The Austin Yogurt Shop Murders: Quadruple Homicide Still Unsolved
Who killed Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison?
Murders Still Unsolved
On December 6th, 1991, the bodies of four teenage girls—Eliza Thomas (17), Amy Ayers (13), and sisters Jennifer (17) and Sarah Harbison (15)—were discovered in an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas.
The girls had been shot to death and at least one of them was sexually assaulted. The store was set ablaze by their assailants, potentially destroying evidence.
The senseless tragedy changed the lives of their families forever and haunted the city of Austin as a whole. In an investigation that would see many fruitless leads and false confessions, a resolution remained elusive.
Who killed Eliza Thomas, Amy Ayers, Jennifer Harbison and Sarah Harbison?
Jennifer, Sarah, Eliza and Amy
Jennifer Ann Harbison was born on May 9th, 1974, in Bowie County, Texas, to parents Barbara and Skip. Athletic, outgoing, and funny, Jennifer was on the varsity track team and was also the president of Lanier High School’s FFA (Future Farmers of America) chapter. She was close to her family, including her younger sister Sarah.
“She (Jennifer) brought joy into the class,” remembered geography teacher Ed Gifford. “She was more excited about life than any kid I’ve known. She was one of the best that Lanier has ever had.”
Sarah Louise Harbison was born on October 28th, 1976, in Bowie County, Texas. Like her sister, Sarah was athletic. She was on the volleyball and basketball teams.
In addition to these activities, she was a cheerleader, as well as an active member of the FFA. Sarah and her boyfriend had been dating for a while and he’d recently given her his class ring to wear, which quickly became one of her prized possessions.
Paul Turner, Lanier High’s then-principal:
“She (Sarah) had already established herself as assertive and enthusiastic, a vital member of the freshman class. She was a leader, clearly a kid who was going to make a mark on the place.”
Eliza Hope Thomas was born on May 16th, 1974, in Austin, Texas, to parents James and Maria. Eliza, despite her young age, was already a skilled car mechanic and always did her own repairs. She and Jennifer, both 17, were best friends and worked together at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in North Austin.
She was also a member of the FFA, loved animals and dreamed of becoming a veterinarian and a model one day. She enjoyed makeup (especially lipstick), country music and poetry.
Eliza had “always been really nuts about animals,” said her father James.
Amy Leigh Ayers was born on January 31st, 1978, in Johnson County, Texas, to parents Bob and Pam. Though Amy—the youngest of the four—went to Burnet Middle School, she was a member of Lanier High School’s FFA chapter as well.
Like Eliza, Amy was passionate about animals (with horses and cats being her favorites) and wanted to become a veterinarian when she grew up. She and Sarah Harbison were best friends.
“I feel the loss everyday,” said Amy’s father Bob. “I miss her everyday. I really do.”
Harbison family friend John Bayh on the friendship the four girls shared:
“You couldn’t see one without seeing the rest of them. They loved each other. They loved working at the yogurt shop together. They played together, and when it came down to it, they died together.”
The Night of the Murders
Friday, December 6th, 1991, would mark the first time that Sarah and Amy were allowed to hang out at the mall with no adult supervision. Jennifer dropped the pair off before heading to work and she was supposed to give them a ride home that night after her shift ended.
I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! was set to close at 11 p.m. Eliza was working that night too. Sarah and Amy arrived at some point that evening, waiting for Jennifer to finish up so she could take them home.
Multiple customers reported spotting two suspicious men sitting at a table. They had a drink and didn’t order any frozen yogurt. But it was really their secretive behavior that caught the attention of others.
The men “kind of leaned over the table, talking to each other and kind of whispering, like they didn’t want anybody to hear what they were saying.”
Additionally, they allegedly had a paper bag on the table between them that they kept reaching into. The contents of the bag are still a mystery.
One of them was described as being roughly 5’6’’ tall, in his late 20s or early 30s, with short “dirty blonde” hair. The other man was said to be “bigger.” The strangers were both wearing a large coat and it is believed that they were driving a green car.
There were also mentions of a man who used the bathroom in the back that evening and supposedly took a long time. It's unclear if this was a third unidentified man or one of the two men who’d been seated at the table.
However, as it would later be discovered that the back exit was left unlocked, some believe this individual was responsible for unlocking it while he was back there.
The two men at the table appear to have been the last customers there when the girls began the process of closing down for the night.
Fire in the Yogurt Shop
A patrolman called the fire department when he noticed that the yogurt shop was on fire. John Jones, who would be one of the first officers on the scene, stated that he received a call about the fire at 11:27 p.m., leaving a surprisingly small window of time between closing and when the fire was set.
The fire was put out and first responders quickly found the bodies of Jennifer, Sarah, and Eliza. Amy, whose body was located in a separate part of the shop was found last. All four girls were nude and had been bound and gagged with their own underwear. While it’s believed that all of them might have been sexually assaulted, male DNA was recovered from only one of their bodies.
Each had been shot in the head. Two different handguns were used: a .380 and a .22, leading investigators to speculate that there had been two assailants.
The crime scene was deeply disturbing to the officers.
“It was dark inside, smoky, burned insulation everywhere,” remembered Detective Mike Huckabay. “Just the cold feeling of death. I saw things in Vietnam that… I thought nothin’ will ever match that. Well, this matches that, you know. Because it’s Austin, Texas. It’s right down the street from where we live.”
One by one the families of the girls were notified of what happened.
“At 3 o’clock that morning, some people were at my door and then they said there was a fire and… they told us.. that both of my girls were dead,” said Barbara.
Early Suspects
Law enforcement believed that the heinous crime had begun as a robbery and escalated from there.
Jones spoke on the various investigative avenues they went down trying to find the culprits:
“They were from all spectrums. I mean, we looked at everybody from family members to drifters.”
Then, eight days after Sarah, Jennifer, Eliza and Amy were murdered, investigators got their first promising lead.
15-year-old Maurice Pierce was caught carrying a .22 caliber gun in the Northcross Mall. However, because the .22 caliber rounds at the crime scene were untraceable, there was no way to conclusively confirm or rule out Pierce’s handgun as the murder weapon.
He was interrogated and eventually confessed to the murders, saying that he and three of his friends—teenagers Forest Welborn, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott—had committed the crime. Investigators were skeptical that Pierce was telling the truth, so they put a wire on him and had him speak about the murders to one of the friends he’d implicated.
To Jones it seemed obvious that Pierce’s friend was genuinely confused as to why he was bringing up the murders and seemingly had no guilt knowledge or involvement in the crime.
Yet in the interest of thoroughly investigating this lead, all four were brought in for questioning. Pierce’s three friends denied any involvement in the yogurt shop murders. Due to a lack of solid evidence connecting these four teenagers to the killings, they were all released.
However, it’s unclear why Pierce was carrying a gun the day he was apprehended.
New Detectives Assigned to the Case
A man witnessed sitting in a car outside of the yogurt shop on the night of the murders was considered a person of interest. This suspicion only deepened when it was learned that the composite sketch of him closely resembled the sketch of a man who had been implicated in a recent rape in Austin.
This man and another suspect in the rape case were eventually apprehended by authorities in Mexico. They were interrogated and confessed to the yogurt shop murders. But when American investigators reviewed their confessions, they noted that the pair got all of the details wrong, including the caliber of gun they allegedly used.
They thought that the Mexican authorities had likely coerced this confession (which both soon recanted) out of the men and that it was actually false. They were ruled out as suspects in the murders of the girls due to lack of evidence.
John Jones left the homicide division in 1994, though he was still haunted by the murders of Jennifer, Sarah, Amy and Eliza. A new set of detectives took a fresh look at the case and, by the late 90s, they had focused their attention on the original four suspects: Pierce, Springsteen, Scott, and Welborn. They became convinced that these were the true culprits.
Conviction
Over the course of a multi-day interrogation, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen confessed. Charges were ultimately dismissed against the other two, as they refused to confess and maintained their innocence during the interviews.
Scott and Springsteen were put on a trial. Both refused to testify, so the prosecution used excerpts from each man’s confession against the other. Scott and Springsteen were convicted, based solely on their confessions, as no other evidence to implicate them was ever found.
In 2009, it was ruled that the prosecution had violated the Confrontation Clause by introducing the men’s own confessions as evidence against each other when neither man was able to cross-examine the other. The convictions were overturned.
The DNA recovered from the body of one of the girls—the only forensic evidence in this case—was finally tested and compared against Springsteen, Pierce, Scott and Welborn. None were a match. The state chose not to retry Springsteen or Scott.
It also came out that one of the investigators who’d questioned them in 1999 had been accused of coercing false confessions out of suspects in another case. Additionally, a detective had allegedly held a gun to Scott’s head during his interrogation.
Other Developments
The families of the four murdered girls struggled with the release of Springsteen and Scott, as they still had no answers or closure.
“My family never talked about my sister after she died,” said Sonora, Eliza’s sister. “It’s too… it’s too painful.”
The DNA evidence led the authorities to an FBI database, as an anonymous possible match popped up there. Though the man’s name wasn’t revealed, it is known that he must have been convicted of a crime at a federal level.
However, the DNA from the yogurt shop murders contained only a partial male profile. Because of this, it could be used to definitively rule someone out, but it couldn’t be used to make a conclusive match.
The original testing of it had come up with only 16 markers. Later testing using more advanced technology managed to turn up 25 markers. According to the FBI, the man in question was ruled out with the more advanced testing and so his identity was kept private.
Law enforcement would receive dozens of false confessions over the course of their investigation and viable leads remained elusive.
To many, it seemed plausible, if not likely, that the two men at the table on the night of the murders—the last customers known to be there—were involved in the crime. But who were they? And where are they now? To this day, they’ve never been found or identified.
The remaining family members of the girls are still hopeful for a resolution.
The tragic murders of Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Amy Ayers, and Eliza Thomas are still unsolved.
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I recall encountering this case in previous years. I appreciate your resurfacing of this factual account.