The Secret Sits

The Yogurt Shop Murders

September 30, 2021 John W. Dodson Season 1 Episode 35
The Secret Sits
The Yogurt Shop Murders
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Show Notes Transcript

When I was in college in the 90’s, one of my many part time jobs was at a TCBY frozen yogurt store.  Around this same time, in Austin, Texas another yogurt store, aptly named, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt became the scene of a horrible murder, which is, to this day, talked about in True Crime circles.  I’m talking, of course, about the Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders.  I’m John Dodson, welcome to The Secret Sits.

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#YogurtShopMurders #Austin #Texas #TrueCrime #Podcast #TrueCrimePodcast #Unsolved #SarahHarbison #AmyAyers #JenniferHarbison #ElizaThomas #1991 #KennethAllenMcDuff #SerialKiller #MauricePierce #ForrestWelborn #MichaelScott #RobertSpringsteen

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When I was in college in the 90’s, one of my many part time jobs was at a TCBY frozen yogurt store.  Around this same time, in Austin, Texas another yogurt store, aptly named, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt became the scene of a horrible murder, which is, to this day, talked about in True Crime circles.  I’m talking, of course, about the Austin, Texas Yogurt Shop Murders.  I’m John Dodson, welcome to The Secret Sits.

December 6, 1991 was a cool, winter day in Austin, Texas, fifteen-year-old Sarah Harbison and her thirteen-year-old friend Amy Ayers were doing what typical teenagers did in the 90’s and they were hanging out at Northcross Mall. 

Sarah’s sister Jennifer Harbison and her close friend Eliza Thomas were both working the closing shift at I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, a frozen yogurt shop located just a few blocks from the Northcross Mall.  It was a Friday and as the afternoon turned into evening, the temperature lowered and added a cool crispness to the air.

Just a little after 10:00PM, Sarah and Amy left the mall and made their way the few blocks to the Hillside strip mall located in the 2900 block of West Anderson Lane.  The girls planned on going to a slumber party that evening and so Sara and Amy figured they could help Jennifer and Eliza close up the shop so they could get to the party.  I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt was scheduled to close at 11:00PM.

Austin Police officer Troy Gay was out on patrol when he noticed smoke billowing from the Hillside strip mall, he checked the time, it was almost midnight.  Officer Gay called dispatch to report the fire and the local ladder company was soon responding to the incident.  While working to extinguish the blaze, the firefighters made a grisly discovery.

The homicide detective on duty this evening was John Jones.  And, yes Austin, at this time was still so small that the department only had one homicide investigator on shift at a time.  Well detective Jones just so happen to be doing a ride along with a new station, trying to do a story on crime in Texas and just nothing was happening for them to report on.  Now we have the actual audio recording of detective Jones receiving this call about the yogurt shop murders and we are going to play it for you now.

AUDIO RECORDING

What they had discovered were the bodies of Jennifer, Sara, Amy and Eliza.  All four girls were deceased.  They could see that each girl was nude and they had been bound and gagged using their own clothing.

One strange thing that investigators noticed right away was that Amy’s body was discovered in the larger open space in the back of the shop, it lay on it’s own, while the other three girls’ remains were found in the deepest portion of the back room, right next to the back door of the establishment. Jennifer was found in a corner made up of the walk-in freezer and a shelving unit which held supplies for the shop.  Eliza and Sarah’s remains were sort of stacked on top of one another.

The girls had been displayed in a gratuitous manner, with their legs wide spread and one of the girls had an ice cream scoop laying between her legs.  Also, the killer, or killers had attempted to burn the bodies, adding accelerants such as napkins and other flammable items from around the store and then, they soaked the bodies with lighter fluid and set the shop on fire.

We will later find out, from the girls’ autopsies that each girl had been shot, execution-style through the back of their heads.  It was also confirmed that at least two of the girls had been raped.  It was also confirmed, through ballistics analysis that two different guns had been used to commit these murders.  This is where the theory of at least two assailants comes into the picture.  It is also later determined that the store had been robbed of $540.

The lead detectives on this case were Detective John Jones and his partner Detective Mike Huckabay.  The investigation was marred from the start.  As we have seen in so many cases of murder, covered up by a fire, the firemen who responded to the initial call about the fire had successfully extinguished the blaze, but in doing so, most, if not all of the vital forensic evidence was washed away with the remnants of the fire.  Also, during the processing of this scene, there were some basic protocols which were broken or just ignored.

For example, rape kits are performed by the medical examiner, at their office in a sterile and contained environment, however; in this case, detective Jones persisted that the rape kits be done right then, at the scene of the crime.  Also, the Medical Examiner did not test any of the four bodies for accelerants, which is also a standard practice in a fire homicide case.  And I am not trying to say that anyone is to blame here, as I have said before, this department is tiny and crimes in Austin are just not that prevalent.  I have read that the crime scene tech had only processed one arson scene before this one, ever.

No one collected fingerprints from the restrooms, the back door lock, which had been broken off by firefighters responding to the fire, had just been discarded and not examined for evidence and almost none of the items left around the girls in the back room, where the bodies were found, were collected as evidence. 

We are also talking about 1991, and not every police department in the country had the resources to mount a full-fledged forensic unit, in fact the Austin department, at the time only had one fingerprint unit available.  Despite this, Jones and Huckabay had plenty of suspects.  Tips had started flooding into the police station, quickly overwhelming the small homicide squad with 342 suspects and at least a dozen false confessions. 

The detectives started in the most obvious place first, they started with looking at any serial killers operating in the area at the time, which led them to Kenneth Allen McDuff.

McDuff was a convicted serial killer who had operated in the state of Texas.  He was convicted of murdering 3 teenagers, but was suspected of a minimum of 14 murders in total.  The significance of McDuff’s conviction in relation to the yogurt shop murders was paramount because in this August 6, 1966 murder in which he and an accomplice murdered three teenagers, two boys and one girl, all in one evening, raping the girl and then breaking her neck with a broom stick.  

McDuff was sentenced to death, but his sentence was changed to life with the possibility of parole in 1972 after the US Supreme Court abolished capital punishment in a 5-4 decision. Due to prison overcrowding, McDuff was paroled in 1989.  McDuff may have committed many additional murders after being paroled, and after finally being recaptured, McDuff was sent to death row for his crimes.

On the day of his execution, November 17, 1998, McDuff made a confession, claiming responsibility for the yogurt shop murders. It is now believed that this confession was McDuff’s last-ditch effort to save himself from execution, at least for a while, but the state carried out his execution anyway.  After his death, authorities investigated his confession but ruled him out when fingerprints and hair collected from the yogurt shop could not be linked back to him. 

On December 14th, 1991, eight days after the murders, investigators got a tip to look into 16-year-old Maurice Pierce. Pierce had been seen at the Northcross Mall with a gun on the very same night Sarah and Amy were hanging out there before they headed the yogurt shop. The gun was a .22-caliber handgun – the same caliber as one of the guns used to execute the girls.  However, once again, nothing came of this lead.

When Pierce’s gun was tested, the ballistics showed it did not match the murder weapon. And, just like with McDuff, neither the fingerprints nor the hair collected from the crime scene matched Pierce.

As years came and went, so did new detectives on the case.  And then suddenly in 1999 four young men, all in their twenties were arrested for the murders.  These boys had originally been questioned eight days after the murders, but for the want of evidence, they were released.  These boys were Maurice Pierce, Forrest Welborn, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen.  These three boys had been with Pierce at the Northcross Mall on the night of the murders, when he had been witnessed with a firearm. 

Michael Scott, confessed to the murders, as did Robert Springsteen and Springsteen added an additional confession of rape of one of the girls as well.  The detectives were overjoyed that they finally had their murders in this eight-year-old case.  Based on interviews and confessions the four boys (and I am referring to them as boys because when this crime happened, there were still minors) were theorized to have planned on robbing the yogurt shop.  Pierce, Scott and Springsteen entered the store, while Welborn was outside acting as a look out.  Somehow, something went wrong during the robbery and all of the girls were killed.  Here is a snippet of Michael Scott’s 20-hour confession.

AUDIO FROM CONFESSION

Ultimately, all charges against Welborn and Pierce had to be dropped due to a lack of evidence linking them to the crimes.  This was exceptionally difficult for the families of the slain girls, because Pierce was supposedly the mastermind behind the robbery, which then led to the murders.

Scott and Springsteen were each tried separately for the murders and each was found guilty of capital murder, Springsteen received the death penalty as his sentence and Scott was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Soon after these convictions, however; there were serious concerns raised as to Springsteen and Scott’s actual innocence. One, there had been no physical evidence linking either man to the crime.  Two, both men stated later that their initial confessions had been coerced.  On top of this a photo surfaced which showed a member of the Austin Police Department holding a gun to Scott’s head during his interrogation.  I’d say that is the most proven case of police intimidation, I have ever heard of.

Because of all of this, approximately 15 years after the murders, convictions for Scott and Springsteen, were overturned.  A judge ruled that both men’s 6th amendment rights were violated.  Both men’s confessions were used in court, against one another, but neither man was able to face his accuser, because their attorneys were never given the chance to cross examine. 

When evidence from the crime was re-tested in 2008, DNA from the crime did not match any of the four boys who had been arrested for the crime.  The Travis County DA at the time, Rosemary Lehmberg stated that she was sure Scott and Springsteen were responsible for the murders, but they were declining to retry them until the unknown male DNA in evidence was matched to it’s owner.

Almost all of the authorities in Austin still believed that they had the correct four suspects all along, but now they put their faith in there being a mysterious 5th man, who had never been mentioned before, who help carry out the crimes.  This 5th man theory was viewed by many as ridiculous.  And I must say, I agree.  You can’t make a case against the four men you think perpetrated the crime, no DNA, no weapon, nothing, so let’s just say there was a random 5th guy present and he had the two different guns and he was the only one who left DNA evidence.  Sounds shady as hell to me.

Many who had been involved in this case, or those like us, who have been exposed to this case through our love of true crime, believe in an entirely different theory about how this case happened.

It is believed by some that there were actually two unidentified customers who were in the yogurt shop right up till closing time.  This coincides with the fact that police interviewed 52 customers who had visited I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt on the day of the murders, however; two men, who were placed at the store by witnesses have never been found.

Three customers who had left the store just prior to it closing said that on their way out they had noticed two men sitting in a booth.  It appeared that one of the men had ordered a soft drink.  As they left, one of the customers says she saw Jennifer lock the front door and put up the closed sign, to alert any other customers that the store was now closed, while the girls started cleaning up for the night.  The two men sitting in the booth were still inside the store at this point.

The witnesses to this incident described these mysterious men in the following way, “one has lighter hair, maybe like a dirty blond, and is about 5 foot 6 … in his late 20s, early 30s. The other is described as a bigger man. Both were wearing bigger coats…one had a green coat…army-fatigue kind of looking jacket, the other had a black jacket.” To this day, neither of these men have been identified. 

The 1991 yogurt shop murders changed Austin forever. The mayor at the time called the murders “the crime where Austin lost its innocence.” The violent and sudden loss of four young girls with their entire lives ahead of them caused residents to question the safety of their beloved city.

The “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!” shop is now gone, and in its place is a nail salon, the only vestige left is a plaque in the parking lot under an old oak tree that reads, In Loving Memory of Jennifer Harbison, Sara Harbison, Amy Ayers, and Eliza Thomas Forever in our hearts.  If you have any information that can help solve this case, please call 512-472-TIPS. 

I’m John Dodson and thank you for joining us on, The Secret Sits.  Audio Eng. by Gabriel Dodson.  Org artwork, provided by Tony Ley.