The Yogurt Shop Murders: Austin’s unsolved teen killings
On the night of 6th December 1991, Austin settled into an ordinary Friday. Nothing seemed amiss until close to midnight, when smoke began seeping from a small frozen-yogurt shop on a quiet strip mall. Fire crews went in and found what still haunts the city (and true crime addicts like us here at Crime+Investigation) three decades later: four teenagers dead inside I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!.
What happened that night
The shop had closed at 11pm. Two of the girls (17-year-olds Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas) were working the shift. Jennifer’s 15-year-old sister Sarah and their 13-year-old friend Amy Ayers had come by to catch a lift home after closing.
Around midnight, a patrol officer reported the fire. First responders were quick to enter the building and discovered the bodies inside. The victims had been bound and shot, and the shop had been set alight, apparently to destroy evidence. Investigators later said two firearms (a .22 and a .380) were used. At least one victim had been sexually assaulted.
Details from witnesses in the hour before closing added to the unease. A man had been allowed to use the back-room loo and stayed an unusually long time. Another couple reported two men acting furtively at a table just before the doors were locked. No one, then or since, has been charged with the murders.
An investigation under strain
From the start, detectives were working against the clock and the conditions. Arson complicates everything. So does the water used to fight a blaze. In late 1991, forensic tools were far less sensitive than today’s. Even so, a quadruple murder of school-age girls brought enormous public pressure for a swift result, and tips poured in by the hundred.
Years passed until 1999, when four young men (Maurice Pierce, Michael Scott, Robert Springsteen and Forrest Welborn) were arrested. Interrogations stretched for hours and two of the men, Scott and Springsteen, eventually gave confessions. They were tried and convicted a few years later, despite the absence of physical evidence tying them to the crime scene.
Ultimately, the lack of evidence meant those verdicts did not stand. Appellate courts ruled that each man’s confession had been used against the other in a way that violated the Confrontation Clause. By 2009, both men were released. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges after new DNA testing excluded the four original suspects. The case returned to 'open and unsolved'.
False trails and false confessions
The Yogurt Shop Murders have drawn an extraordinary number of false leads. Austin police say more than 50 people have confessed over the years, including one notorious serial killer who was later ruled out. None of those statements led to a sustainable prosecution.
DNA hopes and limits
As forensic science improved, investigators revisited what little had survived the fire. Partial male DNA was identified from evidence associated with one victim. For a time, Y-chromosome testing appeared to offer a route forward, but the results did not identify a named suspect and later testing undercut early optimism. In short: there was DNA from an unknown man, but not yet a match that would hold up in court.
This scientific uncertainty has shaped the legal strategy. Prosecutors said publicly they would not retry the case until they could reconcile the unknown male DNA with any future suspect.
The case that changed the law
The families’ persistence helped push a national reform. In 2022, the Homicide Victims’ Families’ Rights Act became U.S. law. It requires federal agencies to review cold cases on request and to apply the latest technology during those reviews. Texas officials explicitly cited the Austin Yogurt Shop Murders as an inspiration for the act.
Cases like the murder of Krystal Jean Baker and Una Crown prove that advances in DNA technology can absolutely help solve cold cases decades later.
Why we’re still fascinated by this story
Part of the reason this story won’t fade is painfully simple: the victims were young and doing something ordinary. Another part is structural: unsolved cases lodge in the public mind. Without an ending, the same questions circle back. Who did this? Why that night? How did they walk away?
The case has also been kept in view by renewed media attention. A recent docuseries returned to the evidence and loose ends, introducing a new generation to a cold case older than they are. Whatever one thinks of true-crime television, the effect here has been to keep the pressure on.
Where it stands today
Austin police say the investigation remains open and advances in forensic testing are checked against preserved evidence when appropriate. But this doesn’t override the central fact that the murders remain unsolved. Until there is a name, an arrest and a trial that stands, the Yogurt Shop Murders will remain a black mark in American criminal history.
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