Under the Gun
After a lengthy investigation that was at times scattershot, overly aggressive, and just plain incompetent, Austin police say they’ve caught the three young men who killed four teenage girls in an “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!” shop in 1991.
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The investigation dragged on, even after the task force was drastically scaled back, in June 1993. Then, a year later, Jones, who still had nothing to show for all the work the APD had done, was removed from the case and transferred into the assault division. It was time for a change, said his supervisors. Jones was angry, calling the sudden transfer a "slap in the face" and criticizing the department. "We just couldn't get personnel, even though we asked for it," he complained to the Statesman. "We'd get stuck in petty politics." Jones, who had four girls himself and who had formed deep bonds with the parents of the yogurt shop victims, was diagnosed with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and had started seeing a psychologist. Some on the force were glad to see him go and blamed him for mismanaging the investigation. "He has an ego the size of a washtub," says a former Austin cop. "He's not open-minded. You can be doing a criminal investigation, think you've got it sewed up, and then something surfaces that could change your mind. You've got to be able to look at it in a new way." By the time Jones left, the case had had four supervisors in two and a half years. The police had collected information on more than 1,200 suspects. The offense report was almost five thousand pages long, and there were another eight thousand to ten thousand pages in the computer database.
As Jones and the rest of the police force were discovering, good intentions were not enough. Toward the end of the 48 Hours episode, Jones had looked into the camera and vowed to the killers: "Whoever you are, you're gonna be mine one of these days." But his bravado was hollow, and he diffidently looked away, unable to hold the camera's gaze.
In January 1996, more than four years after the yogurt shop murders, Detective Paul Johnson was assigned to reorganize the case. The meticulous Johnson analyzed the more than five thousand tips Jones had collected and, over the course of a year and a half, reorganized them, then scrutinized each one for any sign that it had not been sufficiently investigated. One of those concerned a teenager named Maurice Pierce, who had been caught with a gun eight days after the murders and who claimed it had been used by a friend to kill the girls. Meanwhile, as the five-year anniversary of the killings came and went, so did Chief Watson. After an awkward start as chief, she had never been accepted by the rank and file, and almost everyone was happy to see her leave town. Her replacement, Stan Knee, was a suburban L.A. police veteran with a reputation as a cop's cop. His hiring was announced in August, just as another yogurt shop task force was getting under way. Later that year, Johnson went to visit Pierce's friend Forrest Welborn, who was living in Lubbock. According to court testimony by Johnson, Welborn said that he didn't remember the night of the murders, but that he was probably at Northcross Mall because that's where he hung out, and that he was probably with Pierce because that's who he hung out with. Welborn denied any involvement and later passed a polygraph. In November 1998 Johnson (who for a while had been assigned out of homicide to work as a street detective) and Detective Douglas Skolaut traveled to Irving to interview Pierce, who was living in nearby Lewisville. Pierce insisted on his own innocence.
Johnson persisted. When a third task force was formed, in August 1999, it concentrated on only a couple of leads, including the one provided in the 1991 interview of Maurice Pierce. The detectives had already talked to the suspects. Now they went to talk to possible witnesses. They called Mike Scott, who lived with his wife and stepdaughter in Buda, and asked if he would come in and talk to them. He did, on September 9. According to Detective Merrill's court testimony, at first Scott denied any involvement in the murders, then minimized his involvement, then gave more and more details, and finally admitted to being part of the crime. Though at times detectives verbally abused Scott and even held a gun to his head, he was cooperative and even seemed eager to help the detectives, accompanying them to the yogurt shop to refresh his memory. Though his story changed often over the eighteen hours of interrogation, his final, written version, the police felt, was close to being the truth about what had happened at the yogurt shop on the night of December 6. All of the police-station sessions were videotaped, but the September 14 written statement was not.
With one confession in the bag, detectives flew to West Virginia, seeking another. Robert Springsteen had moved to Charleston, where his mother lived, shortly after the murders. He now lived there with his wife and worked odd jobs, including a stint managing a McDonald's restaurant. Over a five-hour, videotaped interview, according to Merrill, Springsteen acted as Scott had—first denying his involvement, then minimizing it, and finally admitting to the crime. Unfortunately for the Austin police, the video camera malfunctioned, and the recording is only about 85 percent audible; in addition, a backup tape of the session ran out after three hours. Even technology, it seemed, was against the APD.
Armed with two confessions, detectives went back to Welborn, now living in Lockhart with his girlfriend. He continued to deny involvement, even under relentless, intimidating interrogation. At one point detectives tried to trap him, using Scott as bait. Skolaut took Welborn to the yogurt shop. According to the detective, Scott walked up behind Welborn, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, "I told them everything. . . . you need to tell them the truth." A startled Welborn replied, "I don't know why the f— you're telling them this."
Even without confessions from Pierce and Welborn, the police decided they had enough evidence to move. In a coordinated raid on October 6, 1999, police officers snared Scott in Austin, Pierce in Lewisville, Welborn in Lockhart, and Springsteen in Charleston. When Mayor Watson, police chief Knee, and DA Earle stood together to announce the arrests, it appeared that Austin had come to the end of a long nightmare. The police department seemed, in fact, at peace with itself for the first time in nearly a decade.
The four men looked dazed and confused in their page-one photos. They turned out to be as unmemorable back in 1991 as the girls, at least in retrospect, are now unforgettable. Scott, Welborn, and Springsteen were McCallum High School students, while Pierce had dropped out of Robbins Academy. Few teachers at the schools recalled them, nor could many of their classmates. Like the murdered girls, they hung out at Northcross Mall. Three of the four came from broken homes, and all would eventually drop out of high school. Pierce, who the police believed was the ringleader, had had several run-ins with the law, including two arrests for theft. They weren't a foursome, though they all knew each other. Pierce, the only one with a car, and Welborn were friends, while Springsteen and Scott, who both had learning disabilities, were friends and even roommates for a short time. When they were arrested, their families angrily pointed out that all four had grown up to be solid citizens who lived normal lives. Three of them held jobs and were in stable relationships with wives or girlfriends, and though all four had had minor scrapes with the law in the nineties, none had done anything violent. Though the police had repeatedly warned family members that the men were going to be arrested, none had fled. Springsteen's father, Robert Springsteen, and Scott's mother, Lisa McClain, insisted that the confessions of their learning-disabled sons had been coerced. The suspects' wives felt even more strongly. "He'd been terrorized," Springsteen's wife, Robin Moss, told a Charleston newspaper. "He was crying, pale, absolutely sick. I think they frightened him to death." According to Mike Scott's wife, Jeannine, the police had taken advantage of his openness to suggestion and his poor memory. "He has a memory like Swiss cheese," she told me.
And the parents asked the question on everyone's mind: How could the four of them keep such a terrible secret for eight years?
Since Welborn and Pierce were juveniles at the time of the murders, they had to be certified to stand trial as adults. At a November hearing, prosecutors had to show that there was probable cause that the two had killed the girls. Police officers testified for the first time in detail about the crime scene, the interrogations, and the two confessions. They played videotapes of interviews with Scott and Welborn. Members of the girls' families, who were hearing certain gruesome details for the first time, wept during the reading of Scott's confession and later when they heard him give his version of their girls' terrifying last minutes. Both Welborn and Pierce—enemies since the latter had accused the former of murder—sat stone-faced at the defense table with their attorneys. Welborn, with long black hair and a mustache, stared straight ahead. Pierce, a crew-cut blond with a big-boned face, occasionally looked down. According to Mike Scott's written confession, as well as his interrogations as characterized in the testimony of several Austin detectives, Maurice Pierce said he needed money, and he and Robert Springsteen agreed that robbing a place would be the easiest way to get it. They cased the yogurt shop while it was still open, leaving the back door ajar, and returned after closing time. Welborn stayed in the car while the other three entered through the back door. Pierce had a .22 pistol and Springsteen a .380. The boys didn't know there would be two other girls there, sitting in the front of the shop. That was unfortunate because Pierce had said before going in that there weren't going to be any witnesses. In Scott's account, Springsteen made the girls strip and Scott helped bind them with their clothes, and it was Pierce who went crazy when he found only $12 or $14 in the register. He screamed at the girls, "Where the f— is the rest of the money?" and then shot one and then another of them. Springsteen raped one of the girls and told Scott to do the same. He tried and couldn't but faked it. Scott then shot the girl after either Pierce or Springsteen told him to. Scott also described how Amy had run to the front of the store but had been caught by Springsteen, and he knew that Amy had been shot twice. After all four were dead, Scott stacked three bodies in the back of the shop, put napkins and cups on them, and set them on fire with lighter fluid. He said that when he, Pierce, and Springsteen went out to the car, Welborn wasn't there, but they picked him up in the parking lot. The whole thing lasted 20 to 25 minutes. Afterward they drove to a bridge about ten or fifteen minutes away, where Scott got rid of a knife he had capriciously taken from the store, and someone, possibly Springsteen, pitched a gun. Over the weekend the four went to San Antonio in a stolen gold Jeep. (Welborn had also spoken of a car theft in 1991, although in his version, the vehicle was a gold Nissan Pathfinder.)
According to Detective Merrill, Springsteen's story corroborated many of Scott's details: Pierce as the boss (he called himself the action man); Welborn as the lookout; Springsteen propping open the back door with a package of cigarettes; Scott trying but failing to have sex with one of the girls. Springsteen said he had raped and shot one of the girls on Pierce's orders and that later, at the bridge, Pierce tossed a gun into the river.
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