- What happens when
a charismatic killer...
- It's classic.
Classic serial killer
can make friends with anybody.
- With a distinctive
homicide technique...
- This wasn't some sort
of impulse grabbing somebody
by the throat
and strangling them.
- Who dumps the bodies
of his victims
in empty parking lots...
- Everybody in Houston
was just shocked.
Stunned. They were angry.
- Goes undetected for years...
- He is an evil person.
He is a guy that preyed
on young women and girls.
- Until his crimes closer
to home bring his downfall.
- He was just out
murdering people
when you were sleeping
in your bed at night.
- It's unspeakable.
It's unspeakable.
- The person sitting there
on the other side of the glass
was not my brother.
All I saw was a demon.
- Despite knowing
this predator closely,
his family didn't know
[ominous music]
* *
- Houston, Texas,
the home of NASA Space Center
and oil exploration.
In the early 1990s,
Houston was going through
a troublesome time.
- People were afraid
to leave their houses.
There were home invasions.
People were getting mugged
and robbed.
We were crime-ridden.
- The general attitude
was it may not be
as safe as it used to be,
so there was some concern
among the community
about the possible dangers
to their children.
* *
- Thursday, April 16th, 1992,
10:35 a.m.,
the parking lot
of Dairy Queen restaurant
in Northwest Houston.
- A guy pulled through to
the drive-through and saw it.
And he couldn't believe
his eyes.
There was a dead body.
- Detectives from
the Houston Police Department
Homicide division
are immediately dispatched
to the scene
at the Daily Queen.
- Once there,
they find the body of a woman
dumped in
the drive-through lot.
- They turn her over.
She has long, black hair
and her hair kind of falls away
and they realize that she's got
a ligature around her neck.
- She had been strangled
with a tourniquet,
an object wrapped around
the cord around her neck
and twisted until the
tourniquet tightened.
- This homicide technique
is complex.
It suggests this might not be
the first time
the killer has struck.
- The killer knew
what he was doing
and was prepared
to commit the murder
at the time he abducted her.
- This wasn't some sort of like
impulse grabbing somebody
by the throat
and strangling them.
Somebody put some thought
and effort into this.
- The deceased female
is partially undressed.
- It looked like you know,
sexual assault
and not only that,
but a brutal sexual assault.
There was obviously
a monster around to do this.
- Ten hours
into their investigation,
detectives get an ID
on the victim.
- Her father actually goes down
to the scene
where police are still,
you know, documenting evidence.
And he identifies her.
- 21-year-old
Maria Del Carmen Estrada
was a Hispanic woman
who worked as a nanny.
- Maria Del Carmen Estrada
was a small woman.
She was, you know, very petite.
She had come to Houston
from Mexico,
hoping to build a better life.
- Maria had only been missing
since that morning.
The local news had alerted
her family to her tragic fate.
[ominous music]
- During an assault
or an abduction,
especially with a female,
it's common to struggle
and scratch her assailant
resulting in skin
or blood being
underneath the fingernails.
- In 1992, DNA analysis
is in its infancy,
but Houston PD thinks it could
be useful in this case.
Swabs and fingernail clippings
are taken
from the woman's body.
- There was a predator
out there.
Someone who would do violence,
violence, violence to women.
- Five miles east
of the Dairy Queen
is the neighborhood
of Houston Heights.
Here 30-year-old single dad
Anthony Shore
is raising
his young daughters.
* *
One woman who knows
Anthony well
is his younger sister, Gina.
- My brother and I probably
became very close
while we were growing up.
And my sister
was so much younger
that she really wasn't
part of our little clique.
My brother,
he sold himself very well.
He carried himself
with the confidence,
very charismatic,
but very arrogant.
He always felt that he was
better than a lot of people.
- In some respects, Anthony
had reason to feel superior.
- My brother was extremely
gifted and talented.
Anything to do with the arts,
just off the charts,
amazingly gifted.
He could hear something
on the radio
and go and play it
on the piano.
* *
- But there's a flipside
to this talented artist.
- He'd always been
kind of a control freak.
He's always been
very structured
as to how he wanted
things to be.
His clothes were always folded
a certain way.
He liked things to be just so.
On his plate, at dinner,
he didn't want his foods
touching each other
on the plate.
Very much in control
of the situation.
* *
- As Anthony grew
into a teenager,
he found a new focus
for his controlling nature.
- He would have me knock
on somebody's door
and have the people's daughter
or whatever come out
so that he could talk to him
and then I would go home.
I don't think it had
ever occurred to me
really completely
what my brother was up to.
* *
- Gina's teacher was
the mother
of one of these
neighborhood girls.
She told Gina
Anthony had been inappropriate
with these young girls.
- I really don't know for sure
what all he did,
but I do know that he was
probably being grabby
and kissy on them
and that's not okay.
I was upset.
Nobody deserves
to be objectified like that.
- As Anthony got older,
he found new ways
to entice young girls.
- We're on our way to a
huge mall in the Houston area
and he saw some girls sitting
at a bus stop and he says,
"Oh, hang on. We're gonna
go back and pick them up.
And the girls
accepted the ride.
I'm sure that they probably
would not have
had I not been sitting
in there.
My brother dropped me off
at the mall and he left.
It seems like he's still doing
some of this wrong behavior.
If he's picking young girls up
at bus stops,
that's not
just boys being boys.
* *
- Even as a 21-year-old
married man,
Anthony's strange
behavior persisted.
- I had gone out and
visited him a couple of times
when he was married
and he was still doing that.
"Oh, here,
I'm gonna drop you off.
I'm gonna go back
and pick these people up."
It bothered me.
- Within 18 months,
Anthony had two children
of his own, Gina's nieces,
Amber and Tiffany.
As Anthony's daughters play
in Houston's quieter streets,
across town,
detectives' hopes of solving
Maria Del Carmen Estrada's
murder are fading fast.
- The police interviewed
everybody at Dairy Queen
who might have seen anything
and they only came away
with a very bland description
of a white man with dark hair.
But it wasn't enough
to bring anybody in.
- You follow every
lead you got.
They didn't have any leads.
They had a body in a driveway
and no suspects.
* *
- But can the DNA evidence
reveal more?
- The lead investigator
had DNA from her mouth
and had DNA from
underneath their fingernails.
So he called in
the sex crimes unit
and asked them, let's go
through your database of DNA
and see if anything matches.
- Unfortunately,
there is no hit
on the suspect DNA.
- Whoever strangled Maria
is not on the database.
How will Houston PD
find Maria's killer?
And could he strike again?
- They were completely
devastated.
I mean, who wouldn't be?
- I would just pretend
to be asleep
because I was afraid
of what would happen.
[ominous music]
- Spring, 1992.
The body of 21-year-old
Maria Del Carmen Estrada
has been found strangled,
sexually assaulted,
and dumped.
* *
Houston PD have no suspects
and no leads.
- The initial investigation
was very rigorous,
but eventually, it just gets
put into folder as a cold case.
* *
- But a forward-thinking
detective makes sure
the evidence
is carefully preserved.
- Detective Kennedy
was very insistent
that the property recovered
in Maria Del Carmen's case
be kept.
- Hopeful of a future chance
to solve the case,
DNA evidence from
Maria Del Carmen's killer
is stored
in Houston PD's archives.
By March 1993, Tiffany
and Amber Shore's parents
have split up.
The girls are living
with their dad Anthony
in Houston Heights.
- As a child, I adored my dad.
I thought he was like
the cool dad
because he was--[chuckles]
He was in a band and he played
the piano when he was home.
He wasn't around as much
as he could have been
because of his band
and his job,
so I remember
missing him a lot
and trying to stay up late
at night
to see him when
he got home from work.
- Anthony's desire
for control
affects everything happening
under his roof.
- My dad had a
unrealistic expectation
of how clean the house
was supposed to be all times.
Everything just had
to be spotless, immaculate.
With two kids
living in the house,
that's not
a realistic expectation at all.
* *
- Tiffany's dad also had
strict ideas about food.
- We didn't have a ton of food
in the house.
Like, we had this horrible
bucket of peanut butter
and it would get ants in it.
And like, we were just
expected to eat that.
He would have, like,
steaks and fancy foods
that were for him.
My father was just
really annoying.
But also I didn't want
to get in trouble,
so I just went along
with the way things were
because I assumed that
that was normal.
Honestly,
at the end of the day,
it just felt like
we weren't wanted.
- Tiffany and Amber's father
make sure his rules
are followed in a brutal way.
- Violence was always
a part of our upbringing.
He would hit us with bare hands
on bare skin,
he would tie us up
on our sheets
so that we couldn't move,
he would smother us
with pillows
so that we couldn't cry
because crying wasn't allowed
in his house.
He was just
very physically abusive.
- Anthony's abuse
of his daughters
involves more
than violent beatings.
- Anthony Shore engages
in classic grooming
where if you're
physically abusing a child,
you give them gifts.
It's kind of an indirect bribe
to cover up what you're doing.
- We had a nice TV,
we had a game system
in our room,
and my sister had, like,
a really nice art set.
At the end of the day,
it was just a bribe.
- While Anthony's daughters
suffer in silence,
to the outside world,
there's no cause for concern.
- He was a very different
person outside in the world.
He was charming
and funny and nice
and all the things that
he was not behind closed doors.
As soon as we got home,
it was always a--
ugh.
* *
- Summer, 1993.
Tiffany is eight
and Amber is nine.
Their aunt Gina pays a visit
and notices new.
disturbing behavior
from her brother, Anthony.
- He was a bit more
touchy-feely with his girls
than what I thought
he should be doing.
It seemed highly inappropriate
to me.
It bothered me.
- It bothers Gina enough
to officially report Anthony.
- Child Protective Services
was just very quick
to dismiss it.
I did feel that he was
touching his daughters
inappropriately,
but they made me feel
as if I was overreacting.
And so I was like,
"Okay, maybe I am wrong."
And I dismissed it.
I let it go.
* *
- Gina heads home to Seattle,
still unsure
about the girls' safety.
In Houston,
Anthony now moves a
new girlfriend into the house.
She's remarkably young.
- She was 17 years old.
I can't imagine
being 30-something years old
and trying to date someone
still in high school.
That is sick in every way.
- August 8th, 1994.
One year since Anthony Shore's
young girlfriend
moved in with him
and his daughters,
another Houston family's life
is about to be
turned upside down.
- We got called into the scene
in the 1400 block
of the West Loop,
which is just north
of downtown.
We got to a
abandoned office building
sometime
shortly after midnight.
And it was dark.
Very dark.
A call came from
the security guard
about a body
in the parking lot.
- Almost immediately, the body
at this scene is identified
as Diana Rebollar.
- Diana was a young
Hispanic girl
who was reported missing
the previous day.
- She goes to the store,
which is only two blocks away,
to buy a bag of sugar.
And then after that,
she just disappears.
- Officers recover her body
less than 24 hours later.
- In the homicide division,
I had literally seen
hundreds of dead bodies,
but anytime you make a scene
where there's a child
or an infant involved,
you have to fight off
your personal feelings
about emotions
so you can do your job.
Diana Rebollar
was nine years old.
- And there's another
gruesome twist.
- It was obvious that she had
been sexually assaulted,
and I observed that
wrapped around her throat,
she had a tourniquet tightened
with a piece of stick
to the point where
it had embedded in the skin
so far that you can
almost not see it,
like we found
on Maria Del Carmen.
- Has Maria's killer
claimed another victim?
[ominous music]
- Houston PD are investigating
the horrific murders
of two young Hispanic girls,
Maria Del Carmen Estrada
and Diana Rebollar.
Both cases involve
sexual assault
and strangulation
with a homemade tourniquet.
The young age
of the latest victim
has rocked the community.
- Everybody in Houston
was aware of what happened
to this poor little girl.
And everybody
was just shocked, stunned.
And yeah, they were angry.
- I spoke with the parents
and they were
completely devastated.
I mean, who wouldn't be?
You send a nine-year-old girl
to the store
and you never see her again.
* *
- These two homicides
are two years apart,
but involve
the same unusual MO.
- The Maria Del Carmen
and the Diana Rebollar case
we began to consider
the possibility
that they were related.
But neither investigation
had turned up any evidence
that would carry forward
in investigating
either one of the cases.
We worked on them for months
and never got the feeling
that we were getting anywhere.
- Less than two miles from
where Diana's body was found,
Anthony Shore is busy
raising his own young girls.
By the summer of 1995,
his behavior had become
even more disturbing.
- Things started escalating
when I was ten.
My dad definitely started
sexually assaulting me
at that particular age.
My sister and I both started
maturing in our bodies.
He started developing behaviors
of exposing himself
or inappropriate touching when
he thought we were sleeping.
And a lot of times I would
just pretend to be asleep
because I was afraid
of what would happen.
I thought that it was
only happening to me,
my sister thought
it was only happening to her.
- Anthony has moved from
physical abuse and control
to sexually assaulting
his children.
- No child can invite
that behavior.
- These girls were absolutely
terrified of their father.
They knew what he was doing
to them was wrong,
but they didn't want him
to get angry
so they weren't resisting him.
They just knew it wasn't right.
And it scared them.
* *
- Her dad's sexual assaults
have a devastating effect
on Tiffany.
- I developed depression,
I was very sad,
I had suicidal ideations.
I tried to kill myself one time
by taking
a ridiculous amount of aspirin.
I was only ten
and I just knew that, like,
when people tried
to kill themselves in movies,
they took a handful of pills,
and so that's what I did.
- Her father's reaction
is astonishing.
- He just yelled at me a bunch.
Like, there was no concern.
He didn't take me to a doctor.
His only reaction was to
just be angry and judgmental.
I just felt unloved.
I just felt like he didn't care
one way or the other.
- Unbelievably,
Anthony continues
abusing his daughters.
- At that point,
I was pretty sure that
life was never going
to improve.
I was finally becoming
of an age where I recognized
that some of the things
in our household
maybe weren't normal and
I just felt pretty hopeless.
There was a lot
of hopelessness.
* *
- Thursday, July 6th, 1995.
11 months after
Dana Rebollar's homicide,
a young Hispanic girl
is running errands in Houston.
- Dana Sanchez was
a 16-year-old.
She lived in
northern part of Houston.
On July 6th,
she left the house
and she just disappears,
vanishes into thin air.
* *
- That evening,
Dana is supposed to get a ride
over to her boyfriend's house,
but she never arrives.
Dana's mother is worried
and reports her disappearance
to the police the next day.
- When Dana Sanchez
went missing,
police probably didn't
take it very seriously.
You know, she wasn't living
with her parents anymore.
She was living with a friend.
You know, kids gonna be kids.
- Dana's mother desperately
searches for her daughter,
but she is nowhere
to be found.
* *
Eight days go by
with no sign of Dana.
- And then all of a sudden,
you get one of the strangest--
[chuckles]
Scenarios.
- On Friday, July 14th,
a call comes into local
Houston news station, KPRC.
- Barbara, who's on the
assignments desk at the KPRC,
she got a call from somebody
she will never forget.
- She picks up and says,
"Hello, how can I help you?"
And person on
the other end says,
"There's a missing girl.
She's gone missing.
And in fact, she's dead."
- "Her body is in a field
north of town."
"Okay.
Well, how do you know that?"
And the voice on
the other end says...
- Click.
Phone goes dead.
- It was a
chilling conversation.
- The remote location lies
outside Houston city limits.
She calls Harris County
sheriff's office
with the details.
- They probably thought they
weren't gonna find anything
because you get these,
you know,
wild goose chases all the time.
But what's the harm
in going to look?
- Harris County detectives
follow the caller's
precise directions
and drive to a small field
beside a dead-end road
off I-45.
- This phone call turns out to
be something really horrific.
They get out and they start
kind of looking around
and all of a sudden,
this smell hits them
and it is bad.
Eventually, they find a corpse
so decomposed
that it's hard to tell
that it's a young woman,
but it's a body.
[ominous music]
- Friday, July 14th, 1995.
Harris County detectives
responding to an anonymous tip
have found a corpse
on the outskirts of Houston.
The strange phone call to KPRC
was no joke.
- This isn't just somebody
who died here.
I mean, they got dumped.
There's a plan
and somebody knows,
and not only do they know,
but they're calling it in.
- Whoever this killer was
had a desperate need
to be noticed.
He wanted to see
what he did on the news.
And the only way for him to do
that was to tip the news off.
[indistinct radio chatter]
- The body is too decomposed
for a simple identification,
but some man-made items
have survived.
- They notice that there
are rings.
- Detectives check recent
missing person reports
and find a lead.
- They take the rings
to the parents' house
and ask 'em, "Are these
your daughter's rings?"
And that's how they identify
that it's Dana.
- Harris County detectives had
found the body of Dana Sanchez.
* *
- Saturday, July 15th.
Nine days after
Dana went missing,
an autopsy is performed on
the 16-year-old girl's body.
- The medical examiner
finds a rope around her neck
and a toothbrush used as
a twisting device in the rope.
* *
- It's another
homemade tourniquet,
a rare weapon with a
specific appeal for a killer.
- He can turn it, tighten it,
loosen it up,
adjust the rate of death.
He had complete
and total control.
- This homicide seems
all too familiar
to local law enforcement.
- Dana Rebollar's case, you had
a tourniquet and you had
a female strangled to death.
In the case of Maria Estrada,
she was strangled to death
with a tourniquet.
Dana Sanchez
was also strangled.
- All of them had one thing
in common as well.
They were all young
Hispanic girls.
- All three cases have
such striking similarities.
A dedicated investigation
task force is set up.
- They wanted to combine forces
between the Harris County
sheriff's department
and the Houston
Police Department.
- They get everybody on board
to try and figure out
what's going on,
'cause they realize
they probably get
a serial killer on the loose.
* *
- December, 1995.
Five months after
Dana Sanchez's body was found,
Gina Shore visits her
brother's family in Houston.
Alarm bells are set ringing
immediately.
- My brother left his girls
at home locked in the house.
All the windows were
nailed shut, no babysitter.
And when we questioned
my brother as to what happens,
if you know,
if there was an emergency,
oh, his neighbor had keys
to let his daughters out.
I felt that that
was not acceptable,
but I didn't want
to start a fight.
- Anthony also seems to have
lost his obsession
with having a spotless home.
- It was really strange,
almost surreal,
the way that they were living.
They had no power,
no running water.
There was stuff strewn
everywhere.
Children being raised
where you can't see the floor.
It wasn't just in disarray.
It was dirty and there was
no rhyme or reason for it.
My brother had a good job,
he was making money,
he was well-respected
in his community,
but I don't think
any of the people
who respected my brother
ever saw what his actual
private life was.
That made me lose respect
for my brother,
that he was endangering
his daughters.
- Once more,
Gina reports Anthony
to Child Protective Services.
- I was completely disgusted
with how CPS was handling it.
My brother is putting
his daughters in jeopardy
and they're just dismissing it.
- But Anthony's public image
wins over CPS welfare workers.
- He's very charismatic,
he was very charming,
and very persuasive.
There was no risk
to his children in CPS.
They're turning a blind eye
because my brother was
so well respected.
It was wrong.
- Gina heads home,
reluctantly
leaving Tiffany and Amber
under their father's control.
- I felt sick to my stomach
having to leave them
in that situation,
but I felt very powerless.
If CPS was not willing
to do something about it,
there was not much
that I could do.
* *
- In January 1996,
Houston's law enforcement's
joint task force
is also feeling powerless.
Their investigation
into Maria, Diana,
and Dana's homicides is not
going the way they'd hoped.
- Days stretch into weeks
and weeks into months
and nothing happened,
so they ran outta leads.
- It was not
for lack of effort.
These guys were really,
really good.
Unfortunately,
there was nothing to be found.
- The lead investigator
sends DNA samples
from Maria Del Carmen's case
for another round of analysis.
- They go back
to the sexual crimes unit.
"Can we run the DNA
that we have
through
the new updated databases?"
- But there are
still no matches.
The killer's DNA
is not in the database.
The three cases go cold.
- You're getting other cases
assigned to you
on a daily basis.
So at some point,
you just have to let go
and hope that you get some
further information
in the future.
- I was so afraid.
- That son of a bitch.
I was horrified.
I was sickened.
- Amazingly, there's a match,
and it's a man in Houston.
[ominous music]
- Early summer, 1997.
16 months since Gina Shore
reported her brother Anthony
for endangering his children,
Tiffany and Amber still live
in Houston with their dad
who's got more
important things on his mind
than his 12-
and 13-year-old daughters.
- My dad decided
to send my sister and I
to go visit my grandmother
over the summer
so that he could
marry his girlfriend
and have a honeymoon.
- Tiffany and Amber head
to their grandmother's
in Sacramento, California.
- It was supposed to be
just for a month,
and then we were supposed
to go back to my dad.
* *
- The girls take turns
visiting their aunt Gina
in Seattle.
* *
- That was when
I decided to tell Gina
about the things
that had been going on
and why I didn't wanna
be alone with my dad.
- Tiffany's moment comes
while waiting for her flight
back to California.
- I'd had a really crappy day
at work
and Tiffany, she says,
"You seem upset."
And I said, "Yeah, haven't
you ever had something happen
"you just felt was unjustified
where it just made
you just wanna punch somebody
in the throat?"
Tiffany turned sheet white,
started bawling her eyes out,
and started telling me
all the things
that my brother
had been doing to her.
He had been molesting her...
and she would wake up
in the middle of the night
with him doing these things.
And I was horrified.
What do you say when
a small child is sitting there
and it's like, you know,
you don't have to go back
if you don't want to.
I will fight to keep you here.
- Gina calls the girls'
grandmother--
hers and Anthony's own mother.
- And I told her
what Tiffany had told me.
Amber was sitting
at my mom's table
and she could hear
what I was telling her.
Amber went ballistic.
She was gonna kill
that son of a bitch
because how dare him
ever touch her baby's sister.
He promised
he would never do that
as long as she was compliant
and let him do whatever
he wanted to her.
- Amber thought that it was
only happening to her
and that she was protecting
her sister, but she couldn't.
- My mom could not believe
that my brother would do that
to his own daughters.
I was not as surprised.
I was horrified,
I was sickened.
He was doing everything
that I suspected him of doing.
I wasn't imagining it.
He was indeed
molesting his daughters.
- Tiffany
and Amber's grandmother
takes immediate action.
- She took them into
child services
there in Sacramento
the next day
and started the process
where my brother
would not have
his daughter's back.
And we pressed charges
at that point.
- Disgusted with her brother,
Gina hunts for answers.
- I did call him
and ask him, "Why?
Why would you do this?"
His response...
"Well, I had lack of control,"
and you know,
"I was doing drugs,"
or "I was drunk."
"And you have to understand
they're very provocative
young ladies."
Provocative or not,
that does not make it okay
to do that to a child.
Even if they were adults,
it doesn't make it okay.
It will never be okay.
* *
- October 31st, 1997.
- Anthony Shore is then charged
with child sexual molestation.
The California authorities
had to hand it over to Texas
because that's where
the molestation occurred.
- In court, Anthony shockingly
gets no jail time
and has put on probation
for eight years.
- All he had to do
was just register
that he had molested
his daughters.
He lived across the street
from an elementary school.
Sex offenders aren't supposed
to be able to do that.
- Anthony's also required
to submit a DNA sample
to the police.
- Anthony Shore at this point
is holding out
as long as he can
before he has to submit
his DNA sample.
What's he trying to hide?
[police siren wailing]
- By the fall of 1998,
Anthony Shore's DNA
is in the new national
DNA database.
* *
Tiffany and Amber's
grandmother
gets custody of the girls.
Though she's hundreds of miles
from Houston,
Tiffany's still scared
of her dad.
- He had absolute freedom
of movement.
I was so afraid that he was
just gonna show up and hurt us.
* *
- The girls rebuild
their lives in California.
Their father carries on
his life
with his young wife in Texas.
* *
Houston, 2003.
Five years on,
Harris County now has
a dedicated cold case squad.
They think
the tourniquet homicides
are worth another look.
- We talked with the Harris
County sheriff's office,
so they advised us
that they were using a company
called Orchid Labs in Dallas,
which was a new company
that was processing DNA.
- Can this new lab finally
unlock these cold cases?
- The fingernail clippings
from Maria Del Carmen,
they had been kept on file
in the evidence room
all these years.
* *
They had DNA, but you use
it up each time you test it,
so they had
to make a decision.
Do we want to use, you know,
the rest of our finite sample
on sending it to Dallas?
- It was decided that
the fingernail samples
would be submitted to see
if there was DNA enough
to match a suspect.
- Can this carefully-preserved
evidence
finally reveal
the killer's identity?
- The DNA analysts,
they do their magic.
They're able
to pull a good sample.
- The DNA profile is run
against the national database.
* *
On October 16th, 2003,
the results come in.
- Amazingly there's a match,
and it's a man in Houston.
- The name, I had never heard
of in my life: Anthony Shore.
[dramatic music]
- It's the breakthrough
detectives have been waiting
over 20 years for.
DNA evidence
firmly ties Anthony Shore,
convicted child molester,
to Maria Del Carmen's murder
in 1992.
- The question now becomes is
Anthony Shore a serial killer?
[ominous music]
- Friday, October 24th, 2003.
- Anthony Shore,
he had been arrested
and taken down
to the homicide division,
and a search warrant
was obtained for his house.
In his bedroom,
he had folders,
many of them that
contained pictures
of young, Hispanic females
in negligees or in stockings.
And he had cut 'em all out and
pasted them in this notebook.
The suspect liked
young, Hispanic girls.
* *
- Anthony Shore is ready
for questioning at 5:00 p.m.,
but he's not about to give
the police an easy ride.
- The cops say,
"We have your DNA
"connected to Maria
Del Carmen's murder.
So we know it's you.
So what do you say about that?"
And he says, "I don't remember
anything like that."
You know,
it just sort of plays it off.
And he's kind of cool
about the whole thing.
- For over five hours,
three different detectives
take turns
interrogating Shore.
- And got nowhere with him.
He wouldn't admit to anything.
- Shortly before midnight,
Detective Swain
has one last try.
- That's when Anthony Shore
opened up and told him
he was going to tell him
about the murders
and also give him a bonus
[ominous music]
- Friday, October 24th, 2003.
Houston PD have
a prime suspect
for three shocking homicides.
Anthony Shore is now offering
a confession for these
and a bonus fourth murder.
- The bonus murder
was the Tremblay murder.
- Laurie Tremblay was
a teenage girl from Houston.
- She was just walking
to school in 1986
and she ended up missing.
- Laurie Tremblay was found
in the parking lot
of a restaurant
behind a dumpster
and had been
strangled to death.
- Laurie's case
had remained unsolved
for 17 years until now.
- Shore ultimately confesses
to killing four people,
all female, all young.
Laurie Tremblay,
Maria Del Carmen Estrada,
Diana Rebollar,
and Dana Sanchez,
all strangled and dumped.
- Not only does he admit
to the three murders,
but there's a fourth murder
that they had no idea about.
It just blows everybody away.
- Shore also admits
he called KPRC news,
alerting them to Dana's body.
- That just
fits serial killers.
Need for control
and a need for attention.
* *
- It's not long before news
of Shore's arrest
reaches his daughters.
- I was about 18 years old
and I remember my sister
calling me on the cell phone
in her very calm, casual way.
It was like, "Oh yeah.
On the news,
Dad's a serial killer."
And I was like,
"Yeah, okay. Whatever."
And she's like, "No, no, no.
Like, I'm serious.
I just saw--"
[chuckles]
"On the news,
Dad is a serial killer."
It was very surreal.
- He is an evil person.
He is a guy that preyed
on young women and girls.
- Tiffany tries to make sense
of what her dad
has confessed to.
- I knew he was
a terrible person.
I knew what he had done
to my sister and I,
but also, like,
that's a hard one to believe.
That the parent
that you lived with
was just out murdering people
when you were, like, at school
or sleeping in your bed
at night and then coming home.
Like it was really,
really a lot to take in.
* *
- Gina's younger sister
brings her the news
about their big brother,
Anthony, who she calls Tony.
- I just got home from work,
and my phone rang.
My sister said,
"You need to sit down.
I've got some news."
I said, "What?"
And she says,
"They've arrested Tony
"for murder.
They're attributing
four bodies to him."
And I said, "I'm not surprised.
I'm not surprised at all."
All that stuff that I had
put aside all came to light.
All the times
I had reported him--
picking people up.
When I was with him before,
I didn't think that
he had murdered people,
you know, trying to rape them
or whatever,
but...
it brought back a lot of...
what I knew.
* *
- Before Anthony stands trial,
Gina visits him in jail.
- The person sitting there
on the other side of the glass
was not my brother.
Looking at his eyes,
that was not the person
that I knew as a child.
That person was long gone.
And when I asked him why,
his response was,
"Because I could,"
and that's all he said.
* *
- Monday, October 18th, 2004.
Anthony Shore's
murder trial begins.
The prosecution tries him
for Maria Del Carmen's
murder first.
- Shore basically just said,
"Yeah, I want
to take credit for this.
"This is my handiwork.
I did it.
"I killed these girls.
I sexually assaulted them.
"And I want the world to know
that Anthony Allen Shore
is a serial killer."
* *
- On day four of the trial,
Anthony Shore is found guilty
of killing
Maria Del Carmen Estrada.
- And after he was convicted
of capital murder,
they brought in all the other
murders for sentencing.
- The court hears details
of the other three homicides,
which Shore has confessed to.
On October 27th,
the verdict is returned.
- The jury has sent him to the
death chamber after an hour.
And I imagine 45 minutes
of that
was deciding who was
gonna be the foreman.
- I wanted him
to be put to death.
I felt that it was
an appropriate sentence
for his crimes.
The only thing that was
regrettable about his sentence
was just how long it took
to carry it out.
* *
- After 13 years on death row,
Anthony Allen Shore
is executed
by lethal injection.
- I showed the pictures.
Laurie, Maria, Diana,
and Dana.
I said, "This is their day.
"And the reign of terror
of Anthony Allen Shore
is finally over."
- Shore never acknowledged
with any sort of remorse
or emotion what he had done.
He did say to his sister
that he did it because he could
and we'll probably
never really know
what motivated him to kill.
* *
- The execution
of Anthony Shore
finally brings closure
for many people in Houston.
- As a homicide investigator,
there are certain cases
that you just
really want to solve,
especially when there's
an innocent victim or a child.
The Diana Rebollar case
haunted me for years.
I wanted to see Anthony Shore
get what he deserved
for leaving Diana Rebollar dead
in that parking lot.
When he was gone,
I was happy as hell.
- Anthony Shore
was a diabolical predator.
One of the worst of the worst.
He would pick up
these young women
and then brutally,
brutally kill them.
It's good that he's gone.
- Shore's family were
also victims.
He's a registered
convicted sex offender,
supplying a DNA sample.
That's the only reason
he got caught,
was because of what he did
to his daughters.
* *
- Gina Shore tries
to reconcile
her feelings
for her brother, Anthony.
- I don't hate my brother.
I hate what he did.
I hate how it affected people,
I hate that it hurt people.
I love the fact my brother
put two beautiful daughters
on this Earth.
[sparse dramatic music]
But I hate the fact
that he hurt them.
- For the most part,
my dad just made my life
inordinately harder
than it needed to be,
and I'm glad he is gone.
- Tiffany is now focusing
firmly on the future.
- Hopefully,
we all have someone out there
that's listening
or seeing what goes on
and doing the right thing and
intervening where they can.