Ayers couple and former prosecutors launch National Cold Case Center after 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders
Shawn and Angie Ayers of Austin have helped establish the National Cold Case Center to fund unsolved-homicide investigations, train investigators and support victims’ families, the couple told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital reported the Ayerses joined former prosecutors Mindy Montford and Anne Marie Schubert to form the nonprofit after decades of seeking answers in the 1991 I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop killings on West Anderson Lane.
The Dec. 6, 1991, attack left four girls dead: Amy Ayers, 13; Jennifer Harbison, 17; Eliza Thomas, 17; and Sarah Harbison, 15. According to FBI files and court documents cited by Fox News Digital, three victims were found bound, gagged and shot in a storage room; Amy Ayers was found in a separate area with burns and a ligature around her neck.
Investigators recovered .22-caliber bullets from the bodies and a .380-caliber cartridge casing in a floor drain, and FBI files describe two gunshot wounds to Amy, including a .380-caliber shot through her cheek and jawline.
In September 2025, DNA and ballistics evidence identified Robert Eugene Brashers as a suspect, Fox News Digital reported. Austin police said Brashers used the same .380-caliber handgun to kill himself during a January 1999 police standoff in Missouri; Brashers had previously been linked to other violent crimes in South Carolina and Missouri, the report said.
Despite Brashers’ identification, the Ayerses and their supporters told Fox News Digital they remain uncertain whether an accomplice was involved because evidence showed two different calibers were used. “I may be incorrect, but I don’t think that I am,” Angie Ayers told Fox News Digital, saying she doubts Brashers used both guns in his other cases.
The case’s investigation and prosecutions stretched across decades and included arrests and false confessions. Austin authorities arrested four local men in 1999 — Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn. Springsteen and Scott were convicted of capital murder in 2001 and 2002, respectively, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Springsteen’s conviction in 2006 and Scott’s in 2007; both were released in June 2009 and the charges were dismissed in October 2009 after DNA testing failed to match them to the crime scene.
Pierce’s capital-murder charges were dismissed in 2003 for insufficient evidence after he spent more than three years jailed; he was fatally shot by an Austin officer in 2010 following a traffic stop in which officials say he stabbed an officer. Welborn was never tried after two grand juries declined to indict him and the case was dropped in 2000; he spent months behind bars earlier in the process.
After investigators linked Brashers to the killings, Travis County Judge Dayna Blazey declared the four men innocent on Feb. 19, 2026, and the Austin City Council approved a $35 million settlement for the three surviving men and Pierce’s family months later, Fox News Digital reported.
The Ayerses told Fox News Digital they had not been contacted by the men or their relatives and that their work on the nonprofit grew out of their own case and encounters with other families. They said the center will provide funding and training for law enforcement, tools for investigating cold cases, accurate reporting of unsolved-case data, interagency connections and peer-to-peer family support, and that initial funding is a priority.
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