Then he told about the Mexican nationals and the six written confessions, the 240 witnesses, the 203 affidavits and the 159 apartments they’d searched, the moving violation citations they’d gone through, the people in black, the witches and Satanists. But what got him in trouble with his boss was getting too close to the families of the victims, especially after he okayed that letter they wrote to the Mexican attorney general.
As for the harsh criticism he, Huck and the others received for their conduct at the crime scene and collecting the evidence, he defended himself and all the agencies that worked with him that night by saying, “Look. Back then we called the DPS evidence-collecting unit the ‘fingerprint team.’ That’s what they had in 1991. But in fact, everybody did their job.” Might not have been perfect. But they did their job.
When an official held up a ten-minute warning sign, Jones mentioned his attire. He’d decided to wear his tux this morning, he said, admitting that he did have a flair for the dramatic. “But I hate jackets,” he said, removing his coat, folding it carefully and setting it aside. “This is me,” he said, holding his arms out. “Bow tie, suspenders, white T-shirt, no sleeves.” Beneath the jacket his arms were bare. “I brought out the guns,” he said later, laughing.
He ended on a final note about the effect of PTSD on a human being, whether a police officer or a soldier. “Damage,” he said. “Damage, damage, damage.”
And when someone asked if he thought those four guys were guilty, he said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
It wasn’t a great talk, but it pretty much summed up the effect of Yogurt Shop on every single person involved in the case in any way. Nobody escaped unscathed: not cops, firefighters, FBI and BATF agents, lawyers, the judge, the families and friends of the girls, other ICBY employees, customers….
Carlos Garcia agrees. “Of course he has PTSD,” he says. “Everybody who was at the crime scene has it, him probably the worst.”
As I made my way out of the hotel, a conferee sidelined me and asked why I was leaving. Wasn’t I going to the body farm?
I’d read about the impending TCPA trip to Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, where donor bodies are allowed to decompose in various conditions of climate and topography.
I said I had to get home.
Oh, she said, she wouldn’t miss it for anything.
2015
Austin’s population is up to around a million today, give or take, about twice the size it was in 1991. We have high-rises downtown, gridlock during rush hour and a light-rail system. Statistics say sixty-five people move here every day, a figure that keeps going up along with the real estate values. A beautiful white-stone boardwalk is connected to the Lady Bird Johnson hike-and-bike trail, allowing us to walk the full ten miles around the lake bearing that great lady’s name. In a city of festivals, we can choose from South by Southwest’s Film and Interactive festivals, followed by its Music Festival, the Fusebox Festival, the Austin City Limits Festival, the Texas Book Festival, the Republic of Texas Motorcycle Rally, the Reggae Festival, the Art Outside Festival, the Fun Fun Fun and Frontera fests, and the newest—the Formula 1 Grand Prix—which is attended mostly by Europeans and South Americans. There are triathalons, marathons, dog parades. Eeyore’s Birthday Party doesn’t attract the crowds it used to, but it’s still on the calendar. In my neighborhood, an outdoor venue called Festival Beach hosts weekend celebrations—without an actual beach—whose themes include Celtic and Pachanga music, raw food and, when summertime temperatures reach into the three digits, a Hot Sauce Festival.
Some of us wonder how long the city can support the weight of all those visitors and new citizens, and we’re swallowing up towns in every direction. I didn’t grow up here, go to UT or live here during the glory days of the Armadillo World Headquarters and Janis Joplin, but a friend who did, and now lives in Baltimore, said, “I’d move back to Austin, but I don’t like what’s happening here.” And I had to wonder, compared to what—Baltimore? And when I asked another friend who lived here then if he felt nostalgic, he said, “Why wouldn’t I? It was fabulous!”
Some things remain the same. Except for the debilitating heat in July and August, outdoor life couldn’t be better, swimming especially. Houstonians still sniff at what they consider our local self-obsession and the absence of world-class cultural institutions, but here we are, still emerging. We aren’t big enough to have a professional sports team, so many of those who yearn for that either travel to San Antonio or root for the Longhorns. Casual dress is an art form, and we’re competing with Portland, Oregon, to be the most tattooed and pierced, dog-friendly and proudly weird city in the country.
2016
Maria Thomas died abruptly, if not unexpectedly, last spring, but the family managed to keep the manner of her passing under wraps, and I didn’t find out about it for months. Barbara Ayres-Wilson was with Maria in her last days and helped her daughter Sonora make funeral arrangements. The Statesman’s obituary was brief, and few people involved in Yogurt Shop seemed to have read it, but two members of the DA’s staff did attend the funeral, and one of them approached Barbara afterward to say he hoped they’d done right by the girls and their families.
Barbara and her husband, Manley, run an on-call legal protection business out of their home in Kyle, one of those small towns being quickly swallowed up by Greater Austin. She also spends a lot of time with two step-grandbabies, twin girls who, because one is chubby and one tiny, remind her of Sarah and Jennifer.
Bob and Pam Ayers live and work west of Austin. They mostly keep to themselves, although if anything broke in the case, Bob would surely be the first parent to show up.
Sidney Lanier High School has installed sturdy pens, troughs and other amenities for the use of FFA members. The ag farm visited by Jennifer, Sarah and Eliza on the morning of December 6, 1991, is now an open, weedy field.
Divorced in 2015, Michael and Jeannine Scott live far apart: Mike in Florida, where he works for a structural steel company; Jeannine in Iowa with Jasmine. Their parting, according to Jeannine, was not friendly. All Mike will say about that stuff back there is he had nothing to do with it, and if anybody wants to know anything else or ask him to participate in the innocence thing, they should talk to his lawyer, Tony Diaz.
Broadus Spivey and his three colleagues—Jim Hackney, Amber Farrelly and retired judge Charlie Baird—await word from the Third Court of Appeals regarding their April oral argument, asking that Robert Springsteen be given the day in court they maintain he deserves. Because the law doesn’t specifically cover Rob’s situation, they are arguing for a novel approach, in which their client would present his case—including the DNA evidence that disproves his confession about raping Amy Ayers—before a civil judge, who would then rule on the validity of his appeal. Two staff members from Rose Lehmberg’s office argued fiercely against Spivey’s position, accusing his team of making an “end run around the law.” In response, Spivey said prosecutors are stonewalling because “they don’t want to admit they screwed up.” He also believes Springsteen’s appeal could open an avenue for others struggling to establish their innocence. “All these people need,” he told a television reporter, “is some forum in which to test whether they are innocent or not, otherwise they’re in limbo.” If granted, Springsteen would become eligible for more than $700,000, in addition to the other benefits; if not, Spivey plans to present his argument before the Texas Supreme Court.
Remarried, Springsteen still lives in West Virginia. On the Sunday before his case came before the Third Court, the Statesman ran the story on the front page. Headlined SUSPECT IN YOGURT SHOP KILLINGS: CLEAR MY NAME, the report rehashed the entire saga and featured a number of photographs, including the ones taken of the four suspects after their 1999 arrests and another of a man on a ladder putting up the original WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? billboard. Most online comments to the story lambasted Springsteen for daring to make his appeal since he was obviously guilty. A few we
eks later, Broadus Spivey received a handwritten letter from a woman in Walla Walla, Washington, naming the Yogurt Shop killers and warning him to watch his back because the two men were contract killers who also liked to commit “recreational murder.” Soon after that, John Jones received a call from a relative of Amy Ayers saying she wanted to fight Springsteen’s suit.
And so the controversy and the intransigent position-taking rock on. And on.
On his current Facebook page, Forrest Welborn lists Austin as his home and Patriot Fence Company as his employer. He has bulked up significantly in the six years since his 48 Hours interview with Erin Moriarty and has shaved his head and grown a thick goatee. His profile photo shows him looking straight into the camera lens, frowning, his eyes in an angry squint. When one of his friends asks why he looks so mad when he’s alive and should be happy, Forrest replies, “That’s me smiling.” In June, Forrest agreed to talk with me about his current life and the effects of Yogurt Shop, but didn’t show up for the meeting. His lawyer, Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez, wasn’t surprised. He said it was really hard to get Forrest to talk about this case, and besides, he thought they’d proved out his client’s innocence during the cert hearings, so no wonder.
Though retired, Jeanne Meurer and Mike Lynch maintain a connection with the Travis County court system as visiting judges. In 2014, Lynch wrote the blueprint for an overhaul of the county indigent criminal defense system, resulting in the creation of the Capital Area Private Defender Service, a carefully structured organization whose job is to select and appoint counsel for criminal defendants who can’t afford to pay for an attorney. This is something he’s thought about for a long time, feeling that, in his experience, defendants often became convinced that judges selected lawyers who’d get the work done quickly by agreeing to a plea deal, thereby moving the docket along. He’s proud of having made this happen. “It isn’t easy to convince judges to give up anything,” he says now, but eventually most of them went along. They still get to appoint counsel in capital cases. Lynch also works in the public school system, helping teenage kids learn about the law. So he’s busy.
After her arrest on a shocking DWI charge—the videotape of which quickly reached the Internet—as part of her plea agreement, Rosemary Lehmberg agreed to step down in November, when she will be replaced.
John Jones applied for a job as Cap Metro’s head of security, but the job went to an applicant from Arizona. “Hmmm,” Jones murmured in mock contemplation. “Isn’t Arizona the state that refused to honor Martin Luther King Day?”
Carlos Garcia—who’s returned to private practice—says every time he looks at his ICBY hard files, he thinks about burning them, just to get them out of his life. “But,” he says and shrugs, “I’ve digitized them all so I’d still have them.” He’s back on the short list of capital case–certified attorneys and is working on two, in one of which the DA is asking for death.
Tony Diaz speaks often to Michael Scott and regrets not pursuing a civil case against the state. He fights back tears when recalling how Mike looked during his incarceration in county jail—handcuffed and hopeful—and says Jeannine Scott is his “hero” for refusing, ever, to back down from her belief in her husband’s innocence.
Sawyer’s still on the short list as well, but he’s less inclined to take on a capital case these days, partly because they take so much time and also because they’re just so personally intense and difficult. He’s become friendly enough with Efrain de la Fuente to ask about Yogurt Shop. “Oh,” he says de la Fuente replied. “That’s all over.”
In addition, Amber Farrelly swears that, walking into the courthouse one afternoon, she passed two guys struggling with a flat roller-cart stacked with banker’s boxes marked “YSM,” with the Scott and Springsteen case numbers. “The famous thirty-three boxes,” she says. She wasn’t in the courthouse long, but when she came out, the guys were still wrestling with the boxes and loading them into a van. She called Alexandra Gauthier—now a magistrate judge in Williamson County—who said the boxes were probably heading for storage.
Two defense lawyers, friends of Ronnie Earle, say the retired DA has told them in confidence that he doesn’t think the four guys they arrested for Yogurt Shop were the real killers. That being the case, we have to wonder, why doesn’t he say so publicly? Broadus Spivey has assured the courts that his plan does not preclude Springsteen’s future arrest, but we also have to wonder if the state is really planning ever to charge him and Michael Scott again. Or will the thirty-three boxes gather dust in some dark basement from now on?
As of mid-2016, we have no answers to those questions, and we still don’t know who killed those girls.
Over lunch one day, I asked John Jones if he thought we ever would.
Like most cops, he’s a confirmed skeptic. So his answer surprised me.
“Oh, yeah,” he said with a little shrug, “we’ll know. Someday.”
Epilogue
There are several ways to look at it. It was Maurice Pierce, after all, who set the ball rolling when he showed up at Northcross Mall with a loaded .22 pistol in his waistband and sixteen rounds of ammunition in his jeans pocket, then told Hector Polanco that his friend Forrest Welborn had borrowed the gun and might have used it to kill the yogurt girls. And when the cop asked Maurice what he’d been up to on the night of the murders, he said hanging out with his friends Forrest, Rob Springsteen and Mike Scott. So there they were, the four guys.
If Maurice hadn’t pulled that prank, who knows? Paul Johnson might have found somebody else in the tips file to pursue and this whole story might have gone off in a completely different direction. But Maurice was Maurice, and that’s pretty much all there is to say about what he did and why he did it.
—
On Friday, December 23, 2010, he was living part-time in Austin with his sister, Renee Reyna, and part-time in Lewisville with his wife, Kimberli, and daughter, Marisa, who’d graduated from high school the previous June and was almost nine months pregnant with his first grandchild. In the spring, he’d face a felony charge for assaulting the Plano police officer. One reason he was commuting was that people in Collin County now knew who he was, which made jobs even harder to come by than before; also, he and Kimberli were having problems. So when one of her relatives offered him work in his Austin landscaping business, Maurice moved in with Renee.
They’d closed early that day because of the Christmas holiday, and then he’d gone out to have some drinks with friends. He was heading back to his sister’s—the same house where the task force Tasered him in 2007—to spend the night before driving home the next morning to spend Christmas with his daughter.
Marisa said she and her father spoke on their cell phones every night, and that night was no different from any other. Maurice was talking away when, at about 10:54, he exited Highway 183 and turned into Renee’s neighborhood on Parmer Lane. Most of the medium-size ranch-style houses had several big cars or pickup trucks parked in their driveways. When Maurice got to the stop sign at Shreveport and Carrera, the streets were empty and so, slightly zonked, talking to Marisa, he slid right through.
Who could have predicted that two cops would be staked out in the next block, watching for speeders? Who would have believed this coincidence, if that’s what it was? In fact, we might wonder why cops were patrolling a dark, quiet neighborhood in northwest Austin that late, only two nights before Christmas. When the story broke the next day, newspaper and television reporters would refer to the neighborhood as Metric. A couple of young people I know told me that drug dealers had moved to Metric because it was safe and out of the way. Maybe that was why a seasoned five-year veteran, Frank Wilson, had chosen that particular neighborhood as a training ground for his partner, Bradley Smith.
According to the incident report, when a black SUV ran that stop sign, the cops turned on their flashers. Later, Renee’s husband will say he actually saw the whirling lights from their living room window. Because Maurice was due back at any minute and was al
ways getting in trouble, he wondered if it was happening again. When investigators listened to Marisa Pierce’s cell-phone conversation with her father, they reportedly heard Maurice say he was almost home and then noted a change in his voice. “They’re after me again,” he told his daughter.
“And then,” Marisa said later, “he told me he loved me and that he would never see me again.” Maurice kept going for a couple of blocks before pulling over. Wilson and Smith pulled up behind him.
The press will refer to this as a “routine traffic stop,” but as John Jones often says, no police work is routine unless you’re sitting at a desk doing paperwork. Once you’re on the street, anything can happen.
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