following Monday, January 6th (which also happened to be the one-month anniversary of the crime itself). At a press conference announcing the official creation of a task force comprised of local, regional, state, and federal police, officials stated that no arrest was imminent, but they were hoping to find justice for the victims relatively soon.

During the press conference, officials would release a more comprehensive profile of the culprits, as they continued to believe that a group of young men had been responsible; either teenagers or men in their early twenties, who were most likely white. The psychological profile they had created narrowed in on the leader of the group, who - investigators believed - had been the dominant personality among them.

According to this profile, the leader of this group likely:

- Had less than a high school education

- Had a history of discipline problems (both anger issues and substance abuse issues), as well as acting out without considering the potential ramifications

- Avoided fights or confrontations that he may lose (likely only lashing out when he had strength in numbers)

- Had a history of unemployment, or had to change jobs often because of his unreliability and volatile personality

- Still lived at home with his parents (or some older parental figure)

- Had a criminal record (which may have included fire-related crimes)

- A history of being abusive towards friends and loved ones (especially women)

- Was familiar with the area around the yogurt shop

- Took very little pride in his personal appearance

Regarding this individual, Lieutenant Andrew Waters said:

"He is under a tremendous amount of stress from fear of detection and apprehension because the commission of this crime may not have gone as planned. The offender is very concerned about the loyalty of his accomplices because he knows they regret their involvement in this crime."

Throughout January and February, police in Austin would end up focusing a lot of their efforts on the local alternative community: people that seemed to have an interest in the occult or were self-professed Satanists.

In reality, many of these people were just involved in Austin's underground gothic and industrial movement, but because they wore black, had tattoos, and may have listened to heavy metal music - at a time in which Satanic Panic was still very much alive throughout America - they were of extreme interest to the APD. Investigators began to refer to these individuals as PIB's: People/Persons In Black.

In the weeks after the yogurt shop murders, police spent a lot of time investigating PIB's, believing that the murders might have had some kind of Satanic cult-angle. Throughout January and February, investigators would begin to harass several members of this underground community, attempting to get friend to testify against friend, grilling people in lengthy police interviews, and trying to figure out intimate details of these individuals' sex lives.

One woman, named Claire Lavaye, was even accused by APD of being part of a Satanic cult in the region that participated in illegal activities. '48 Hours' had begun putting together a special about the case, and were actually filming when police conducted a raid of Lavaye's home, hoping to find proof of Satanic sacrifices and grave-robbing. The host of '48 Hours,' Erin Moriarty, even referred to Lavaye as a "high priestess," which would turn out to be nothing more than a cringeworthy accusation. The bones discovered in Lavaye's house were little more than clay sculptures and animal bones, and the rumors of her having led a devil-worshipping cult were just that: silly rumors, perpetuated by the same overzealous folks that perpetuated a lot of the Satanic Panic myths of the 1980s and 1990s.

Members of this underground community would later express the belief that Austin Police were trying to shut down their movement, having used the yogurt shop investigation as a cover to do so. And that belief would be granted some kind of backing when the police themselves announced that none of the Persons-In-Black were suspected of involvement in the yogurt shop murders. By March, police would announce that there was nothing cult-related about the crime scene, but they were unwilling to give up on any lead - no matter how zany or outlandish.

Speaking to reporters with the Austin American-Statesman, Lieutenant Andrew Waters said:

"I wouldn't really say (a Satanic tie) is still in our mind, but as far as absolutely ruling it out, I wouldn't say that."

Several weeks after the investigation had started, the case began to receive national attention through a couple of high-profile broadcasts. First came an appearance on "America's Most Wanted," hosted by John Walsh; which was then followed up by an even more in-depth appearance on "48 Hours," hosted by the aforementioned Erin Moriarty. Here she is in a brief clip, asking Sergeant John Jones about the active state of the investigation.

As weeks dragged out into months, with no end in sight for the criminal investigation, the loved ones of the victims struggled to move on. Especially since they had to do so without any kind of resolution, but with this gaping loss in their lives. First came what would have been Amy Ayer's 14th birthday, on the final day of January (1992), which her family tried their best to celebrate.

But the loss of the four girls continued to express itself in other ways, with individuals outside of their families. For example, the FFA chapter that all four had belonged to, at Lanier High School, was now without its president and several of its members. Their duties had been delegated to other members, who reluctantly stepped up into their positions on a temporary basis. Even the animals that the girls had been raising - some lambs and a pig - were now left orphaned by the loss of the girls. Other students would have to step up and care for the animals, aware that they could never explain the loss to the creatures; they were just this strange, new nurturing presence in their lives.

In June of 1992, Jennifer and Eliza's classmates graduated from Lanier High, taking their first steps into a much larger world. The girls' absence was noted by a couple of empty seats at the ceremony, with their classmates acknowledging that - even though the two girls couldn't walk with them - their presence would still be felt in the years to come.

The loss of the four was impossible to comprehend for the victims' families. While Amy and Eliza's parents had other children that they could care for, their loss was felt heavily throughout those first few months, as major holidays came and went. Then the major milestones, such as graduation and prom - which would have been joyous occasions, but now felt empty and hollow.

For Jennifer and Sarah's parents, the tragedy was twofold. Both sisters had been lost in a single evening, and neither of their parents had any other children.

Meanwhile, the scene of the crime itself - the 'I Can't Believe It's Yogurt' shop in the Hillside Center shopping center - would never re-open for business again. After being cleared by investigators, the interior of the store was left for weeks, before being emptied; all the while, people in the area left mementos outside of the store, in the form of candles, balloons, and written messages that were meant for the murdered girls. Within a week, the sign on the front of the yogurt shop would be removed. What would follow was a long and arduous process of the building changing owners several times, as the legacy of this crime continued to cast a large shadow over the area.

In early February, a series of billboards would be erected throughout Austin, bearing the images of the four girls along with the question "Who killed these girls?"

Throughout the rest of the year, the reward for information leading to the identification and apprehension of the culprit(s) would continue to rise - first to $100,000, and then to $125,000 - eventually becoming the largest reward offered for any crime in the Austin area.

In March of 1992, police began circulating a composite image of a young man whom they believed had been seen in the area of the yogurt shop on the night of the murders. According to at least one witness, this young man had been seen inside of an older-model four-door white automobile, which was believed to be a Chevy. This young man was described as standing roughly 5'4" tall, weighing approximately 140 pounds, having long straight dark hair that reached past his neck, and being of possible Hispanic descent.

As soon as this sketch was released to the press, it began to draw immediate comparisons to a similar sketch that Austin police had released just a few months prior, back in November of 1991 (one month before the yogurt shop murders). In that case, three men had kidnapped a woman from outside of an Austin night club, driven her to an apartment complex just down the street from the yogurt shop, and then driven her to San Antonio (roughly 80 miles away). Throughout the entire ordeal, the woman had been sexually assaulted by the three men at gunpoint, and she would later describe them all to police.

One of these three men was the sketch that was almost identical to the most recent one released to the press: a young man of similar proportions with long, dark hair, who appeared Native American in appearance but spoke fluent Spanish.

Mexican authorities would later identify the individual from the composite images as Albert Jimenez Cortez (aka "The Wizard"). He was a member of the Mierdas Punks, a Mexican motorcycle gang; three of whom were believed to have committed the kidnapping and rape of the woman from Austin in November of 1991. The leader of this trio was a man named Porfirio Villa Saavedra (aka "The Terminator"), who - alongside Cortez - had acted alongside another man, Ricardo Hernandez (aka "El Brujo"). All had left the Austin area shortly after the yogurt shop murders, and were believed to have fled to Mexico.

Saavedra and Cortez were arrested by Mexican authorities in October of 1992 and were charged with the rape-kidnapping from November 1991 (in addition to other crimes, such as drug trafficking). Because they were Mexican nationals that were in Mexico at the time, they could not be extradited to the United States, but they could still stand trial for crimes they had committed across the border.

However, during their initial questioning, both had supposedly confessed to involvement in the Austin yogurt shop murders; which were still completely unsolved. Because one of the men (Cortez) looked like a composite image released by police in that crime, Mexican authorities were sure that this trio had been responsible.

A trial began within weeks for the rape case and (some of) the other charges, but neither Saavedra or Cortez would ever be charged for the Austin yogurt shop murders. Primarily, because there was no evidence linking them to the crime - the composite image released by police was just someone that had supposedly been seen in the parking lot that night, and APD had never named him a suspect (nor positively ID'd Cortez as this individual) - but also because both men had recanted their confessions almost immediately. They claimed that they had been tortured by Mexican police during their interrogations, and had nothing to do with the yogurt shop crime.

Investigators would travel to Mexico on multiple occasions over the next couple of years so that they could meet with detectives down there and interview these two men for themselves, but they were never able to find anything directly linking them to the yogurt shop murders.

The two men, Albert Jimenez Cortez and Porfirio Villa Saavedra would be convicted for other crimes, but would never stand trial in this case. Meanwhile, their third accomplice - Ricardo Hernandez - would manage to avoid capture in the years to come, avoiding justice for the crimes that he and his cohorts had committed.

While investigators were never able to officially clear these three as suspects, they had no reason to believe that any had been involved in the yogurt shop murders.

Over the next couple of years, this case would begin to enter cold case territory.

Police were seemingly nowhere close to cracking the case, having exhausted all of their workable leads. By all accounts, they were right back where they had started in December of 1991, but the momentum they once had behind them - as well as the public's support - was gone.

The truth would continue to elude them in the years to come.

As the investigation carried on through the rest of 1993 and into 1994, change was in the air. The public was not satisfied with the overall lack of answers, and the Austin Police Department - facing pressure from elected officials - began to reshuffle the investigation as it struggled to regain its bearing after a couple of high-profile disappointments. Meanwhile, the task force once assembled to spearhead the case, started to crumble behind-the-scenes.

Sergeant John Jones, who had been overseeing the case from the very beginning, was soon transferred to the APD's assault division, a demotion in all but name. He was ceasing the day-to-day responsibility of the yogurt shop casefile but would remain a consultant on the case for the foreseeable future.

Despite senior officials in the APD claiming that Jones had requested the change, Jones himself would dispute that, claiming that he was essentially forced out of not only the case but the homicide division entirely. However, Jones himself would later admit that the change might have been for the better, as he had started to develop a serious case of PTSD as a result of working this case full-time for several months, as he had developed close bonds with the victims' family members and other loved ones. He felt a deep sense of grief, not being able to bring them any kind of resolution in the case; as did they, having been unaware of this turnover until they saw it on the news.

Sergeant Jones would later describe the administrative turmoil throughout the Austin Police Department as a major deterrent to the investigation, which had been plaguing it from the start. Speaking to the Austin American-Statesman, Jones said about himself and his partner, Mike Huckabay, who had single-handedly led the investigation for more than two years:

"We did the best we could with what we had, and we didn't have much. We could get computer stuff; the community kicked in and did stuff; we got the space (in North Austin for a task force office). But we just couldn't get personnel, even though we asked for it. We'd get stuck in petty politics."

In truth, this kind of dysfunction would stymy a lot of the early investigation. The APD's homicide division had just six detectives at the time of the yogurt shop murders, which was incredibly small for a city of nearly half-a-million people. Even though Austin's crime rate had been skyrocketing in the years before this crime, the city hadn't invested heavily in its law enforcement division, and it showed in their response to this crime.

Meanwhile, the families of the murdered girls would experience some kind of relief that same year, 1994. The year prior, they had filed a lawsuit against the owners of the shopping center that 'I Can't Believe It's Yogurt' was in, as well as the yogurt chain itself. They alleged that the yogurt chain had not done what it could to protect its teenage employees and that the owners of the shopping center had not responded to the shocking amount of robberies leading up to the murders. They claimed that this entire ordeal could have been avoided if either - or both - had dealt with their security issues beforehand.

The suit came to a resolution in January of 1994, and the families were awarded roughly $12 million in a settlement. They would end up using a chunk of the proceeds to set up a nonprofit organization in the girls' honor, called "We Will Not Forget SAJE" (which took an initial from each of the girls' first names). Over the next several years, they would end up distributing safety material to businesses and schools throughout Texas, which aimed at preventing a crime like this from happening again.

By the time this lawsuit came to a resolution, all of the families had moved out of the area; having been unable to continue living in the same houses that the four victims had once called "home."

Throughout the mid-1990s, another prominent suspect would emerge in the form of a serial killer, who - for decades - had been inspiring terror in Texas.

In 1966, Kenneth Allen McDuff had just been paroled for burglary and would go on to commit a heinous crime alongside an accomplice. In that case, McDuff and his accomplice would abduct two men and a woman at gunpoint, forcing them into a car trunk and then driving them to an isolated location. There, the two men were shot in the head, and the woman was forcibly raped, before being strangled to death by McDuff with a broomstick.

The crime would later earn the nickname "The Broomstick Murders," but would only remain unsolved for a few hours. The following day, McDuff's accomplice (Roy Dale Green) would confess his involvement to police and agreed to testify against him in the subsequent trial. Kenneth McDuff was later arrested, charged, and ultimately sentenced to death for this crime.

During his incarceration, however, the death penalty would be suspended, earning McDuff a stay-of-execution. In 1989, he was granted parole due to an overcrowding issue plaguing Texas prisons, and he became a free man once again.

It is believed that, almost immediately after his release, Kenneth McDuff started killing again. He is known to have killed several women throughout Texas over the next couple of years; many of whom went missing or their cases unsolved while McDuff assimilated back into society. All the while, he became a violent drunk and a cocaine addict, which only exacerbated his existing issues.

McDuff lived in the Austin area, and just a couple of years after his release from prison would become implicated in the deaths of two women: Melissa Northrup (whom he worked with), and Colleen Reed, a woman that was supposedly abducted from a cash wash not too far from the yogurt shop - the same month that the yogurt shop murders happened (December of 1991). By the time police suspected McDuff of either, he had already fled the area but was later found to be living in the Kansas City region under an assumed name.

Following an appearance on the television programs "America's Most Wanted" and "Unsolved Mysteries," McDuff was arrested, and tried for the murder of Melissa Northrup. He was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death. Subsequently, he was tried for the murder of Austin's Colleen Reed, whose body had not yet been found, but whose disappearance had been linked to McDuff (and an accomplice). He was also found guilty in that case and eventually led police to Reed's body just outside of Marlin, Texas.

For the next few years, Kenneth McDuff would remain on death row, confessing to several crimes he had been already been tied to. In at least a handful of cases, he was able to lead police to the bodies of other women he had killed and disposed of. But as his execution date approached in 1998, McDuff decided to throw up a hail mary and confess to Austin's most infamous unsolved crime: the yogurt shop murders, which remained unsolved nearly seven years later. He believed that his confession might perhaps grant him some more time - at least a stay of execution from the state governor, George W. Bush - but he thought wrong.

On November 17th, 1998, Kenneth Allen McDuff was executed by the state of Texas. Whatever secrets he might have still had went with him to the grave.

After his death, investigators would compare his confession to their records, which included his fingerprints and DNA, which they could compare to samples recovered from the crime scene. Despite Austin police investigating him as a serious suspect, they could find no feasible link between McDuff and the Austin yogurt shop murders, and he was posthumously cleared as a suspect in this case.

In January of 1996 - more than four years after the yogurt shop murders - APD Detective Paul Johnson was chosen to begin overseeing this investigation, which had not seen much public activity in recent months. Before he could truly dive into the case, however, he needed to reorganize almost everything about it, to try and uncover leads that might have been glossed over or forgotten about in the maelstrom of those first few years.

This was no easy task, considering that the investigation led by Sergeant Jones (and others) had collected information on more than 1200 suspects, accumulated more than 5000 pages of handwritten notes, and a computer case-file containing more than 10000 pages of reports and logs. He would have to begin re-organizing everything into smaller, more manageable files; which he tried to separate by tip and by suspect.

As you can imagine, this was an incredibly lengthy task, which would go through several starts and stops over the next couple of years. During this time, the original task force - which was comprised of Austin police, Travis County Sheriff's officials, members of the FBI and ATF, and others - would officially disband after several months of inactivity. A second task force would be assembled in its aftermath, to re-consolidate assets and information, but that too would die a quick death.

It would take a couple of years for this reorganization to truly reap any benefits, as the APD began reaching out to outside agencies for help; not only the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office, but the Travis County DA and the Texas state Attorney General. This entire process - which was described by Austin's Assistant Police Chief Michael McDonald as a "re-review" - was just one of several that would unfold between 1996 and 1999.

In August of 1999, it was announced that the yogurt shop murder investigation was being officially relaunched, due to a drop in Austin's homicides in recent years. Members of the APD homicide division were being tasked with investigating the area's cold cases in a new task force; the most prominent among them being, of course, the yogurt shop murders.

These detectives began going through the reassembled casefile with a fine-toothed comb, looking for anything that might have fallen between the cracks months - if not years - beforehand. And surprisingly, after a few weeks, they found something, which hearkened back to the early days of the investigation: a supposed confession, which had implicated four young men in the murders.

By early that Fall, police officials announced to the press that an arrest was imminent; but many in the region believed that this was an empty threat, similar to the promises Sergeant Jones had made back in January of 1992. Surprisingly, though, a press conference was quickly thrown together for Wednesday, October 6th... a press conference where Austin police would announce that they had arrested four young men and were now charging them with the yogurt shop murders.

Two of the suspects named in this press conference had been connected to the case early on: Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn.

If you recall back to the episode introduction, the then 16-year-old Pierce had been arrested at the Northcross Mall eight days after the murders, for unlawfully carrying a .22-caliber handgun. During an interview with an Austin detective, Pierce claimed that the pistol had been used in the commission of the yogurt shop murders, and he even implicated his friend, Forrest Welborn, in the crime.

For a variety of reasons, this confession was later discredited by the investigators working the case. Beyond this confession, nothing was linking either of the teens to the yogurt shop. Weeks later, the officer that solicited this confession - Hector Polanco - would be accused of coercing confessions through intimidation tactics, and this was just believed to be one of those.

Both Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn had been cleared by detectives, who believed that Pierce had an undiagnosed mental illness that caused him to give the false confession. Years later, however - during the case's re-evaluation - detectives began to dive back into this confession and found it to be incredibly enticing. They began learning more about the two young men that had been questioned at the time - Pierce and Welborn - as well as the other two young men that they claimed they had spent the weekend with, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen.

Three of the suspects (Welborn, Scott, and Springsteen) had been attending McCallum High School at the time of the yogurt shop murders. If you recall, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas had attended McCallum before transferring to Lanier High, but it was not believed that she knew any of these four young men. All three that attended McCallum would end up dropping out: Springsteen in December of 1991 (just a couple of weeks after the yogurt shop murders), Scott in 1992, and finally Welborn in 1993.

Maurice Pierce, on the other hand, had attended a handful of Austin-area schools, including a few that treated troubled students (primarily those with behavioral issues and special needs). However, he had actually dropped out before the yogurt shop murders took place, having last attended Anderson High School as a 9th grader. This level of education (or, rather, the lack of it) fit in with the original police profile: which speculated that the leader of the group (in this case, Maurice Pierce), was an uneducated and volatile youth at the time of the crime.

At the time of the murders, all four of these boys had lived in the Austin area, and were connected through their friendship to one another. At the time the crimes unfolded, all were teenagers, although their culpability varied because of Texas state law.

Maurice Earl Pierce had been 16 years old at the time of the murders and would continue to live in the Austin area throughout 1997. He only had one significant encounter with police in the years since - a misdemeanor drunk driving arrest from 1992 - but had since moved to the Dallas area and begun to live a respectable life. He was working at a warehouse and had just recently married his longtime partner, whom he had known for over a decade and had a 7-year-old child with.

Forrest Brook Welborn had been just 15 at the time of the crime, making him the youngest of the four suspects implicated. Like Pierce, Welborn only had one real run-in with the law - a 1996 incident, in which he had pleaded no contest to driving with a suspended license - but he had since moved to Lockhart, Texas (about 30 miles south of Austin). There, he lived alone in an RV park and ended up starting a career as a rather-talented mechanic. At the time of his arrest, he had just opened up his own shop in Lockhart.

Robert Burns Springsteen Jr. was 17 years old in December of 1991 and had dropped out of high school less than two weeks after the yogurt shop murders. He then moved to West Virginia to be closer to his mother. There, he would begin working a series of jobs, including a part-time gig selling newspapers door-to-door, as well as having once been the manager at a McDonald's fast-food restaurant. He had just married his girlfriend that Valentine's Day, and was arrested at their home in Charleston, West Virginia.

Michael James Scott was a quiet kid with long blonde hair at the time of the murders; an 18-year-old that was enrolled in special education classes and generally kept to himself. He would end up repeating his sophomore year, before dropping out a year later (roughly 12 months after the yogurt shop murders). He had since found work through a series of mechanical repair jobs and continued to live in the Austin area. Like two of the other suspects, he had just recently married his wife that prior March (1998), and regularly helped take of his wife's child from a prior relationship.

After taking these four men into custody, police began announcing the type of case that they had against them: one that was built almost entirely upon confessions. Not only the confession from Maurice Pierce back in 1991 (which he had given when he was just 16 years old) but two new confessions, which had come from police interviews with Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott that September.

A confession was what had brought police back to these four young men all of these years later; after they had moved on with their lives. As you just heard, in at least 3 out of the 4 instances, these young men had gotten married and started families, and they were now a far cry from the teenage miscreants they had once been.

However, when investigators began to look over the case once again, they kept coming back to Maurice Pierce's confession from back in 1991. In 1996 and 1997, police again reached out to those two suspects - Pierce and his friend, Forrest Welborn - re-interviewing them and seeing if they had any new information to offer. Both had denied - again - having any involvement in the murders. Yet police kept circling back around to that original confession from Pierce, which - even though it had been discredited by investigators - contained points of interest for those now in charge.

In 1999, when the investigation into the yogurt shop murders was officially relaunched, detectives began reaching out to not only Pierce and Welborn but the two young men that they had been with that weekend: Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen. In Pierce's original confession, he had claimed that the four had stolen a golden Nissan Pathfinder that Saturday - a day after the murders - and then driven to San Antonio. Now, investigators were hoping to verify that information... and potentially implicate two others in the crime.

Now, instead of just interviewing Pierce and Welborn, they began interviewing all four - with the young men having gone off in separate directions in recent years, and no longer really communicating with one another. They could possibly catch one of them off-guard, and then use that information to springboard into another confession.

That is actually what ended up happening.

During an interview with police on September 9th, 1999, Michael Scott began telling police what they wanted to hear. This came after roughly eighteen hours of interviews over four days, but at the end of it, Scott - a high school dropout that had been enrolled in special education classes - started to tell police what they wanted to hear.

As you heard, Michael Scott provided police with a lot of information, which was limited to not only a specific series-of-events but information that police had supposedly withheld from the crime scene: such as the materials used to bind the victims, as well as their location within the yogurt shop.

Now that they had this information, investigators proceeded to question the next of the four: Robert Springsteen, who was living in West Virginia at the time. Just like Scott, Springsteen would confess, verifying that their group of four boys had conspired to rob the yogurt shop, and then raped and murdered the teenage girls inside.

Based on these two confessions, police had created the following timeline, which they believed to be airtight:

- Shortly before closing time, one of the boys had gone inside the yogurt shop to scope it out and unlock the back door

- Forrest Welborn, the youngest of the four, had remained outside in the car and acted as a lookout. There, he watched for any sign of trouble as the other three went into the yogurt shop at around closing time through the unlocked back door, to begin the robbery.

- While inside, the three culprits had proceeded to sexually assault at least two of the victims, forcing them to undress, and then binding them with their own clothing; before executing all four, setting the crime scene on fire, and then fleeing before help could arrive.

During the press conference announcing the filing of charges against these four young men, police and other public officials began taking their victory lap; praising the arrests as the largest step in a long and painful grieving process. During the press conference, Austin mayor Kirk Watson even stated:

"On December 6th, 1991, we - as a city - lost our innocence. Today, we regain our confidence."

The loved ones of the victims expressed gratitude towards the investigators for dedicating so much time to the case over the years but were too reluctant to begin gloating quite yet. It had still taken police nearly eight years to arrive at this point and had done so after only circling back to some early leads that the original investigators had discounted entirely. Doubts would continue to linger in many minds, including in the victim's families.

After all, the four young men that now stood accused had themselves been teenagers at the time of the murders, and their age was surely going to be a hassle as the inevitable trial moved forward. Especially since prosecutors stated that they were going to be pushing for the death penalty in at least two out of the four cases (the other two, since they had been minors at the time, could only be sentenced to life in prison).

While police and prosecutors were assured that they had the culprits of Austin's most high-profile murder case behind bars, awaiting trial, a more complicated story would begin to unfold over the next several months; a story that wasn't as black-and-white as officials would lead the public to believe. This was a much more nuanced story, which didn't just exchange four bad boys for the four good girls lost nearly a decade prior.

Even though police had rolled out these four suspects on a figurative silver platter, their guilt was far from assured.

That's on the next episode of Unresolved.

Continue to Part Three

Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on March 29th, 2020

Producers: Maggyjames, Roberta Janson, Ben Krokum, Quil Carter, Peggy Belarde, Laura Hannan, Damion Moore, Amy Hampton, Scott Meesey, Steven Wilson, Scott Patzold, Marie Vanglund, Astrid Kneier, Lori Rodriguez, Victoria Reid, Gabriella Bromley, Jessica Yount, Aimee McGregor, Danny Williams, Sue Kirk, Sara Moscaritolo, Thomas Ahearn, Sydney Scotton, Marion Welsh, Seth Morgan, Alyssa Lawton, Kelly Jo Hapgood, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Rebecca Miller, Tatum Bautista, and Michelle Guess