He wrote that he was aroused by his daughter. “There she was,” referring to Tiffany, “wet and totally incapacitated. She didn’t look like my little girl any more [sic]. It was at this moment I experienced some level of arousal, her body was that of a woman, very developed and muscular.”
Shore described how he was supposedly overcome by an intense sensation. “Somehow though, for a split second, suspended in time, I lost control and my mind gave way to fear.” He seemed to blame his behavior on extenuating circumstances. “I was scared, confused, high, and she was wet and vulnerable.” Apparently, the combination was too much for him to withstand. “I could not have been in my right mind, for in that moment I was overcome by some sick desire to touch her vagina by hand.”
* * *
Tony Shore wrote specifically about what he did to his oldest daughter, Amber. “I was in a dream state, half awake, half asleep, snuggling with Amber on the couch when I caught myself touching her breast through her clothes. She was asleep and I stopped the moment I became conscious.” Shore never could accept full responsibility for his actions. He continued, “I was sick and embarrassed. That was the moment I realized I was preoccupied sexually with touching Amber. Prior to that, my fantasy was more just disrobing with my eyes.”
Unfortunately, his preoccupation flourished. “After the incident with Amber I think the fantasy grew and I would wonder how supple her breasts might feel.”
* * *
Tony Shore wrote down what he considered to be triggers that aroused him when it came to his daughters:
• Long clean brushed and flowing hair
• Athletic/shapely long bare legs
• Short skirts/shorts/braless tops/swimwear
• Bare breasts
• Beautiful dark eyes and nice smile
• Form-fitting clothes like a tee or tank top
• Crop tops with nicely shaped firm flat tummy showing
• Flirting is a turn-on, complimenting me
• When women would play with my hair (used to be long)
• Kissing and touching me in an inviting way
• Provocative or suggestive dancing
“These were all triggers in both cases which I feel led to preoccupation with each of my daughters.”
* * *
Tony Shore wrote about the denial he went through after he molested his daughters. He justified his actions by convincing himself that what he did was an accident, or that the girls didn’t know what happened to them, or by buying them expensive musical equipment, or that since no vaginal penetration was involved, his behavior was acceptable.
He added that he obviously lost the girls’ trust and that “their stress was beyond words and they lost their ability to focus their attention.” He added, “I’m certain they were consumed with anger, rage, terror and confusion and in the end they lost contact not only with Dad, but with everyone whoever mattered.”
* * *
Tony Shore wrote about the consequences of his actions and how they impacted his own personal relationships. “As for my immediate family, my dad, mom, aunts, uncles, sisters, without exception, they abandoned me.” Tony Shore claimed that everyone abandoned him. “They hate me. I have lost all contact with any/all of my relatives. As far as my family is concerned, I’m deceased and do not exist anymore.”
CHAPTER 44
Tony Shore’s probation turned out to be a joke. Not once, but twice, he submitted a urine sample laced with cocaine. Instead of facing serious time behind bars, Shore did not receive any punishment. He truly seemed to be charmed.
Shore made sure that Amy was by his side every time he had to make a courthouse appearance. He wanted to create a familylike atmosphere with Amy playing the supportive wife role. She was with him at each hearing.
Amy talked about Shore’s bizarre behavior during this time. She stated that he often told her he was “going trespassing.” According to Amy, that was “a sport for him to go and see if he could go in some place where he wasn’t supposed to be and then leave again without getting caught. Without anyone knowing that he had been there.”
She also talked about how Shore would dress up in disguise, usually in a long black wig, so he could mingle about in crowds where there would be children.
A friend of Shore’s named Mort also mentioned that Tony used to wear disguises whenever they would hit the bars. Mort claimed that he and Shore worked together and hung out and got wasted over a period of two years. “He was a good friend to me,” Mort recalled. “Tony was very strange, not unlike myself or any of the freaks I run with.
“He always told me, ‘You think you know me, but you don’t know me.’ I assumed that what he was saying was a roundabout way of saying he was into some homosexual stuff, so I never made too much of it. I guess I was asleep.”
Mort had some words for his friend. “He was always kind and giving, but everyone has a dark side. His was just darker than others.”
Amy also talked about a dark side to her husband that others did not see. She recalled one time when he came home very late and his shirt was covered in blood. He told her that he had helped a little girl in a white dress who was bloodied in a car accident. Shore claimed he knew CPR and was ready to help if necessary. Amy doubted the sincerity of that explanation.
CHAPTER 45
Fall 1998,
700 block of East Eighteenth Street,
Houston, Texas.
Amy Shore entered her home to see her husband frantically pacing the hallway. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
Tony Shore stopped, looked up at her, and continued to pace.
“Tony, what is wrong?” she asked again.
“I’m gonna make you famous,” he said to her.
Amy thought that maybe he was talking about her musical career. He had always told her he would make her a star one day. She felt in her skin, however, that he was not talking about pop stardom.
“Tony, what are you talking about?”
Shore continued to pace. Finally he stopped and looked up at her again. “One of my conditions for probation,” he stated, “is to give a DNA sample. Why should I have to give my DNA for something I didn’t do?”
Amy was amazed at her husband’s demeanor. He had always looked so calm to her. Always in control. Always in charge. Now he was bouncing around like a jackrabbit on cocaine. She was worried for him, but also nervous because of the way he was acting.
“You know I didn’t do this, right?” he asked her. Amy nodded her head.
“I don’t want to do this. I just don’t,” he declared. Shore turned around in a flash toward Amy. “I’m gonna run! I’m gonna run!”
Shore began pacing again as he told Amy what they were going to do. “First I’m gonna get a boat and you’re coming with me. You’re my guardian angel.” He loved to call her that. He was her protector and she was his guardian angel. He also used to say that he was her “Rock of Gibraltar.”
“We’ll take a boat and head out into the Gulf and make our way out to the Atlantic. We’ll get away from American soil and that way we can’t be extradited back to the States.”
Amy stared at him in amazement.
He turned around and looked at her again. “I’m gonna make you famous.”
* * *
Tony Shore waited until the last possible day before he finally complied and supplied a DNA sample.
CHAPTER 46
Saturday, January 16, 1999,
700 block of East Eighteenth Street,
Houston, Texas.
Despite his strange behavior and the child molestation charges brought against him by his own two daughters, Amy stayed married to Tony Shore. She even stuck with him when he began to intimidate her physically.
Shore attempted to get Amy to join him in some riskier sexual encounters. He wanted Amy to let him choke her while they had sex. “If you’re asphyxiated, then you will get off better and you’ll cum,” he told her, expecting her to get excited by the prospect. Amy smacked hi
m on the shoulder and told him, “Get out of here, Tony. I’m not doing that.”
The next morning Amy woke up groggy and incoherent. As she stumbled out of bed, she had difficulty righting herself just to walk to the bathroom. While Amy shuffled forward, she felt a severe pain in her neck. At first, she assumed she must have slept wrong and gotten a crick in her neck. She then felt the pain in her chest and then a pain in her throat. She thought it was rather odd coming so soon after her husband said he wanted to choke her during sex.
Despite all the warning signs, Amy stayed with Tony Shore.
That is, until one night in winter 1999. Shore and Amy were in their home making love when things got out of control. According to Amy, Tony Shore drugged her drink and she became woozy and passed out. She awoke to her husband’s hands wrapped around her throat. Shore squeezed her throat as hard as he could, so hard that Amy could not physically defend herself. She started to fall unconscious as he kept choking her.
Miraculously, Tony Shore stopped just short of killing her. Amy, however, believed he had every intention of doing so. She blamed his cessation of choking her on her acting skills as she played possum and faked falling unconscious.
As Amy lay there in a semiconscious state, Shore decided to have his way with her. He rolled his wife over onto her stomach, pulled off her panties, and took her from behind. Amy continued to play possum during the rape. He started to pound away at her and make bizarre grunting noises. Suddenly he stopped, ejaculated inside her, and dismounted. He then grabbed Amy and tossed her on her back. He began to pound on her chest with his fists. He leaned over her face, grasped her nose and pinched the nostrils shut, and placed his mouth over hers. He began a rhythmic breathing pattern while alternately applying pressure to Amy’s chest. He was trying to resuscitate her.
The force of her husband’s breath into Amy’s mouth caused her more pain. She began to cough so violently that he pushed himself off her. Amy sat up and kept hacking until her air passage seemed clear. She looked at Shore, but did not say a word.
Amy could not believe what her own husband had just done to her. But she dared not utter a word of discontent, for she feared for her life. Instead, she lay awake in bed next to the man she agreed to stay with until “death do us part.”
Amy Lynch was determined that she would not be that person.
The following morning Amy bolted from her home and sought comfort from a friend, telling her what Shore had done to her the night before. Two days later, Monday, January 19, 1999, she found herself on the steps of the Harris County Courthouse, ready to file for divorce. But there was one problem: Monday was a federal holiday due to the observation of Martin Luther King Day. Amy was ready to cry. It was almost as if Tony Shore had some irreproachable control over every aspect of her life.
But Amy pulled herself together, realized the foolishness of her thinking, and returned to her friend’s residence for the night.
The following morning, Tuesday, January 20, Amy returned to the courthouse, where she successfully filed a petition for divorce from her husband, Anthony Allen Shore.
Shore blamed the dissolution of his marriage to Amy, not on the accusation of and sentence for molesting his own two daughters, but rather on Amy’s supposed materialistic needs.
“When I could no longer support (and spoil her) in the fashion she was accustomed to, she left me,” Shore said of his second wife.
CHAPTER 47
January 1999,
700 block of East Eighteenth Street,
Houston, Texas.
Tony Shore’s downward spiral continued unabated. He spent Christmas alone, he had not heard from either of his daughters, and his divorce from Amy was pending.
Then he met Pauline Cody. Pauline was a not-so-fresh-faced gal from the school of hard knocks. Despite hardships and setbacks, she had a strong work ethic and was doing everything she could to get her life back on track.
One of the avenues Pauline undertook to better care for herself was spending a year-and-a-half in a drug rehabilitation center known as the Door to Recovery. They helped her kick her addictions to marijuana and alcohol. They also moved her from Austin to Houston, supposedly to separate her from any bad elements.
After Pauline successfully completed her drug treatment, she moved into her aunt and uncle’s home. They lived in The Heights.
Pauline was lucky enough to land some work at the nearby C & D Hardware, located down the street from her aunt and uncle’s. She worked the cash register and also helped customers find items they couldn’t locate on their own. It was an honest job with a decent paycheck that kept her close to home. She also scored a second job working for Buchanan’s Nursery, across the street from the hardware store. She eventually did so well for herself that she was able to lease one quadrant of a fourplex in the same neighborhood, only a few streets from her jobs.
Pauline felt very confident that things were only going to get better for her.
One day, while working at C & D Hardware, a gentleman with short dark hair and a dark goatee walked through the store’s front door and asked Pauline if they had a specific piece of hardware. She had never heard of what the man was looking for and told him so. The man smiled and said he would find it himself. Pauline thought he was cute and that he seemed very courteous, despite the fact that she could not answer his question.
After a few minutes, the man returned with the mystery item in hand. He had a big smile on his face. Pauline returned the smile when she saw that he found what he needed. He gave her the item and some cash, and then said, “Would you like to go out with me tonight?”
Pauline was embarrassed. But pleasantly so. She had been flying low on the dating scene ever since she had been admitted to rehab. The fact that a fairly attractive, congenial man expressed interest in her warmed her soul. She smiled and agreed to go out with him. She told him where she lived and he told her what time he would pick her up.
Tony Shore arrived at Pauline’s apartment right on time and whisked her away to a nice Mexican restaurant called Spanish Flowers. The two dined and conversed easily together. After they finished their meal, he drove her to a coffeehouse called Café Artist, where they both nursed hot cups of joe.
Pauline asked Shore up to her apartment and he eagerly accepted. The couple spent the rest of the night talking about each other and writing poetry. He told her about being on probation, but Pauline did not seem to mind. Of course he lied to her and told her his own mother had put his daughters up to it. Pauline believed Shore and actually felt sorry for him. They spent the rest of the night enjoying each other’s company. He was a complete gentleman and eventually left her and went home.
Pauline was instantly enamored with Tony Shore. Even though he was nearly fourteen years older, she believed he understood her and she felt he was a great listener. She also found him very attractive and was especially enthralled with his creative side. “He swept me off my feet,” she recalled.
Pauline added that “he was very charming. There was a lot about him that seemed attractive. He was really smart. He was very articulate and musically inclined and just opened my world to a lot of new things.”
Shore spent the next several days courting Pauline. They ate out frequently at several nice restaurants. They went to the movies together. Shore wowed her with his musical prowess on the piano, guitar, and drums. Pauline told Shore of her tainted past. He informed her that he was separated and would soon be divorced.
Within a couple weeks, Pauline had moved all of her possessions out of the fourplex and into Shore’s home on East Eighteenth Street. “It just kind of happened,” Pauline recalled. “We didn’t really discuss moving in.”
After she moved in, Tony decided it was the appropriate time for them to engage in intimacy. The first night they went to bed, Shore got in his preferred doggy-style position. As he thrust into his new girlfriend’s willing orifice, he reached down with his hand and gripped it around her throat. Pauline was oblivious at first, but as he continu
ed to put the G.I. Joe kung fu grip on her, she began to get light-headed.
“I realized, after some time, that this was really not something I was interested in doing,” Pauline recalled. She asked him to stop and he complied. She then told him to never do that to her again.
“Tony, why would you want to do that?” she wondered.
“Some people get off on it.” He smiled. “I don’t know. I just thought it might enhance your pleasure. I’m sorry.”
He never tried to choke Pauline again.
She did notice, however, that he seemed to choke on his responsibilities. In the beginning of their relationship, Pauline saw him write and mail child support checks to his mother in Sacramento. Apparently, this task did not last very long and Shore quit sending in payments. “I just didn’t see him do it anymore,” Pauline recollected. “It kind of fell off.”
Pauline also began to notice Tony’s fluctuating work situation. One week he worked for one towing-truck company and made good money. A month or so later, he was no longer working there. This transcience became a pattern. He told her that these moves from company to company resulted in better pay.
Shore also became more reclusive as time went on. About the only person he invited over to the house was his neighbor Rick Huey. The other visitor to the house was Shore’s probation officer, Chet Machen, and Shore wasn’t ever happy to see him. Almost every time Machen paid Shore a visit, Tony would instruct Pauline not to make a sound while the probation officer knocked on the door. He hated dealing with Machen. Shore even knew where all the squeaky sections of the hardwood floors were and pointed them out to Pauline so she wouldn’t step on them and make noise.
Pauline recalled that Shore did a lot of unusual things in the house. When she first moved in, he had been painting the inside in exchange for rent payments. He put up brown paper on all the windows to keep the paint off the glass. It took him nearly two months to complete the job; however, he did not take down the paper.
Strangler Page 16