The 1991 murder of four teenage girls in a Texas yogurt shop remains unsolved, but there's hope that advancing DNA technology will change that.
When four teenage girls were murdered in an Austin, Texas, yogurt shop in 1991, a heartbroken city was left searching for answers. No one imagined that 30 years later, the case would remain unsolved.
Gunshot wounds revealed two different types of guns were used — but there was scant other evidence at the scene, and debris from the fire complicated the early investigation. The Austin Police Department soon developed a task force dedicated solely to solving the crime.
In October 1999, nearly eight years after the yogurt shop murders, Austin police announced the arrest of four suspects in the case. Pictured clockwise from top left are Maurice Pierce, Forrest Welborn, Robert Springsteen, and Michael Scott. All four men had been questioned within days of the murders, but the lack of any hard evidence connecting them to the crime meant that none of them were charged at the time.
Still, prosecutors were determined to retry Springsteen and Scott. But before doing so, they wanted to figure out who that mystery DNA belonged to. District Attorney Lehmberg says more than 100 men — such as crime scene investigators and personnel from the medical examiner's office who might have come in contact with the body and possibly been a source of contamination — were tested. It was all to no avail. In 2009, with no matches, the charges against Springsteen and Scott were dropped.
"And that was the greatest disappointment because we really thought we had it," Congressman McCaul told Moriarty.
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