The town of Austin can pay $35 million to 3 males and the household of a fourth who had been wrongly accused of the 1991 rape and homicide of 4 teenage women at a yogurt store, a case that originally despatched one of many males to demise row and one other to life in jail, below a tentative settlement reached Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had all insisted they had been harmless of one of many metropolis’s most infamous crimes. They had been lastly declared harmless by a choose in February after investigators decided the crime was dedicated by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement should nonetheless be authorized by town council at a later date. Particulars of the funds to the lads and their households weren’t launched.
“This settlement closes the ultimate chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s historical past,” Austin Metropolis Supervisor T.C. Broadnax stated in a press release. “We’re happy to have reached an settlement with those that had been wrongly accused and wrongly convicted on this case and hope that this settlement brings a way of closure to everybody affected by this horrific occasion.”
Scott and his lawyer Tony Diaz stated in a joint assertion they’re hopeful the settlement will assist enhance investigation practices and safeguards towards wrongful convictions.
“Discussions and negotiations are ongoing concerning police reforms that may assist be sure that nothing like what occurred on this case ever occurs once more,” they stated.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, had been certain, gagged and shot within the head on the “I Can’t Consider It’s Yogurt” retailer the place two of them labored. The constructing was set on hearth.
Investigators chased hundreds of leads and several other false confessions earlier than the 4 males, who had been youngsters when the women had been killed, had been arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott had been convicted based mostly largely on confessions they insisted had been coerced by police. Each convictions had been overturned within the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged however by no means tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail earlier than the fees had been dismissed. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a visitors cease.
Prosecutors needed to attempt Springsteen and Scott once more, however a choose ordered the fees dismissed in 2009 when new DNA assessments that had been unavailable in 1991 and the earlier trials revealed one other male suspect.
Investigators decided in 2025 that new DNA science and opinions of previous ballistics proof pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the only real killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used superior DNA proof to hyperlink Brashers to the strangulation demise of a South Carolina lady in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old woman in Tennessee and the capturing of a mom and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The hyperlink to the Austin case got here when a DNA pattern taken from below Ayers’ fingernail got here again as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself throughout an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.