Killer confessed to 60 more rapes before execution
Houston’s Tourniquet Killer boasted that he drugged, sexually assaulted strangers in van
In the weeks before his execution, Houston serial killer Anthony Shore confessed to another 60 rapes, sources say.
No one knows their names or ages, what they did or where they lived. But Anthony Shore says he raped them.
In the weeks before his execution, the Houston serial strangler known as the Tourniquet Killer confessed to another 60 rapes, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
The former wrecker driver who last week became the nation’s first killer executed in 2018 also admitted to two copycat assaults in the 1970s previously attributed to a Sacramento predator known as the East Area Rapist — a case in which his sisters already suspected him.
“Everywhere we lived, there was a rapist,” his youngest sister, Laurel Scheel, told the Chronicle.
The four-time killer confessed to law enforcement before his Thursday night execution, boasting of seducing strangers at bars, dosing them with Rohypnol — the so-called date-rape drug — and sexually assaulting them in the back of his van, the sources said.
He didn’t remember any details, except that he raped them.
This isn’t the first time Shore has offered up a confession with scant evidence. Late last year, he falsely copped to two other slayings, then got his first execution date pushed back after investigators learned of an alleged plot to confess to a third murder.
Now, less than a week after his death by lethal injection, the charismatic killer has left behind a new trail of unanswered questions.
One woman who knew him recalled many nights of drug-fueled parties — and black spots in her memory.
“I know that he drugged and date-raped me,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified.
And it wasn’t just her, she said. There were others.
The musical prodigy who grew up to become one of the Bayou City’s most notorious serial killers was hit with the state’s harshest punishment in 2004 for the rape
and murder of 21-year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada, one in a series of brutal slayings that terrorized Harris County in the 1980s and 1990s.
When police finally caught up with him — after a DNA breakthrough tied him to the last of the killings — he calmly confessed to three additional murders as well as a rape.
Even early on, there were whisperings of more.
“He would allude to other things, but it was always an allusion,” said defense attorney Patrick McCann, who defended Shore during his initial trial. “‘If you guys only knew the whole story.’ But honestly, we were just trying not to ask questions we didn’t want the answers to.”
During the punishment phase of his 2004 trial, the court heard about how he raped a handful of other women, including his preteen daughters. Those crimes had previously landed him on the sex offender registry, which is how police got the DNA they later matched to a cold case.
A 2007 true crime book, “The Strangler” by Corey Mitchell, offered other chilling details, including an ex-wife who suspected he’d drugged and raped her, even during their marriage.
If the circle of victims was even wider, though, there wasn’t any proof.
Possible copycat crimes
Eventually, the public stopped asking questions. His name fell out of the headlines. He grew old on death row as his attorneys quietly fought his appeals.
But for 13 years, Shore’s life went on. He picked up pen pals and found new friends, even from the silence of his prison cell.
One of those pen pals was a woman named Lea. Still in her late teens, she started writing the condemned killer more than a decade before his death, and the two grew to be close friends.
“He would always say, ‘You’re the only one who will love me regardless,’” said the woman, now 28, who asked that her last name not be used. “I think he is genuinely remorseful for what he did, but he also knew there was something wrong with him.”
The two talked about their lives and their feelings, about spirituality and books. But they also spoke of darker things.
“There were a lot of rapes going back to when he was a teenager in California,” she said. “A lot of the rapes he had said he just didn’t know their names.”
It’s not clear when the alleged assaults started, but one of the first times Shore’s sisters suspected him was when they lived in the Sacramento area, where the East Area Rapist was already making headlines.
Before his death — a few days before word of the new rape confessions emerged — his sister Gina Shore voiced suspicions about the California case, though she pointed about that the predator was already active when the Shores moved to the area.
“It’s entirely possible that him or his friends did a copycat,” she said last week.
Anthony Shore would have only been 17 or 18 years old at the time, and there may not be any DNA preserved from the case to help check his claims, one source said.
In his final days, Shore also claimed a slew of Houston-area rapes. But again, there’s no evidence. His DNA doesn’t match any unsolved assaults, and he couldn’t offer any details. It’s not clear how so many assaults could have gone unreported, with no DNA left behind.
Nonetheless, he insisted to investigators that he’d regularly drugged girls in bars and raped them in his van, sources said. He even claimed he’d taken on two apprentices.
All told, he allegedly told authorities, there were roughly 60 victims.
“I doubt it ends at 60,” Scheel said.
Tom Berg, first assistant at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, said the claims are being reviewed by the state.
“We’re not really in a position to comment,” Berg said. “We’ve got to wait for the Texas Rangers to more fully investigate.”
A final slap in the face
The 11th-hour confessions don’t seem to square with the killer’s last words.
In his final statement, he claimed there were “no others.” But some who knew him are skeptical.
“I call (expletive) on ‘There are no others,’ ” said the woman who described Shore’s pattern of drugging and raping women. “There are no other what?”
Another woman who knew Shore told the Chronicle she sensed his regret. The former musician and longtime friend started writing Shore more than a decade ago, after getting in touch with her faith.
He wished her happy birthday in his final statement.
“I’ve got to say his final statement sounded like remorse to me,” said the woman, who asked not to be named again. “And the fact that he took the time to wish me a happy birthday.”
But his own family is less inclined to trust the killer’s words.
For his daughter, Tiffany Hall, the fact that he signed over his remains to a pen pal instead of family is a final slap in the face.
“He was a pretty awful person in life,” she said. “So it only follows that he would be an awful person in death.”