David Muir

The yogurt shop was maybe a couple of blocks from North Cross Mall here in northwest Austin.

And so all the kids were congregated at the mall.

About eight days after the murders, Maurice Pierce is a teenager who is found at North Cross Mall with a 22.

This is Maurice Pierce.

He was 15 in 1991.

He was bragging about a gun, about a .22.

And authorities initially became really excited that they thought maybe they had found the perpetrator.

And they call him in for questioning, and he is questioned at length.

And it's during questioning that Pierce tells investigators that on the night of the murders, another boy named Forrest Wellborn borrowed his gun and later returned telling Pierce he'd done something bad and that he smelled of smoke.

I think they actually wired up

Pierce put a bug on him to see if he could get Forrest to tell the story again.

And Forrest says, no, the next day me and Maurice and my other friends Robert and Mike, we stole a car and drove to San Antonio together.

And the police were drawn to the fact that these four original suspects, Maurice Pierce, Forrest Wellborn, Michael Scott, and Robert Springsteen, had been involved and had staked out the yogurt shop earlier in the evening and planned to return to rob it.

So the operating theory that the police are working with is that Pierce and Wellborn, along with two other friends, Scott and Springsteen, all teenagers, rob the yogurt shop, assault and kill the girls, set the store on fire, and then steal a car and skip town.

To investigators, all the pieces seem to fit together.

They have the motive, they have the opportunity, according to them, and the .22 caliber murder weapon, all except for one thing.

There was absolutely no evidence at all.

They didn't have the ballistics for the 22.

They didn't have fingerprints, hair, DNA, nothing that tied any of these boys or anyone to this crime at all.

They had at the beginning a lot of gossip, teenage gossip.