In 1991, four teen girls were killed at a frozen yogurt shop in Texas. More than three decades later, a new docuseries explores the unsolved slayings and provides a look behind the scenes at the investigation.

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The Yogurt Shop Murders, which premiered Aug. 3 on HBO Max and concludes Sunday, revisits the Dec. 6, 1991, deaths of shop employees Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both 17, Jennifer's sister Sarah Harbison, 15, and a friend of the girls, 13-year-old Amy Ayers. Police found the four teens dead, each shot in the head and severely burned after a fire was set at the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt store where they had been together at closing time.

Nearly a year after the killings, investigators arrested two men from Mexico for the crime. Mexican officials, who had arrested the two men, said they confessed to the slayings.

Investigators later determined that details the suspects gave about the killings didn't match with what really happened, and the men later recanted their confessions.

Police reopened the investigation in 1997, seeking to take a fresh look at evidence.

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"We do think it's our responsibility on something as tragic as this to look at what we've done so far and see if we can do anything differently," the Austin Police Department's assistant chief, Michael McDonald, said at the time.

This reopening of the case led to the arrest of four new suspects -- Maurice Pierce, Forrest Welborn, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott. Each had been interviewed in the days after the slayings, but there was no evidence to connect them to the crime.

Springsteen and Scott ultimately confessed and were convicted in 1999. These convictions were overturned five years later upon appeals over prosecutors using both confessions in each man's trial without allowing the other man to be questioned.

In 2008, new technology found that DNA evidence found on one of the victims didn't match either of the two men, and a year later, all charges were dismissed.


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The Yogurt Shop Murders, which features footage of Springsteen and Scott's interrogations, explores how a lack of resolution in the case means the two men still live under the shadow of suspicion. Meanwhile, the families deal with grief and ongoing uncertainty about what really happened to four teen girls that day in 1991.