She never learned the young man’s name.
The following morning she woke up to the sound of her hotel door slightly creaking as it was being opened. As the sun pierced through the crack, she saw a figure enter her room, but was hazy as to who it was. As the figure entered the room, it blocked the light. Lynda was slowly able to make out the face that belonged to the figure. It was Shore.
Lynda had no idea how Tony Shore knew to come to get her, because she had no recollection whatsoever of having spoken to him. She definitely did not remember asking him to come and retrieve her. Shore packed her up and took her home, where she immediately fell back asleep. Lynda slept almost another twenty-four hours before she was able to regain her senses.
CHAPTER 49
Friday, October 24, 2003,
Houston Police Department Headquarters,
Homicide Division—Sixth Floor,
1200 Travis Street,
Houston, Texas.
After receiving the call from Katherine Long indicating that she had received a positive match on the DNA underneath the fingernail clippings of Carmen Estrada, Detective Bob King began to research Tony Shore.
“Found out he had been a telephone repairman. Started looking into his work history. Looked at his residences. Started looking at his vehicles. The state came up with a list of them. One was registered to a shop or a garage and we went and talked to that guy.”
When Captain Richard Holland determined it was time to go after Shore, he had King contact ADA Kelly Siegler to assist with a warrant to search Lynda White’s house.
In the warrant King declared that Shore was a “possible serial killer” and that “there exists the distinct possibility that the defendant has kept as ‘trophies’ something from each of his victims, as in perhaps, items of clothing or similar items from the crimes he has committed. Your affiant believes that the defendant may still have in his possession such items from the victims.”
The legal wheels had been properly set into motion. Now they needed to find Shore, arrest him, and search his residence.
“It got to the point where Captain Holland said, ‘This guy’s too big a threat to the public. We can’t let him just stay out there. We need to go ahead and get him in,’” King recalled. “I got with Kelly Siegler and drew up a probable cause arrest warrant. He’s not actually charged. It’s also called a pocket warrant. You lay out your probable cause for arresting him.
“She and I went to the judge in the court where he was on deferred adjudication, so he signed off on that warrant and the search warrant for Lynda White’s house. I called back over to Lieutenant Neely, who had headed up the task force since March, and he had Hal Kennedy sitting up on a wrecker storage lot where Shore worked.”
Friday, October 24, 2003,
Champion Collision Center,
8747 Daffodil Street,
Houston, Texas.
Houston Police Department patrol officer Robert Farmer had only been on his shift for two hours when he received a call to arrest a man suspected of murder. The suspect was dressed in a black T-shirt with a Mini Cooper logo that said “Let’s Motor” on it, tucked into a pair of faded light blue jeans, and he wore a medallion around his neck. He was standing outside Champion Collision Center, at the corner of Daffodil Street and Crossview Drive, smoking a cigarette.
Officer Farmer spotted the man, pulled his squad car within twenty feet of him and stepped out of his vehicle. He approached the man in black and said, “You’re under arrest.”
The man looked up at the officer, did not say a word, and then continued to smoke his cigarette.
“Put your hands behind your back, sir,” the officer told the suspect. The man complied without saying a word.
Officer Farmer reached in to cuff the suspect’s wrists together when he noticed that the suspect still had the burning cigarette in his hand. “Sir, please drop that cigarette,” he ordered the suspect.
The man defiantly held on to the cigarette.
Officer Farmer reached for his flashlight and “cracked him on the knuckles” so he would finally drop it. “After that,” Farmer later recalled, “there was no further resistance.”
* * *
Much later, Tony Shore’s father was stunned by the news.
“I was very surprised. Got a couple of calls from Lynda White. He brought Lynda over once. She seemed really nice. Really nice. She was really torn up about this,” Rob Shore sympathized. “It was kind of a sad situation. Tony was calling her a lot and she didn’t know what to do. My take on it was ‘Don’t stay in contact with him.’”
Tony’s first wife, Gina, was just as taken aback.
“It just blew me away. Especially since the way I first heard about it was from Amber on the answering machine. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s so funny. Ha! Ha!’” She thought it was a vicious prank, even for her daughter.
Eventually Gina went home and turned on the television.
“I heard it on the news and I screamed,” she recalled.
“I was astounded. It was such a shock. And then the phone starts ringing. Media. Everybody thinks you know something, but you don’t. I said, ‘I don’t know anything. I’m just as surprised as anyone else.’ Shit, the wife [Lynda White—girlfriend, actually] he was living with had no clue. Nobody had a clue.”
Gina was just as confused as the media was about what Shore had been charged with. She would ask reporters why they thought he did it and they would say they didn’t know either.
“I think in the very, very beginning of everything, I wondered, ‘Is it something I did? Is it my fault?’” Gina expressed a sense of guilt, a trait often seen with surviving family members of suicide victims. She finally came to the conclusion that it was all Shore’s choice and that it had nothing to do with her or anything she did.
“You have to accept responsibility for your own deeds,” Gina concluded. “When you’re a little bitty kid and people dominate your life, then you can blame somebody. But once you’re an adult, and you go out and make these decisions, you really can’t blame [someone else], unless you have ‘Stockholm syndrome,’” Gina said, referring to the condition wherein a captive individual eventually acquiesces to the seemingly untenable demands of their captor, such as in the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. “Or you’re an Iraqi prisoner or something. That might tend to warp ya.
“But he didn’t have such a terribly awful childhood.” As far as the alleged abuse Tony Shore supposedly received at his father’s hand, Gina stated, “I don’t even remember him talking about his father being violent like that. His mom, on the other hand, she has the raging Italian temper!” But Gina believed Dea reserved her punishments for Shore’s sister. “I think she used more physicality with Regina. I remember the family talked about a couple of physical contacts when Regina was a teenager. But, I never heard anything about Tony except that he was a free spirit up there, that he was in a band, Foxfire, and that he wasn’t going to school.”
According to Gina Worley Shore, “Dea had one rule: ‘Do not go into my closet.’ It’s like everything that’s holy to her she kept in her closet. She worked like sixteen hours a day as a waitress at Denny’s.”
Gina recalled when Tony got in trouble with his mother. “She left Tony to take care of Regina and Laurel. I think it was his fifteenth birthday [and] he had a really wild party, and there were people in her closet making out. That was it. She threw him out.”
When asked what was so important in Dea Shore’s closet, Gina Worley Shore stated, “She was a costumer. She did alterations and costumes and she did portfolios on the side with models, so most of it was clothes that she had sewn and costumes and the boas and things like that.” Understandably, Dea Shore did not want her hard work to be soiled or tainted in any way. “She’d go in there and smell the smoke in the fabric, which would ruin them. She told Tony, ‘That’s the one thing I asked you not to do. I can’t handle it, Tony. I have to work. If you can’t give me that one courtesy, then
you have to move your stuff out.’”
Gina added, “Dea was working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. One day she got a box of chocolate-covered cherries from someone. It was the one treasure that she was looking forward to after working so hard. Waitresses work very hard. She was coming home looking forward to eating this box of chocolate-covered cherries, but someone had eaten the whole box. Man, she was so mad. She wanted to know who it was. Each person blamed the other. Even to this day I’ve asked about that and I still don’t know who ate the chocolate-covered cherries.” She does have her suspicions, though. “I think it’s probably Laurel.” She laughed.
Gina also wondered if an automobile accident might have triggered something in her ex-husband.
“He and a friend were driving down some dark country road, and he went to pass someone, but the car wouldn’t let them pass, nor would it let them back in the lane and they had a head-on collision with a truck,” Gina recalled. “His friend got a cut across the forehead. Tony shattered all of his fingers. Shattered his jaw. The ignition went up through his spinal cord. I think he was in the hospital for almost a year. He has little dots where the pins were.”
According to Gina, the doctors told Shore that he would never play piano again. “But he got one of those handballs and he worked through it himself. He didn’t have enough money to pay the hospital bills. Rob, the trombone player (from Foxfire), played a platinum trombone. Tony sold it so he could pay his bills. Needless to say, that didn’t go over too good with Rob.”
Gina continued saying that Shore “couldn’t even pay the anesthesiologist when he had his pins taken out, so he had them taken out without any anesthetic.”
Gina later saw a picture of the car. “I’m surprised he even survived. The front of the car was all the way in the backseat. It looked like a little car.”
CHAPTER 50
Lynda White’s Residence,
300 block of Freeport Street,
Houston, Texas.
Lynda White sat in her living room holding her grandson, enjoying some alone time with her little bundle of joy. She was a bit concerned, however, because she had not heard from Tony Shore and was beginning to wonder when he would show up.
Her silent reverie was loudly interrupted with a loud bang on her front door. She jumped at the noise and then realized there were people standing outside. She walked briskly to the front door and opened it up. Standing in front of her was Detective Bob King. She smiled until she looked over his shoulder and saw what appeared to be the entire Houston Police Department on her front doorstep.
“While they were talking to him, I was out with D. D. Shirley at Lynda White’s house,” King recalled. “Knocked on the door. She answers the door. Broke the news to her. There were seventeen of us. Different uniforms. Plainclothes guys. So we’re out there while most of the interrogation is going on.”
Lynda was scared to death. She had no idea what was going on. She did watch the officers, in addition to searching her entire house and garage, confiscate her personal computer.
After the arrest the news media would not leave Lynda White alone. She said that they literally camped out on her doorstep.
Lynda was also distraught when she lost several of what she thought were close friends because of the ordeal.
“They shunned me.”
CHAPTER 51
Wednesday, October 29, 2003, 3:45 P.M.,
Houston Police Department Headquarters,
Homicide Division—Sixth Floor,
1200 Travis Street,
Houston, Texas.
Bob King felt a sense of relief. Nearly ten years of holding on to the Diana Rebollar case file, and staring at the photograph of her face every day as he sat down to work, took its toll on him. With Tony Shore’s confession in hand, however, he finally began to relax—just a bit.
King worked in a cubicle alongside Boyd Smith, the sixty-one-year-old veteran homicide investigator who had been involved in the Tony Shore case with the Laurie Tremblay murder. Of course, neither King nor Smith knew Shore was involved in their respective cases until Shore opened up the floodgates. Both officers seemed incredibly relieved to have possibly closed the long-dormant murders.
Detective King returned to his cubicle after a late lunch. He stopped cold in his tracks, however, when he saw several of his fellow officers standing over something near his desk. He noticed two paramedics dressed in white and brandishing a banged-up stretcher. King briskly moved toward the commotion.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked one of the other officers standing nearby.
“Smith,” the officer replied.
“What about him?” King shot back.
“He’s got a fucking hole in his head.” The officer shook his own head as he responded.
“What?” King asked incredulously.
King brushed past the other detectives until he could see for himself. There he was. Boyd Smith’s near-dead body lay crumpled on the floor near King’s desk, blood splattered everywhere. Smith’s head appeared to still be gushing blood. Somehow, miraculously, Smith was still breathing. The paramedics worked furiously to keep him alive and get him transported to Ben Taub Hospital, which was only six miles away.
There was confusion in the department as to whether the wound was self-inflicted or if Smith had been attacked by another officer and shot in the head. Either way, the paramedics hustled his body onto the gurney and hoisted him out of the Homicide Division. They slowly descended in the elevator to the lobby, headed out the doors, and inserted him into a waiting ambulance, which rushed him to the hospital.
It would be several hours before Bob King and the rest of the Houston Police Department Homicide Division detectives heard the status of their fallen comrade. As they waited on edge, the story began to clear itself up. Apparently, Smith had not been attacked, but had instead taken his own service gun, a .45-caliber Colt Model 1911 and placed it to his head and pulled the trigger. It appeared to be a suicide attempt.
* * *
Approximately three hours later the worst possible news was delivered. Boyd Smith did not survive. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Official cause of death was ruled a suicide.
Needless to say, the detectives were devastated. Smith was considered to be one of the most well-liked and fun-loving officers in the whole of the Houston Police Department.
Acting police chief Joe Breshears, who was giving a press conference on the closing of the HPD toxicology lab, stated that Smith was “a man dedicated to his city. It’s a tremendous loss to the police department. He was a good man. He was a great man. He will be missed.”
The sentiment was echoed repeatedly, to the man, about their esteemed colleague. Retired Homicide detective Bobby Adams declared that Smith was “a star for the Homicide Division.” Adams also noted that “when he and his partner were on a scene, you knew it was going to be done right. And I never recall him ever being asked to do something that he didn’t do absolutely correctly, and with a good attitude.”
Adams was shocked that his friend may have committed suicide. “He always had a smile on his face,” the retired detective fondly recalled. Adams had even spoken with Smith one week earlier at a retirement party for another detective. “He was smiling. He looked good. He looked happy.”
Several of the officers commented on his work on several high-profile cases. He worked on the case of Coral Eugene Watts, the country’s most prolific serial killer, who was almost set free to roam the streets of Texas due to a legal technicality that would allow him to be released despite killing at least twelve women. He also was one of the detectives who questioned Andrea Yates, the Clear Lake housewife who killed her five children by drowning them, one by one, in her bathtub. In addition, Smith had worked on the possible serial killing case of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.
Smith was noted for his tenacity. He had a reputation as a strong man who never gave up on a case. One such instance was the rape and murder of Mary Ann Castille, a twenty-y
ear-old girl murdered back in 1982. Smith worked the case the entire time, all the way through 1999 when a DNA hit came back and led the way to Castille’s killer, Michael Brashar. The Castille case had been featured on the highly respected crime-fighting television program America’s Most Wanted. Indeed, the capture of Brashar was referred to by producers of that show as “one of the most stunning moments in the history” of the program. John Walsh, show creator and TV host, chipped in that Smith was “a dear friend of America’s Most Wanted, and one of the most dedicated cops I’ve ever known.”
One of the program’s producers, Cindy Anderson, was shocked by the news of Smith’s suicide. She had spoken with him on Tuesday, one day before his death, about the fact that America’s Most Wanted was airing an updated episode of the Castille case on the upcoming Saturday. She stated that Smith sounded “ebullient and excited.” She also stated that he was in “very happy spirits yesterday, very happy. This is something this guy had worked so hard on.” Anderson seemed shocked at the news. “He was excited, he was feeling good. Then we got [to] talking about Michael Brashar’s trial. He said, ‘Maybe now, someday, I can retire.’”
Boyd Smith’s retirement was not that far off. Four years to be exact. Smith had mentioned that one of his kids was about to start college, so he wanted to continue working. That was another big reason why so many of his coworkers were stunned by his death.
Furthermore, Smith was ecstatic about finding the killer in another long-term case he had been involved in—Laurie Tremblay’s murder. Smith had recently been taken off duty after having undergone minor surgery. Despite not having yet been cleared to return to work, Smith came in every day during the week to help out on the Tony Shore case.
“That’s the kind of policeman Boyd was,” declared Harris County district attorney Chuck Rosenthal. “That’s the kind of man he was.”
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