Austin Yogurt Shop Pt. Two

comes to finding colorful suspects. But the police started receiving 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, 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.

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 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 to innocent people being railroaded. But in this case, Claire LaVey was just embarrassed rather than falsely in prison.

It was because an Hispanic looking man with long hair 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

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 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.

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, 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, yet there was no evidence to implicate any of them.

like it is today. There wasn't social media, So like, what was going through these two Mexican or Mexican police 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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.

signed a fourteen page confession. But you talked about how 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 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 way for him to confessing.

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.

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 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. 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 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 for the jury.

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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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?

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

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. 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. I'm not going to testify, even though it meant he could have walked right then and there.

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.

just seemed very earnest and genuine. And I mentioned earlier 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 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 release him. So he never did go on trial.

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 evidence was so weak because, unlike his alleged co conspirators, he never confessed, so what evidence was there to place him near the scene.

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 going to bring it to trial. The other guys are more of a slam dunk because they actually.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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 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, so we don't want to put these two on the stand.

from the murderers, but the results were inconclusive. So after they were arrested in May of two thousand, they decided 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 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, 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.

So I think most of the time it goes unnoticed, 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 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.

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.

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 them all together into one that would be a really risky move. That's a gamble. And so I can understand their strategy.

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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

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.

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 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. 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, 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.

But all you're thinking is maybe you should have thought 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.

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 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.