Strangler

by Corey Mitchell

  JS: Okay. Now on this one you think it was a white cord and you said like a pencil or a paintbrush or something?

  TS: Piece of wood. Some kind of piece of wood.

  JS: I don’t know. What’s the word? ‘Tourniquet’ maybe?

  TS: Yeah.

  JS: You put it in there and then you twist it?

  TS: Yeah.

  JS: Alright, it’s now about 12:30 A.M., I’m gonna turn the tape off.

  Detective Bob King recalled John Swaim’s interrogation methods.

  “He started talking. In the state of Texas it’s the detective’s choice how he takes a confession,” King informed. “It can be a written confession that the suspect writes out himself or one the detective types out and he signs off on. It can be audiotape or it can be videotaped. It’s the detective’s choice. John Swaim likes to use the audiotape.

  “He didn’t have to do it the way he did it,” King explained, laughing. “For each murder he stopped, got a new tape, and read the guy his rights again. It was real funny. And Todd Miller and Allen Brown and I are outside watching it on the monitor, going, ‘Yes! Yes!’ John Swaim goes, ‘No. We’re gonna talk about this murder on this day and I’m gonna read your rights this time and then when we go to the next murder, we’re gonna do it again.’ We’re all going ...” He cringed as he recalled the detective’s interrogation method.

  “You don’t have to do it that way.” King chuckled at the memory. “You just have to read them their rights one time on tape and they can confess to as many murders as they want to.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Saturday, October 25, 2003, 12:32 A.M.,

  Houston Police Department,

  Interrogation Room #6,

  1200 Travis Street,

  Houston, Texas.

  Sergeant John Swaim sat down in front of his tape recorder. Tony Shore sat across the table from him. Both men did not seem tired despite the late hour. Swaim continued to get each and every one of Shore’s confessions on tape. He proceeded on to another case that no one had any idea Shore was involved in.

  The following text is the transcript from the actual interrogation of and confession on tape by Anthony Allen Shore in regard to the 1993 rape of Selma Janske (name changed to protect the innocent):

  John Swaim (JS): John Swaim of the Homicide Division here talking to Anthony Allen Shore, correct?

  Tony Shore (TS): Yes.

  JS: Tony?

  TS: Yes.

  (Swaim proceeded to read Shore his rights.)

  JS: You understand these rights ?

  TS: Yes, sir.

  JS: You wanna waive these rights and talk to me?

  TS: Yes, sir.

  JS: Okay.

  TS: Talk about another case y’all don’t know about.

  JS: Okay.

  TS: There’s a reason I wanna talk about that.

  JS: Okay.

  TS: There was a girl that I’d never seen before, which, once again . . . I had fantasies about her. I had seen her several times.

  JS: Where was this?

  TS: [1900 block of] Portsmouth. I don’t know for sure that’s the right address.

  JS: Okay.

  TS: Girl’s name is Selma Janske, I know that. J-A-N-SK-E. I’m guessing she’s probably sixteen, seventeen at the time. I’m not really sure how old. She was young. She was attractive. I was a phone man working outdoors, outside plans, and I worked down this street several times.

  I’d seen her coming home and I knew that she was a latchkey kid. Came home from high school or whatever school she was going to and I wanted to put a stop to . . . the taking of life. I didn’t want to do this anymore. (Shore’s voice quietly trailed off with the last word.)

  Hell, I did this, at this time I, it’s a sexual union, had something to do with it. The more I’m thinking, in retrospect, that it’s having to do with possession of a person. Making them . . . do . . . things.

  So I broke into the house which wasn’t easy. The door was unlocked and I waited for her to get there. She got there. I stole twenty dollars off of the dresser, probably her parents’ room. She came in and I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t have to . . . take the life. That’s the reason why I’m telling you this.

  JS: Okay. That’s fine.

  TS: So I had on—

  JS: Now when was, you think, was this?

  TS: Probably after . . . I don’t remember the timeframe for sure but probably after Diana Rebollar but before Dana Sanchez.

  JS: Okay.

  TS: Okay. So, I . . . tied her up with electrical cord. And I took, and, the resistance from the violence that I thought that I was going to do this again but I promised myself that I wasn’t going to take any more lives no matter what.

  As sick and fucked up as it sounds, I really, really, really was trying to get better in a real sick, demented way. I don’t discount it. I’m not stupid, but I was trying . . . but I promised myself I wasn’t gonna do it and, uh.

  In her bedroom, and uh, I told her that I knew how the police would ask her this and that and I told her say that it was a short, fat black man and that if I heard different then I’d come back and take her family out and I made a lot of threats and uh, when I mentioned the family thing she started fighting and kicking. Now her hands were restrained as she started just going berserk. I really didn’t know when everybody else would come home or when somebody could show up, I just knew that it got out of hand and I had to make a decision.

  JS: At what time? This was when?

  TS: Afternoon. Right after school. 4:00, 5:00 o’clock.

  JS: Oh, that’s right. Right after she got home from school.

  TS: So, I thought I had to make a decision. Once again, I started to strangle her and I thought “No, I just can’t. I just need to get the fuck out of here.” And I left. Thank God.

  JS: You take anything?

  TS: Naw.

  JS: But you didn’t, you didn’t strangle her at all or you started to—

  TS: I started to and I stopped.

  JS: Did you have something around her neck to do it?

  TS: On this one, no. I think I was gonna use my hands and I just freaked ’cause I promised myself I wasn’t gonna do this and all the sudden—like the pathology and the anger and the freaking out. I kept telling myself, “This isn’t necessary. This is not. None of it is necessary.” So I bolted. I left.

  And uh, I walked out, people saw me. There’s people walking in the street. Driving by.

  JS: Normal business.

  TS: Finally walked through the back yard out to the front. I parked my phone truck over on the Whataburger parking lot over at Shepherd and Portsmouth or somewhere in that area. Walked right up to my truck, got rid of my shirt that I had on. Went back to work, scared to death. I was paranoid. I was afraid because I had left somebody as a witness.

  Nobody ever came and talked to me. Nobody ever came and arrested me. There was a part of me, I think, that wanted to be caught.

  JS: That’s what I was fixing to ask you—

  TS: I wanted to be stopped so many times. I just wanted this whole thing to end. That’s why I’m talking to you now. And I want to make sure that nothing ever happens again.

  CHAPTER 35

  Thursday, March 25, 1993,

  700 block of East Eighteenth Street,

  Houston, Texas.

  Gina Shore was in for a real surprise on her and Tony’s wedding anniversary. “He comes home on our tenth anniversary. We’d gone out to a nice dinner; then we went to IMAX and then we came home and Tony had some champagne, ice, an upright thing, and glasses sitting there,” Gina recalled. “We popped and uncorked the champagne. He goes down on one knee and tells me he’s been having an affair for months and that he cannot continue to live a lie.” Gina was floored by this revelation.

  “And he left right there,” said Gina, who had been completely blindsided. “I think I just sat there until he left. I was absolutely blown away.” Gina described herself as a Pollyanna type who tries
to see the best in everyone. “I had not a clue, and now he was gone.”

  According to Gina, Shore had been having an affair with Elizabeth “Lizz” Martin somewhere between three and six months. To add insult to injury, Lizz was a singer in St. Vitus Dance, Shore’s band. “I wrote lyrics for her!” She caustically laughed.

  Shore enjoyed talking to Gina about his sexual escapades with Lizz. He told her that his and Lizz’s first sexual experience took place on a top of a rice silo.

  Bob King later confirmed Shore’s predilection for sex in unusual places.

  “He had a thing about the Hollywood Cemetery,” King recalled with a chuckle. “He loved sarcophagi—those coffins aboveground.

  “And he was queer for rice dryers. Like the AR Rice dryers. He loved that shit.” King shook his head at the thought. “He was big on creeping around the one off of Studemont they tore down. And there’s one on Hempstead Highway that’s still there, but it’s not a rice dryer anymore. He’d take girls over there and he liked to go creeping around. He just thought they were cool. So I checked to see if there were any bodies found around any of those places and there weren’t.”

  To Gina, that was the first time she thought something was wrong with Tony Shore. “That may be the first glimmer that there was anybody like that underneath the surface. He was a pretty mild-mannered darned guy. He was not prone to shouting, he didn’t scream a lot. No jumping up and down. Sure, he got mad on occasion, but . . .”

  Gina also recalled that when she and Shore would get into arguments she used to call him “gay. I only did it whenever he would say mean things to me. I do, however, think he’s a latent homosexual and that is something, still to this day, that he has to deal with. I do. I do. He had tendencies towards guys. Sexual tendencies. And if he couldn’t perform, he’d get mad at me.”

  Gina added that Shore often gave her too much information after they separated. “He had an enormously big mouth and he loved to talk, especially if it was about himself.” He informed her that his relationship with Lizz began to sour almost immediately. “He paid all of her debt, paid for her car to be fixed, made everything good for her, but she left.”

  During these events Tony Shore was granted custody of Amber and Tiffany.

  “They were eight and seven,” Gina recalled when speaking about the girls. “I was so irritated. I said, ‘If you want to pull this [separation], fine, but can’t you just wait until the end of the school year? It’s gonna be like two months until the end of the school year and then they’ll have summer.’” Apparently, Shore did not care. “Literally, after he walked out on the twenty-fifth [of March], I got up on the following Monday to check the balance on the phone, pay the rent, and he had taken all the money out of our accounts. I had nothing to pay the rent with.”

  According to Gina, her second ex-husband was remorseless.

  “I’m not living here, I’m not gonna pay it,” he informed her.

  “How can you do this?” Gina queried, dumbfounded. “I’m gonna have to go live with my mother. Yank Amber and Tiffany out of school. You’re gonna cause Amber to regress.”

  “She’s already regressed,” he said without a lick of concern in his voice for his own daughter.

  “I packed everything,” Gina recalled. “I packed his stuff. I packed my stuff. I packed their stuff. What I couldn’t pack I sold. I preregistered Amber and Tiffany in another school, which they hated.”

  The separation was hard on Amber. “It’s so important for Amber to have that stability. She had to go into a whole new situation. She did indeed regress. It was just nuts.” Gina shook her head as she remembered.

  “Actually, I gave one of those little fake talks that parents give to children. ‘Mommy and Daddy still love you, but Mommy and Daddy aren’t getting along,’ yadda yadda yadda,” Gina continued. “We went to stay with my mom. Tiffany was absolutely bereft. She was daddy’s girl.”

  Tony, Lizz, and her two boys pulled up to Gina’s mother’s curb in an open-air convertible. “They looked like such the cheery all-American family, and Amber and Tiffany would get in the car and go to Astro World and to the zoo and do all these wonderful things.”

  Gina started feeling like the bad cop in the girls’ lives. “When they came home, of course, they had to go to school, they had to do their homework, they had to clean their rooms, they had to sweep, they had their chores. When they get to Dad’s, it’s fun! They get to meet musicians and have parties!”

  The girls began to rebel against their mother. “They decided they would just not do anything I asked them,” Gina remembered. “I was trying to find another job and I wasn’t working for a while, staying at home with Amber.

  “And Tiffany used to say, ‘I want my dad! I want my dad! I want my dad!’ Finally I just decided that we could always split and I said, ‘Tiffany, you can go with your dad and Amber can stay with me.’” Gina did not want to give up her daughter, but she felt it was the right thing to do given her difficult economic situation.

  Then Amber informed her mother that “I want to go with my sister wherever she goes. I want to go with my sister.”

  Tiffany was adamant. “I’m gonna go live with Dad,” she informed her mother. “I am.”

  Gina thought that it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, since Shore lived in a house, had a steady income, and could have Lizz help out with the girls. She felt that it might be good to have Lizz’s two boys around to look after them as well. She also knew that Lizz liked to eat good healthy food. Also, her estranged husband would allow the girls to have a dog. All in all, it sounded like the smartest move for everyone, so Gina agreed.

  So, when summer rolled around, Amber and Tiffany moved in with their father.

  Regina Shore, Tony’s sister, claimed that she was not surprised the girls ended up with her brother. She claimed that Tony’s wife, Gina, had a drinking problem and couldn’t take care of the girls.

  Gina Worley Shore adamantly denied any drinking problem. “He spread that around.” She then used her daughter Amber as an example for her defense. She stated that Amber said, “I don’t remember you ever being drunk or even hearing about that from Dad until after you got a divorce.”

  Gina declared that this was just another way for Tony Shore to try and exert control over her. She talked about how she was constantly on the go, what with taking the girls to school, church, art classes, and extracurricular activities and that she never had time to have a drink, much less get drunk.

  Gina believed, however, that people might have misconstrued her as being drunk because, she alleged, Tony used to drop Rohypnol, or roofies (aka “the date-rape drug”), into her Cokes.

  “One morning I woke up,” Gina recalled, “and I’m sleeping with Amber and she’s one of these people who sleeps like a gymnastics person. So, I woke up in Amber’s bed and she had her foot up my nose and I’m like, ‘How the hell did this happen?’” At first she blamed it on stress.

  It wasn’t until years later when Regina Shore asked Gina, “Did you know that he was drugging you?”

  “No!” Gina exclaimed. “You’re kidding!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Regina affirmed, “he laughs about it and about how gullible and stupid you were.”

  “Well, maybe if he was spreading rumors that I was intoxicated and drunk all the time,” Gina pondered, “maybe that was the cover-up.”

  Gina was frightened by what her ex-husband Shore was capable of doing. “It was scary. I had no idea how long he may have been doing that. How many years? I have no idea what he did to me or may have done elsewhere while I was knocked out.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Saturday, October 25, 2003, 12:43 A.M.,

  Houston Police Department,

  Interrogation Room #6,

  1200 Travis Street,

  Houston, Texas.

  The following text is the transcript from the actual interrogation of and confession on tape by Anthony Allen Shore in regard to the murder of Diana Rebollar:

  Tony Shore
(TS): The Diana Rebollar case, Rebollar, however you say it.

  John Swaim (JS): Rebollar.

  TS: Rebollar. At that point in time I was living in The Heights on East 18th Street, corner house at East 18th Street and Beverly behind the elementary school with my, she wasn’t a wife, but a live-in. Girlfriend. She had two sons and I had two daughters when we were living there.

  Her car had broke down. I didn’t have transportation at that time. She had an old Dodge van. I have no idea what year it was. Sports van.

  JS: What’d it look like?

  TS: It was beige with white trim down the center. And it had one big door on the back and it—

  JS: And whose was this?

  TS: . . . Was an extended van. Yolanda Elizabeth Martin. She was a live-in. Not married.

  JS: Elizabeth Martin.

  TS: Elizabeth Martin.

  JS: This van was . . . ?

  TS: This van belonged to her. It belonged to her dad. It belonged to somebody but we were using it. It didn’t have a transmission. I put the transmission in.

  JS: It was a Dodge you said?

  TS: It was a Dodge sports van. It was an older model. It was an extended van. It had the long rear end.

  Anyway. She and I had been on the rocks, up and down. It was a bad rollercoaster kind of relationship. We had four kids living in the house and we had a two bedroom house, not enough space, ’cause Lizz had come out of a lesbian relationship to be in our relationship and she was going out, sometimes with her gay friends and stuff and I was unhappy and things weren’t going well.

  And, uh, Diana Rebollar. That was a freaky pack of specifics I don’t understand exactly. Too young. Not developed. That was an opportunity, a freaky thing that I don’t know why I did that. I remember seeing this girl walking alone.