Rangers offer new details on killer
Executed in January, Shore confessed to more at last minute
In the days before his first scheduled death date, Houston serial killer Anthony Shore admitted to raping a woman at gunpoint in front of her husband and another at knifepoint after a break-in, according to newly released Department of Public Safety documents.
Also known as the Tourniquet Killer, Shore was executed in January for four killings in the Houston area in the 1980s and ’90s.
Afterward, sources told the Houston Chronicle he’d offered up a number of last-minute confessions, including two slayings, and a number of rapes in California and Texas.
Now, an October report — just released after the state attorney general ordered DPS to turn it over following a records request — offers more detail on Shore’s confessions surrounding the earlier crimes in California.
The first time the Texas Rangers interviewed Shore in the hopes of closing other cases, he wasn’t willing to talk. At that point, he still had pending appeals and wanted court wranglings resolved before he would consider coming clean to any other sordid misdeeds.
So the Rangers left and started doing some digging.
“We conducted research into Shore’s background and found he lived in numerous states throughout his childhood and adult years, and several police agencies had considered Shore as a suspect in numerous unsolved homicides and sexual assaults,” they wrote in their report.
Then in mid-October — just two days before his first scheduled execution — they came
back.
“We told Shore we were interested in ‘clearing’ any old crimes in which he was involved, and Shore agreed to speak with us freely,” the Rangers wrote.
First, he clarified that he was not the I-45 Killer — though he had lived in the area at the time.
Instead, he admitted to participating in another serial crime, as a copycat of the East Area Rapist, a Sacramento-area criminal active in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
When he was a teen, Shore’s family was living in Citrus Heights, a suburb not far from the California capital. He followed the serial rapes on the news and said he was already groping women on local bike trails.
“Shore alleged he would grab the female’s breasts or buttocks and then would flee on his bicycle,” according to the report. “He was never caught or questioned about these assaults; however, on one occasion, he was chased down by an adult male, who he believed to be one of his victim’s fathers.”
Riding a bicycle, the man chased him into a river bed, and the two started struggling.
“According to Shore, he picked up a rock and hit the man in the head rendering him unconscious,” the report notes. “He suspects the man may have died.”
Several more crimes
But there were no reports of a murder like that in the news — so Shore never found out for certain.
In 1977 and 1978 — now confident after “getting away” with the groping — Shore raped two women in the Sacramento area.
First, he broke into a woman’s house and held her at knife point before tying her up and raping her, according to the report.
Later, Shore said, he broke into a young couple’s house.
“Shore allegedly tied up the man and the woman, and made the man ‘watch’ as he sexually assaulted the woman,” the report said. “According to Shore, he used a gun, possibly a .38 caliber, to commit this crime.”
The confessions surrounding the California crimes all came out just before Shore’s first execution date, which was canceled at the last minute in light of an alleged confession plot with a fellow death row prisoner.
It was reset for January, and in the days before his death he unloaded on the investigators again, 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 Chronicle learned.
False confessions
The October report only details the two rapes, but sources said that around the same time he falsely confessed to two slayings as well.
In 1986, he killed 14-year-old Laurie Tremblay, snatching the girl up on her way to the bus stop then dumping her corpse behind a Ninfa’s Restaurant. Six years later, he raped and murdered 21year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada before leaving her naked body in the drive-thru of a Spring Branch Dairy Queen.
In 1994, he killed 9-year-old Diana Rebollar. When her battered body was found, she was wearing only a black Halloween T-shirt — and a ligature twisted around her neck.
Less than a year later, he murdered 16-year-old Dana Sanchez, then reportedly called a local TV station to report a serial killer on the loose.
All the victims were raped and tortured before he strangled them with handmade tourniquets.
Even after the conviction for molesting his daughters forced him onto the sex offender registry in 1998, it took another five years before authorities finally tested cold-case evidence and matched a murder to Shore.
He was executed Jan. 18.