A Sleepover That Never Happened
On December 6, 1991, four Austin teenagers — 17‑year‑olds Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, 15‑year‑old Sarah Harbison, and 13‑year‑old Amy Ayers — planned a sleepover after closing the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!” shop on West Anderson Lane.
Jennifer and Eliza worked there; Sarah and Amy were hanging out until closing so they could all leave together.
Just before midnight, an Austin patrol officer saw fire coming from the shop and reported it.
When firefighters knocked down the flames and went inside, they discovered one of the city’s worst crime scenes.
All four girls lay in the back of the store.
They were nude, bound and gagged with their own clothing, and had been shot in the head execution‑style; at least one had been sexually assaulted.
The killer had then set the Yogurt Shop on fire, destroying evidence and amplifying the horror.
Case Snapshot
- Location: I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop, 2949 W. Anderson Lane, North Austin, Texas
- Date: Night of December 6, 1991
- Victims:
- Jennifer Harbison, 17
- Sarah Harbison, 15
- Eliza Thomas, 17
- Amy Ayers, 13
- Original suspects (1999): Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, Forrest Welborn (all teens at time of crime)
- Status (2026): Four original suspects formally exonerated; case attributed to deceased serial offender Robert Eugene Brashers through DNA and forensic review.
A Burned‑Out Shop and Thousands of Leads
The fire left smoke and soot on almost every surface inside the yogurt shop, complicating basic crime‑scene work like fingerprinting.
Still, investigators collected shell casings, bullets, clothing remnants, and biological material that would later be re‑examined as DNA science improved.
In the 1990s, detectives chased thousands of tips.
Witnesses remembered a man using the restroom near closing and two men sitting at a table acting nervously; composites were drawn, but nothing stuck.
The case loomed large over Austin — four young victims, a neighborhood strip mall, and no clear suspect.
Billboards, press conferences, and repeated calls for information kept the case in the public eye but didn’t deliver a solid break.
Four Young Men, Long Interrogations, and Problematic Confessions
In 1999, after years of dead ends, attention focused on four young men who had been teenagers when the murders occurred: Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn.
Pierce was initially looked at because he had once been stopped with a .22 caliber handgun — the same caliber used in the murders — and allegedly bragged about being involved, though he later denied this.
Over time, detectives brought all four in for extensive questioning.
Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen ultimately gave lengthy, videotaped statements describing involvement in the crime.
But:
- Those statements came after hours of interrogation.
- Key details shifted over time.
- Some elements didn’t match physical evidence or each other.
Welborn never confessed, and grand juries twice refused to indict him.
Pierce spent about three years in jail on charges that were eventually dropped; he died in 2010 after being shot by police in an unrelated traffic stop.
Convictions, Overturned Verdicts, and DNA That Didn’t Match
Springsteen was tried first.
In 2001, a jury convicted him and sentenced him to death, based largely on his confession and statements that implicated Scott.
Scott was convicted in 2002 and received a life sentence.
But both cases soon unraveled.
In 2007 and 2008, appellate courts ruled that using each man’s statement against the other violated their constitutional rights and that key parts of the confessions were problematic.
At the same time, DNA testing on samples from the crime scene — including semen evidence — revealed a male profile that did not match any of the four accused men.
That raised a crucial question: if none of them matched the DNA, who did?
By 2009, prosecutors dropped all charges rather than attempt a new trial with weakened confessions and exculpatory DNA.
The four men were out of prison or off the hook legally, but not fully cleared in the public’s mind.
A Serial Offender and a New Name: Robert Eugene Brashers
For years, the Yogurt Shop case sat in limbo: technically unsolved, but with four men still associated with it in news archives and memory.
Meanwhile, advances in DNA and genealogy techniques helped investigators around the country link an itinerant offender named Robert Eugene Brashers to a string of crimes, including:
- The 1990 strangulation of a woman in South Carolina
- A 1997 rape of a 14‑year‑old in Tennessee
- A 1998 shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri
Brashers died by suicide in 1999 after a standoff with police, but his genetic profile remained in evidence.
By 2025, Austin cold‑case detectives and outside forensic experts had re‑examined evidence from the Yogurt Shop murders and announced they had linked the unknown male DNA profile to Brashers.
This pointed to him as the likely killer of the four girls, even though he was long dead.
Exoneration: Four Men Declared Innocent
In February 2026, after years of work by defense attorneys, innocence advocates, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, a judge held a hearing in Austin to formally address the status of the four original suspects.
Prosecutors moved to amend filings and to dismiss the case against Springsteen, Scott, Pierce, and Welborn based on actual innocence.
Judge Blazey stated on the record that the court could say “without qualification and hesitation” that the men were innocent and that their names should be cleared.
APD cold‑case detective Daniel Jackson testified that his review had found no evidence tying them to the murders, and that the case instead pointed to Brashers.
For the three surviving men and for Pierce’s family, it was the end of a 25‑plus‑year fight to escape the shadow of a crime they did not commit.
Why This Case Is on True Crime Maps
The Yogurt Shop murders are anchored to a very ordinary North Austin geography:
- A strip mall on West Anderson Lane where families bought desserts on Friday nights.
- A small back room where four girls were bound, shot, and left as a fire was set around them.
- A city that spent decades living with both the horror of the crime and the doubt around who actually did it.
On True Crime Maps, the pin for this case marks the former yogurt shop site as a junction of two stories:
- A mass murder of four teenagers whose families waited decades for answers.
- A miscarriage of justice where four young men were arrested, two convicted, and only much later fully exonerated when DNA and careful review pointed to someone else.
It’s a reminder that the line between solving a case and creating a new injustice can be thin — especially when burned evidence, public pressure, and unreliable confessions collide.
When you click this pin, you’re not just seeing where a yogurt shop once stood.
You’re looking at a map point where science, persistence, and the willingness to admit past mistakes finally changed the official story.
