November 6, 2025 • 44 mins
Join Robin as he tells Jules the details of the recently solved Austin Yogurt Shop Murders. (Ash is out this series of episodes but will be back when she is done her book tour). Part 2/3
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Welcome back to part of our series about the Austin
Yogurt shot murders and the recent resolution of the case.
So I, given that this was the early nineteen nineties
in Texas, I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn
that we also have a touch of Satanic panic, because
this is pretty much a kitchen sink case when it
comes to finding colorful suspects. But the police started receiving
(00:52):
tips about a group of local residents who were nicknamed
the People in Black, who supposedly had an interest in
the occult and vanism and would perform activities like dancing
on tombstones, and of course there were rumors in the
area that they were all part of a Satanic cult.
The leader of the group was a woman called Claire LeVay,
(01:12):
which is probably not a real name. I think she
changed it as a homage to the Church of Satan
founder Aunt Don Leavey. Yeah exactly. But what's hilarious is
that forty eight hours this was when they started covering
the Austin yogurt shop murders. You know, you know Aaron Moriarty, right, Oh, yes.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I know who Aaron Moriarty is.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yes, this is pretty much one of her pet cases
because she was assigned to cover it back in nineteen
ninety two and then would keep covering the case for
like the next thirty years. She came very passionate about it.
But what's hilarious is one of her first assignments is
when forty eight hours the camera crew was given permission
when they performed a raid of Claire LaVey's house in
(01:51):
order to bring her in for questioning and see if
she had any knowledge of the yogurt shop murders. And
when the police broke and burst down the door and
came in with the camera crew, turned out that Claire
LaVey was naked inside and pleasuring herself with a vibrator
just when the police arrived, which is a very hilarious
story in a very sad case. But they found like
(02:12):
a skull inside, but it turned out it was made
of wax, and she had some bones in there, but
they belonged to animals like rats and squirrels. And of
course when John Jones looked into her, he realized, no,
she's got nothing to do with this. This is just
like a false le at, a red herring, and they
dropped it. But thankfully they had some good sense this time,
because we've seen so many of the satanic panic lead
(02:32):
to innocent people being railroaded. But in this case, Claire
LaVey was just embarrassed rather than falsely in prison.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I mean, get it, Claire Leavey don't want to yuck
her yum. I mean, I can understand that she would
have been embarrassed because you don't expect law enforcement to
come bursting in. Well, one is in the act of
pleasuring themselves. But you're right, that is a really hilarious
spot in a very very dark case. And you can't
(03:00):
have a nineteen nineties case it's unsolved without having like
some kind of smattering of satanic panic, just like sprinkled
in for good measure.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
It feels like pretty much. Yeah. And for the record,
that footage of her with the vibrator did not make
the forty eight Hours episode that they didn't want that
going on a network TV. So there would be one
more very interesting false lead, and this time it involved
a gang of Mexican bikers from a gang called Nierrada's Punks.
It was because an Hispanic looking man with long hair
(03:30):
in a car had been seen parked outside the yogurt
shop on the night of the murders, and the eventually
I thought they had identified them as a trio of
bikers named Alberto Jimenez, Cortes, Portfrio Villa Severrada and Ricardo Hernandez.
And these were dangerous guys because three weeks before the
yogurt shop murders they had actually abducted a young women
from a nightclub in Austin and proceeded to gang Raper
(03:53):
before letting her go. So they put out an a
restaurant for these guys. They wondered if they might have
been responsible for the yogurt shp crime, but they had
escaped over the border into Mexico. But in October of
nineteen ninety two, nearly a year later, they finally captured
two of them, Cortes and Seretta, for other crimes such
as drug trafficking and gun smuggling, and as we were
(04:16):
being held in custody by the Mexican authorities, they both
supposedly confessed to being responsible for the yogurt shop murders.
But thankfully John Jones was still on the case and
once he read the confession, he instantly became skeptical because
there were a lot of incorrect details, because one of
them even said that the girls were cut up and mutilated.
(04:37):
So Jones decided to perform his own interview with these
guys where they recanted these confessions and claimed that they
had only done it because they had been tortured by
the Mexican authorities, because obviously down there there's more human
rights violations, and it seemed like the Mexican authorities wanted
to take credit for solving this very infamous American crime,
(04:58):
so they tortured these two by into making a false confession.
And they weren't bad guys. They did go to prison
for the gang rape, so they deserve to be locked up,
but they were ultimately ruled out as being responsible for
the yogurt shop murders. But it just kind of demonstrated
what a big farce this case was becoming because we
were finding all these colorful suspects, many of them were confessing,
(05:19):
yet there was no evidence to implicate any of them.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
And like, Okay, the year's nineteen ninety one. We've got
like really rudimentary internet. It's pretty basic, and I've just
got to wonder what type of news media was reaching
Mexico about the Austin yogurt shop murders. It wouldn't be
like it is today. There wasn't social media, So like,
what was going through these two Mexican or Mexican police
(05:46):
officers who are questioning these bikers and they're like, hey, bro,
let's just get these guys to confess so that we
can take credit for solving the Austin yogurt shop murders.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
What I mean, I guess it'd be because it's near
the Mexican border to Austin that maybe word has spread
about it down there and they had heard of it.
But I think they just saw it as an opportunity
because maybe they saw in the police band that they
were wanted for questioning and the yogurt shot murders, and
once they realized that they had them in custody for
other crimes, they said, oh, this will be a big
coup for us if we can solve this case and
(06:19):
make the Americans look bad. But of course they didn't
do it, and all they got were false confessions. But
it just showed how much time was wasted in the
early years pursuing all these leads that ultimately went nowhere.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah, it's just like everybody who is faced with a suspect,
no matter how credible they are or how credible the
details that they give are, they're just so hungry for
a result that they want to solve the case. And
I'm sure that the motivations are many that some people
who want to solve it, they truly have their eye
on justice and they want to solve it because they
(06:52):
want to give the families that resolution and to be
able to give the community that resolution. And then there's
other people where it's more of an ego project, right,
and it's like, Okay, well, if I do this, it's
going to make me look so good. And then Mexico
doing that and be like, let's torture these guys and
get this result. I'm not laughing at the torture, It
just it seems absolutely absurd to me that they would
(07:16):
then try their hand at this where these guys clearly
didn't do it. Yeah, they're bad guys and they did
deserve to be locked up, but not for the Austin
yogurt chop.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Murders exactly, because, as we're going to talk about, the
real killer was getting away with it. And when we
get to the end and I reveal who the real
killer was, it's going to horrify you how many other
crimes he was getting away with while they were looking
at the wrong suspects in this case. So, unfortunately, the
case would remain solid for the next several years. Like
(07:46):
I said, John Jones was transferred off the case and
everything went cold. But in August of nineteen ninety nine,
the Austin pe decided to form a new task force
to relaunch the investigation and would it be led by
a homicide detective named Paul Johnson and assisted by some
other detectives named Ron Laura, John Hardisty and Robert Merrill,
who pretty much decided, we're going to solve this at
(08:08):
any costs. So while looking back through the files, they
found out about this whole lead involving Maurice Pearce and
how he had implicated three accomplices, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott
and Forrest Wellborn, and they hadn't been looked at in years,
and even though there was no evidence against them other
than like a half ass confession from Maurice, they decide, well,
(08:29):
they're in the mid twenties now and they're now living
with jobs and they have families of their own. Some
of them even have children, why not bring them back
in and question them again? And like I mentioned back
in nineteen ninety one, they were all like kind of
juvenile delinquents. They were high school dropouts who spent a
lot of the time partying, didn't seem to have much
focus in life. Some of them had some misdemeanor crimes.
(08:51):
Maurice had been arrested once for drunk driving, Mike had
been arrested once for possession of weed. Forrest had once
been arrested for driving with a suspended license. Once again,
none of these guys had any documented history of violence
to suggest they were capable of a crime this heinous,
and they were all teenagers at the time. We had
two seventeen year olds, one sixteen year old and won
(09:12):
fifteen year old. And the crime really looked like it
was committed by an offender who had a lot of
prior experience of that and may not have been their
first murder. But regardless, they still wanted to question them again.
So the next first person who was brought in was
Michael Scott, and the first thing he said in his
interrogation room was I got a sorry, guys, but I
(09:33):
had memory issues. I may have trouble for getting stuff
that took place nearly eight years earlier. And I think
they took advantage of that because as they started interrogating
him for several hours, they started planting the seat in
the head that he may have committed the murder and
completely blacked out and forgotten about it. So at one point,
ten hours into his interrogation, Michael was given a cell
(09:55):
phone in order to call his wife and he actually
said to her, quote, I know more about this case
than I thought I knew.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Oh my god. That just gives me such a shudder
to think that, like, poor Michael Scott, who's clearly got
memory issues, and he's telling the police this and they
seem to be weaponizing it against him. And I don't
know how much of this is done in a calculated
manner and that they actually believe that he's guilty, or
if they're just like, this guy looks like he could
(10:23):
be good for it. Let's just take advantage of this.
It just seems like such low hanging fruit. When you
take somebody who's got any type of mild cognitive impairment
or somebody who is easily influenced, you can plant the
seeds and make them believe that they did just about anything,
which is why one of the techniques that is allowed
in the US, I don't know if we allow it
(10:44):
in Canada. That I hate is when police lie to
suspects and they say, we have your DNA here, And
I think that like when you say to somebody who
has or suffers from any kind of cognitive issues or
memory issues, or they're very easily influenced, that if you
say that, then there's a strong likelihood that you're going
(11:06):
to get a percentage of those people who are going
to go, oh, my DNA was there, I must have
been there, I must be guilty. And then it's just
a really dangerous trajectory for the rest of the interrogation
because you can very easily plant the seeds and make
somebody believe that they themselves committed this crime, which seems
like that's what happened here.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, Like they did let Michael go go back home
to his wife, but then they brought him in again
the following day and continue to go at him for
several more hours, and then finally, after being interrogated for
a total of eighteen hours over the course of two days,
he finally admitted that he participated the murders and then
signed a fourteen page confession. But you talked about how
(11:47):
they can lie to suspects to plant the seeds in
their heads that they might have done it, and we
have an example of it here because Michael claimed that
his alibi around the time of the yogurt Chop murders.
This is another colorful detail is that he and Robert
Springsteen were attending a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror
Picture Show, which is taking place at the local mall,
and they at one point during the interrogation, what if
(12:10):
I told you that we checked and the Rocky Horror
Picture Show wasn't playing at the theater that night, And
of course that wasn't true. They didn't go back and
check records for a movie that took place eight years ago.
They just said it randomly in the interview, and of
course Michael started doubting himself. Oh so maybe I wasn't
actually there. Maybe I could have been in the yogret
shop committing these murders. And that's what eventually paved the
(12:31):
way for him to confessing.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And so often in these cases you see a situation
where somebody will say I have memory impairment issues. They
may take advantage of that by pushing really hard, not
giving him a break. If he doesn't have access to
a lawyer and he doesn't know to ask for when
there's a problem, and if he doesn't have any food,
(12:54):
he doesn't have any beverages, maybe he's not allowed to
go to the bathroom. We don't know the whole scenario
played out there or is there a video of it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
There is some video tape interrogation, but he did get
some breaks and stuff. But you're correct he did not
have a lawyer there when he was doing this because
he probably figured, well, I had nothing to do with this.
Here we are years later. I'm just going to answer
questions and make things easier for them, little knowing that
they're trying to like extract a false confession from them.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Well, in the nineties, that was kind of the idea, right, like,
if you didn't commit the crime, if you are innocent,
then you've got nothing to hide. Why would you need
a lawyer? I think it's only upon examination of all
of these wrongful conviction cases that we've seen, you absolutely
need a lawyer, whether you're guilty or whether you're innocent.
(13:43):
The police aren't looking out for your best interests. You
need to preserve your interest and the only way that
you can do that is hiring a legal professional to
have them help facilitate that conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Oh yeah, exactly. And he never would have even considered that.
I mean, all these four suspects, they're not considered to
be disabled or anything. But when they were in high school,
they had to take special education courses, so they weren't
exactly very smart people. And obviously they're more kind of
more simple minded, Like they can function on their own,
they can live lives, have families, and have careers, but
(14:17):
they're just not going to think to themselves that if
the police are bringing me into question, to me, they're
going to make me confess to something I didn't do.
Since he implicated Robert Springsteen, he was brought in for
questioning next. At this point, he had moved out of
Texas and was living in West Virginia, so detectives Ron
Laura and Robert Merrill went over there to question him.
(14:37):
And when they brought Robert in, he had worked multiple
shifts at his two jobs, so he had gotten virtually
no sleep. And I think it had been up for like
twenty hours at that point, so they only had to
interrogate him for about four hours before he just got
so exhausted that he told them what he wanted to
hear and finally confess that he was involved in the
murder as well. And I know that there was one
(14:59):
point where he just got so frustrated when they tried
to press him saying that you sexually assaulted this thirteen
year old girl, Amy Errs, and he finally snapped and said, Okay,
I did it. I put my dick in my pussy
and I raped her. And of course he just said
that out of frustration. He obviously didn't mean it. But
they played the videotape of that at his trial, so
you can only imagine what a terrible impression that set
(15:22):
for the jury.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah. I can't imagine that the jury would have listened
to that and had any great thoughts about him. It's
just so graphic, Yeah, exactly. And I think once they
saw that, it didn't even matter what other evidence was
against him, they pretty much probably decided this guy is guilty,
because no one who was innocent would say something like that.
(15:46):
So in the end, Mike and Rob gave these two
different statements that had some contradictory details, but the police
eventually kind of combined them together into what they believed
was a scenario about what they believe happened. What both
men said is that the mastermind of the crime was
Maurice Pierce, and that was a robbery gone wrong, that
the group had been casing the yogurt shop since the
(16:07):
afternoon and after evening hit Maurice entered first and purchased
a yogurt in order to keep Jennifer and Eliza distracted,
while Michael and Roberts knucking through the back area and
unlocked the rear door, and they proceeded to use a
folded pack of cigarettes to prop the door open, which
would allow them to exit the shop during closing time.
(16:28):
They implicated Forrest well Born, but said he did not
directly participate in the crime, that he just sat in
the group's getaway car in order to function his a lockout,
and that Maurice, Mike, and rob did the robbery themselves
after eleven PM after closing, but were completely thrown off
by the fact that Sarah and Amy were in the back,
so they weren't expecting four girls to be there instead
(16:48):
of two and their story was that after the register
was opened, Maurice was angry because there wasn't as much
hash in there as he was expecting, so he accused
the girls of lying and demanded to know where the
rest of the money was, even though they maintained there
was no more money. They then forced the girls to undress,
tied them up a gunpoint, and when Eliza and Jennifer
(17:09):
continued to maintain that there was no additional money, Maurice
shot them both in the back of the head, and
then he ordered Robert to rape Amy, which he did,
and he also ordered Michael to rape Sarah, but he
says he couldn't go through with it because he was
unable to achieve an erection, and then he told Michael
to shoot the other two girls in the head or
he would be mit next. So Mike complied, and of course,
(17:32):
after Mike shot Amy twice in the head with a
twenty two caliber gun, he pulled out a three eighty
pistol to fire the kill shot. So they claimed that
after that they set the girls on fire and used
lighter fluid in order to get it started, but claimed
that when they fled the shop, they discovered that forest
well Born was no longer in the getaway car, so
(17:52):
they climbed into the vehicle, drove after him and came
across Forrest walking down the street, and then picked him up.
And then they went to a bridge and toss the
three eighty pistol into Lake Austin, which is one of
the first strange details of the crime because they used
two murder weapons. Yet why would they throw one of
them into the lake and then hold on to the
other one. I can see how like a jury, if
(18:14):
they were going to listen to this, that they would think, Wow,
this is highly specific. These guys have a lot of details.
How would they have these details unless they themselves committed
the murders. Because I don't think that most juries in
the nineteen nineties, especially ninety one, are going to look
at it and think, oh, maybe the police fed them
these details. Maybe this is BS. I would think that
(18:38):
there was much more of a trust for law enforcement
and the methods by which they would extract confessions. They
would think these people are on trial, there's a reason
for it. They're likely guilty. And if they're confessing and
they're saying these things. If you go back to the
nineteen nineties and what people's knowledge of false confessions was
and the idea around law enforcement and extracting false confessions.
(19:02):
I would think it would be much more centered around
you're going to trust the police, these guys have too
many details, they're probably guilty, or why would the prosecutor
bring charges?
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And that's pretty much the mentality, because they would be
charged without any other evidence besides these confessions. And sure enough,
after Robert and Michael confessed, they charged both of them,
as well as Maurice Pierce and Forrest Wellborn for the
Roles and the yogurt chop murders. But there was a
big problem because even though Maurice and Forrest were extensively interrogated,
(19:33):
they maintained their innocence from the outset and never did confess.
And of course, shortly thereafter, Robert and Michael both recanted
their confessions, saying that they were under such pressure and
were being manipulated that they finally told the police what
they wanted to hear. So essentially, you're trying to put
four guys on trial for the same crime on the
basis of nothing more than two confessions that were only
(19:56):
made by half of them. So the big problem here
was forres wellb Born is figuring out how to charge
him because in both the confessions they say that he
did not directly participate in the murder. They just said
that he was in the getaway car, he tried to
run away. And with these confessions they couldn't even prove
that Forrest knew that any murders were going to take place,
So what exactly could they put him on trial with.
(20:19):
There was really no evidence that had he even done anything wrong.
So at one point he was approached by prosecutors and
was given an offer to testify against his three co
defendants in exchange for immunity. And this isn't a reduced
sentence for a quadruple murder. This is immunity, which meant
no jail time whatsoever. And he pretty much said, no,
I was not involved in this, I didn't do it.
(20:40):
I'm not going to testify, even though it meant he
could have walked right then and there.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Wow, Forrest, that's impressive because he looked at the picture
holistically and it wasn't just hey, I want I'm out
here for my own self preservation. He wasn't going to
throw the other guys under the bus. Because he knew
the entire story was bs and he wasn't involved, and
so it's very likely that they weren't involved, and then
none of this was true. But he very easily could
(21:06):
have just been like, screw you guys. You implicated me.
I never confess I'm in this position because of you.
I'm going to testify against you and ensure that I
never go to prison because of this. But he didn't
do that, So that's pretty admirable.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Pretty much. Yeah, and he wasn't even accused of being
the murder. They just said he waited in the getaway car,
but he wouldn't even admit to that. He just said
I wasn't there, And he had a really low IQ.
And even though people like that are generally coerced into
making false confessions, he did the exact opposite. Where he
seemed like a guy who was incapable of lying. He
just seemed very earnest and genuine. And I mentioned earlier
(21:45):
that forty eight Hours did a lot of coverage in
this case over the years, and that Aaron Moriarty was
the primary reporter, and she said her big turning point
in the case is when she went to interview Forrest
Welborn in jail, and she'd heard these guys a confess,
so of course going in under the assumption that they're
probably guilty. But she said, when I interviewed Forrest Welborn,
he was so earnest and so direct and so genuine
(22:07):
that I thought he was credible and that he was
absolutely telling the truth when he said he didn't do this.
And they couldn't even get an indictment on him, like
they were able to get murder indictments for Robert, Michael
and Maurice, But because Forrest, they said, had just waited
in the car, they tried in front of two grand
juries and they couldn't get any indictments on him for
any crime. So they finally had no choice but to
(22:29):
release him. So he never did go on trial.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Well, the involvement, even the other guys implicated him, was minimal,
I mean, if he was the getaway driver. But correct
me if I'm wrong. In certain states, if a murder
is committed and somebody is the getaway driver, any person
who's involved in the commission of that crime in any
capacity can be charged with murder. Is that correct?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
I think it depends on state to state, Like I
have seen cases. Yeah, yeah, I know. There's one a
famous case in Florida where a guy just lent his
car to someone who went to commit a murder, and
he got charged with a felony murder even though he
wasn't even there, So that can't happen. So, I mean,
they could have charged Forrest with something even if it
was not direct murder, but they just felt that the
(23:12):
evidence was so weak because, unlike his alleged co conspirators,
he never confessed, so what evidence was there to place
him near the scene.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Did you ever watch that documentary? It's really old. It
was Werner Hertzogs into the Abyss.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yes they did, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
One of the guys on that I can't remember his name,
it was so long ago that I watched it. But
he was a getaway driver, I believe, and they had
held up two of his cohorts or whatever it held
that convenience store or something, and the clerk was killed
during the commission of that robbery. And he was convicted
of the murder as well because he was involved with
(23:49):
that crime, even though he didn't kill anybody. And so yeah,
he was on death row. And that's what I thought
when I thought of Forrest was, they could have likely
charged him with something. But if you can't get an indictment,
if a grand jury doesn't want to indict, then why
are you going to bother Because if you don't think
that you can get a conviction, the prosecutors probably aren't
(24:12):
going to bring it to trial. The other guys are
more of a slam dunk because they actually.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Confessed yes, and the way it works is that you
can't use their confessions against another defendant on trial unless
they testify, which Robert and Michael were not going to do.
But it was kind of sad because even though Forrest
was a free man again, everyone was just assuming that
he was involved in a murder. At that point, he
had started up an auto repair shop, but it wound
(24:37):
up going out of business because of that publicity. He
had a hard time finding employment after that, and he
pretty much faded into obscurity. Like he has led a
very private life the last twenty five years since he
was released. He has not done any interviews since that
forty eight Hours interview with Aaron Moriarty. He did not
participate in the documentary, so he pretty much just decided
(24:57):
to get out of the public spotlight. I hear he's
doing well today, But he's just someone who thought just
as one accusation completely ruined my life, so he tried
to distance himself from it as much as possible, even
though he never even did any they wrong. He didn't
even confess.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
My heart goes out to Forest because I feel like
they really tried to railroad him, and unfortunately, his friends
were easily influenced and implicated him. Luckily they implicated him
in a capacity. It wasn't like directly involved in the murder.
But even though no charges robotic gainst him and that
he didn't spend his life behind bars, the fact that
(25:34):
it continued to reverberate outwards and it affected him in
I'm sure a myriad of ways, right. I'm sure it
affected his personal relationships. We know that it affected his
income and his ability to get a job and to
be successful in business, and then, like you said, he
just faded into obscurity. So I really hope that everything
(25:54):
went well for Forest, because I think that he's such
a victim in this story and he truly did deserve
what happened to him.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Oh definitely, yeah, And we'll talk more about this later.
But now that this case has been resolved. I'm really
curious to see if any of these defendants are going
to try to get a wrongful conviction lawsuit filed and
finally get damages after all these years for being falsely
accused of this crime. So before the trials even started,
morehole started opening up and the cases against these guys.
(26:23):
Because they tried showing the photographs of Mike, Maurice and
Robert to some of the other customers who had gone
into the yogurt shop that night, and none of them
picked them out. And the two most important witnesses were
Tim Striker and Margaret Sheen, but when they were shown photographs,
they were unable to identify any of these suspects as
the two men they had seen sitting at the table
(26:46):
right before closing. And when you think about it, the
confession kind of contradicted the story provided by Striker and
she And because they said that they saw these two
guys sitting in the store shortly before closing. Yet in
the confession, Mike and said that we got in through
the back door after the store was already closed. So
you have these two promising suspects, these two unidentified men
(27:08):
sitting at the table yet it seems pretty certain that
this was not Michael, this was not Robert, this was
not Maurice and lo and behold. When the trials started,
Tim Striker and Margaret Sheen were never called upon to
testify or tell the jury about their account because the
prosecution pretty much feared this has gone to contradict the confessions,
(27:28):
so we don't want to put these two on the stand.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Well, that makes total sense, But you got to wonder
did the defense have the information about Striker and Chienne.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Ah, they did, yes, Like, guys, we're going to find
out Oh, oh no, wait, maybe that he didn't. No,
I don't think they knew about it. The prosecution did
have the information, but the defense didn't.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yeah, That's what I was wondering. Is this like a
Brady violation where you're going to hold something like that
back because it certainly isn't going to benefit you as
like being the prosecutor in that situation. So it's like,
m were not going to put them on this down
because it's not going to support our narrative. And why
would we release the information to the defense because that's
only going to help their.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Case pretty much. And I've got another Brady violation to
share with you. You might recall that when they confiscated the
twenty two caliber pistol from Maurice back in nineteen ninety one,
they did ballistic tests and compared it with the bullets
from the murderers, but the results were inconclusive. So after
they were arrested in May of two thousand, they decided
(28:29):
to have the Bureau of Alcohol to back when firearms
perform more advanced ballistics testing, and they ultimately issued report
which showed that the results conclusively determined that Maurice's gun
did not match the bullets and was not the murder weapon,
which is all well and good, but it turned out
that over a year later, in January of nineteen ninety nine,
nearly nine months before the suspects were arrested, the Austin
(28:52):
Pede had already performed their own ballistics tests on the gun,
and once again the results showed that it did not
match the bullets and was not the murder weapon. Yet
they still decided to bring in Michael, Robert and Maurice
for interrogation and hand the indictments down. And it turned
out that this information about the ballistics tests from January
of nineteen ninety nine were not presented to the grand jury,
(29:15):
which might have influenced their decision not to hand down
the indictments. And when the question the lead detected Paul Johnson,
he said, Oh, it was an unintentional oversight. I simply
forgot the original ballistics tests.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Sure, Paul, Sure. I think we see Brady violations so
often because I think prosecutors will do it more often
than we hear about because half the time we wouldn't
find out about it because they don't know about it.
So unless they discover the information on the defense side,
then they're not going to know that there's a Brady violation.
So I think most of the time it goes unnoticed,
(29:51):
or they'll release it within like a huge data dump
of like a ton of different documents and hope that
it's hidden and then that way the defense has to
go through thousands of pages and they'll bury it somewhere
in there, but just to hold that information back because
it doesn't serve their narrative. Like, I'm not surprised, but
it's one of those things that you'd think there should
(30:11):
be more of a penalty for prosecutors when they do that,
but they seem to get a just a slap on
the wrist pretty much.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Yeah, Like to this day, no one has ever gotten
any blowback for some of the unethical things that were
done in this case. They pretty much got away with it,
and they use the oh I forgot defense. It seems
quite a lot. And here's another sneaky tactic. When Robert
and Michael were put on trial, an intentional choice was
made to only charge them with the murder of Amy Airs,
which meant that if they were acquitted, that means they
(30:38):
could charge them with the murders of the other three
girls if need be. It's kind of like the Darley
Routier case where they only charged her with the murder
of one of her sons in case she was acquitted,
because then they could put her on trial for the
murder of her second son. And while I believe Darley
Routier is guilty, I still think that's a very sneaky
tactic which seems to happen a lot in Texas, and
that certainly holds true here.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, I used to think that there was a possibility
that Darley was innocent. I talked to Maggie Freeling about
that case, and she believed in Darley's innocence. But the
more that I've read on it and the more looked
into it, my gut has told me that like she
did it. There's just not enough evidence to support this
intruder theory and the motivation is so unclear. But yeah,
(31:21):
it totally made sense in that case. If you're looking
at somebody who potentially murdered their children, you want to
hedge your bets and you want to make sure that
if you believe that this woman is guilty, or in
this case, if you believe that these guys are guilty
of killing these four girls, then you want to make
sure that they're going to pay. And so to lump
(31:42):
them all together into one that would be a really
risky move. That's a gamble. And so I can understand
their strategy.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
There, Yeah, because I guess they did have a lot
of confidence in their cases and we're thinking, well, all
we have is a confession here, but if we get
it wrong this time, we have three more chance is
to put them in prison.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
This way, you're going to get four bites at the apple,
not one.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah, exactly. So. Robert Springsteen's trial began in May of
two thousand and one, and he was informed that he
would face the death penalty if he was found guilty,
but he was offered a plea deal in which the
death penalty would be taken off the table if he
would testify against his co conspirators and he could receive
a sense of no more than fourteen years in prison.
(32:25):
But of course rob said, no, I'm not taking it
because I didn't do it, so I'm going to take
my chances at trial. So it was an awkward thing
because Mike also turned down the same deal. He refused
to testify against Robert at the trial, but they were
able to read excerpts from Michael's confession which implicated Roberts,
and it was kind of a thing where the only
(32:46):
real evidence they have is snippets of a co conspirator's
confession that they could read to the jury, but the
co conspirator himself is not testifying. And there was more
controversy because, as I mentioned earlier, when the original arson investigator,
Melvin Stall, looked at the scene, he pretty much said
that he thought that the metal shelves had been set
(33:08):
on fire in the back room, and that they'd set
fire to the combustible materials such as the cyrofoam cups.
But the problem is that when Robert and Michael testified,
they said that they had used an accelerant like lighter
fluid to start the fire, which was a big contradiction.
So they state got another arson investigator named Marshall Lyttleton,
(33:29):
who once worked with the ATF as an explosives and
fire investigator, and he expressed his belief that the fire
had originated from the center of the room and that
the defendants had used some accelerants and placed some flammable
items on top of the victim's bodies and that's how
they started the fire. So of course the defense wanted
to bring in the original arson investigator, Melvin Stall, provide
(33:52):
his theory of events, saying that, oh, well, if they
started the fire on the shelf with the combustible materials,
that totally contradicts the confession. But when Melvin Stall took
the witness Dan, he said, yeah, I looked up Marshall
Littleton's report and I'm now convinced that they used an accelerant,
So I changed my mind from my original ruling, which
was a major blow for the defense.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Oh well, that's really convenient, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, exactly, they did try to point towards another suspect
you may have heard of, Kenneth McDuff, who was a
notorious serial killer who operated in Texas. It turned out
that on December twenty ninth, nineteen ninety one, just over
three weeks after the Yogret Shop murders took place, another
horrible crime took place in Austin when a twenty eight
year old woman named Colleen Reid was violently abducted from
(34:37):
a car wash not too far from the yogre shop
and she wound up being raped, tortured, and murdered, and
the perpetrators were identified as Kenneth McDuff and an accomplice
named al but Hank Whorley. So Kenneth McDuff. By this
point he had already served time in prison, but got
released in nineteen eighty nine because of overcrowding, even though
(34:58):
he had committed three murders and he was a free
man in nineteen ninety one when the Yogret Shop murders
took place, and he was even though he lived in
Waco at the time. He would reportedly make trips to
Austin to score drugs. So the defense starts looking at
the possibility what if Kenneth McDuff and albahnk Warley were
the two men who were seen sitting at the table
before closing, But they didn't really match the descriptions because
(35:20):
they were described as being clean shaven men in their twenties,
whereas Kenneth McDuff was forty five and albahank Warley had
a long, bushy beard, so it was probably not them.
During Robert's trial, the Austin TV station KVUE News reported
that some anonymous sources had claimed that Kenneth McDuff had
confessed to the yogret shop murders on the day he
(35:42):
was executed in nineteen ninety eight, so they started looking
into that, but unfortunately they cannot find any corroborating evidence.
And apparently McDuff before he was executed, was asked about
yoga chop murders and actually said, no, I did not
do that crime, and I would have been proud of
it if I had done it, so which is a
very classy thing to say. So they didn't find enough
(36:04):
evidence that McDuff was the real killer, so they couldn't
introduce this evidence at trial. But for many years after that,
some people started wondering, could Kenneth McDuff have been the
real killer because this sort of crime faced his mo
because he had at least nine confirmed victims that we
know of, so killing four more would have been right
up his alley.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
But it sounds like, just based on what he said,
that there's an amount of humorous involved in that he's
going out and maybe he would have liked to have
taken credit for it if he did indeed do it,
because he thought it to be impressive on some level,
because you know, when it comes to killers, they seem
to admire the work of each other. I mean, you
can look at it two ways. He could have denied
(36:44):
it if he was responsible, because he just wants to
f with everybody and while he goes and not give
them any breadcrumbs. Or he would own it and say yeah,
I did it. I don't know. I can see why
he was a really good suspect because obviously he had
that many confirmed kills. It isn't a far reach to
believe that he could be responsible.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yes, and spoiler alert, we're going to reveal that a
serial killer was responsible for this crime, but it wasn't
Kenneth McDuff. But when I covered this on the trail
when cold two years ago, I thought that McDuff was
a fairly intriguing alternate suspect. So Rob's trial lasted three
weeks and when the case went to the jury, they
deliberated for thirteen hours and they found him guilty of
(37:26):
the murder of any Airs and he would be senced
to death by a lethal injection. So Michael Scott's trial
would begin over one year later in August of two
thousand and two. And while I can understand separating the
defendants and giving them separate trials, you just know that
there's going to be a lot of bias there because
no matter what the jury says, there's a good chance
they probably heard that another defendant has already been convicted
(37:49):
a co con spirit or of this same crime, and
I think there's going to be a lot of bias.
Once again, Robert refused to testify as a witness at
Michael's trial, so other really had was being able to
read some excerpts from Robert's confession without him actually going
on the witness stand to corroborate any of it. But
it still turned out to be enough to sway the jury.
They deliberated for two days and found him guilty of
(38:12):
Amy's murder. But since they cannot reach a unanimous verdict
that they're sensing, he did not receive the death penalty
and wound up receiving a sense of life imprisonment with
no possibility of parole for thirty five years. But here's
two separate trials to defendants where the only thing you
had of them was their own confession and alleged co
conspirators confession, and they were both found guilty, and.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
They'd both recanted their confessions by that point, correct, they did, Yes,
So all you have is these initial confessions. But you also,
I don't know if the defense knew this had confessions
from what forty eight other people? Yeah, so, I mean
how meaningful is that really when you don't have any
(38:54):
physical or real circumstantial evidence to back this up other
than the fact that they can.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
But as we talked about, these are juries in the
early two thousands when there's not as much public knowledge
above Faull's confessions. So they probably thought that was enough.
They figured there's no way they would have done it,
done these confessions unless they were guilty, and that influenced
their verdict, but the state would face a bigger problem
when Maurice Pierce was supposed to go on trial because
(39:22):
he never did confess, so there really wasn't anything against
him besides the confessions from Robert and Michael. And they
have a rule that if you're implicated by a co conspirator,
you can't use their confessions unless they take the witness
stand to testify, and they refuse to do that. And
it makes me think of the West Memphis three case
where they had to do a separate trial for Jesse
(39:44):
miss Kelly, who confessed, but when Jason Baldwin and Demon
Eccles went on trial separately, Jesse refused to testify against them,
so they were unable to use his confession as evidence
against them at their trial. And this was a big
problem with Maurice because the there was literally no other
evidence besides the other confessions and they could not use them.
(40:05):
So they ultimately decided to drop the murder charges against
him before they went on trial, but they still said,
we still believe he's guilty, but we just can't take
him to trial with the evidence we have, so we
have to let them go. And you can imagine what
a bittersweet feeling that was for the victims' families because
you've got two guys in prison right now, but the
guy who has been accused of being the mastermind, they're saying, Oh,
(40:28):
we can't take him to trial and we just have
to let him go. So you've technically got a half
solved mystery where two of the perpetrators are in prison
and two of them are free.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
But literally, like when it comes down to cases, it's
who can tell the best story, right, And for Maurice,
what type of story would the prosecutor tell? You? Literally
have zero evidence. He never confessed. You can't use those
confessions because the other guys aren't going to testify at
his trial. So you've got no physical evidence, no other
(41:00):
circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
What would you present, Yeah, there's really nothing like he
held out. He did not make his own confession, and
there's no physical evidence against them. There's nothing placing him
at the scene, and all they have are the confessions
from his alleged co conspirators who refused to take the
witness stand, so you can understand why they did this.
But all you're thinking is maybe you should have thought
(41:23):
about that before charging him in the first place, because
he just had to spend four years sitting in a
jail cell. And now you're letting him go, and you're
just putting the victim's family through a ringer because now
they believe that the alleged mastermind is going to walk
free again.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Well, they were probably just hoping that they could eventually
get the guys to take the stand and to testify
against him. That didn't happen. But it's unfortunate that he
had to spend four years behind bars. But I'm sure
that the prosecutor and the investigators weren't sad about that.
They were like, at least that's some kind of justice,
because they truly believe it seems that he was involved.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah, so they kind of justified it to themselves. And
they did say that the door was open to charge
him again if we could find new evidence, but of
course they never did. That. Brings an end to part
two of our series about the Austin yogurt chot murders.
Join us again next week for part three.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on
(42:42):
the Trail went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to
Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three,
the ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer
is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of UNSAWD Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in
(43:06):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the jeweles Nashty patreons, So there's early ad free
episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent
Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're
not very mini, but they're just too short to turn
into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so
we hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link them
in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or to rate and review is greatly
appreciate it. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at
gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at
the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle
up because cold trails and chilly pass call for warm clothing.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy
Welcome back to part of our series about the Austin
Yogurt shot murders and the recent resolution of the case.
So I, given that this was the early nineteen nineties
in Texas, I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn
that we also have a touch of Satanic panic, because
this is pretty much a kitchen sink case when it
comes to finding colorful suspects. But the police started receiving
(00:52):
tips about a group of local residents who were nicknamed
the People in Black, who supposedly had an interest in
the occult and vanism and would perform activities like dancing
on tombstones, and of course there were rumors in the
area that they were all part of a Satanic cult.
The leader of the group was a woman called Claire LeVay,
(01:12):
which is probably not a real name. I think she
changed it as a homage to the Church of Satan
founder Aunt Don Leavey. Yeah exactly. But what's hilarious is
that forty eight hours this was when they started covering
the Austin yogurt shop murders. You know, you know Aaron Moriarty, right, Oh, yes.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I know who Aaron Moriarty is.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yes, this is pretty much one of her pet cases
because she was assigned to cover it back in nineteen
ninety two and then would keep covering the case for
like the next thirty years. She came very passionate about it.
But what's hilarious is one of her first assignments is
when forty eight hours the camera crew was given permission
when they performed a raid of Claire LaVey's house in
(01:51):
order to bring her in for questioning and see if
she had any knowledge of the yogurt shop murders. And
when the police broke and burst down the door and
came in with the camera crew, turned out that Claire
LaVey was naked inside and pleasuring herself with a vibrator
just when the police arrived, which is a very hilarious
story in a very sad case. But they found like
(02:12):
a skull inside, but it turned out it was made
of wax, and she had some bones in there, but
they belonged to animals like rats and squirrels. And of
course when John Jones looked into her, he realized, no,
she's got nothing to do with this. This is just
like a false le at, a red herring, and they
dropped it. But thankfully they had some good sense this time,
because we've seen so many of the satanic panic lead
(02:32):
to innocent people being railroaded. But in this case, Claire
LaVey was just embarrassed rather than falsely in prison.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I mean, get it, Claire Leavey don't want to yuck
her yum. I mean, I can understand that she would
have been embarrassed because you don't expect law enforcement to
come bursting in. Well, one is in the act of
pleasuring themselves. But you're right, that is a really hilarious
spot in a very very dark case. And you can't
(03:00):
have a nineteen nineties case it's unsolved without having like
some kind of smattering of satanic panic, just like sprinkled
in for good measure.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
It feels like pretty much. Yeah. And for the record,
that footage of her with the vibrator did not make
the forty eight Hours episode that they didn't want that
going on a network TV. So there would be one
more very interesting false lead, and this time it involved
a gang of Mexican bikers from a gang called Nierrada's Punks.
It was because an Hispanic looking man with long hair
(03:30):
in a car had been seen parked outside the yogurt
shop on the night of the murders, and the eventually
I thought they had identified them as a trio of
bikers named Alberto Jimenez, Cortes, Portfrio Villa Severrada and Ricardo Hernandez.
And these were dangerous guys because three weeks before the
yogurt shop murders they had actually abducted a young women
from a nightclub in Austin and proceeded to gang Raper
(03:53):
before letting her go. So they put out an a
restaurant for these guys. They wondered if they might have
been responsible for the yogurt shp crime, but they had
escaped over the border into Mexico. But in October of
nineteen ninety two, nearly a year later, they finally captured
two of them, Cortes and Seretta, for other crimes such
as drug trafficking and gun smuggling, and as we were
(04:16):
being held in custody by the Mexican authorities, they both
supposedly confessed to being responsible for the yogurt shop murders.
But thankfully John Jones was still on the case and
once he read the confession, he instantly became skeptical because
there were a lot of incorrect details, because one of
them even said that the girls were cut up and mutilated.
(04:37):
So Jones decided to perform his own interview with these
guys where they recanted these confessions and claimed that they
had only done it because they had been tortured by
the Mexican authorities, because obviously down there there's more human
rights violations, and it seemed like the Mexican authorities wanted
to take credit for solving this very infamous American crime,
(04:58):
so they tortured these two by into making a false confession.
And they weren't bad guys. They did go to prison
for the gang rape, so they deserve to be locked up,
but they were ultimately ruled out as being responsible for
the yogurt shop murders. But it just kind of demonstrated
what a big farce this case was becoming because we
were finding all these colorful suspects, many of them were confessing,
(05:19):
yet there was no evidence to implicate any of them.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
And like, Okay, the year's nineteen ninety one. We've got
like really rudimentary internet. It's pretty basic, and I've just
got to wonder what type of news media was reaching
Mexico about the Austin yogurt shop murders. It wouldn't be
like it is today. There wasn't social media, So like,
what was going through these two Mexican or Mexican police
(05:46):
officers who are questioning these bikers and they're like, hey, bro,
let's just get these guys to confess so that we
can take credit for solving the Austin yogurt shop murders.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
What I mean, I guess it'd be because it's near
the Mexican border to Austin that maybe word has spread
about it down there and they had heard of it.
But I think they just saw it as an opportunity
because maybe they saw in the police band that they
were wanted for questioning and the yogurt shot murders, and
once they realized that they had them in custody for
other crimes, they said, oh, this will be a big
coup for us if we can solve this case and
(06:19):
make the Americans look bad. But of course they didn't
do it, and all they got were false confessions. But
it just showed how much time was wasted in the
early years pursuing all these leads that ultimately went nowhere.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah, it's just like everybody who is faced with a suspect,
no matter how credible they are or how credible the
details that they give are, they're just so hungry for
a result that they want to solve the case. And
I'm sure that the motivations are many that some people
who want to solve it, they truly have their eye
on justice and they want to solve it because they
(06:52):
want to give the families that resolution and to be
able to give the community that resolution. And then there's
other people where it's more of an ego project, right,
and it's like, Okay, well, if I do this, it's
going to make me look so good. And then Mexico
doing that and be like, let's torture these guys and
get this result. I'm not laughing at the torture, It
just it seems absolutely absurd to me that they would
(07:16):
then try their hand at this where these guys clearly
didn't do it. Yeah, they're bad guys and they did
deserve to be locked up, but not for the Austin
yogurt chop.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Murders exactly, because, as we're going to talk about, the
real killer was getting away with it. And when we
get to the end and I reveal who the real
killer was, it's going to horrify you how many other
crimes he was getting away with while they were looking
at the wrong suspects in this case. So, unfortunately, the
case would remain solid for the next several years. Like
(07:46):
I said, John Jones was transferred off the case and
everything went cold. But in August of nineteen ninety nine,
the Austin pe decided to form a new task force
to relaunch the investigation and would it be led by
a homicide detective named Paul Johnson and assisted by some
other detectives named Ron Laura, John Hardisty and Robert Merrill,
who pretty much decided, we're going to solve this at
(08:08):
any costs. So while looking back through the files, they
found out about this whole lead involving Maurice Pearce and
how he had implicated three accomplices, Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott
and Forrest Wellborn, and they hadn't been looked at in years,
and even though there was no evidence against them other
than like a half ass confession from Maurice, they decide, well,
(08:29):
they're in the mid twenties now and they're now living
with jobs and they have families of their own. Some
of them even have children, why not bring them back
in and question them again? And like I mentioned back
in nineteen ninety one, they were all like kind of
juvenile delinquents. They were high school dropouts who spent a
lot of the time partying, didn't seem to have much
focus in life. Some of them had some misdemeanor crimes.
(08:51):
Maurice had been arrested once for drunk driving, Mike had
been arrested once for possession of weed. Forrest had once
been arrested for driving with a suspended license. Once again,
none of these guys had any documented history of violence
to suggest they were capable of a crime this heinous,
and they were all teenagers at the time. We had
two seventeen year olds, one sixteen year old and won
(09:12):
fifteen year old. And the crime really looked like it
was committed by an offender who had a lot of
prior experience of that and may not have been their
first murder. But regardless, they still wanted to question them again.
So the next first person who was brought in was
Michael Scott, and the first thing he said in his
interrogation room was I got a sorry, guys, but I
(09:33):
had memory issues. I may have trouble for getting stuff
that took place nearly eight years earlier. And I think
they took advantage of that because as they started interrogating
him for several hours, they started planting the seat in
the head that he may have committed the murder and
completely blacked out and forgotten about it. So at one point,
ten hours into his interrogation, Michael was given a cell
(09:55):
phone in order to call his wife and he actually
said to her, quote, I know more about this case
than I thought I knew.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Oh my god. That just gives me such a shudder
to think that, like, poor Michael Scott, who's clearly got
memory issues, and he's telling the police this and they
seem to be weaponizing it against him. And I don't
know how much of this is done in a calculated
manner and that they actually believe that he's guilty, or
if they're just like, this guy looks like he could
(10:23):
be good for it. Let's just take advantage of this.
It just seems like such low hanging fruit. When you
take somebody who's got any type of mild cognitive impairment
or somebody who is easily influenced, you can plant the
seeds and make them believe that they did just about anything,
which is why one of the techniques that is allowed
in the US, I don't know if we allow it
(10:44):
in Canada. That I hate is when police lie to
suspects and they say, we have your DNA here, And
I think that like when you say to somebody who
has or suffers from any kind of cognitive issues or
memory issues, or they're very easily influenced, that if you
say that, then there's a strong likelihood that you're going
(11:06):
to get a percentage of those people who are going
to go, oh, my DNA was there, I must have
been there, I must be guilty. And then it's just
a really dangerous trajectory for the rest of the interrogation
because you can very easily plant the seeds and make
somebody believe that they themselves committed this crime, which seems
like that's what happened here.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, Like they did let Michael go go back home
to his wife, but then they brought him in again
the following day and continue to go at him for
several more hours, and then finally, after being interrogated for
a total of eighteen hours over the course of two days,
he finally admitted that he participated the murders and then
signed a fourteen page confession. But you talked about how
(11:47):
they can lie to suspects to plant the seeds in
their heads that they might have done it, and we
have an example of it here because Michael claimed that
his alibi around the time of the yogurt Chop murders.
This is another colorful detail is that he and Robert
Springsteen were attending a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror
Picture Show, which is taking place at the local mall,
and they at one point during the interrogation, what if
(12:10):
I told you that we checked and the Rocky Horror
Picture Show wasn't playing at the theater that night, And
of course that wasn't true. They didn't go back and
check records for a movie that took place eight years ago.
They just said it randomly in the interview, and of
course Michael started doubting himself. Oh so maybe I wasn't
actually there. Maybe I could have been in the yogret
shop committing these murders. And that's what eventually paved the
(12:31):
way for him to confessing.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
And so often in these cases you see a situation
where somebody will say I have memory impairment issues. They
may take advantage of that by pushing really hard, not
giving him a break. If he doesn't have access to
a lawyer and he doesn't know to ask for when
there's a problem, and if he doesn't have any food,
(12:54):
he doesn't have any beverages, maybe he's not allowed to
go to the bathroom. We don't know the whole scenario
played out there or is there a video of it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
There is some video tape interrogation, but he did get
some breaks and stuff. But you're correct he did not
have a lawyer there when he was doing this because
he probably figured, well, I had nothing to do with this.
Here we are years later. I'm just going to answer
questions and make things easier for them, little knowing that
they're trying to like extract a false confession from them.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Well, in the nineties, that was kind of the idea, right, like,
if you didn't commit the crime, if you are innocent,
then you've got nothing to hide. Why would you need
a lawyer? I think it's only upon examination of all
of these wrongful conviction cases that we've seen, you absolutely
need a lawyer, whether you're guilty or whether you're innocent.
(13:43):
The police aren't looking out for your best interests. You
need to preserve your interest and the only way that
you can do that is hiring a legal professional to
have them help facilitate that conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Oh yeah, exactly. And he never would have even considered that.
I mean, all these four suspects, they're not considered to
be disabled or anything. But when they were in high school,
they had to take special education courses, so they weren't
exactly very smart people. And obviously they're more kind of
more simple minded, Like they can function on their own,
they can live lives, have families, and have careers, but
(14:17):
they're just not going to think to themselves that if
the police are bringing me into question, to me, they're
going to make me confess to something I didn't do.
Since he implicated Robert Springsteen, he was brought in for
questioning next. At this point, he had moved out of
Texas and was living in West Virginia, so detectives Ron
Laura and Robert Merrill went over there to question him.
(14:37):
And when they brought Robert in, he had worked multiple
shifts at his two jobs, so he had gotten virtually
no sleep. And I think it had been up for like
twenty hours at that point, so they only had to
interrogate him for about four hours before he just got
so exhausted that he told them what he wanted to
hear and finally confess that he was involved in the
murder as well. And I know that there was one
(14:59):
point where he just got so frustrated when they tried
to press him saying that you sexually assaulted this thirteen
year old girl, Amy Errs, and he finally snapped and said, Okay,
I did it. I put my dick in my pussy
and I raped her. And of course he just said
that out of frustration. He obviously didn't mean it. But
they played the videotape of that at his trial, so
you can only imagine what a terrible impression that set
(15:22):
for the jury.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah. I can't imagine that the jury would have listened
to that and had any great thoughts about him. It's
just so graphic, Yeah, exactly. And I think once they
saw that, it didn't even matter what other evidence was
against him, they pretty much probably decided this guy is guilty,
because no one who was innocent would say something like that.
(15:46):
So in the end, Mike and Rob gave these two
different statements that had some contradictory details, but the police
eventually kind of combined them together into what they believed
was a scenario about what they believe happened. What both
men said is that the mastermind of the crime was
Maurice Pierce, and that was a robbery gone wrong, that
the group had been casing the yogurt shop since the
(16:07):
afternoon and after evening hit Maurice entered first and purchased
a yogurt in order to keep Jennifer and Eliza distracted,
while Michael and Roberts knucking through the back area and
unlocked the rear door, and they proceeded to use a
folded pack of cigarettes to prop the door open, which
would allow them to exit the shop during closing time.
(16:28):
They implicated Forrest well Born, but said he did not
directly participate in the crime, that he just sat in
the group's getaway car in order to function his a lockout,
and that Maurice, Mike, and rob did the robbery themselves
after eleven PM after closing, but were completely thrown off
by the fact that Sarah and Amy were in the back,
so they weren't expecting four girls to be there instead
(16:48):
of two and their story was that after the register
was opened, Maurice was angry because there wasn't as much
hash in there as he was expecting, so he accused
the girls of lying and demanded to know where the
rest of the money was, even though they maintained there
was no more money. They then forced the girls to undress,
tied them up a gunpoint, and when Eliza and Jennifer
(17:09):
continued to maintain that there was no additional money, Maurice
shot them both in the back of the head, and
then he ordered Robert to rape Amy, which he did,
and he also ordered Michael to rape Sarah, but he
says he couldn't go through with it because he was
unable to achieve an erection, and then he told Michael
to shoot the other two girls in the head or
he would be mit next. So Mike complied, and of course,
(17:32):
after Mike shot Amy twice in the head with a
twenty two caliber gun, he pulled out a three eighty
pistol to fire the kill shot. So they claimed that
after that they set the girls on fire and used
lighter fluid in order to get it started, but claimed
that when they fled the shop, they discovered that forest
well Born was no longer in the getaway car, so
(17:52):
they climbed into the vehicle, drove after him and came
across Forrest walking down the street, and then picked him up.
And then they went to a bridge and toss the
three eighty pistol into Lake Austin, which is one of
the first strange details of the crime because they used
two murder weapons. Yet why would they throw one of
them into the lake and then hold on to the
other one. I can see how like a jury, if
(18:14):
they were going to listen to this, that they would think, Wow,
this is highly specific. These guys have a lot of details.
How would they have these details unless they themselves committed
the murders. Because I don't think that most juries in
the nineteen nineties, especially ninety one, are going to look
at it and think, oh, maybe the police fed them
these details. Maybe this is BS. I would think that
(18:38):
there was much more of a trust for law enforcement
and the methods by which they would extract confessions. They
would think these people are on trial, there's a reason
for it. They're likely guilty. And if they're confessing and
they're saying these things. If you go back to the
nineteen nineties and what people's knowledge of false confessions was
and the idea around law enforcement and extracting false confessions.
(19:02):
I would think it would be much more centered around
you're going to trust the police, these guys have too
many details, they're probably guilty, or why would the prosecutor
bring charges?
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And that's pretty much the mentality, because they would be
charged without any other evidence besides these confessions. And sure enough,
after Robert and Michael confessed, they charged both of them,
as well as Maurice Pierce and Forrest Wellborn for the
Roles and the yogurt chop murders. But there was a
big problem because even though Maurice and Forrest were extensively interrogated,
(19:33):
they maintained their innocence from the outset and never did confess.
And of course, shortly thereafter, Robert and Michael both recanted
their confessions, saying that they were under such pressure and
were being manipulated that they finally told the police what
they wanted to hear. So essentially, you're trying to put
four guys on trial for the same crime on the
basis of nothing more than two confessions that were only
(19:56):
made by half of them. So the big problem here
was forres wellb Born is figuring out how to charge
him because in both the confessions they say that he
did not directly participate in the murder. They just said
that he was in the getaway car, he tried to
run away. And with these confessions they couldn't even prove
that Forrest knew that any murders were going to take place,
So what exactly could they put him on trial with.
(20:19):
There was really no evidence that had he even done anything wrong.
So at one point he was approached by prosecutors and
was given an offer to testify against his three co
defendants in exchange for immunity. And this isn't a reduced
sentence for a quadruple murder. This is immunity, which meant
no jail time whatsoever. And he pretty much said, no,
I was not involved in this, I didn't do it.
(20:40):
I'm not going to testify, even though it meant he
could have walked right then and there.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Wow, Forrest, that's impressive because he looked at the picture
holistically and it wasn't just hey, I want I'm out
here for my own self preservation. He wasn't going to
throw the other guys under the bus. Because he knew
the entire story was bs and he wasn't involved, and
so it's very likely that they weren't involved, and then
none of this was true. But he very easily could
(21:06):
have just been like, screw you guys. You implicated me.
I never confess I'm in this position because of you.
I'm going to testify against you and ensure that I
never go to prison because of this. But he didn't
do that, So that's pretty admirable.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Pretty much. Yeah, and he wasn't even accused of being
the murder. They just said he waited in the getaway car,
but he wouldn't even admit to that. He just said
I wasn't there, And he had a really low IQ.
And even though people like that are generally coerced into
making false confessions, he did the exact opposite. Where he
seemed like a guy who was incapable of lying. He
just seemed very earnest and genuine. And I mentioned earlier
(21:45):
that forty eight Hours did a lot of coverage in
this case over the years, and that Aaron Moriarty was
the primary reporter, and she said her big turning point
in the case is when she went to interview Forrest
Welborn in jail, and she'd heard these guys a confess,
so of course going in under the assumption that they're
probably guilty. But she said, when I interviewed Forrest Welborn,
he was so earnest and so direct and so genuine
(22:07):
that I thought he was credible and that he was
absolutely telling the truth when he said he didn't do this.
And they couldn't even get an indictment on him, like
they were able to get murder indictments for Robert, Michael
and Maurice, But because Forrest, they said, had just waited
in the car, they tried in front of two grand
juries and they couldn't get any indictments on him for
any crime. So they finally had no choice but to
(22:29):
release him. So he never did go on trial.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Well, the involvement, even the other guys implicated him, was minimal,
I mean, if he was the getaway driver. But correct
me if I'm wrong. In certain states, if a murder
is committed and somebody is the getaway driver, any person
who's involved in the commission of that crime in any
capacity can be charged with murder. Is that correct?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
I think it depends on state to state, Like I
have seen cases. Yeah, yeah, I know. There's one a
famous case in Florida where a guy just lent his
car to someone who went to commit a murder, and
he got charged with a felony murder even though he
wasn't even there, So that can't happen. So, I mean,
they could have charged Forrest with something even if it
was not direct murder, but they just felt that the
(23:12):
evidence was so weak because, unlike his alleged co conspirators,
he never confessed, so what evidence was there to place
him near the scene.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Did you ever watch that documentary? It's really old. It
was Werner Hertzogs into the Abyss.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yes they did, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
One of the guys on that I can't remember his name,
it was so long ago that I watched it. But
he was a getaway driver, I believe, and they had
held up two of his cohorts or whatever it held
that convenience store or something, and the clerk was killed
during the commission of that robbery. And he was convicted
of the murder as well because he was involved with
(23:49):
that crime, even though he didn't kill anybody. And so yeah,
he was on death row. And that's what I thought
when I thought of Forrest was, they could have likely
charged him with something. But if you can't get an indictment,
if a grand jury doesn't want to indict, then why
are you going to bother Because if you don't think
that you can get a conviction, the prosecutors probably aren't
(24:12):
going to bring it to trial. The other guys are
more of a slam dunk because they actually.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Confessed yes, and the way it works is that you
can't use their confessions against another defendant on trial unless
they testify, which Robert and Michael were not going to do.
But it was kind of sad because even though Forrest
was a free man again, everyone was just assuming that
he was involved in a murder. At that point, he
had started up an auto repair shop, but it wound
(24:37):
up going out of business because of that publicity. He
had a hard time finding employment after that, and he
pretty much faded into obscurity. Like he has led a
very private life the last twenty five years since he
was released. He has not done any interviews since that
forty eight Hours interview with Aaron Moriarty. He did not
participate in the documentary, so he pretty much just decided
(24:57):
to get out of the public spotlight. I hear he's
doing well today, But he's just someone who thought just
as one accusation completely ruined my life, so he tried
to distance himself from it as much as possible, even
though he never even did any they wrong. He didn't
even confess.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
My heart goes out to Forest because I feel like
they really tried to railroad him, and unfortunately, his friends
were easily influenced and implicated him. Luckily they implicated him
in a capacity. It wasn't like directly involved in the murder.
But even though no charges robotic gainst him and that
he didn't spend his life behind bars, the fact that
(25:34):
it continued to reverberate outwards and it affected him in
I'm sure a myriad of ways, right. I'm sure it
affected his personal relationships. We know that it affected his
income and his ability to get a job and to
be successful in business, and then, like you said, he
just faded into obscurity. So I really hope that everything
(25:54):
went well for Forest, because I think that he's such
a victim in this story and he truly did deserve
what happened to him.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Oh definitely, yeah, And we'll talk more about this later.
But now that this case has been resolved. I'm really
curious to see if any of these defendants are going
to try to get a wrongful conviction lawsuit filed and
finally get damages after all these years for being falsely
accused of this crime. So before the trials even started,
morehole started opening up and the cases against these guys.
(26:23):
Because they tried showing the photographs of Mike, Maurice and
Robert to some of the other customers who had gone
into the yogurt shop that night, and none of them
picked them out. And the two most important witnesses were
Tim Striker and Margaret Sheen, but when they were shown photographs,
they were unable to identify any of these suspects as
the two men they had seen sitting at the table
(26:46):
right before closing. And when you think about it, the
confession kind of contradicted the story provided by Striker and
she And because they said that they saw these two
guys sitting in the store shortly before closing. Yet in
the confession, Mike and said that we got in through
the back door after the store was already closed. So
you have these two promising suspects, these two unidentified men
(27:08):
sitting at the table yet it seems pretty certain that
this was not Michael, this was not Robert, this was
not Maurice and lo and behold. When the trials started,
Tim Striker and Margaret Sheen were never called upon to
testify or tell the jury about their account because the
prosecution pretty much feared this has gone to contradict the confessions,
(27:28):
so we don't want to put these two on the stand.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Well, that makes total sense, But you got to wonder
did the defense have the information about Striker and Chienne.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Ah, they did, yes, Like, guys, we're going to find
out Oh, oh no, wait, maybe that he didn't. No,
I don't think they knew about it. The prosecution did
have the information, but the defense didn't.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yeah, That's what I was wondering. Is this like a
Brady violation where you're going to hold something like that
back because it certainly isn't going to benefit you as
like being the prosecutor in that situation. So it's like,
m were not going to put them on this down
because it's not going to support our narrative. And why
would we release the information to the defense because that's
only going to help their.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Case pretty much. And I've got another Brady violation to
share with you. You might recall that when they confiscated the
twenty two caliber pistol from Maurice back in nineteen ninety one,
they did ballistic tests and compared it with the bullets
from the murderers, but the results were inconclusive. So after
they were arrested in May of two thousand, they decided
(28:29):
to have the Bureau of Alcohol to back when firearms
perform more advanced ballistics testing, and they ultimately issued report
which showed that the results conclusively determined that Maurice's gun
did not match the bullets and was not the murder weapon,
which is all well and good, but it turned out
that over a year later, in January of nineteen ninety nine,
nearly nine months before the suspects were arrested, the Austin
(28:52):
Pede had already performed their own ballistics tests on the gun,
and once again the results showed that it did not
match the bullets and was not the murder weapon. Yet
they still decided to bring in Michael, Robert and Maurice
for interrogation and hand the indictments down. And it turned
out that this information about the ballistics tests from January
of nineteen ninety nine were not presented to the grand jury,
(29:15):
which might have influenced their decision not to hand down
the indictments. And when the question the lead detected Paul Johnson,
he said, Oh, it was an unintentional oversight. I simply
forgot the original ballistics tests.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Sure, Paul, Sure. I think we see Brady violations so
often because I think prosecutors will do it more often
than we hear about because half the time we wouldn't
find out about it because they don't know about it.
So unless they discover the information on the defense side,
then they're not going to know that there's a Brady violation.
So I think most of the time it goes unnoticed,
(29:51):
or they'll release it within like a huge data dump
of like a ton of different documents and hope that
it's hidden and then that way the defense has to
go through thousands of pages and they'll bury it somewhere
in there, but just to hold that information back because
it doesn't serve their narrative. Like, I'm not surprised, but
it's one of those things that you'd think there should
(30:11):
be more of a penalty for prosecutors when they do that,
but they seem to get a just a slap on
the wrist pretty much.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Yeah, Like to this day, no one has ever gotten
any blowback for some of the unethical things that were
done in this case. They pretty much got away with it,
and they use the oh I forgot defense. It seems
quite a lot. And here's another sneaky tactic. When Robert
and Michael were put on trial, an intentional choice was
made to only charge them with the murder of Amy Airs,
which meant that if they were acquitted, that means they
(30:38):
could charge them with the murders of the other three
girls if need be. It's kind of like the Darley
Routier case where they only charged her with the murder
of one of her sons in case she was acquitted,
because then they could put her on trial for the
murder of her second son. And while I believe Darley
Routier is guilty, I still think that's a very sneaky
tactic which seems to happen a lot in Texas, and
that certainly holds true here.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, I used to think that there was a possibility
that Darley was innocent. I talked to Maggie Freeling about
that case, and she believed in Darley's innocence. But the
more that I've read on it and the more looked
into it, my gut has told me that like she
did it. There's just not enough evidence to support this
intruder theory and the motivation is so unclear. But yeah,
(31:21):
it totally made sense in that case. If you're looking
at somebody who potentially murdered their children, you want to
hedge your bets and you want to make sure that
if you believe that this woman is guilty, or in
this case, if you believe that these guys are guilty
of killing these four girls, then you want to make
sure that they're going to pay. And so to lump
(31:42):
them all together into one that would be a really
risky move. That's a gamble. And so I can understand
their strategy.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
There, Yeah, because I guess they did have a lot
of confidence in their cases and we're thinking, well, all
we have is a confession here, but if we get
it wrong this time, we have three more chance is
to put them in prison.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
This way, you're going to get four bites at the apple,
not one.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah, exactly. So. Robert Springsteen's trial began in May of
two thousand and one, and he was informed that he
would face the death penalty if he was found guilty,
but he was offered a plea deal in which the
death penalty would be taken off the table if he
would testify against his co conspirators and he could receive
a sense of no more than fourteen years in prison.
(32:25):
But of course rob said, no, I'm not taking it
because I didn't do it, so I'm going to take
my chances at trial. So it was an awkward thing
because Mike also turned down the same deal. He refused
to testify against Robert at the trial, but they were
able to read excerpts from Michael's confession which implicated Roberts,
and it was kind of a thing where the only
(32:46):
real evidence they have is snippets of a co conspirator's
confession that they could read to the jury, but the
co conspirator himself is not testifying. And there was more
controversy because, as I mentioned earlier, when the original arson investigator,
Melvin Stall, looked at the scene, he pretty much said
that he thought that the metal shelves had been set
(33:08):
on fire in the back room, and that they'd set
fire to the combustible materials such as the cyrofoam cups.
But the problem is that when Robert and Michael testified,
they said that they had used an accelerant like lighter
fluid to start the fire, which was a big contradiction.
So they state got another arson investigator named Marshall Lyttleton,
(33:29):
who once worked with the ATF as an explosives and
fire investigator, and he expressed his belief that the fire
had originated from the center of the room and that
the defendants had used some accelerants and placed some flammable
items on top of the victim's bodies and that's how
they started the fire. So of course the defense wanted
to bring in the original arson investigator, Melvin Stall, provide
(33:52):
his theory of events, saying that, oh, well, if they
started the fire on the shelf with the combustible materials,
that totally contradicts the confession. But when Melvin Stall took
the witness Dan, he said, yeah, I looked up Marshall
Littleton's report and I'm now convinced that they used an accelerant,
So I changed my mind from my original ruling, which
was a major blow for the defense.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Oh well, that's really convenient, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, exactly, they did try to point towards another suspect
you may have heard of, Kenneth McDuff, who was a
notorious serial killer who operated in Texas. It turned out
that on December twenty ninth, nineteen ninety one, just over
three weeks after the Yogret Shop murders took place, another
horrible crime took place in Austin when a twenty eight
year old woman named Colleen Reid was violently abducted from
(34:37):
a car wash not too far from the yogre shop
and she wound up being raped, tortured, and murdered, and
the perpetrators were identified as Kenneth McDuff and an accomplice
named al but Hank Whorley. So Kenneth McDuff. By this
point he had already served time in prison, but got
released in nineteen eighty nine because of overcrowding, even though
(34:58):
he had committed three murders and he was a free
man in nineteen ninety one when the Yogret Shop murders
took place, and he was even though he lived in
Waco at the time. He would reportedly make trips to
Austin to score drugs. So the defense starts looking at
the possibility what if Kenneth McDuff and albahnk Warley were
the two men who were seen sitting at the table
before closing, But they didn't really match the descriptions because
(35:20):
they were described as being clean shaven men in their twenties,
whereas Kenneth McDuff was forty five and albahank Warley had
a long, bushy beard, so it was probably not them.
During Robert's trial, the Austin TV station KVUE News reported
that some anonymous sources had claimed that Kenneth McDuff had
confessed to the yogret shop murders on the day he
(35:42):
was executed in nineteen ninety eight, so they started looking
into that, but unfortunately they cannot find any corroborating evidence.
And apparently McDuff before he was executed, was asked about
yoga chop murders and actually said, no, I did not
do that crime, and I would have been proud of
it if I had done it, so which is a
very classy thing to say. So they didn't find enough
(36:04):
evidence that McDuff was the real killer, so they couldn't
introduce this evidence at trial. But for many years after that,
some people started wondering, could Kenneth McDuff have been the
real killer because this sort of crime faced his mo
because he had at least nine confirmed victims that we
know of, so killing four more would have been right
up his alley.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
But it sounds like, just based on what he said,
that there's an amount of humorous involved in that he's
going out and maybe he would have liked to have
taken credit for it if he did indeed do it,
because he thought it to be impressive on some level,
because you know, when it comes to killers, they seem
to admire the work of each other. I mean, you
can look at it two ways. He could have denied
(36:44):
it if he was responsible, because he just wants to
f with everybody and while he goes and not give
them any breadcrumbs. Or he would own it and say yeah,
I did it. I don't know. I can see why
he was a really good suspect because obviously he had
that many confirmed kills. It isn't a far reach to
believe that he could be responsible.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yes, and spoiler alert, we're going to reveal that a
serial killer was responsible for this crime, but it wasn't
Kenneth McDuff. But when I covered this on the trail
when cold two years ago, I thought that McDuff was
a fairly intriguing alternate suspect. So Rob's trial lasted three
weeks and when the case went to the jury, they
deliberated for thirteen hours and they found him guilty of
(37:26):
the murder of any Airs and he would be senced
to death by a lethal injection. So Michael Scott's trial
would begin over one year later in August of two
thousand and two. And while I can understand separating the
defendants and giving them separate trials, you just know that
there's going to be a lot of bias there because
no matter what the jury says, there's a good chance
they probably heard that another defendant has already been convicted
(37:49):
a co con spirit or of this same crime, and
I think there's going to be a lot of bias.
Once again, Robert refused to testify as a witness at
Michael's trial, so other really had was being able to
read some excerpts from Robert's confession without him actually going
on the witness stand to corroborate any of it. But
it still turned out to be enough to sway the jury.
They deliberated for two days and found him guilty of
(38:12):
Amy's murder. But since they cannot reach a unanimous verdict
that they're sensing, he did not receive the death penalty
and wound up receiving a sense of life imprisonment with
no possibility of parole for thirty five years. But here's
two separate trials to defendants where the only thing you
had of them was their own confession and alleged co
conspirators confession, and they were both found guilty, and.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
They'd both recanted their confessions by that point, correct, they did, Yes,
So all you have is these initial confessions. But you also,
I don't know if the defense knew this had confessions
from what forty eight other people? Yeah, so, I mean
how meaningful is that really when you don't have any
(38:54):
physical or real circumstantial evidence to back this up other
than the fact that they can.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
But as we talked about, these are juries in the
early two thousands when there's not as much public knowledge
above Faull's confessions. So they probably thought that was enough.
They figured there's no way they would have done it,
done these confessions unless they were guilty, and that influenced
their verdict, but the state would face a bigger problem
when Maurice Pierce was supposed to go on trial because
(39:22):
he never did confess, so there really wasn't anything against
him besides the confessions from Robert and Michael. And they
have a rule that if you're implicated by a co conspirator,
you can't use their confessions unless they take the witness
stand to testify, and they refuse to do that. And
it makes me think of the West Memphis three case
where they had to do a separate trial for Jesse
(39:44):
miss Kelly, who confessed, but when Jason Baldwin and Demon
Eccles went on trial separately, Jesse refused to testify against them,
so they were unable to use his confession as evidence
against them at their trial. And this was a big
problem with Maurice because the there was literally no other
evidence besides the other confessions and they could not use them.
(40:05):
So they ultimately decided to drop the murder charges against
him before they went on trial, but they still said,
we still believe he's guilty, but we just can't take
him to trial with the evidence we have, so we
have to let them go. And you can imagine what
a bittersweet feeling that was for the victims' families because
you've got two guys in prison right now, but the
guy who has been accused of being the mastermind, they're saying, Oh,
(40:28):
we can't take him to trial and we just have
to let him go. So you've technically got a half
solved mystery where two of the perpetrators are in prison
and two of them are free.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
But literally, like when it comes down to cases, it's
who can tell the best story, right, And for Maurice,
what type of story would the prosecutor tell? You? Literally
have zero evidence. He never confessed. You can't use those
confessions because the other guys aren't going to testify at
his trial. So you've got no physical evidence, no other
(41:00):
circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
What would you present, Yeah, there's really nothing like he
held out. He did not make his own confession, and
there's no physical evidence against them. There's nothing placing him
at the scene, and all they have are the confessions
from his alleged co conspirators who refused to take the
witness stand, so you can understand why they did this.
But all you're thinking is maybe you should have thought
(41:23):
about that before charging him in the first place, because
he just had to spend four years sitting in a
jail cell. And now you're letting him go, and you're
just putting the victim's family through a ringer because now
they believe that the alleged mastermind is going to walk
free again.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Well, they were probably just hoping that they could eventually
get the guys to take the stand and to testify
against him. That didn't happen. But it's unfortunate that he
had to spend four years behind bars. But I'm sure
that the prosecutor and the investigators weren't sad about that.
They were like, at least that's some kind of justice,
because they truly believe it seems that he was involved.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah, so they kind of justified it to themselves. And
they did say that the door was open to charge
him again if we could find new evidence, but of
course they never did. That. Brings an end to part
two of our series about the Austin yogurt chot murders.
Join us again next week for part three.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on
(42:42):
the Trail went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to
Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three,
the ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer
is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of UNSAWD Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in
(43:06):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the jeweles Nashty patreons, So there's early ad free
episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent
Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're
not very mini, but they're just too short to turn
into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so
we hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link them
in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or to rate and review is greatly
appreciate it. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at
gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at
the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle
up because cold trails and chilly pass call for warm clothing.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy
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