The 48 Hours episode ‘Innocence Lost’ investigates the 1991 murder of four teenage girls – Amy Ayers, 13, Eliza Thomas, 17, and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, 15 and 18. Their bodies were found inside an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt store in a shopping mall in suburban Austin, Texas after the store had been set on fire. The bodies were found tied, stripped down, and stacked. Each victim had been shot in the head. In 1999, the Austin Police Department arrested four young men and charged them with capital murder. In 2009, after requesting DNA tests, the two young men who confessed and were convicted of the murders, Michael James Scott and Robert Burns Springsteen were released from jail. Their DNA did not match the DNA found in evidence from the crime scene. The killer(s) is still at large.
Wikipedia reports that more than 50 people confessed to the murders. Whether that figure is accurate, Austin police clearly heard confessions from more people than could have actually been involved in the murders. (A not so unusual circumstance.) One of those who confessed was Texas serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff aka the Broomstick Murderer. McDuff confessed to the teen yogurt shop murders on the day of his execution in 1998 (most of his victims were teenagers). 48 Hours airs Saturdays at 9pm and 10pm on CBS.
