The city of Austin will pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused of the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a , a case that initially sent one of the men to death row and another to life in prison, under a tentative settlement reached Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had all insisted they were innocent of one of the city’s most notorious crimes. They were finally by a judge in February after investigators determined the crime was committed by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement must still be approved by the city council at a later date. Details of the payments to the men and their families were not released.
鈥淭his settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin鈥檚 history,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.鈥�
Attorneys for Springsteen and Scott did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the 鈥淚 Can鈥檛 Believe It鈥檚 Yogurt鈥� store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 and the previous trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators determined in 2025 that new DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers鈥� fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Brashers when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
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