Strangler

by Corey Mitchell

  Warren Diepraam, an ADA under Rosenthal, agreed. “He was a good guy who always made the extra effort to help out.”

  The mood around the department had changed by Thursday. In addition to the depressing air in the room, there was also an issue of consternation. Apparently, some people in the department did not believe that Smith had killed himself. Instead, they believed he may have been the unfortunate recipient of a weapons malfunction. Indeed, only a few days prior to Smith’s death, another detective’s Glock was set off when the officer placed the holstered gun on a hook on a bathroom door in the men’s restroom.

  Allegedly, officers had had problems with the model gun Smith carried. The Colt models are cocked and ready to go so the officers can have a fast reaction time, if necessary. They use a thumb release that locks the trigger; however, the thumb release is not always reliable. The releases occasionally deploy accidentally and cause a misfire. Over the years various accidents had occurred in HPD, including one officer who shot himself in the foot and another who shot his horse.

  In addition, one of the local television news stations reported that Smith had been in an argument with another detective right before he was shot. All of the other officers in the department categorically denied the station’s claims.

  On Friday, October 31, the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office officially declared that Larry Boyd Smith had committed suicide via a gunshot to the head. Police department chaplain Edwin Davis expressed concern that some of Smith’s fellow detectives were not going to buy the determination. “There’s going to be an overwhelming number of people very shocked and in disbelief about it. I think you’re going to have some who are not going to believe the ruling.”

  Davis spoke the following day at Smith’s funeral. He spoke of how the death had been hard on Smith’s coworkers. “I’d say the mood is somber. Everybody is just stunned. We’re just trying to make some sense of it. To have something like this tragedy occur at the workplace, it’s just been very devastating.”

  As some of Smith’s friends and coworkers went over the details of his life, they started to see a pattern of loss. He and his wife were divorced just two years earlier. Soon thereafter, his mother passed away. In addition, all four of his adult children had flown the coop and set off on their own. And, like a bad country song, his dog died two weeks earlier.

  “Might not sound like a big deal,” stated one of Smith’s coworkers, “but when he got home at night, that was his only companion.”

  At Smith’s funeral the next day, there were people from all stripes of life in attendance: coworkers, friends, family, families of crime victims, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and even the waitresses from his favorite restaurant.

  HPD Homicide captain Richard Holland likened Smith to Lieutenant Columbo, the seemingly bumbling ’70s television detective played by actor Peter Falk, who always got his man through sheer persistence and tenacity. Holland said Smith was better than Columbo, who always had one last surprise question for a suspect.

  Retired HPD police officer Jim Boy summed up his friend nicely: “Every investigation that man did was for the family, it was for justice, it was honorable the way he did business. He was a good man and a good detective.”

  * * *

  Two-and-a-half months after Boyd Smith’s ruled suicide, his toxicological reports came back with a record of a drug in his system known as Citalopram, more commonly known as Celexa, which is used in the treatment of depression.

  * * *

  In addition to Smith’s suicide during the month of October, Harris County ADA Kelly Siegler informed the media that the district attorney’s office would pursue the death penalty for Tony Shore.

  CHAPTER 52

  Friday, November 14, 2003.

  Tony Shore wrote a note “To Whom This May Concern” asking whoever found the note to “notify my wife: Lynda White that Tony would no longer be a burden to her.” He bequeathed all of his belongings to his stepson Josh.

  The note appeared to be a suicide note. Shore added, “Hope to see you all again on the other side.”

  He ended with a dramatic flourish: “I’m not afraid to die! Only afraid to live. Dieing [sic] is easy.”

  He signed off with his name and also as “Lynda’s Tony.”

  Tony Shore then proceeded to swallow twenty-five sleeping pills, the specific type of which no one was sure. Shore was rushed to a hospital to be treated for the overdose.

  He did not die.

  CHAPTER 53

  Friday, February 6, 2004,

  300 block of Freeport Street,

  Houston, Texas.

  Nearly four months later, Lynda White opened up a letter addressed from the Harris County Jail. Obviously, it was from Tony Shore. She had no idea what to expect.

  She was immediately taken aback by the large all-caps exclamation “I LOVE YOU LYNDA!” that adorned the top of the long letter. Before she could even begin to read the tome, she noticed notes running up and down the sides of the page that were vertical and sideways. The largest said, “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL! YOU ARE MY WIFE! WE WILL BE TOGETHER AGAIN . . . SOON! I LOVE YOU!”

  Lynda was now sufficiently mortified.

  She began to read Shore’s letter.

  After starting off proclaiming his love to her yet again, Shore commanded his “wife” that she “must destroy this 1st page after you read it.” His words sounded like the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic who was planning a serious, all-out, balls-to-the-wall, bloodletting jailbreak. “When I go, it will be do or die . . . a one shot deal,” he declared. “In the event I cannot snatch you within the first twenty-four hours, then I will of course bide time to insure your safety and well being.”

  Tony Shore, ever the gallant white knight.

  He warned Lynda that as soon as he escaped, she would be put under surveillance. But he was determined to see his damsel in distress.

  “Once we are together again,” Shore assured, “and I have you in my custody, my love, I can promise your safety and guarantee your safe return at your discretion.”

  Again, to insure her safety, he commanded she burn the letter. The second page had another side-page message, which read, “Burn this Lynda . . . Read it . . . Memorize it if you want BUT DO BURN IT!”

  Shore indicated that he might be able to escape as early as that April.

  He wanted her to be ready at a moment’s notice and to even pack her bags. “There will be no time for any last minute arrangement. So any evidence must be destroyed in advance to insure you will be completely free from suspicion or harm.”

  He ordered her to “think ahead” and to “be ready at all times.” He instructed her that the best way to be prepared would be to already have any necessary medications on her person, expenses, arrangements for food, shelter, transportation, and identification.

  Shore also promised Lynda “love and ecstasy, adoration and devotion beyond your wildest dreams,” and that he would satisfy her “every fantasy.”

  In case there was any doubt about his sincerity, Shore closed with “I’m going to make it happen or die trying. There is a way, though it will by no means be easy or safe for me to get out. I will make this happen. I promise!”

  Apparently, the offer was not quite good enough for Lynda to accept. Instead, she picked up the phone and contacted Detective Bob King.

  Later that evening, Tony Shore’s jail cell was searched extensively for any tools, notes, or plans for an escape. A thorough search turned up nothing. He was kept under closer scrutiny from that point on.

  CHAPTER 54

  Saturday, March 6, 2004,

  Houston Police Department,

  Digital Forensic Lab,

  Houston, Texas.

  Nearly half a year after Tony Shore’s arrest and the subsequent confiscation of his personal home computer, Officer J. T. Smith, of the Houston Police Department Digital Forensic Lab, got his hands on it. The twenty-seven-year veteran Smith’s job was to scan suspects’ computers to see if t
he police could locate any evidence to use in the case against them. Smith used a program known as In Case, which helped detect every bit of computer usage by a suspect, including files that might have been deleted by the user. Smith, who had been in the Digital Forensic Division for three years, had received all of the necessary training and certifications to conduct a thorough investigation.

  What he found was quite compelling—hundreds of snapshots of Web sites that Shore had visited on Lynda White’s computer. A large portion was dedicated to straight sex between a man and a woman. Some of those sites included Lickable Teens, Pregnant Perversion, and Sexy School Girl. Interestingly, Shore visited as many gay male porn sites as he did heterosexual porn sites. Some of these he visited were Hot Male Butt Sex, Well Hung Studs, and Asian Twinks. There were also a few random lesbian-oriented sites, bondage sites, Asian female sites, and legal teen female sites. Shore’s sexual interest ran the gamut from bondage and discipline to golden showers to fisting and everything else under the sun.

  Shore also visited several child porn sites—almost as many as he had of the straight sex sites and gay male sex sites. The vast majority of the teen and preteen porn sites he visited focused on boys. The sites were extreme in nature and contained full-frontal nudity, graphic sex between minors, and graphic sex between minors and adults. Some of the sites he visited were Boys Factory, Nudeboys World, and Lolita Slumber Party.

  Officer Smith found something else of importance on the computer used by Tony Shore. He was able to access Shore’s search moves on the missing persons’ Web site that he had been surfing when Lynda White walked in on him. Smith confirmed that Shore surfed the site and that he looked up the names of Dana Sanchez, Maria del Carmen Estrada, and Diana Rebollar.

  Perhaps even more disturbing was that he also looked up two more names: Collette Williams and Gloria Gonzales.

  CHAPTER 55

  Harris County assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler was coming off a hot streak. Her recent prosecution of Susan Wright, the former stripper who stabbed her husband 193 times and then pitifully buried his body in their backyard, had garnered her national media attention. The attractive attorney drew the majority of the attention when she faithfully re-created the Wright murder scene by actually bringing the Wrights’ bed into the courtroom, straddling her co-counsel, ADA Paul Doyle, and acting as if she were stabbing the tied-down man nearly two hundred times. It did not hurt her case that the district attorney also had a nice figure. Siegler’s performance was bandied about on every twenty-four-hour cable news show and “yellivision” screamfest.

  Siegler was born and raised in Blessing, Texas, located in Matagorda County, less than one hundred miles southwest of Houston. Blessing, a town of only nine hundred residents, was originally going to be called “Thank God”; however, the United States Post Office shot that name down.

  According to Siegler, Blessing has “one blinking light, not even a red light. You have to go to the Post Office to get your mail. No Dairy Queen. People say, ‘What’s your address?’ It’s on the first street off the highway. ‘Yeah, well what’s your house number?’ I go, ‘No, no. We don’t go by house addresses.’

  “UPS used to stop by my daddy’s barbershop and ask, ‘Where does so and so live?’ It used to be, until a few years ago, that he would dial four numbers and call someone and tell him to come pick up his package. That’s where your mail was that didn’t make it to the Post Office.”

  Siegler graduated from Tidehaven High School, which was the consolidated high school for all the small towns in that area. The tiny AA school was located in the middle of a cotton field.

  Like many Texas youth during that time period, Siegler was actively involved in sports and played volleyball and basketball.

  “It was a great way to grow up. I wish more kids would grow up that way.”

  Siegler also excelled academically. “I was valedictorian. I was a geek.”

  Siegler’s family tended to be at the center of Blessing’s comings and goings. Specifically, her father’s business, Billy’s Barber Shop, which she described as “half barbershop and half liquor store. Funny story. TABC [Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission] requires that there is a wall separating the two businesses. And Daddy was like, ‘Wait a minute. There’s an air-conditioning window unit that cools both places. I can’t put a wall up. So Daddy put chicken wire up so the air could still go across it, but he wasn’t violating the TABC rule.”

  Billy’s Barber Shop became a veritable library of knowledge for Siegler on how to read people, how to understand basic human interaction, and—best of all—how to spin a good yarn. “You live in a little town. You have to get along with everybody or you’re gonna have problems. And I think we’re friendlier than people who grew up in the city because you know everybody, everybody knows you. There are no secrets. You do something stupid on Friday night, your mom and dad know the next day.”

  The cast of characters that traipsed in and out of her daddy’s barbershop had a great impact on Siegler’s personality. “You know, when you’re little, growing up, you just think everybody’s like that. Everybody’s just kind of funny or whatever. Now, when I go home and I’m sitting there drinking beer at Daddy’s barbershop and everybody’s coming by and they say, ‘Hey, Kelly’s home. Let’s go visit.’ We sit out there listening to country music, of course, drinking beer, and I just go, ‘Man!’ You know, you go home and see it, it looks a little different than growing up.

  “It was always wonderful. They were all friendly and happy. Easygoing. A lot more easygoing than we are.”

  After she graduated valedictorian at Tidehaven, Siegler applied for admission to the University of Texas (UT) and was readily accepted.

  “Looking back, that wasn’t a good idea,” she wistfully recalled. “Culture shock.

  “I wanted to get out. I wanted to be different ’cause very few went to college, but if they did, they went to Blinn [Junior College] or maybe they went to A and M [Texas A&M University], but I wanted to go to UT, so I went to UT.”

  But Siegler was none too thrilled with UT. “I hated it and got out in three years.” She did not quit; she earned her degree and graduated in three years.

  While she was there, she had intentions of majoring in international business. “I was gonna go off and be a lawyer and travel the whole world. It was another bad idea, but I was gonna get out of that damn school in three years and I wasn’t gonna change my major. Learn about tariffs and quotas and all that miserably boring stuff.”

  Siegler did decide, however, to go to law school. She attended South Texas College of Law, in Houston. “I could have gone to a couple of law schools,” Siegler recalled, “but I picked South Texas because I could live with my aunt and I didn’t want it to be three more years of misery like UT was.”

  Siegler moved in with her father’s sister and focused on her classes during the first year. Her second year, she landed a job at a civil law firm. She stated that South Texas was a clearly divided school between the students who went to school on “daddy’s dime” and those who had to work to pay their way through school. Siegler fell into the latter category.

  “South Texas, back then, was more of a ‘you could go to school around the job if you needed to make the money to be able to go to school’ school.” So, to make the money, she worked at a civil firm. “It was horribly boring. And that’s when I realized even more, international business and this civil law stuff was just bullshit. I didn’t know how I was going to do this the rest of my life.”

  Siegler realized she needed something more. “Around the middle of my second year, a friend of mine, who interned here [at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office], needed to make more money and said, ‘Kelly, I’m gonna quit my job. Why don’t you go interview for a job as an intern at the DA’s office in the Family Criminal Law Division, Domestic Violence.’ So I came over as an intern [during her third year in law school], got the job, and never left.”

  Siegler was not thrilled
with law school; however, she did fall in love with her criminal law courses while at South Texas.

  “They were my favorite classes, which I thought probably everybody thought. It wasn’t like I was thinking going in I was going to be a prosecutor, I was going to be a criminal lawyer. I was going to be the international business lawyer.”

  Her experience at the civil law firm convinced her that she needed to try something different. “The civil firm I worked at, they were very nice, but I’d sit there and try not to fall asleep all day when there were chores and assignments. I just couldn’t wait to get out.”

  Once Siegler landed the intern position at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, she knew she had struck personal nirvana. “The days just fly by, even now, almost twenty years now. Every single day just flies by. You’re doing something different and fun. Talking to people every day, all day.

  “You research, get what you need. But you’re talking to people all day. Defendants, lawyers, witnesses, cops. It’s pretty much you just bullshit all day long,” she added with a laugh.

  Siegler’s first responsibility as an intern was to interview abused spouses or battered girlfriends and convince them not to drop charges. “And I was in charge of protective orders, which are like restraining orders for domestic violence cases.”

  Siegler spent one year as an intern. She then interviewed for a precommit job. She passed the State of Texas Bar Exam and became an assistant district attorney the day after she received her results.

  “You start out in Misdemeanor when you’re new here. And then you progress up in Misdemeanor court, starting with possession of marijuana cases, DWI, ‘no test’ cases, to the more serious misdemeanors. Then you go up to Felony court for a little while doing the less serious felonies. Then you’re a Misdemeanor supervisor. A Misdemeanor chief supervisor, supervising the brand-new people. Then you go back up to Felony and progress up until you make chief of a Felony court. The longer you’re here, the more serious cases you handle, and the more people you supervise,” Siegler explained.