Getting Away With Murder: 15 Chilling Cold Cases That Will Make You Think Twice About Going Outside
Despite a decline in the number of murders in the United States since the 1960s, thousands go unsolved each year.
As of 2013, the solve rate was at an all-time low at only 65 percent of the total committed.
The 15 murders profiled in this book were committed between 1958 and 2014. The oldest of the set involves the bizarre murder of Pearl Eaton, one of the famous Ziegfeld Follies Girls of the 1920s. From the beginning, the crime had no leads or suspects and remains among the coldest of the 15 unsolved crimes.
The most recent – the murder of four members of the McStay family found buried in the California desert in November 2013 – is under active investigation.
As of 2013, the solve rate was at an all-time low at only 65 percent of the total committed.
The 15 murders profiled in this book were committed between 1958 and 2014. The oldest of the set involves the bizarre murder of Pearl Eaton, one of the famous Ziegfeld Follies Girls of the 1920s. From the beginning, the crime had no leads or suspects and remains among the coldest of the 15 unsolved crimes.
The most recent – the murder of four members of the McStay family found buried in the California desert in November 2013 – is under active investigation.
Buy Now!
|
|
|
|
Excerpt
1991 Austin Yogurt Shop Murders
At about 11 P.M. on the night of December 6, 1991, four teenage girls were closing a yogurt shop in north Austin, Texas. Shortly before midnight, the Austin Fire Department responded to a fire at the same location. Fire and police officials thinking they were responding to a structural fire were horrified to discover the bodies of the four teens among the rubble. The first police officer to enter the building described the scene as wholesale carnage. Twenty-three years later, no one is in prison for the crime.
Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both age 17, worked in the I Can’t Believe it is Yogurt! shop located in a strip mall at 2949 West Anderson Lane in Austin, Texas. Jennifer’s sister Sarah Harbison, age 15, and a 13-year-old friend Amy Ayers, joined the two girls at the shop on the night of December 6, 1991, to help with closing. All four girls were later described by family, friends, and school officials as wholesome, full of life, and popular with their classmates.
Sometime after closing, one or more assailants shot three of the teens in the back of the head once and the fourth girl twice. Both .22 and .380 caliber weapons were used. The fourth girl was also strangled and one, perhaps two, of the teens was sexually assaulted. All four girls were stripped of their clothes and bound and gagged with them. Three of the bodies were piled on top of one another in the back room of the shop. The youngest teen tried to escape and was killed near the front door and the empty cash drawer was found next to her body. The front door still had the key in the lock – a detail that required first responders to break down the door.
To eliminate any witnesses and cover up the crime – which may have started out as a robbery – the assailants piled Styrofoam cups on the bodies, poured lighter fluid on them, and set the store on fire. A patrolling police officer notified the Fire Department at 11:47 P.M. When the wristwatch was later removed from Jennifer Harbison’s arm, the time read 11:48.
The coroner determined that all four girls were dead before the fire was started and each had extensive burns. Even though they were all shot in the back of the head execution style, they were all four found lying face up on the yogurt shop’s floor.
Eyewitnesses and customers from the night of the crime were able to offer clues to the last few hours in the yogurt shop. Among them was a former police officer and security company owner who noticed a tall, thin, young man in a green camouflage jacket. Acting oddly, the man went to the back of the store to use the restroom but never returned. Suspicious, the security company owner later told police he feared the man had waited until the store was closed and the front door locked and then let in an accomplice through the back door. The man in the green jacket was never identified.
Just before 11 P.M., a married couple noticed two men sitting in one of the yogurt shop’s booths. In their account, the couple stated the men were acting strangely and made them uncomfortable, much like the account of the man in the green jacket. When the couple left the shop, the two men were still there watching the girls as they filled empty napkin containers and turned empty chairs upside down on the tables. Even though the fire destroyed most of the shop’s interior, crime scene photos clearly reveal the booth described by the couple. The napkin container was still empty and there were no chairs placed on the table of that one booth. The two men could not be located.
Over the years, there was a long list of suspects. For unclear reasons, more than 50 people, mostly teens, confessed to the crime and hundreds more were interviewed. Within the first 2 weeks, there were 25 possible leads. These included a teenaged girl and her boyfriend who confessed, but ultimately knew no accurate details of the crime; a group of suspected drug dealers found through a 911 tip, but with airtight alibis; and two men previously suspected of murdering two Austin convenience store clerks. Each lead was investigated, but all were dead ends.
At times, the Austin police were convinced that an arrest was imminent, at other times, there were no viable leads, and the case was cold. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, generated a profile of the killers – white males, age 17 to 28; emotionally immature and easily angered – and 20 large billboards donated by local businesses were erected all over the city. The billboards displayed photographs of each girl and offered a reward, which over time rose from $25,000 to $100,000. Although the billboards generated more than 2,000 tips, the reward went unclaimed. An artist’s sketch of a man frequently seen parked in a car outside the yogurt shop also was distributed to the public, but provided no new leads. The crime also received national attention when it was the subject of episodes of 48 Hours (March 1992) and America’s Most Wanted (August 1992).
In the Spring of 1993, the Austin police added six new officers to the original 12-man task force investigating the murders. With no new leads, the additional staff cleared a backlog of several thousand tips before the task force disbanded. Two homicide detectives stayed on to monitor the investigation and an FBI agent, an Austin arson investigator, and an agent from the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms continued on full time.
By December 1993, the door to the yogurt shopped had been bricked over and the windows darkened and reinforced. The space was eventually converted for other retail purposes and is no longer recognizable as the yogurt shop. A bronze marker naming all four of the victims was placed in a grassy area of the strip mall parking lot.
Over 2,500 people attended the joint memorial service for the four girls. Three of the teens – Jennifer, Sarah, and Amy – were buried next to each other and a memorial bench placed at the gravesite.
In late 1992, three Mexican nationals charged in the kidnapping and rape of a woman outside an Austin nightclub were questioned in the yogurt shop murders and one even confessed to the crime. Two of the men later recanted their accounts saying they were forced to make false statements and all three men were eventually removed from the suspect list and never charged in the crime.
Kenneth Allen McDuff, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1998 for a series of brutal crimes between 1965 and 1992, was questioned repeatedly about the yogurt shop killings, but denied any involvement. An unnamed source told an Austin television station that McDuff confessed to the yogurt shop murders on the day he was executed, but investigators said key details of the crime were incorrect and they did not believe the confession. Given his long violent history, including the kidnapping and murder of three teens in Fort Worth, McDuff likely had the answers to numerous unsolved crimes, but took that information to his death.
The last of the viable suspects were four men who were arrested in 1999. At the time of the crime, all four were teens and two were juveniles. Michael James Scott (25), Forrest Welborn (23), and Maurice Earl Pierce (24) were arrested in Texas; Robert Burns Springsteen (24) was arrested and extradited from West Virginia. Information leading to the arrests originated with a 1997 interview with Pierce, who was caught with a .22-caliber pistol in a shopping mall a few days after the killings. Pierce told the police that it was the weapon used in the yogurt shop murders, but that Welborn had the gun at the time. After several interviews, police determined that both were lying and no charges were filed.
The interrogation of Pierce and Welborn eventually led to the questioning of Springsteen and Scott, both of whom confessed to the crime but also implicated Pierce and Welborn. All four were arrested in October (1999) and charged with capital murder. After 8 years without any solid suspects, the residents of Austin thought the police had finally caught the killers. At trial, the prosecuting attorney insisted that Springsteen entered the store earlier in the evening and fixed the rear door lock so that his accomplices could enter later for a robbery. When the men discovered four teens at closing instead of two, they murdered the four girls and tried to cover up the crime by burning down the building.
Between 1999 and 2009, cases against each of the four men were repeatedly in and out of court. Both Welborn and Pierce were juveniles at the time of the crime and there was a court battle over whether to try them as adults. While that was taking place, Grand Juries twice refused to indict Welborn, who was accused of being a lookout and the getaway driver. Pierce insisted on his innocence admitting only to being with the other three the night after the crime. Based on a lack of evidence, all charges against Welborn were eventually dropped in June 2000.
Because he was a juvenile at the time of the murders, Pierce faced life in prison. Having only a minor arrest record prior to the murders and with no hard evidence to hold him, all charges were dropped in January 2003. Pierce remained haunted by the experience. Even though he had been exonerated, the police continued to consider him a prime suspect and family members later commented that Pierce feared he would eventually be rearrested for the crime. On the night of December 23, 2010, Pierce reportedly ran a stop sign and when Austin police officers attempted to stop him, he pulled the car to the side of the road and fled on foot. An altercation subsequently occurred and Pierce reportedly grabbed a knife from one of the officer’s belts and stabbed him in the throat. The officer survived, but managed to fire a single shot that fatally killed Pierce.
The District Attorney’s office asked for the death penalty for Springsteen and Scott arguing that the two men knew details of the crime that only the killers would know. Defense attorneys argued that the police coerced Springsteen and Scott into their confessions and a photograph surfaced of an Austin police detective holding a gun to Scott’s head in an interrogation room. Although the District Attorney vigorously denied the charge, the detective was eventually fired.
In 2001, Springsteen was convicted of capital murder and given the death penalty. In 2005, his sentence was commuted to life in prison after the Supreme Court ruled that executing juvenile killers was unconstitutional. In 2008, Springsteen was granted a new trial by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the basis that he had been unfairly convicted. Using the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as a basis for the argument, Springfield’s attorney argued that he had been convicted using a written statement from his co-defendant Scott. The Texas court ruled that Springsteen had been denied the constitutional right to confront his accuser.
Scott was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 during a separate trial. As with Springsteen’s case, Scott’s attorney argued that Springsteen’s confession helped to convict Scott and Scott’s confession helped to convict Springsteen, but neither was afforded their Constitutional right to confront the other. In June 2009, both convictions were overturned on this technicality and Scott and Springsteen were released on bond. Prosecutors vowed to retry both.
Complicating a potential retrial of the remaining two suspects, FBI ballistics tests showed that the handgun owned by Pierce was not the murder weapon. The second weapon – a .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol believed to have been owned by Springsteen – was never found. Most significantly, DNA samples taken from the murder scene were tested in 2008 and found to be from two, possibly three, unknown males. None matched any of the four suspects. Defense attorneys argued that the DNA belonged to the real killers and proved that the confessions had been coerced. Prosecuting attorneys argued the DNA samples were either contaminated and/or that the four original suspects were aided by additional accomplices.
In February 2013, Defense Attorneys for Scott and Springsteen requested DNA testing of alternative suspects to look for matches to the unidentified male samples found at the crime scene. The testing would include serial killer Kenneth McDuff, who was executed in 1998. Additional DNA tests for the alternative suspects have not yet been conducted.
Based on the ballistics tests and the lack of a DNA match to either Springsteen or Scott, the District Attorney dismissed all charges against the two men on October 28, 2009. Despite a complete lack of evidence from the crime scene, as of 2014, Scott and Springsteen continue to be prime suspects in the yogurt shop murders. Although their convictions have been overturned, the Court did not issue a judicial declaration of innocence. As a result, they are not eligible for restitution for the years they were wrongfully incarcerated. Springsteen is actively pursuing his innocence and, ultimately, restitution in the Texas Civil Court system.
At about 11 P.M. on the night of December 6, 1991, four teenage girls were closing a yogurt shop in north Austin, Texas. Shortly before midnight, the Austin Fire Department responded to a fire at the same location. Fire and police officials thinking they were responding to a structural fire were horrified to discover the bodies of the four teens among the rubble. The first police officer to enter the building described the scene as wholesale carnage. Twenty-three years later, no one is in prison for the crime.
Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both age 17, worked in the I Can’t Believe it is Yogurt! shop located in a strip mall at 2949 West Anderson Lane in Austin, Texas. Jennifer’s sister Sarah Harbison, age 15, and a 13-year-old friend Amy Ayers, joined the two girls at the shop on the night of December 6, 1991, to help with closing. All four girls were later described by family, friends, and school officials as wholesome, full of life, and popular with their classmates.
Sometime after closing, one or more assailants shot three of the teens in the back of the head once and the fourth girl twice. Both .22 and .380 caliber weapons were used. The fourth girl was also strangled and one, perhaps two, of the teens was sexually assaulted. All four girls were stripped of their clothes and bound and gagged with them. Three of the bodies were piled on top of one another in the back room of the shop. The youngest teen tried to escape and was killed near the front door and the empty cash drawer was found next to her body. The front door still had the key in the lock – a detail that required first responders to break down the door.
To eliminate any witnesses and cover up the crime – which may have started out as a robbery – the assailants piled Styrofoam cups on the bodies, poured lighter fluid on them, and set the store on fire. A patrolling police officer notified the Fire Department at 11:47 P.M. When the wristwatch was later removed from Jennifer Harbison’s arm, the time read 11:48.
The coroner determined that all four girls were dead before the fire was started and each had extensive burns. Even though they were all shot in the back of the head execution style, they were all four found lying face up on the yogurt shop’s floor.
Eyewitnesses and customers from the night of the crime were able to offer clues to the last few hours in the yogurt shop. Among them was a former police officer and security company owner who noticed a tall, thin, young man in a green camouflage jacket. Acting oddly, the man went to the back of the store to use the restroom but never returned. Suspicious, the security company owner later told police he feared the man had waited until the store was closed and the front door locked and then let in an accomplice through the back door. The man in the green jacket was never identified.
Just before 11 P.M., a married couple noticed two men sitting in one of the yogurt shop’s booths. In their account, the couple stated the men were acting strangely and made them uncomfortable, much like the account of the man in the green jacket. When the couple left the shop, the two men were still there watching the girls as they filled empty napkin containers and turned empty chairs upside down on the tables. Even though the fire destroyed most of the shop’s interior, crime scene photos clearly reveal the booth described by the couple. The napkin container was still empty and there were no chairs placed on the table of that one booth. The two men could not be located.
Over the years, there was a long list of suspects. For unclear reasons, more than 50 people, mostly teens, confessed to the crime and hundreds more were interviewed. Within the first 2 weeks, there were 25 possible leads. These included a teenaged girl and her boyfriend who confessed, but ultimately knew no accurate details of the crime; a group of suspected drug dealers found through a 911 tip, but with airtight alibis; and two men previously suspected of murdering two Austin convenience store clerks. Each lead was investigated, but all were dead ends.
At times, the Austin police were convinced that an arrest was imminent, at other times, there were no viable leads, and the case was cold. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, generated a profile of the killers – white males, age 17 to 28; emotionally immature and easily angered – and 20 large billboards donated by local businesses were erected all over the city. The billboards displayed photographs of each girl and offered a reward, which over time rose from $25,000 to $100,000. Although the billboards generated more than 2,000 tips, the reward went unclaimed. An artist’s sketch of a man frequently seen parked in a car outside the yogurt shop also was distributed to the public, but provided no new leads. The crime also received national attention when it was the subject of episodes of 48 Hours (March 1992) and America’s Most Wanted (August 1992).
In the Spring of 1993, the Austin police added six new officers to the original 12-man task force investigating the murders. With no new leads, the additional staff cleared a backlog of several thousand tips before the task force disbanded. Two homicide detectives stayed on to monitor the investigation and an FBI agent, an Austin arson investigator, and an agent from the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms continued on full time.
By December 1993, the door to the yogurt shopped had been bricked over and the windows darkened and reinforced. The space was eventually converted for other retail purposes and is no longer recognizable as the yogurt shop. A bronze marker naming all four of the victims was placed in a grassy area of the strip mall parking lot.
Over 2,500 people attended the joint memorial service for the four girls. Three of the teens – Jennifer, Sarah, and Amy – were buried next to each other and a memorial bench placed at the gravesite.
In late 1992, three Mexican nationals charged in the kidnapping and rape of a woman outside an Austin nightclub were questioned in the yogurt shop murders and one even confessed to the crime. Two of the men later recanted their accounts saying they were forced to make false statements and all three men were eventually removed from the suspect list and never charged in the crime.
Kenneth Allen McDuff, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1998 for a series of brutal crimes between 1965 and 1992, was questioned repeatedly about the yogurt shop killings, but denied any involvement. An unnamed source told an Austin television station that McDuff confessed to the yogurt shop murders on the day he was executed, but investigators said key details of the crime were incorrect and they did not believe the confession. Given his long violent history, including the kidnapping and murder of three teens in Fort Worth, McDuff likely had the answers to numerous unsolved crimes, but took that information to his death.
The last of the viable suspects were four men who were arrested in 1999. At the time of the crime, all four were teens and two were juveniles. Michael James Scott (25), Forrest Welborn (23), and Maurice Earl Pierce (24) were arrested in Texas; Robert Burns Springsteen (24) was arrested and extradited from West Virginia. Information leading to the arrests originated with a 1997 interview with Pierce, who was caught with a .22-caliber pistol in a shopping mall a few days after the killings. Pierce told the police that it was the weapon used in the yogurt shop murders, but that Welborn had the gun at the time. After several interviews, police determined that both were lying and no charges were filed.
The interrogation of Pierce and Welborn eventually led to the questioning of Springsteen and Scott, both of whom confessed to the crime but also implicated Pierce and Welborn. All four were arrested in October (1999) and charged with capital murder. After 8 years without any solid suspects, the residents of Austin thought the police had finally caught the killers. At trial, the prosecuting attorney insisted that Springsteen entered the store earlier in the evening and fixed the rear door lock so that his accomplices could enter later for a robbery. When the men discovered four teens at closing instead of two, they murdered the four girls and tried to cover up the crime by burning down the building.
Between 1999 and 2009, cases against each of the four men were repeatedly in and out of court. Both Welborn and Pierce were juveniles at the time of the crime and there was a court battle over whether to try them as adults. While that was taking place, Grand Juries twice refused to indict Welborn, who was accused of being a lookout and the getaway driver. Pierce insisted on his innocence admitting only to being with the other three the night after the crime. Based on a lack of evidence, all charges against Welborn were eventually dropped in June 2000.
Because he was a juvenile at the time of the murders, Pierce faced life in prison. Having only a minor arrest record prior to the murders and with no hard evidence to hold him, all charges were dropped in January 2003. Pierce remained haunted by the experience. Even though he had been exonerated, the police continued to consider him a prime suspect and family members later commented that Pierce feared he would eventually be rearrested for the crime. On the night of December 23, 2010, Pierce reportedly ran a stop sign and when Austin police officers attempted to stop him, he pulled the car to the side of the road and fled on foot. An altercation subsequently occurred and Pierce reportedly grabbed a knife from one of the officer’s belts and stabbed him in the throat. The officer survived, but managed to fire a single shot that fatally killed Pierce.
The District Attorney’s office asked for the death penalty for Springsteen and Scott arguing that the two men knew details of the crime that only the killers would know. Defense attorneys argued that the police coerced Springsteen and Scott into their confessions and a photograph surfaced of an Austin police detective holding a gun to Scott’s head in an interrogation room. Although the District Attorney vigorously denied the charge, the detective was eventually fired.
In 2001, Springsteen was convicted of capital murder and given the death penalty. In 2005, his sentence was commuted to life in prison after the Supreme Court ruled that executing juvenile killers was unconstitutional. In 2008, Springsteen was granted a new trial by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the basis that he had been unfairly convicted. Using the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as a basis for the argument, Springfield’s attorney argued that he had been convicted using a written statement from his co-defendant Scott. The Texas court ruled that Springsteen had been denied the constitutional right to confront his accuser.
Scott was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 during a separate trial. As with Springsteen’s case, Scott’s attorney argued that Springsteen’s confession helped to convict Scott and Scott’s confession helped to convict Springsteen, but neither was afforded their Constitutional right to confront the other. In June 2009, both convictions were overturned on this technicality and Scott and Springsteen were released on bond. Prosecutors vowed to retry both.
Complicating a potential retrial of the remaining two suspects, FBI ballistics tests showed that the handgun owned by Pierce was not the murder weapon. The second weapon – a .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol believed to have been owned by Springsteen – was never found. Most significantly, DNA samples taken from the murder scene were tested in 2008 and found to be from two, possibly three, unknown males. None matched any of the four suspects. Defense attorneys argued that the DNA belonged to the real killers and proved that the confessions had been coerced. Prosecuting attorneys argued the DNA samples were either contaminated and/or that the four original suspects were aided by additional accomplices.
In February 2013, Defense Attorneys for Scott and Springsteen requested DNA testing of alternative suspects to look for matches to the unidentified male samples found at the crime scene. The testing would include serial killer Kenneth McDuff, who was executed in 1998. Additional DNA tests for the alternative suspects have not yet been conducted.
Based on the ballistics tests and the lack of a DNA match to either Springsteen or Scott, the District Attorney dismissed all charges against the two men on October 28, 2009. Despite a complete lack of evidence from the crime scene, as of 2014, Scott and Springsteen continue to be prime suspects in the yogurt shop murders. Although their convictions have been overturned, the Court did not issue a judicial declaration of innocence. As a result, they are not eligible for restitution for the years they were wrongfully incarcerated. Springsteen is actively pursuing his innocence and, ultimately, restitution in the Texas Civil Court system.
