The four men wrongfully accused of the infamous yogurt shop murders have been declared innocent by a Texas judge, 35 years after the brutal slayings.

The bodies of Eliza Thomas, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, and Amy Ayers were found charred beyond recognition inside the storage room of the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt shop in Austin on December 6, 1991.

The girls were found naked, gagged, tied up, and stacked on top of one another, each having been shot in the back of the head. At least one of the teens had been raped.

Investigators believe that after they were attacked and killed, their murderers started a fire using lighter fluid and paper products from the shop to cover up their crime.

At the time, detectives centered their investigation around four teenage boys: Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Maurice Pierce, and Forrest Welborn. 

Scott and Springsteen confessed to the killings while in police custody. Scott was sentenced to death and Springsteen to life behind bars. But their convictions were ultimately struck down by the Texas Court of Appeals and the pair were freed.

But state District Judge Dayna Blazey has now formally cleared their names, declaring in court Thursday: 'You are innocent.'

Blazey called her order 'an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.'

The ruling comes after case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri. 

The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the four men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators' inability to solve it for decades. 

Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. 

Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.

'Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,' Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. 

'We could not have been more wrong.'

A declaration of 'actual innocence' would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.

'All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,' Strassburger told the court.

Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.

Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.

Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.

Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.

'Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,' Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.

The case effectively went cold until 2025 when it got new public attention after an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.

Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.

Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.

The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers' fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.

Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.

Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers' other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.

Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hours-long standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.