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[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): Shore was a telephone lineman. He had access to every neighborhood in Houston.
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He had a reason to be there. He had a marked vehicle. It made it totally easy for him to just look for victims.
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Anthony Shore is the worst of the worst, serial murderer, torturer, enjoyer of other people's pain
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and suffering, murderer of little children and women, the kinda guy who we can never be safe enough from.
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[THEME MUSIC] NARRATOR: The strange behavior exhibited by Anthony Shore began early.
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BRIAN FREDERICK (VOICEOVER): A few things stand out for me about Shore's early life.
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He was very precocious. Four to five years old, he's-- he's already sort of making, you know, for a five-year-old, what
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could be construed as, you know, sexual advances towards these little girls. Laurie was walking to school, doing
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what thousands and millions of youngsters do every day. And here comes this predator.
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ANDY KAHAN (VOICEOVER): 14 years old, Lori is 14 years old. I mean-- I mean, think about-- you know,
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think about your children, who are 14 years old. I mean, just-- it's unfathomable what happened to her.
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If he starts actually now talking to this girl and confiding in her, it's probably
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because he knows that older women would think I'm strange. Younger girl is going to listen, especially
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if he's got stuff to give Anthony Shore, from my perspective, after being in the criminal justice system for over 30
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years, is probably one of the nation's most cold-blooded, diabolical, notorious serial killers
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in this country's history. KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): And as a young line prosecutor, I worked in the Special Crimes Division
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of the Harris County District Attorney's Office, which I now lead. When I worked on those cases as a young prosecutor,
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looking for a serial murder was like looking for a needle in a haystack. If a child is cruel to animals, something is going on.
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One of the biggest red flags for an eventual antisocial personality disorder or what people colloquially
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know as psychopaths is that they torture animals at a young age. And it's just the visual of it, that an innocent little child
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might torture an innocent, cute, cuddly little animal. And yet this is exactly what Anthony does.
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It shows a level of lack of empathy, lack of emotionality, and just something that can't simply
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be learned from your social environment, typically. You know, nobody at the age of four or five
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typically has that many other friends who are doing the same thing, torturing animals and killing them.
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And so it shows that there might be a genetic predisposition here towards doing evil acts.
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NARRATOR: There was worse to come when he went on to be a serial groper of girls and attacking
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one of his sisters. JUDY HO (VOICEOVER): By the time he was a elementary school kid
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and he was trying to drive a screwdriver through his sister's head, I think, sadly, he was kind of
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marked for evil, in many ways. Because at that young age, you just don't see that kind
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of behavior very often. I think when somebody shows the propensity to do something so violent to a family member
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that early, I think that shows that we're dealing with somebody very different here than just
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the typical person who grew up in an abusive environment and learned bad behaviors.
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This is not just learned. This is something that is built in. BRIAN FREDERICK (VOICEOVER): Shore used his sister
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to lure girls in the neighborhood back to, you know, his house or to grope them, to kiss them.
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This suggests some sort of-- especially when you're working in tandem with somebody, right, when you're conspiring,
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it suggests a level of organization, at an early age, but organization that's not necessarily healthy.
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BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): He was a groper. Sometimes it could start off as simple as somebody
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in an elevator and they liked the fact that they can bump up against a stranger and get away with it.
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Anthony was that kind of person. He would bump up against people. He would grope people and see how he could get away with it.
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And then, he would graduate, because that no longer was satisfying to him. A typical criminal, they'll start out.
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Once they're successful, the very first time that they're successful, they will continue
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to do the crime the same way. NARRATOR: Driven by sexual desire, Shore was likely to kill again.
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The only question was when. In 1992, Shore was married. And soon after, his wife had two daughters.
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Many believe he was building a cover story to hide his sexual assaults. I do have to wonder about the true nature
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of that relationship. Did he really get married because he had genuine affection for this person?
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Or was she basically used as a pawn in his game? The fact that he had a wife and children
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would make it easier for him to commit crimes and escape unnoticed. KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): Shore was a telephone lineman.
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He had access to every neighborhood in Houston. He had a reason to be there. He had a marked vehicle.
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It made it totally easy for him to just look for victims. BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): He knew how
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to blend into neighborhoods. It would not be uncommon to see a telephone truck or a blue collar-type worker
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in many of the neighborhoods and communities where he would select his victims from.
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ANDY KAHAN (VOICEOVER): That's how serial killers operate. They blend in, so they remain anonymous.
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BRIAN FREDERICK (VOICEOVER): Shore was married. And it's not uncommon for serial killers to be married.
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And he had children, also not uncommon. In addition to Shore working at a-- you know,
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a regular job during the day, I mean, in the evening, he-- it's my understanding that he performed.
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He was a, at least a self-described, you know, child prodigy of-- of the arts and particularly
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the piano itself. BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): Serial killers tend to be very smart, almost sociopathic.
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Sociopaths can also be very charming. And when somebody is charming, people like them.
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They have relationships. They build families and friends. And so therefore, people aren't gonna question them.
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That's part of the facade that they try to maintain. That's kind of like their double--
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their Jekyll and Hyde ego that they like to have, is there's some sort of normalcy where no one suspects anything.
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It's very interesting when we see psychopaths have these pro-socially encouraged relationships, such as marriage
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and having a family. In many ways, it's a cover for all of the other bad things that they're going to do.
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Because maybe you wouldn't suspect a family man that seemed happy in his marriage
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and in his family life. Serial killers have a desire to kill. They have a thirst to kill.
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And so the average serial killer could be your postman, could be your doctor, could be your--
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in this case, the telephone man. NARRATOR: Unsuspected of the murder of Laurie Tremblay, Shore was ready to sharpen
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his predatory instincts. When he had killed before, Shore suffered an injury to his hand.
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So he adapted. BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): He realized that when he was trying to strangle her,
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his finger got hurt. And so it was a learned behavior. He said, you know what? Next time, I'm not gonna have my finger in that position
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where it can hurt. It can leave too much evidence. I could bleed. That could possibly lead to me being caught.
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So what does he do? He gets a tourniquet. Here she was again, vulnerable, by herself, no one else around.
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And here comes Anthony Shore, again, seizing that opportunity. When he picked his victims, you will notice that they were
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all of the same kind of size, all looked relatively young, all with the dark hair, primarily that-- that
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very Hispanic look to them. I believe that, in his own mind, Anthony Shore, for whatever reason, really had an affinity for Carmen.
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And if you look at some of the serial killers that are out there, there always tends
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to be one victim that they can associate with, that they believe is theirs and that
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can understand them the most. So perhaps Carmen was his pet, Carmen was his prize.
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And he liked Carmen. The most personal way to kill somebody is to strangle them.
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And in Anthony's case, not only did he choose strangulation, but he has this tourniquet that can give life or take life.
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And it was personal and close. And so he was able to watch and literally watch the breath of life come out of that person.
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KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): The tourniquet is a signature for Anthony Shore. And it, to me, distinguished him from other individuals who kill
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people with their bare hands. The tourniquet takes your fingers off the pulse, literally, but it gave Shore the ability
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to turn life on and off, by controlling the air flow of the victim. And it heightens the anxiety and pain and fear
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of the suffering victim. I think in Anthony Shore's mind, he was probably thinking,
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what can I do to achieve that level of notoriety? What will separate me from these other serial killers
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that no one else has done? Aha. I can strangle my victims to death with a handmade tourniquet.
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He seemed to take a-- take pride, a sick kind of pride, in his killing and in his
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technique with the tourniquet. It worked for him. It was his signature. BRIAN FREDERICK (VOICEOVER): With his second victim,
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there's a cord in the backseat. Strangulation is probably the ultimate in power.
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You are literally taking someone's life with your own bare hands. Listening to Shore, I don't hear self-absorbed narcissist.
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I hear someone telling a story, very matter of factly. It lacks empathy, right? But it's not-- it's not embellished.
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It doesn't se-- he doesn't seem to be excusing his behaviors, nor is he making her out to be this vamp, if you will.
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He's telling a story. Unfortunately, the story ends badly. But to someone who can't empathize, to someone who
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doesn't realize that hearing a story like that might evoke emotions in us, they'll tell it as if they
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were telling any other story. BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): He got the thrill from watching his victims die.
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He had the control. He was, in his mind, God-like. He could grant life or grant death.
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KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): The Dairy Queen where Carmen's body was found was our Dairy
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Queen in the neighborhood. And so when that case came across my desk, I couldn't help but notice that.
00:17:59
I can't imagine this being spontaneous. I mean, to me, this is so methodically calculated,
00:18:07
on his part, as to how he picked his victims and then, of course, what he did to his victims afterward.
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This was not some spontaneous, spur of the moment. This was somebody who was so devious and so cunning
00:18:20
in nature that his thought process started from how to abduct, how to sexually torture, how to kill,
00:18:27
how to dispose. Less than a year and a half after his murder of Maria del Carmen Estrada, he attacks Selma Janske, age 14,
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but he flees the scene. NARRATOR: Claiming to be determined not to kill the victim, Shore takes a different approach
00:19:14
to his method of attack. He considered it an accomplishment to be able to rape women without murdering them.
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JUDY HO (VOICEOVER): I think that there was a couple of components to this. One is very poor impulse control.
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So he just did whatever he felt like. But the other piece of it is that he probably
00:20:29
derived some kind of sick joy from dominating people who were vulnerable. KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): These were people's children, daughters.
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They're real people. His crimes were calculated. He planned and premeditated all of them.
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It was just a question of who was going to be his next victim. I felt like it was only a matter of time
00:21:02
before the next body would show up. NARRATOR: Anthony Shore had tortured animals, sexually
00:21:14
abused his sisters and their friends. By his thirties, he had raped three times and killed two young women.
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Within months of his latest attack on Selma Janske, serial killer Anthony Shore was on the hunt for new prey.
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Anthony Shore picked his victims, because they were vulnerable. It just made them such easy prey for a guy like Shore,
00:21:39
whose heart was set on evil and whose pleasure was derived from other people's pain.
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Cause he's not picking on people who are his own size. And so, he's always looking for victims that he would
00:21:55
clearly be declared the winner. It was rigged from the start. These young women and little girls were totally vulnerable.
00:22:03
They were young. They were female. And they were forcibly kidnapped. They were raped.
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They were tortured to death. Less than a year later, he sexually assaulted, beaten, and then strangled a nine-year-old, Diana Rebollar.
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The unique thing about the city of Houston is there's a lot of small towns inside the big city.
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And this particular neighborhood is just that. It's a small town. The mom sends her to the store.
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It's just down the block. It's not very far. And lo and behold, there's a predator in the midst,
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being Anthony Shore. When you talk about a nine-year-old girl, it's always the children that haunt you the most.
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She was sexually tortured and dumped, like the rest of them. That's his personal touch.
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You gotta-- you know, if you go back and look at serial killers, everybody has a catchy nickname,
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a phrase that we give them. And it becomes his signature card, his calling card.
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And he gets good at it. He just did whatever he felt like, but the other piece of it
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is that he probably derived some kind of sick joy from dominating people who were vulnerable.
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Notice that he doesn't necessarily dominate people who were his size. BRIAN FREDERICK (VOICEOVER): She's
00:24:10
nine years old, for God's sake. I mean, it's just unconscionable that someone can do this to a nine-year-old, in the middle of the day.
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We're not talking about someone walking, you know, in the dark, after hours. We're talking about the middle of the day in a neighborhood.
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That's pretty brazen. Even the worst, the-- the dregs of society, the worst criminals out there
00:24:39
that there is no mercy for somebody who could take the life of a child for their own sexual pleasure,
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for their own pleasure. Perhaps this is one of those cases that even the devil himself wouldn't want Anthony Shore.
00:24:56
NARRATOR: Still, the killing continued. Shore's fourth victim, in July 1995, was 16-year-old Dana Sanchez.
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She fitted his preferred profile, Hispanic-looking, from a less affluent part of town,
00:25:10
a single girl, vulnerable on the streets. KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): The neighborhoods
00:25:14
in Houston were changing in the late '80s and '90s. And part of it was we had an immigrant population, very low
00:25:23
on the socioeconomic scale, many of them not citizens of the country. And so that created an opportunity for a serial killer
00:25:35
who was looking for people who he could grab, rape, kill, and who might not be missed.
00:25:43
What we do know is that a victim profile, for sure, has emerged. OK? In hindsight, we see that he's attacking
00:25:52
younger Hispanic women, young-- young girls. Again, 16-year-old teenager, middle of the day,
00:26:00
minding their own business, not doing anything wrong, not doing anything illegal, just doing what teenage girls do.
00:26:08
Dana goes to make a phone call, in the days of telephone booths. She's just gonna make a phone call.
00:26:14
What a perfect victim for Anthony Shore. He's the phone man. She's seen, certainly, repair man.
00:26:35
This guy doesn't look like much of a threat. I mean, my goodness he must be at work.
00:26:42
So she's very trusting. And that's one thing Anthony Shore made note of, that all
00:26:48
the victims were very trusting. And she-- Dana trusted him for a ride. NARRATOR: For some reason, Dana was
00:27:32
cautious, lied about her name. Shore reverted to his usual methods. There's a phone call, a tip.
00:29:07
NARRATOR: Incredibly, Shore had called the media with a tip-off, about himself. He certainly wanted credit, wanted to be known.
00:29:16
So he has the audacity to contact a local news station and tip them off as to where the body could be found, just so he
00:29:28
can make sure that he got credit for the latest murder, in his own mind. NARRATOR: After 15 years, police had
00:29:53
failed to capture the man known as "The Tourniquet Killer." Still, there wasn't anything to link him with the murders.
00:30:03
NARRATOR: Then, Anthony Shore sexually abused his own daughters. Three years after Dana Sanchez's murder,
00:30:10
he is convicted, in 1998, of molesting his two daughters. Sadly, it's no surprise that he would definitely abuse
00:30:18
his own family members as well. BRIAN FREDERICK (VOICEOVER): And this is the turning point in the case.
00:30:23
Because now, he's required to submit a DNA sample. What Anthony Shore did to his family
00:30:31
was, even in some ways, more despicable, because you're doing it to your family members.
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What he did to his wife and, of course, what he did to his two daughters. NARRATOR: Believing the molestation
00:30:43
to be his first offense, the judge dealt leniently with him. He was released on probation.
00:30:49
But there was a catch. Anthony Shore was a sex offender. And because he was a sex offender,
00:30:56
he had to give the state a sample of his DNA. NARRATOR: Something that had been impossible
00:31:02
at the time of the murders. KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): There was no general testing of DNA.
00:31:08
Pre-DNA, 1992 through 1994, when it was very uncommon for it to be tested-- it was possible, but only at Quantico.
00:31:19
BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): So in 1986, nobody knew of DNA. We started videotaping crime scenes
00:31:25
and we knew how to lift fingerprints. And lifting fingerprints went back decades.
00:31:30
But there was no new law enforcement technology. Yet these detectives had the foresight to collect
00:31:37
and preserve that evidence. They were able to extract DNA from Maria Estrada's fingernails.
00:31:44
Anthony Shore's own DNA finally caught up to him. And in almost a strange cathartic way,
00:31:50
his daughters ends up solving the murders of the four young girls. Because if he hadn't've committed those atrocities,
00:32:00
the abuses on his daughter, who knows if it would ever have been solved? BRIAN HARRIS (VOICEOVER): It's not
00:32:12
an interrogation that you hear. It's a conversation. It's a conversation of Anthony Shore sharing,
00:32:20
with the detective, the horrible evil that he has done. If you're not gonna give the death penalty in this case,
00:32:38
you're not-- there's no reason to have a death penalty. When I became the Harris County District Attorney
00:32:44
and it became my duty to schedule executions of people who had already received the death penalty,
00:32:52
Shore's name was on the list. He wasn't gonna get any attention if he didn't get the death penalty.
00:32:59
If he got life-- and we didn't have life without parole back then-- again, I don't think he would've achieved
00:33:06
that level of notoriety that he so desperately wanted. He had to have the death penalty to feed his own ego.
00:33:16
NARRATOR: Held for 13 years, when the date finally arrived, he had one last cruel blow to inflict
00:33:23
on his victims' families. Even on death row, Shore was still playing games. Only when it became a reality, when an execution date that
00:33:32
looked pretty much set in stone was gonna happen, all of a sudden, again, the floodgates
00:33:37
open up by Anthony Allen Shore. But again, self-serving, strictly to save his own neck.
00:33:50
You know, we were-- we were expecting him to confess to other murders of other young girls, probably from Alaska
00:33:57
to Maine, any unsol-- he was gonna confess to. We were expecting that. NARRATOR: The execution was stayed while the authorities
00:34:03
investigated. When the government exercises the greatest power it has, which is to kill a citizen, it always has
00:34:12
to be taken with great care. It's the most serious act our government commits. And he got a 90-day reprieve, in order to look at all
00:34:25
the, quote, "offenses" he was claiming credit to, just to make sure and determine that he indeed didn't commit
00:34:33
any further murders and rapes. And so all of a sudden, everything-- everything stops for families who had
00:34:41
prepped for years for this day. Shore is not the typical low-functioning one bad crime defendant.
00:34:52
He was a calculated, thinking, predatory killer. Whether he was showboating at the time of his execution,
00:35:02
I can't say. I don't know what his motive was. But he acted as though he wanted to clear his conscience.
00:35:08
It was so calculated to me, again, by his narcissistic ego, on how he continued to seek attention.
00:35:16
And again, it's all about him. Always has been, always will be. It's hard to know what to believe from a serial killer.
00:35:25
But it's easy to imagine other victims, because Shore was prolific, but he was calculated.
00:35:36
ANDY KAHAN (VOICEOVER): Anthony Shore is-- is about as smart as a serial killer as I've seen in 30 plus years of criminal justice.
00:35:43
You hate to say he is-- he is diabolically brilliant. He played his hand like an ace poker player.
00:35:51
And he waited right until that exact moment when he knew he could throw those cards in and cash in.
00:35:59
And he did it. Basically, Shore bought himself 90 day's worth of life. It's hard to imagine somebody who tortured these women
00:36:13
and sexually exploited and enjoyed their pain and suffering, to his benefit, to know what to believe.
00:36:21
ANDY KAHAN (VOICEOVER): Nothing's been factually proven on any claim he has made since he has been on death row.
00:36:29
I'm not gonna even give him the satisfaction of even, you know, pretending that he actually committed
00:36:37
any more sexual assaults. I don't think we're ever gonna know what was going through Anthony Shore's mind at the time of his death,
00:36:52
but I don't see how it couldn't have been the faces of his victims. ANDY KAHAN (VOICEOVER): You have to look at his victims.
00:36:59
These were four young girls from the ages of 9 to 21, not doing anything wrong. The one is buying groceries for her mother, just walking home.
00:37:11
And then, the way he would kill his victims, that has to-- you know, using a tourniquet, it--
00:37:18
it's so personal and such a slow, agonizing form of death. It's just unimaginable and unspeakable what
00:37:29
these young women had to undergo before they were finally killed by Shore. The people whose children and family members were murdered
00:37:40
are broken from the crimes of Anthony Shore. And there's really nothing that we in the system
00:37:46
can do to fix what happened to them. But I do believe that, by finishing the case,
00:37:55
and asking that the sentence be carried out, that at least they can move on. NARRATOR: It was justice of a kind for the victims'
00:38:07
still grieving families. ANDY KAHAN (VOICEOVER): There-- there are certain cases
00:38:12
that haunt me, to this day. And I vividly will never forget Anthony Allen Shore.
00:38:20
Anthony Shore is the worst of the worst, serial murderer, torturer, enjoyer more of other people's pain
00:38:28
and suffering, murderer of little children and women, the kinda guy who we can never be safe enough from.
00:38:40
I think unless he had multiple positive influences throughout his life there to catch him at his every evil act
00:38:49
to turn him around right then and there and to continue to be incessant in their quest to try to change
00:38:56
the behaviors of this young man, I don't think that there was gonna be a-- a path off of this.
00:39:03
KIM OGG (VOICEOVER): I don't think he was a redeemable person. I thought that we would always be
00:39:07
in danger from Anthony Shore. And taking a look at his victims' families in the waiting room with them, before the execution,
00:39:16
these were broken people. And I think the future dangerousness is that every breath that man took
00:39:23
caused those families pain, including his own family, who testified and told the media they wanted him dead.
00:39:30
I think that, by the time he was a elementary school kid and he was trying to drive a screwdriver
00:39:38
through his sister's head, I think, sadly, he was kind of marked for evil, in many ways.
00:39:45
Because at that young age, you just don't see that kind of behavior very often. And unless he was in therapy throughout his entire life
00:39:53
and he had only positive role models, I think there might've been a small chance.
00:39:57
But who's gonna be there in all the moments of his life? And there may be so many other evil and bad things
00:40:03
that he did that nobody will ever know about. And I think that's the problem. And sometimes we do see, on very rare occasions,
00:40:09
somebody who truly feels like they are born evil. And I believe that that's Anthony.
00:40:33
[THEME MUSIC]