Theory may have role in yogurt shop defense

 

By Leah Quin

American-Statesman Staff

Friday, March 31, 2000

 

His son was in a West Virginia jail, accused with three other men of killing four girls in an Austin yogurt shop. There was already talk of the death penalty.

 

Robert Springsteen Sr. searched the Internet for information about the 1991 killings. He found a treatise detailing a vast, complicated conspiracy behind the slayings. Curious, he contacted the author in Seattle.

 

Springsteen still remembers that first conversation.

 

"Your kids didn't do it," Erik C. Moebius said with reassuring certainty. "I know who did it."

After spending years on the fringes of this terrible story, Moebius -- an ex-lawyer disbarred for misconduct 18 months before pleading guilty to child abuse -- may have found a way into the heart of Austin's biggest murder case in three decades.

 

Within days of the Oct. 6 arrests, Moebius was on a plane to West Virginia to help Robert Springsteen Jr. fight extradition to Texas. Moebius has since befriended several members of the suspects' families, one of whom filed a court document Dec. 14 echoing his conspiracy theory.

 

Also in December, relatives of Michael Scott, one of the four suspects, fired Scott's court appointed attorneys and hired a lawyer who says Moebius' reasoning appears airtight and could provide an alternate motive to present to a jury.

 

The lawyer, Tony Diaz, has met at least twice with Moebius to discuss trial strategy.

"Whenever he tells me something, it seems plausible," said Diaz. "Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But we probably will explore it."

 

Nine years in the making and widening into an ever-expanding list of suspects, Moebius' theory states that the girls were killed as part of a larger scheme to launder money through insurance payments.

 

Recently provided documents seem to poke holes in much of his theory. Still, lawyers for the other three suspects say they fear Moebius will get his theory into court and make a mockery of the capital murder case, in which two defendants could face the death penalty.

 

The lawyers for Forrest Welborn, Maurice Pierce and Springsteen have condemned the theory as preposterous and insulting, as have prosecutors and the victims' families.

"These boys absolutely must have a fair trial," said Barbara Ayres, mother of two of the victims, Jennifer and Sarah Harbison. "All they're going to do is screw it up for those boys."

 

"I do not pay attention to, and give no credence to, the ravings of idle minds," said Joe James Sawyer, who with Berkley Bettis represents Springsteen. Another lawyer, who didn't want to be named citing a judge's gag order in the case, called the theory suicidal and said it would surely offend a jury.

 

But some members of the defendants' families are willing to take that chance, if it means proving their sons had nothing to do with the murders of Amy Ayers, Eliza Thomas and the Harbison sisters.

 

"It's more logical to me that this is more than a $14 robbery," said Phil Scott, Michael Scott's father, referring to the amount of money police said was taken during the robbery of the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt store in North Austin.

 

The theory

 

In a nutshell, Moebius believes the Dec. 6, 1991, yogurt store killings were perpetrated by lawyers and other shady characters to siphon off large portions of any insurance settlement.

 

Moebius' theory -- or at least part of it -- was contained in the Dec. 14 court filing from Phil Scott, who was asking for a hearing to examine allegations against his son. Scott wrote he believed "these murders were conducted pursuant to the Brice Foods investor fraud scheme and the $12 million `settlement' of the yogurt shop murders."

 

In 1994, yogurt shop owner Brice Foods paid $12 million to the parents of the four girls to settle a negligence lawsuit. Under Moebius' theory, the payout disguised a complicated scheme to hide far greater sums from the government -- money obtained from a variety of illegal sources.

 

But two sets of documents, recently made public, seem to disprove key pillars of Moebius' theory.

First, the law firm that represented the girls' families recently released copies of checks and a wire transfer showing that the $12 million payout came from Brice's corporate liability policy -- not from illegal sources.

 

"How someone can look at these documents and say that this wasn't insurance money is beyond my comprehension," said Mark Hefter, an attorney with the Austin law firm Shields and Rusk, which represented the families.

 

Second, unsealed autopsy reports refute Moebius' claim that the victims were tortured by professional killers. There is no evidence of the mutilation he described, according to the reports, unsealed this month after a request from the Austin American-Statesman.

 

"I was wrong," Moebius said later. "But that's what I'd heard from several individuals."

He still stands by his theory that the killings were planned. If he's wrong, Moebius asks, why have so many judges, lawyers and investigators simply dismissed his claims or, worse, actively conspired to silence him?

 

"It's all circumstantial," he said. "But circumstantial doesn't mean insubstantial."

 

Who is Erik Moebius?

 

Depending on your point of view, the main argument for or against Moebius' theory is Moebius himself, a 49-year-old Connecticut native whose graying blond hair is usually tousled.

He walks and speaks at a fast clip, reciting full names and long-distance telephone numbers from memory, as though there's not a minute to waste.

 

Those who believe he's on to something, such as the fathers of Scott, Springsteen and Pierce, cite his exhaustive research, his attention to detail and his past employment in the highway division of the Texas attorney general's office, where he worked for five years before going into private practice in 1988.

 

But others look no further than Moebius' 1995 disbarment trial, in which a Travis County jury found that he had failed to communicate with clients, made false statements about judges and repeatedly violated court procedures.

 

"Bless his heart, I'm convinced he believes everything he says," said John J. "Mike" McKetta, an Austin litigator who prosecuted Moebius at the request of the state bar association. "But I've never been able to follow what he's saying for more than a few consecutive minutes. . . .

 

"He never met a coincidence that wasn't conspiratorial." Over the years, the ever-evolving conspiracy theory has expanded to include others who have thwarted Moebius, such as judges who decided against him and attorneys who opposed him.

 

During Moebius' disbarment trial, McKetta asked Moebius to list the judges involved in the insurance conspiracy. Moebius named about 15 from Austin, San Antonio and New Orleans, McKetta said.

 

"They had little in common, apart from having at some point ruled against Erik," McKetta said.

Moebius says the trial was unfair. He says he was not allowed to present evidence and that jurors were influenced and ultimately were overruled by a judge on key questions. He has asked a federal court to dismiss the disbarment. In March 1996, Moebius was charged with indecency with a child and accused of improperly touching boys. In court pleadings, he said the charges were manufactured to prevent him from exposing the scheme behind the yogurt shop killings.

 

Since his trip to West Virginia to try to halt Springsteen's extradition, Moebius has devoted long hours to the yogurt-shop case: meeting with the suspects' families, appearing on Austin public access cable television and preparing motions that he hopes Diaz will present in court.

 

If reinstated to the bar, he hopes to defend one of the suspects.

 

Diaz, the defender

 

While still in West Virginia last year, Moebius put the Scott family in touch with his longtime friend Gil Gamez, an insurance adjustor and civil rights activist associated with the Austin division of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

 

In the mid-1990s, Gamez filed several complaints with the state bar association on Moebius' behalf, citing suspicions of corruption and official misconduct.

"I don't think anybody else had been willing to say, `I don't believe your kid did it,' " Gamez said of his first conversations with Phil Scott.

 

After relatives clashed repeatedly with Scott's court-appointed lawyers, Gamez suggested they hire his associate, Diaz, with whom he shares an office in South Austin.

 

"He's known to champion what appear to be lost causes," said Dexter Gilford, an attorney who has worked with Diaz. "He's an experienced litigator, passionate, caring about his clients. He's the most passionate lawyer I know."

 

Diaz is best known for running against 200th District Judge Paul Davis in 1996. That same year, he was suspended from the bar after a jury found he used client money to buy a house and then lied about it.

 

He appealed the suspension but lost both it and the election. The suspension prevented him from practicing law for three months in 1997; he remains on probation until 2001.

Diaz says he was unfairly prosecuted.

 

Relatives of the suspects are aware that Moebius' theory sounds incredible. But they said it's just as unlikely that these men, lacking violent histories, could have committed such a hideous crime as teenagers -- and then kept silent for eight years. For that reason alone, Moebius' claims are worth exploring, relatives said.

 

One who doesn't share their opinion is Sharon Pollard, mother of Forrest Welborn, the only suspect who remains unindicted.

 

"Those accusations are pretty off the wall," Pollard said. "I don't think that should be Forrest's defense. His defense is, he wasn't there and he wasn't involved. We don't want to focus on other parties who might or might not have been involved.

 

"It's horrible enough what we're going through."

 

You may contact Leah Quin at lquin@statesman.com or 445-3621.

 

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