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He Was a Suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders for Thirty Years. He Can’t Forget.
Forrest Welborn had nothing to do with the Yogurt Shop Murders, the grisly killing of four young women in Austin, Texas, in 1991. His buddy, Maurice Pierce, had been under pressure to confess by investigators who wanted a collar for the crime. Eventually, Pierce caved under questioning. He implicated himself and his best friend, Forrest, along with two others, in a crime they did not commit. For Texas Monthly, Michael Hall covers the case and its horrific aftermath.
Both boys were taken to a juvenile detention center, and at around midnight, Maurice was transferred to the police station. A couple of hours later, his questioning began, directed by Senior Sergeant Hector Polanco, a fifteen-year veteran with a reputation for getting confessions. Polanco was known to walk into an interrogation room and announce that his nickname was “El Diablo”; he would threaten the death penalty and grab a man’s arm and show just where the needle would go.
Maurice was terrified. He later told his girlfriend, Kim, that Polanco had claimed that his pistol was the murder weapon—and showed him graphic photos of the dead girls. “They were throwing them in his face, saying, ‘This is how the girls look now,’ ” Kim told me. (Polanco later denied doing either of these things.) In a statement Maurice wrote later that afternoon, after several hours of questioning by Polanco, he admitted to having the gun the night of the murders but insisted he didn’t have anything to do with the crime. Instead, he claimed that Forrest had borrowed the gun, had been acting oddly (“I think he was on some kind of drugs. . . . He was jumping around and acting crazy”), and had boasted that he and a friend had shot the girls in the back of the store and started a fire with their bodies. Maurice said Forrest told him, “I enjoyed watching them burn.”
