New DNA evidence has cleared four men long suspected in the infamous 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders, with a Travis County judge on Thursday formally declaring them innocent and closing a case that haunted the city for more than three decades.
Judge Dayna Blazey ruled that Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn were "actually innocent" of the killings of four teenage girls at the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop, a crime that shocked Austin in December 1991.
The decision comes months after authorities said advanced DNA analysis identified the real killer as serial offender Robert Eugene Brashers, who died by suicide in 1999. Investigators said no physical evidence ever tied the four men to the crime scene, despite their arrests in 1999 and the later-overturned convictions of Scott and Springsteen, according to ABC News.
At the hearing, Travis County District Attorney José Garza's office asked the court to amend filings and dismiss the case based on actual innocence, citing years of work by the office's conviction integrity unit and new forensic findings.
An Austin police cold case detective testified that his review found no evidence connecting the men to the murders and pointed instead to Brashers, whose DNA was allegedly linked to items from the scene and other violent crimes across the country, People reported.
Scott addressed the court, saying he had "nothing to do with these crimes" and describing how he lost his family and his youth while fighting to clear his name. A statement from Springsteen said he had spent 27 years being treated "as a monster," including a decade on death row in solitary confinement, before his conviction was overturned.
A defense attorney noted that the men had been "normal teenage boys" when they were first accused and said "their entire youth and futures were taken away from them."
Under Texas law, the innocence finding makes the men eligible for financial compensation, potentially up to tens of thousands of dollars for each year they were imprisoned, while Pierce's family may pursue a civil claim because he died in 2010.
In a statement, relatives of victim Amy Ayers said they never wanted anyone wrongly convicted, but each new development forces them to relive the horror of the 1991 attack. Judge Blazey told the men that no ruling could restore their lost years, but said the court "without qualification or hesitation" affirms their innocence, as per WCYB.
