Crime Junkie - WANTED: Austin Yogurt Shop Killer

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

In the early 90's, Austin, TX was turned upside down when four young girls were sexually assaulted, murdered, then set on fire inside an ICBY store. Four men were accused of the crime, but there have always been questions around their guilt. Those questions have only been amplified in recent years as new DNA technology as revealed an unknown perpetrator's DNA at the scene. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/austin-yogurt-shop-murders/    

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And you guys, before we jump in, and I tell you about our case today, does anyone care if I give you like a little mini story before the story? And I'm like, that's totally, yeah, it's a rhetorical question. You guys are Crime Junkies. I don't know if you saw this, Britt, in the news.

There was a girl named Olivia Ambrose who was abducted and her sister. I mean, I think she had an if I go missing folder because her sister was able to find her and save her because she was able to do the find my iPhone and locate her. That's awesome. Even more proof that everyone should have an if I go missing folder. Yes. That's literally like the whole crazy story. She was out one night and there's like video surveillance of her getting

like taken forcefully away by this guy. And police didn't know who this guy was or where she was. And again, I don't know if she actually had an if I go missing folder, but she had a sister who at least knew her information enough that she could track it down. They didn't have to wait for a warrant and they were actually able to go and save her before anything really harmful physically happened to her. And so she is now safe.

She's back with her family. It's an amazing story. And again, a reason everyone should have an if I go missing folder, even if you don't want to use all of the information, like there are some key pieces in there your family should have. So you can always go to our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com to download that free resource. Highly recommend and now today is a special episode

because it was picked for all of you by our patrons on Patreon. I decided to let them choose our next case because I let them pick our Halloween case on Patreon, which we did on a Lisa Lamb. And it has by far been the most popular case we've ever done. People are still talking about it. So clearly they know how to pick good cases. And so I thought I'd let them do it again. And this is the case of the Austin Yogershop murders.

On December 6th, 1991, 17 year old Eliza Thomas got ready for work at her house, putting on her I can't believe it's yogurt uniform and pulling her hair into a scrunchie. When she left to make it on time for her seven o'clock shift, she, nor her family, had any way of knowing that she would never come home. Eliza got to work and was soon met there by her friend, who was a nurse at the time, who was a nurse at the time. Eliza got to work and was soon met there by her friend and co-worker, Jennifer Harbison, who was also 17.

And Eliza had actually helped Jennifer get the job there. And both girls were just trying to make some extra money. They were in high school. They wanted some spending cash, wanted gas money, paid for their cars. So on that night, it was just the two of them working that evening. And their shifts were pretty short. The store actually closed at 11 o'clock. And if they could start cleaning up early, they'd be out of there pretty quickly.

And they were pretty sure tonight would be a breeze, because Jennifer and Eliza had extra help. Jennifer had a younger sister named Sarah, who was 15. And Sarah had been hanging out at the mall, which was just a couple of blocks away with her 13-year-old friend, Amy Ayers. After the mall closed, the two of them went over to the, I can't believe it's yogurt shop, to help Eliza and Jennifer close down. Amy and Sarah stayed in the back since they weren't technically employees

and they weren't in uniform. And I think they just kind of helped put things away, maybe wash some dishes, they had some pizza, and just kind of hung out while Eliza and Jennifer stayed in the front. Now, my first job was actually at an ice cream place, and we would always start the nightly cleanup well before officially closing. And that's what the girls did that night. They started putting up the chairs,

they started wiping down the tables, cleaning out the machines, restocking the napkins, all of it. Jennifer went out into the lobby while Eliza stayed behind the counter to do like the cleaning in the back and ring up the couple of last-minute customers that were flowing in. And we know it was her behind the counter, not just because of witnesses, but it was her register number used to check these people out.

Shortly before closing, a woman enters the shop, and she's actually just picking up some ice cream to take home to her husband. And when she enters, she comes to an abrupt stop. There are only two other customers in the store, and for whatever reason, they make her very uncomfortable. She describes them as two teens who are facing one another as they sit at this table. They aren't eating frozen yogurt or anything at all from what she can see,

but they're focused on some kind of sack in between them. And the boy that she can see, she describes as having darker skin. Darker skin, maybe Hispanic, but maybe he could have just been very tan. But this one guy has his hand in the sack, and he's like rolling something around that sounds like change, or maybe marbles. And she remembers having the urge to ask the girls if they were OK, alone in there with these guys, but the girls seemed fine.

They were chatty, they were happy. So she kind of convinces herself, like a lot of us do, that she's just being paranoid, that she's being crazy. So she decides not to say anything, and she leaves the shop. Later on, there's another couple that comes in. They come in while the girls are doing their pre-closing routine. It's a man and a woman. And when they come in, they notice two guys sitting at a booth,

closest to the cash register. And I kind of want to describe this store to you. So when you walk in, you basically see a row of booths on your left. You see some tables in the middle, and you see a row of booths on your right. And these boys were sitting in the row of booths on the left side, and they were farthest away from the door, but closest to the cash register.

And there's basically this long counter, and then you can go through this doorway into the back room. OK, that makes sense. Right. So the couple says that when they walk in, Jennifer was out in the lobby and cleaning up, just like we said, and Eliza was behind their register. And they didn't even know it at the time, but there were the other two girls in the back.

But again, they said, we didn't see them. We didn't hear them. We had no idea. The couple gets their yogurts and they sit down to eat instead of taking it to go. And the woman said she was kind of eavesdropping on the girls like as they were chatting. And she felt like for whatever reason,

the men were eavesdropping as well, because they weren't really talking to one another. They, as far as she could tell, weren't eating or drinking anything. So she too felt that it was a little bit strange that these men were just sitting here so late without any kind of ice cream. And as the woman is sitting in the booth, now she's sitting in the chair that is facing the outside window. And it's late at night.

It's after 10 30, which means that it's completely dark. And you know how when it's dark, like there's like the reflection you see more than you see outside when all the lights are on. Yeah. Well, she said she remembers looking and she can see the two men almost behind her. And one of the guys has his back to her. And so it's really hard for her to get an idea of what this guy looks like.

And she even says she's just assuming their guys based on like their general form. But the one with his back to her had a padded tan jacket on. And the other one she could kind of see because he was facing the glass as well. And he looked thin with maybe light brown hair. But it was really hard to make out any kind of distinguishing features from that far away, like looking in a glass reflection. Finally, at 10 47, the couple decides that they should probably leave. Like the girls are clearly trying to clean up.

They don't want to be in their way. And so they leave, leaving the two men behind as the only patrons in the restaurant. Now, it was policy for the store that at 10 50, about three minutes after this couple left, that the girls were supposed to lock the door from the inside. This would basically prevent any new customers from coming in, but it would allow the people who are still inside to get out. And we know they did this because later on, the keys would still be found in the lobby door. And we know that they continued with their cleanup routine because almost all the napkin

dispensers had been refilled. Almost all of the chairs were propped up on the table, all except for one. And this is something that to me and many people years and years later stands out. The booth closest to the counter, the one that they were supposed to open, that everyone says they saw two strange men or two strange boys at still had after they came and photographed it later, an empty napkin holder when all of the other napkin holders in the place were full. And it had no chair on the end of the table, like all of the other booths.

And clearly that was because someone was in that booth preventing Jennifer from cleaning it. What happened after 1047 is unknown. Did the girls ask the two men to leave at closing time, prompting the men to like pull a gun on them? Did the men pretend to leave to ease their worries and then slip back in the back door, which was later found propped open? We may never know. All we know is that whatever happened, likely happened at 11.03 PM when Eliza hit the button for no charge sale on their register, which opened the cash register drawer.

This was the triggering incident when the killer or killers took around $500 in cash. But the real thing of value they took were the four lives of those girls in the shop that night. About an hour later, a cop on patrol sees smoke billowing up from the shopping center where the Yogurt Shop is located. He calls it in at 11.48 and the fire department is dispatched. Most of them admitted that foul play wasn't even on their minds when they pulled up. The windows were completely black. Smoke was pouring out of them.

It's very common for businesses to leave stoves on after closing. And they thought that's probably what happened here, like there was a restaurant, the place caught fire, but what they'd eventually realize is that the ICBY didn't have any stoves. The firefighters worked to put out the flames, and later the officer said, you know, had we had known what we were stepping into, we probably would have done it differently. Because when the firefighters went in, there was really no concern for preserving evidence or a crime scene. They just went in to put out a fire.

And, you know, I'm no professional, so I don't know what the difference is. To me, I think you can only put out a fire one way, but maybe there are certain techniques they can use, or maybe it's everybody looking back and just being a little harder on themselves knowing how the case ended up almost 30 years later. But as they moved through the store, fighting off the flames, they could barely see through their masks, but the one thing that caught their eye was a foot. And, Brett, I don't know if this happens to you, but there are certain memories that are like etched in my brain when someone brings something up, like you get that first flash

of something, and the firefighter who found them says that any time he thinks back on the crime scene, or he thinks about this case many, many years later, it's that image that's conjured up in his mind of that single foot, charred black, but distinctly human. And that's when they all realized that they weren't dealing with a normal fire. They saw a second body almost right away, and then a third body, and something about the positioning of the first two, the way the girls were stacked, one on top of the other, naked and bound, they knew that this was going to be a homicide investigation. The homicide detective that was on duty at the time, his name was John Jones, and he ended

up being called to the scene, and it's actually kind of crazy because we have tape of him getting this call that very night, because he was doing a ride along with a news station. They were doing this story on crime in Texas, they'd been in Austin for a couple of days, and really were getting nothing. Austin was still kind of a small town back in 1991, with very little violent crime. And there was even this offhand comment made on the very last day before this call came in, something along the lines of like, you know, you probably won't get a lot for your story here, but at least you're going to Houston the next day, like, that's the big city,

that's where you'll be able to get crime to report on. But little did they know, that night, they would get one of the biggest crimes in Austin, maybe even in Texas history. Here is the call that comes in to Detective Jones. Jonesy? Yeah. Uh, you hear about the call 2900 with Anderson? Yeah, I'm headed over there.

Okay. I'll meet you out there. Wow. 2900. 2900. That's a business. All right. Get on.

Go ahead, Wayne. It's, uh, yeah, I'm in San Diego. I'm going to get on the side of this, uh, here in the tally. That's 10-4. I'm going around. Triple for tally. All right. All right.

All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right.

Triple for tally. I'm murdered. I'm great. No, that's a shopping center. Uh, where do I need to come to in here? What place of business is this? This is the, uh, I can't believe it. We're in the back.

We're somewhere out of the back here at the wall. Uh, I'll try. Can I get around from the south side? There's a fire. I'll stretch across the Anderson line. Before he even arrived on scene, the men at the scene of the crime radio him back and say, make that four bodies. And even with the warning, Detective Jones had no clue what he was about to walk into.

When Detective Jones walked through the yoga shop, still thick with smoke that was filling his lungs, he was horrified at what he saw. The girls had been burned so badly that their bodies had melted and they had become part of the floor that they were found on. They were all found in the back of the store and in most of the retellings of this story, you'll hear it generalized as they were stacked atop one another and then set on fire. But that's not exactly right or it might be right, but we really have no proof and it's kind of speculation at this point.

The way that they were recorded as being found by homicide was Sarah was laying on the floor by the back door. Eliza was laid on top of her and right next to them was Jennifer. And Amy was actually the farthest away, more towards the entrance leading to the front of the store. And it's possible that more than just Sarah and Eliza were stacked and somehow the velocity of the water used possibly like pushed Jennifer off of the others. But it's also possible that Jennifer and Amy were always positioned how they were.

And I think it's safe to say that at least Amy was never in the same area as the other girls because she was the least burned of all of them. Positioned on her stomach or her right side, she was somewhat recognizable. And it was her, the youngest of all of them that gave Detective Jones the first indication that they would later find signs of sexual assault. Even her nude and spread legs was an ice cream scoop pointed up toward her pelvic bone. Before the girls were transported one at a time to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy to be performed, rape kits were performed on the scene.

Now usually this would be like super no, no, like you don't do anything on the scene. All of this is done at the Emmy's office. Protocol was clear on this matter. But the detective in charge was adamant about breaking protocol too much had already been lost due to the fire and the water damage. They could not risk losing any more evidence or contaminating anything by transport. So after a tiff with the Emmy's office, like they kind of got into it, they ended up agreeing and taking rape kits there.

Now I tell you this because by the time the medical examiner's office got the girls, there was so much hostility built up between the Emmy and the detectives. And this could have led to the Emmy not being as thorough as they normally would because they didn't do something that normally is done in every single arson case. They did not swab any of the bodies for accelerant. Now part of the reason that this might have happened, like in addition to the hostility, is because everyone at the scene agreed that they couldn't smell any accelerant on the girls, on the floor where the bodies were found, or on any of the ligatures used to

bind them. But whether everyone agreed or not, standard practices dictated that they should have been swabbed anyways, but they weren't, which is going to play a major factor in the case later. And while we're talking about it, there's a lot that wasn't done, that looking back should have been done. But Austin was not ready for this. Their crime scene tech had only processed maybe one other arson case before this one.

So no one dusted the bathroom for fingerprints. Not everyone on the scene was wearing booties. They didn't keep the lock on the back door to see if maybe it was like tampered with. They didn't save a lot of the materials that were found in the back with the girls. And maybe none of those things would have helped solve the case years later or even at the time. But no one ever know. Exactly.

Ugh. The medical examiner's office was able to confirm that at least some of the girls had been sexually assaulted. They don't ever officially rule out any girls, but I think some of them were so badly burned that nothing could conclusively be saved or collected. The girls had each been shot in the head with a.22. But again, Amy's body was a little different than everyone else's because she had actually been the only one who was shot twice.

Once on the side of the head with the.22, but when that didn't kill her, a second larger caliber weapon, likely a.380, was used to shoot her again. She also had a bruise under her chin indicating that she had been struck and she'd also been strangled before being shot. Again, it's hard to tell if Amy was singled out for some reason or if all of the girls were tortured like this before their death, but their bodies were too burned to show any signs of it. So who would have done this?

This was really a gruesome scene and was it really a robbery gone wrong or were these girls targeted and the $500 or so dollars that were taken was just an afterthought. Neither scenario made sense to investigators. These girls had no enemies, they weren't into anything nefarious, and if the 1103 register opening is any indication, it seemed they put up no fight when handing over the money. So why? Police tried to hold a lot of the crime scene details back in the early days. They didn't want the public to know about Amy's bruises or how many times she'd been

shot or about the ice cream scoop between her legs. They didn't want the public to know where the fire actually started, which according to early reports was like the shelving unit next to Eliza and Sarah and Jennifer. They didn't want to say what was used to buying the girls or how much money was even given. The idea was if they could hold some of these key pieces back, they could weed out false confessions and they'd be able to know if they ever got somebody for this if he was telling the truth by comparing statements to the facts never released to the public.

And this was a nice idea in the beginning, but slowly facts started leaking out. Like for example, someone who worked in the medical examiner's office would gossip with their hairdresser, who would tell their next client about the latest insider news that they heard on the case. And just like that, the news outlets and the public started reporting on things police tried to keep quiet. Not everything, but way more than the police wanted because they again, they did use those facts to weed people out.

As crazy as it is to imagine, they got lots of people who tried to confess to these crimes. But one by one, Detective Jones would realize that their account didn't line up and he would eliminate them from the suspect pool. But the pool of suspects was growing faster than they could even eliminate people. At one point in the investigation, there were over like 350 suspects. But a week into the investigation, one lead really jumped out at investigators. A 16-year-old named Maurice Pierce was arrested at the mall nearby and found with a.22 caliber gun, the exact kind of gun police were looking for in this crime.

When he was questioned about the crime, Maurice started to confess, but not saying that he did it. He fingered a friend of his. He said that a 15-year-old friend named Forrest Wellburn had borrowed the gun that night of the murders and he was the one who killed the girls. Now, this feels huge to investigators. You have a kid with the right kind of weapon saying that he knows who did it. So the next step is to bring in Forrest and see what he has to say about Maurice's statement

the night of the murders. When they talk to him, Forrest swears that he had nothing to do with the crime. He says the night of the murders, he was with Maurice and two other guys, both these 17-year-olds named Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen. And all four of the boys had taken a stolen car to San Antonio, Texas. So not only was Forrest denying this now, but there was little to no details for Maurice that matched the real crime scene. The only thing that tied them to the case was the fact that it looked kind of fishy,

that this Maurice kid had a.22 caliber on him. But when that gun was tested, it turns out that the ballistics didn't match and it wasn't the gun actually used at the crime. So Maurice and the three other boys were just another set of names that Jones scratched off his list. There was eventually a profile made of the perpetrators and it kind of went like this. They said there's at least two men. One of them has a dominant personality.

Obviously these two men are both white and in their late teens to mid-20s. One of these men is the dominant one and the one that really pushed this crime forward. They think that in school he was likely an underachiever. He probably resents discipline. He has an explosive personality. He gets really angry really easily and it's even worse when he's mixing drugs and alcohol. He's just kind of impulsive and explosive. They say that he's likely to get involved in physical confrontation but only when he

has the advantage. And he's probably unemployed or has like a very menial job but has history of changing jobs all the time. He's not super dependable. Likely because of this, he lives with his parents or some kind of older person. They think that this person would have been a frequent patron of the ICP wife, familiar with like the area and the streets, maybe even a resident of that very neighborhood. They think the person would have had a criminal record.

This person could have likely been abusive to women or especially young women. And they think that this person has no remorse about what they did but might be acting strangely because he's super stressed that whoever he did this crime with is going to be like his downfall because maybe that person is feeling some kind of regret. And this confrontation like him being stressed and this other person regretting it might lead to some kind of violent fallout. Their belief is that after this deed was done, they probably went to a secure location and they may have even come back that night to watch police and the firefighters but likely

went away for a while after and probably missed school or work or wherever they were supposed to be. Now, this profile is kind of thorough but unfortunately it wasn't quite specific enough and it really could have been any number of young men in the area. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the traits they described were like, yeah, that sounds like someone who would do this. It's not very, it's so broad, you know? It is.

Yeah, like any kind of... Any kind of violent offender. Who's a young man? Like anyone who's like been in and out of the system. I mean, this again, very, very broad to any troubled young man. And Austin again was small town in the idea that there wasn't a ton of violent crime but it was still a big enough town that you had a very large pool of suspects. Now more weeks would pass turning into months and eventually years.

This case took an immense toll on Jones who eventually had to take a month's leave from the job because he was experiencing PTSD symptoms like linked to the case. It's all he thought about day in, day out, night in day, day in night. His relationship with his family became strange. He would have nightmares about the event. This thing consumed him. And he was really frustrated with his own people, with the police because publicly, they were saying all the right things.

They're saying this case isn't cold, we have active resources working on it. It's of the highest priority for us. But Jones felt like it was a little bit of BS because if it was of the highest priority, why weren't they getting more people assigned to the case? Like they had a group of investigators for like a month or so, but then everyone got pulled off. Eventually Jones would even be pulled off as well after about three years he was promoted to another position.

And it would take nearly eight years after the crime before there would be any new developments in the case. In 1999, an officer named Hector Polanco was the new lead investigator on the Yogarchop cases. And when he looked at the case as a whole, the same thing kept popping out at him, those four boys. In his gut, he felt that they had something to do with the crime and he was going to prove it.

He re-interrogated the boys, pressing them for hours at a time. Maurice and Forrest held firm. They were not involved. But those two 17 year old boys, well 17 at the night, now it's eight years later, these are 26 year old grown men, they were not as strong. When Michael Scott was interviewed, he started by saying he had no idea what happened to those girls and his memory was terrible. But the detectives didn't take that to mean he didn't do it.

They decided it was their job to help him remember what happened. Hour by hour, they break him down, eventually getting him to admit that they had cased the place earlier and he was outside of the shop when everything went down. And he says that it was Maurice and his other friend Robert who were inside. Well a few more hours into the interrogation and then Michael puts himself inside the store holding a gun. At some point in this interview, Michael tells police that he thinks he needs a lawyer but they don't stop questioning him.

That's super illegal, right? Yeah. This comes up later but what the detectives say is he thinks he needs a lawyer, the detectives kind of leave and then they come back and just start questioning him again and he keeps talking. So the police say that they just thought he was thinking about getting a lawyer and not actually asking for one right then. By seven hours into this interview, Michael is now admitting to having the gun and being

the one shooting on Robert's command. At some point, Maurice and his, that revolver, what does he say to you? Either shoot him or you're next. That's what he said. Because I didn't want to do it. Right. Either shoot him or you're next. What do you remember hearing then?

I remember looking at this girl. I cry. I hear Robert saying, do it, do it. I had a gun go off. I only pulled the trigger once. I turn around. Here's your sticker gun. In one of the craziest parts of the interview, one of the investigators brings in a revolver

to air quotes, help Michael remember, and he even jabs something against the back of his head to help him remember. This is like very clearly seems like intimidation. It's scary. You can kind of start to see why maybe somebody would want to confess under these pressures. The investigator says that he just used a finger and it wasn't really the gun, but it's still a terrifying tactic that I'm sure contributed to the confession that they got. They keep pressing Michael for details, those details that they had been holding back that

only the killer would know. Like what were the girls tied with? At first, Michael tries to kind of skirt around it saying that he didn't tie them up. It was Robert, but Polanco is like, no, no, no, it takes more than one person to tie them up. So tell me what you used. So you can tell in the interview, Michael is like trying to reach and trying to come up with something.

So he starts talking. He's like, well, maybe a t-shirt and Polanco is like, okay, yeah, like a t-shirt and what else? And then he's like, I want to say some kind of cord. And Polanco is like, no, it wasn't a cord. What else was it? And they do this for a while where he's like naming things that he could have tied them up with.

And Polanco says, no, try again. He's like, what about napkins? And he says, no, that's not possible. So while he's not telling them what to say, he's very clearly leading him to whatever it is he wants to hear. After 20 hours, they have a confession from Michael. They think they can use and a confession that they truly believe in, I think. So then they try the same techniques on Robert Springsteen.

And he starts much the same swearing that he has nothing to do with it. The problem is, we don't want to argue with you any more truth than I've argued with you and where do we go from here? Why can't you? Because you've already done the hole, the hole is there. I don't know, that's why I keep telling you guys, I mean, my God, this was seven years ago. But this is one of the most significant things that ever happened in your life.

That's why I keep trying to explain to you, if I was there and I partook in this, I would remember these things. And you do remember these things. No, I don't. I do not. You're the coldest guy I've ever talked to in my life. Are you a cold-blooded murderer? No, sir, I'm not.

I think you are. I think Maurice is absolutely true about you. Well, then let's take whatever actions we need to take. If that's what you believe and that's where you think this case needs to go, then let's go there. We don't want to go there. But I'm doing everything I can and have exceeded my limits of helping you guys. Where do we go now?

After hours and hours, they break him down as well until they have him confessing that he killed some of the girls himself. There was no talk of rape until police kept pushing. What else did you do? What else did you do? And he kept saying that he doesn't know. And finally, the detectives get fed up and they're tired of waiting, and he just flat out says, tell me how you raped her.

And Robert, clearly defeated, just says, fine, I stuck my d**k in her d**k. And that is all police needed. Most of Michael and Robert's confession matched, likely because, I think, that they were led by the same guys. But those investigators think they matched because they really did it. With their confessions, Polanco puts together his theory of events. He says that 16-year-old Maurice was the mastermind of this. Robert and Michael were the ones who pulled it off, and Forrest was the lookout.

As word of this theory trickled back to the original Investigator Jones, he didn't believe it. Still doesn't believe it. He had no control over the case anymore, and it was in someone else's hands now. Polanco took his theory to the prosecutors who would evaluate the case against these boys. Ultimately, only two of the four men were taken to trial. Maurice and Forrest had never confessed to the killings.

And because there was no physical evidence, I repeat, no physical evidence linking them to the scene, it would have been a really hard conviction to get. So the prosecutors ended up dismissing all charges against Maurice, citing lack of evidence. And they actually tried a little bit to take Forrest to trial, but after two grand juries wouldn't indict him, they decided to drop the charges against him as well. But with Michael and Robert, they had confessions, and they thought with those, they could get convictions. Because of the confessions, it made it an uphill battle for their defense attorneys.

Though each man had recanted their confession and said they only confessed due to coercion, it was too late, and those confessions would be used against them in court. They were each tried separately, and Michael's confession was used in Robert's trial and vice versa, but they didn't have the actual man come and testify because that would have been a disaster. Like say Michael shows up at Robert's trial, takes a stand, he would have repeated what he's saying in his case, like, hi, my confession was a total lie. We didn't do it.

They just made me say that, and that's not very convincing. So instead of bringing the men into court, they just used their tape confessions from earlier and showed that to the jury, and they didn't actually bring them in, which means that they weren't allowed to actually confront their accuser, which is a pretty unconstitutional thing and is going to come up later in our story. Now the one thing that the defense did try to point out in the trial was that there were parts of their confession that didn't quite match up to the facts in the case. Both men couldn't agree on what they used to prop open the back door, but I think the

most important detail, each man said that the girls were stacked and that they used accelerant to douse the girls and light them on fire. Now in every original report, it said that the fire was started on the shelves near the girls, not actually on the girls. And remember, we said all of the people who were on the scene didn't smell accelerant on the girls or their ligatures or on the floor around them. But after this confession, some experts were brought in and they changed the official ruling years later to say that the girls' bodies were the point of origin of this fire.

Now normally, this would have been something that could easily have been refuted by a defense team once the case went to trial if we would have had those swabs. But remember, for whatever reason, the swabs were not taken in this case. The defense tried to push that the men were forced into confessing, but by the time these men were in court, it's 2001 and the idea of false confessions were still a very foreign idea to the general public, so a jury found it very hard to believe and both men were convicted of the murders. Robert was sentenced to death and Michael was sentenced to life in prison.

Both men would spend years in jail before getting any of their appeals granted. Both men appealed their convictions on the basis of not being able to confront their accuser, which, as I mentioned earlier, is a constitutional right. The higher courts agreed, and in 2006, the Court of Appeals threw out Robert's conviction and Michael's was thrown out one year after in 2007, but even though their convictions were thrown out, they each had to remain in jail while the prosecution decided if they were going to retry the case. In 2008, the defense teams for the men do something bold.

They request to have the evidence retested using all of the new DNA technology that's available. That's brave. If the DNA evidence doesn't come back in their favor, it could ruin everything, right? Agreed, but I think that's a testament to how much they were trying to get others to hear them when they said that they were innocent. They knew in their heart of hearts that that DNA would not come back to matching them. And it didn't.

There was at least one unknown male sample that was found in the rape kit that didn't match Michael or Robert or anyone connected to them. And this was groundbreaking. The defense thought here, here is our proof that you have the wrong guys go out and find the right people for this now. But that is not exactly what the DA and the investigators did. They doubled down and they didn't reinvestigate or look for new suspects, rather, they only looked at the case again to see what else they could do to tie it to their jailed men.

And that new DNA, it didn't bother them, they came up with a slightly different theory. In their mind now, there aren't four men involved. There is this magical fifth man who they don't know about. And has never been brought up in any of the confessions. On top of this man literally just appearing, doesn't it go against what Robert said in his confession that he was the one who raped the girls? Yeah. Well, the confession that they're using to say that they did it is now clearly wrong,

but they're saying like, oh, the confession's kind of not true. Like only part of it, the parts we want to be right are right. And listen. Right. They're picking and choosing. Yeah. And listen, I get it from both sides a little. I'm sure that some of these people really believed that they were guilty and they were

just doing their best job to keep who they thought were dangerous men off the street. But I think it's also important to point out that after the men were convicted, Polanco had actually gotten into some trouble on another case that was overturned, where they proved that he had forced a false confession. So knowing your lead detective on this case had a history of doing that. Maybe you should take a second look, but it seems everyone was convinced no one on the case or in the prosecution had second thoughts about the men's guilt and they wanted to find anything they could that would prove that, but they couldn't find anything more.

And when the old jury was polled, they found out that seven of the 12 wouldn't have convicted the men had they known about the DNA evidence. So the prosecution then realized that they didn't have a case against these men and they were forced to let them go. On October 28th, 2009, all charges were dismissed against Michael and Robert. Now they let them go, but that does not mean that they are found innocent. And realistically, they could be recharged if the DA ever wanted to do that or if they ever found anything and the men can't sue saying that they were like wrongfully convicted.

It's like a very sticky spot for them. Now subsequent testing was done and a second unknown males DNA had been found on other items of evidence, which makes this fifth man theory harder and harder to believe. Nothing in the shops or on the girls has ever been linked to the four men. Maurice ended up passing away in 2010 after a totally unrelated altercation with the police. The other men are alive and maintain their innocence, but I don't think anyone is taking a new and critical look at this case. And to me and to many people, the key to really cracking this case is to find out who those

two men were sitting in the booth that night at the yoga shop. I don't think it was any of the four men accused of this crime. And I think it's someone else who is still walking free. You know, there was another person in the store that night, like much earlier in the evening when it was still kind of hustling and bustling, which makes me think that these men were hanging out like a really long time, which makes them even more suspicious. But this other yogurt shop goer was actually like an off duty or ex police officer. And he had a weird interaction with a guy that kind of matches one of the descriptions

of the two men. And this guy is like standing in line and lets everyone like go ahead of him, go ahead of him, go ahead of him. Like he doesn't know what he's doing if you're just gonna let everybody get in line ahead of you. And the guy gets like a little bit fishy and he asks him, like, are you a cop? And the guy is like, yeah. And he's like, okay, go ahead, go ahead.

He's like, no, you go ahead. And the guy gets up to the counter and he just buys a soda. And then he says he actually like walks back and goes towards the back of the store. Now you have to enter in the back to go to the restrooms. But he also, this person could have easily gone in the back and propped open the door for them to come in later when the girls would have asked them to leave. So again, I think the key to whatever happened that night is finding those two men sitting at the booth.

I feel like I bring this up in like every case, but this one seems just perfect and ripe for it. Is there enough DNA evidence to run through a genetic matching programmer system? So I would think because they had like such a good sample from Amy's rape kit. I don't know if there are any swabs left, but again, we've said this before, anyone who wants to take us up on it, like we will fund the testing, but I think this would be like the perfect and I, it seems like a high profile enough case that, that they'd want to do it.

Right. But that's only if they're honest officers and prosecutors. Like I think they will do that if they are. But not if it will expose a mistake that their team made. Right. Like there could be some real answers, but if they're afraid of being proven wrong and like finding out that it's linked to somebody that they can't link back to their four guys, they might not want to.

And I'm not sure why being right is more important than finding justice for four young girls, but I worry that that might be the case here. Can't the four men's defense team request it? No. And this is what totally sucks about the justice system. When you are the defendant, you can only request testing be done if they are like coming after you. So unless they were to bring charges against the men again, like that's the only time they

could request things be done. If no one has charges pending against them, there's no defense to be made. Yeah. So people who can get testing are like the DA are the police and it's totally in their hands and not even like the family members. I mean, I'm sure they could push pretty hard, but they can't like demand it. You can't get a court order for it. It seems a little bit backwards knowing there's so much at our fingertips now.

Not ideal, but that's kind of the place that we're in. I would, you know, if I were the family, I think we said this in other episodes as well. Like I would be constantly pushing on the police. I don't know if the family still believe these four men did it or if they're kind of wondering if it's someone else as well. Even if they still think it's these four men, like I don't see what harm it would cause. There was obviously someone else involved and if we can maybe get that person, maybe it brings us closer to justice, whatever that means.

So I would encourage them to be, you know, putting the pressure on police, putting the pressure on the prosecution. I don't know what that looks like, just getting public attention, starting petitions, getting on the news, but it's never too late and it shouldn't be too late for these girls. If you want more information on this case, if you want to see some pictures of the layout of the store, of that booth and how there was like nothing on it and why we think there were men sitting there, you can check out those pictures on our website. CrimeJunkiePodcast.com.

You can also follow us on Twitter at CrimeJunkiePod and on Instagram at CrimeJunkiePodcast. And we will be back next week with a brand new episode. This episode of CrimeJunkie was researched, written, and hosted by me with co-hosting by Brit Preywat. All of our editing and sound production was done by David Flowers and all of our music including our theme comes from Justin Daniel. CrimeJunkie is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think Chuck, do you approve?