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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. And tonight, I will continue to be your guide on our tour of the life and crimes of the tourniquet killer. Last week, we ended the episode with the murder of a nine-year-old child.
Tonight, I will finish the painting and present to you his further crimes, his arrest, and final fate. Also, please check out patreon.com forward slash the serial killer podcast. Thanks to my patrons. TSK podcast is possible. Without them, I would not be able to publish new episodes every week, even though I occasionally have great sponsors backing the show.
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Soon, I will upload even more exclusive content to the $10 Plus Club. So, make sure you don't miss out. Despite the murders, Shore appeared to those around him a successful, friendly guy. He enjoyed chatting up strangers on the job and mixed easily with both musicians and the blue-collar guys at his regular bar.
After installing telephones at Ernie's on banks, he initiated Tuesday night blues jams at that bar. Regulars called him Telephone Tony when bartender Ramiro Gonzalez needed a phone line in his new apartment. Shore did the job himself. That was the kind of guy he was, Gonzalez said. He'd help you out, end quote.
Even Shore's wife didn't seem to realize what she was dealing with. In April 1993, the same year he allegedly raped the 14-year-old, he and Gina separated. Gina agreed to pay him $75 a week in child support, and he got custody of their daughters.
Anthony's mother says that Tony's ex-wife began making late-night calls to her, telling her, in slurred words, that Deanna really knew nothing about her son. Deanna reasoned she was just bitter. "'Honey,' she remembers telling her, "'you're drunk.' For Tony Shore's mother, the truth still hadn't registered."
One hot July night, eleven months after Abular's death, sixteen-year-old Dana Sanchez phoned her boyfriend to say she was hitchhiking to his house. Then she disappeared. Shore had never bothered to hide his victim's bodies, but the field where he dumped Sanchez was apparently just too remote. Police didn't find her body until a week had passed.
And only then, because a mysterious caller warned the television station of a serial killer and gave directions to her remains. Police and sheriff's investigators assembled a task force almost immediately. Still, they kept it quiet.
We joked about it, because the understanding given to us by the people above us was that we don't want to call this a task force or a serial murderer. We don't want to panic people. Officer Billingsley is quoted as saying, It was a non-task force task force. In official statements, the department played down links among the murders.
But the detectives on the case were convinced they had a serial killer. We worked and worked and worked, Sergeant Swaim said. We looked at everybody. Sex offenders and parolees and boyfriends. We looked at their schools. Despite his increasingly odd behavior, investigators never had any real reason to look at Shore.
He had never been arrested, and naturally, he had never showed up on a list of sex offenders in the area. And even when the Houston police picked him up, seven months after Sanchez's murder, he managed, just like Ted Bundy, to stay cool and composed. There was no sleuthing in the misdemeanor arrest.
An undercover cop posing as a prostitute randomly offered Shore sex for a fee, according to the police report, and he accepted. Court records show he got three months unsupervised probation and a $122 fine. I think it's wrong to criticize the police for not making the connection between Shore being arrested for trying to purchase sex and an active serial killer case.
Prostitution is very common. One might even say rampant. And hundreds of thousands of men solicit prostitutes every year in America. To profile based on that would give the police far too many suspects to handle. Around that time, Shore's sister Gina visited once more. Again, she was horrified by her brother's behavior.
When Tony went out for the evening, he deadbolted the door, locking his two young daughters inside. Then he and his friends invited Gina and her companion to do drugs with them. Again, Gina claims, Child Protective Services was contacted. This time by her companion, whom she claims also sent a letter.
Agency spokeswoman Estella Olguin says CPS has no way to verify or dispute Gina's account. She says that if no charges are filed, records of an investigation are destroyed after three years. If the agency did receive that complaint and had spent any time following up on that complaint, they should have noticed problems.
Tony's house had no electricity, and he'd boarded up the windows. Rob Shore was living in Clear Lake Shores, not far from his son in Houston, but their relationship had grown chilly. When the two bumped into each other at the Westheimer Art Festival one spring, Anthony didn't have much to say. Rob's wife, Rose, thought he was on drugs.
He seemed to drop by his father's house only when he had a new girlfriend to show off. When Tony was 33, that girlfriend was Amy Lynch, an 18-year-old high school student. Friends say he'd worked on her family's telephone line and arranged an introduction after noticing her picture. The appeal of such a younger woman was evident.
Rose Shore remembers Tony visiting them that Easter with his daughters and girlfriend. Amy eagerly blurted out that Tony had told them all what to wear, from their dresses to their socks and shoes. He was in control at that point. Rose says they had to do what he said. They were dressed well, but it was definitely a red flag.
Two years after Tony and Amy got together, in the spring of 1997, Tony called his mother in California and told her he was getting married. He asked if he could send his daughters for a long visit during the honeymoon. When Deanna refused, his charm abruptly turned into a threat. If you don't see them now, you never will. It was not a good time for me, Deanna sure says.
But I ended up saying okay. When they arrived, Deanna knew something was wrong. The girls, now twelve and thirteen, were silent. They stuck close together, and though it was nearly one hundred degrees in Sacramento, they insisted on wearing layers of clothing. Frustrated, Deanna sent the youngest girl to visit Gina, Tony's sister, in Washington State.
Deanna was convinced they'd been molested. Her idea was that if the girls were split up, they might volunteer info regarding any molestation from their father. And so it was. In Washington, the truth came out. Gina had been complaining about a situation at work. "Do you ever feel like something is totally unjustified?" she asked the little girl.
and Shore's daughter turned ashen. How do you know about that? she gasped. The girl explained. One night when Tony's girlfriend was in the hospital, he'd raped her. I know he's been doing it to my sister for years and years, she told her aunt. I was supposed to mind my own business. Gina called her mother, and her mother called the police.
According to their case file, the girls told California authorities about the abuse and their father's drug use. Sometimes they said he even drugged them. Their medical examinations showed evidence of trauma. Tony Shore was charged with aggravated sexual assault. Deanna called her son to confront him, but he simply flatly denied everything and was furious at his mother for calling the police on him.
It took only a few months for defense attorney Bill R. Gifford to hammer out a deal with the district attorney's office. Shore agreed to plead guilty to two counts of indecency with a child. The offense can net five years to life, but Tony got no prison time, just a $500 fine and eight years of probation. When I read that, I felt sick.
Here is a man that for years violently raped and thus tortured his own young daughters, and the only sanction given was a $500 fine and a temporary status as a registered sex offender. The girls, having already gone through several years of hell, probably still suffer the gruesome mental aftereffects such abuse can produce.
There were a few conditions to his sentence. He'd have to register as a sex offender, meet regularly with a probation officer, and do some community service. But under the Deferred Adjudication Program, he'd have no record of a conviction if he made it through the eight years of probation without a problem.
Serious sex offenders like Shore are required to register with authorities in person every 90 days. Initially, he'd also have to meet with his probation officer every 15 days, but his wings were hardly clipped. He was barred from being within 100 yards of a school or daycare, but the judge made a special exception to allow him to keep living on East 18th Street.
in a house that overlooks the playground at Field Elementary School. He was also exempted from the rule that barred him from contacting his daughters, according to court records. Such a light sentence isn't exactly normal, but it's not outside the norm either, according to D.A. Unkin.
When prosecutors have a weak case, she said, their only choice may be to take what they can get. Deanna Shore says she would have done anything to cooperate. But the prosecutors didn't seem to care. She learned of the plea bargain only when she called to check on the status of the case. They told me they didn't want the girls to feel guilt. To which Deanna
She was rightfully outraged. The girls had no reason to feel guilty. The only person who should have felt that was probably incapable of feeling guilt at all. The girls were also, rightfully, terrified that Tony would come for them and take revenge. Only Anthony Shore seemed to think he'd gotten a tough sentence.
though he was hiding four murders. He filed a motion to withdraw his plea just weeks after accepting it. Attorney Gifford argued in the motion that Shore had learned of the stringent requirements for registered sex offenders only fifteen minutes before his plea, and while he agreed to the deal because he thought it would allow him to keep his job, he'd been fired from Southwestern Bell.
The judge denied the motion, and an appeals court later upheld the extremely light sentence. The authorities seemed intent on moving on. Shore's sister, Gina, had filed an affidavit telling how he cruised high schools and groped women. I think there were a lot more girls he molested, she said. No one contacted her.
Though urine tests during Tony Shore's first year of probation twice revealed cocaine, he was for some reason never sent to jail. Tony Shore's arrest as a serial killer came as more denouement than climax. Years had passed since the task force disbanded.
To all but their shell-shocked relatives and a few devoted police officers, the victims had been forgotten. His molestation conviction required Shore to give Houston police a DNA sample in 1998. He'd complained about the terms of his deal in his appeal, including court-ordered therapy. Curiously, when it came to providing the DNA, he testified that he didn't have a problem with that.
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Real Noom user compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, the typical Noom user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh.
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The DNA, however, was a perfect match to that left by Maria del Carmen Estrada's killer in 1992. But the cops didn't realize that when they obtained Shore's sample in 1998.
There is sometimes a few years delay before samples can be entered into law enforcement databases. But police didn't realize they had a hit until October 2003, five years later. The reason for this was that during the time of Estrada's murder, the police department had serious problems with its crime lab.
The department shuttered the lab in December 2002 after an independent audit found that analysts had been poorly trained, lab conditions were inadequate, and the subsequent results were shaky at best. In the aftermath of the audit, police decided to send samples from a few high-profile murder victims. Estrada was among them.
to an independent lab in Dallas for testing. The test results surprised detectives. Anthony Alan Shore, on probation for molesting his daughters, was a match. This was the same guy that social workers apparently let off the hook several times, and the same guy the court had allowed to live next door to an elementary school.
He was also the same guy who stopped in at the police station every three months to confirm his address. The detectives rushed out to the quiet brick house off Uvald Drive, where Shore had moved out a year earlier. His second wife had left him, filing for divorce just two days after she moved out, according to the court records.
She would later tell the Houston Chronicle that she bolted after waking up to find his hands around her neck. But she never filed charges, and sure seemed to have straightened out his life. He was living with a new girlfriend, whom he called his wife, and her three teenage kids. He had purchased a wrecker and gone into the towing business.
When he returned to earn his bar one night, he handed out business cards with his phone number and the moniker Texas T. Shore. To say I was shocked was putting it mildly, said his girlfriend Linda, who asked that her full name not be used. Pretty much everything he had told me was not true, and to have twelve to fifteen homicide detectives at your house one night, I never would have guessed anything like that.'
Investigators believe Shore probably expected to be discovered. Shore admitted to the killings during an interrogation by Detective Swaim. Then he added, Now I'm going to tell you something you don't know, and confessed to Tremblay's murder as well as the rape of a teenager in 1993.
In every case, he assured police he had a justification. He'd been dating Tremblay, he said, and had to strangle her when she promised to tell his wife. He later told family members that one of the victims had been in his daughter's school. Another had heard his jazz band play. Swaim is today convinced the story is made up drivel. They tell you just enough.
but not enough to make themselves look too bad, he said. My idea was he was giving himself an out. I'm not as bad as you think. We had a relationship, and so on. He had an explanation for everything, but it's not going to wash, end quote. Investigators differ on whether Shore committed more murders in the five years after giving his DNA samples.
Officers looked at all the cases of unsolved females that fit his modus operandi, but Swaim believes the last killing was Sanchez in 1995. I, on the other hand, tend to be more sceptical.
There is little reason Shore, a classical sexual serial killer and psychopath, would stop raping and killing once he had gotten a taste for it. And when researching this case, it is quite obvious the police did not handle the investigation in an optimal manner. Shore killed his last known victim in June of 1995.
He was not caught until 2003. He did get arrested for child molestation in October 1997, and that might have put a damper on his ability to kill, but we know next to nothing about his activities from June 1995 until then. That is ample time for a serial killer to stalk,
Kidnap, torture, and murder several victims. Anthony has twice written his father long letters from jail, full of explanations. Tony claims his mother molested him as a child. Diana even underwent hypnosis to see if that could be true, but came up with nothing to support the claim.
Rob doesn't believe such allegations either, nor does he write back. Diana Shore was 57 when she started as a mother again. Her granddaughters initially had no clothes or beds or shoes. Raising the girls was also emotionally difficult. The older daughter couldn't sleep unless her 130-pound dog was in the room.
She also developed a habit of igniting her stuffed animals. The younger one had nightmares about her father. Diana and her daughter Gina flew to Houston in March 2005 to visit Anthony. Rob drove them to the Harris County Jail, but when they went in, he sat in the car and waited.
The visitors' room was a cacophony of girlfriends and husbands shouting into speakers, struggling to be heard by prisoners on the other side of the glass. But even cuffed, even in a bright orange jumpsuit, Tony Shore was completely unselfconscious. He said he was working on a book of memoirs. He claimed he was right with God.
"'He was just as friendly as if he was having tea with us,' Diana marvels. "'He didn't deny anything, but he didn't admit the murders either. "'I know I'm forgiven,' he said. "'Diana, not content with such a non-answer, asked if the parents of the murdered girls had forgiven him too, and how they possibly could forgive the man who had murdered their daughters.'
With another non-committal answer, he told her simply, they had a right to feel that way. They left Anthony without any real answers. Anthony continued to write. His mother and sister read his letters, but they didn't really believe anything he wrote. Diana's therapist warned her that the letters were classically sociopathic. He praises her.
Then asks for something, or he played the guilt card. In letters to his sister Gina, Tony seemed to be reveling in his notoriety. He asked for copies of any newspaper stories she could find about his case. Anthony Shore's trial started on the 18th of October, 2004, on capital murder charges. Even his family didn't contend he is innocent.
His own father won't argue that he deserves mercy. The jury found Shore guilty of capital murder. During the sentencing phase, Shore's only surviving victim testified. After less than an hour of deliberations, the jury recommended that Shore be put to death, which Shore had asked for himself. He was sentenced to death on the 15th of November, 2004.
As it is with the judicial system in the USA, it takes many years for a death penalty to be carried out. Shore, by then 55 years old, was killed by lethal injection on the 18th of January 2018 in Texas. In Shore's final statement, he was apologetic and his voice cracked with emotion. I quote...
No amount of words or apology could ever undo what I've done. I wish I could undo the past, but it is what it is. End quote. As the lethal dose of pentobarbital began, Shore said the drug burned. "'Oo-wee, I can feel that,' he said, before slipping into unconsciousness. "'Let us pause for a brief moment.'
and expand a bit on this, dear listener. As you know, I often try to explain to you in detail what being killed actually entails. On this show, these explanations have for the most part concerned the victims of serial killers. But here, we have a case of a serial killer being killed, and thus it's even more important with a thorough explanation.
If you are a member of the TSK $10 Plus Club on Patreon, as in donating $10 or more on theserialkillerpodcast.com forward slash donate,
You can now listen to an exclusive bonus episode on patreon.com forward slash the serial killer podcast, where I detail all the most common ways of execution, as well as a few more uncommon ones. However, in this episode, I'll stick to explaining lethal injection.
Lethal injection is used for capital punishment by the federal governments of the United States of America and 36 states, at least 30 of which use the same combination of three drugs, sodium theopentyl, a barbiturate to induce anesthesia, and curonium bromide, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes all the muscles of the body,
and potassium chloride, a salt that speeds the heart until it stops. This protocol was developed in 1977 for the state of Oklahoma by then Chief Medical Examiner Jay Chapman, but it has never been codified or sanctioned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA.
The second drug, bromide, blocks chemical signals reaching receptors on motor neurons, the nerve cells that trigger movement. The result is paralysis of muscles, including the muscles needed for breathing. If the prisoner is not fully sedated by the anesthesia, the pain and distress of suffocation will be considerable.
Once the prisoner has been immobilized, the third drug can be administered to stop the heart. Potassium chloride has been used in several executions. Potassium is an essential element for the normal functioning of the heart, as it is involved not only in nerve signals that coordinate the heartbeat, but also in the contractions of the heart cells themselves.
An excess of potassium causes cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is not always painful, but the potassium injection itself is notoriously agonizing and has been described as a severe burning sensation. The immobilizing injection of bromide could potentially mask signs of any pain the prisoner is experiencing.
After having been injected with the three chemicals, Anthony Allen Shore was pronounced dead 13 minutes later. Shore's daughter, Tiffany Hall, said she was hurt when she learned her father signed over his estate to a pen pal. He was a pretty awful person in life, she said. So it only follows that he would be a pretty awful person in death, end quote.
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