Erin Moriarty (Host)

That's Marissa Pierce speaking about her late father, Maurice Pierce.

Pierce was one of four men originally suspected in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls, Eliza Thomas, Amy Ayers, and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison.

They were at a I Can't Believe It's yogurt shop in Austin, Texas.

What did you see when you first walked into the yogurt shop?

Sergeant Jones was looking at the badly burned bodies of four teenage girls who had been bound and gagged and shot in the head.

The yogurt shop had been set on fire to cover the killer's tracks.

The case has for years become known as the Yogurt Shop Murders.

Nearly 35 years later, all four men were declared innocent and exonerated after the Austin Police Department tied another man to the crimes.

And now the city of Austin has made an offer of $35 million to be split amongst the wrongfully accused men, including the family of Maurice Pierce, who died before this settlement was reached.

In the end, this is a story about eight victims.

The four girls who were killed at the yogurt shop.

and the four boys who were wrongfully accused of killing them.

What I think we need to remember is that over all these years, as terrible as it was for Sarah, Jennifer, Amy, and Eliza's families, the four boys and their families were hounded and treated as pariahs.

I'm 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty, and this is Case by Case.

I've been reporting on this case...

since almost the beginning and nearly my entire career at CBS News.

The signs of pain and outrage are everywhere around Austin.

So the police have formed an elite unit whose only mission is to catch whoever killed those girls.

The gunshot wounds show that actually two different kinds of guns have been used, a .380 and a .22.

Back then, one of the early suspects was Maurice Pierce, who was 16 years old at the time.