TOURNIQUET KILLER SAYS 'THERE ARE NO OTHERS'

HUNTSVILLE, Texas - Voice quavering as he held back tears, Anthony Shore offered an admission before his execution: "There are no others."

The whispered words brought an end to the swirl of unanswered questions about possible other victims, just before the notorious Houston serial killer was put to death Thursday night in what was the nation's first execution in 2018.

"No amount of words or apology could ever undo what I've done," Shore said while strapped to the death chamber gurney. I wish I could undo the past but it is what it is," Shore added before he died quietly at 6:28 p.m., 13 minutes after the execution began.

"It does burn," he said as the drugs began coursing through his veins. "I can feel that."

The 55-year-old former wrecker driver who came to be known as the Tourniquet Killer was hit with the state's harshest punishment in 2004 for the rape and murder of 21-year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada, one in a series of brutal slayings that terrorized the Bayou City in the 1980s and 1990s.

When police finally caught up with him - after a DNA breakthrough tied him to the last of the killings - he calmly confessed to three additional murders as well as a rape.

"Anthony Allen Shore's reign of terror is officially over," city of Houston victim advocate Andy Kahan told reporters Thursday night in Huntsville.

Previously, Shore was scheduled to die in October, but word of a bizarre death row confession plot with fellow prisoner Larry Swearingen derailed the state's execution plans. Ultimately, despite fears of a possible confession in one case and apparently false confessions in two others, investigators declared him not a suspect in any other Texas slayings.

But with Shore, there are few certainties.

"With a serial killer like Shore, there is always a possibility he has committed other crimes, left other unknown victims behind," said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg earlier in the week.

Even though he begged for death during the punishment phase of his 2004 trial, he's spent more than a decade fighting his fate.

"I'd prefer to live a bit longer but am ready if it's God's will," he told his father in a letter last year.

Disturbing history

Decades before he became the Tourniquet Killer, Shore was a talented little boy full of promise.

"All my girlfriends were in love with him because he was so charismatic and cute," his youngest sister Laurel Scheel, now 47, said last year.

But he also had a dark side, even at a young age.

One time, when he was 5 or 6, he stabbed a kitten to death. Another time, he pushed a screwdriver into his sister's head, according to court records.

As he grew older, his pastimes grew even darker. Repeatedly, he used his sister as bait to lure young girls outside. He once bragged that he'd helped beat a homeless man to death behind a grocery store.

Though his family moved around frequently for his father's jobs, as an adult Shore ultimately settled in the Houston area. He had two daughters. He got a job. He joined a band.

And then in 1986, he slaughtered 14-year-old Laurie Tremblay, snatching the girl up on her way to the bus stop. Her body was found outside a restaurant trash bin.

Six years later, he raped and murdered Estrada before dumping her naked body in the drive-through of a Spring Branch Dairy Queen. In his confession, he said he used a pair of shears to aid in the rape, according to court records. He also used a tourniquet to strangle her.

In 1994, he killed 9-year-old Diana Rebollar. When her battered body was found, she was wearing only a black Halloween T-shirt and a ligature twisted around her neck.

Less than a year later, he murdered 16-year-old Dana Sanchez, who was hitchhiking to her boyfriend's in Houston. Afterward, he reportedly called a local TV station to warn them of a serial killer on the loose.

He also raped a 14-year-old who survived the attack, though he threatened to kill her family if she reported it.

Linked by DNA evidence

Years later, during his confession, Shore claimed that the rape proved he could "beat the evilness" by sexually assaulting a woman without killing her, according to court records.

It's not clear why he stopped, but he may have gotten away with it - if it weren't for a later conviction that landed him on the sex offender registry in 1998 for sexually assaulting his own daughters.

Five years after handing over his DNA to the state, authorities matched it to cold-case evidence from the Estrada slaying.

When police brought him in for questioning, he calmly offered up a confession.

Later, during the punishment phase of his Harris County trial, he shocked the court by asking for death.

"It is where he is and it is what he thinks should happen to him based upon how he has lived his life," his lawyers said at the time.

But in the years that followed, he fought his case tooth and nail, filing a flurry of appeals citing everything from bad lawyering to previously unrealized brain damage. The U.S. Supreme Court turned down his case last year and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected his plea for clemency.

Hours before he was scheduled to die in October, a judge agreed to push back the date in light of an alleged confession plot that would have seen him admit to another man's crime, threatening to muddy the waters in a Montgomery County case and save a death row friend from execution.

He later admitted he had nothing to do with the case, but offered apparently false confessions in two other cases in which he'd once been a suspect. The Texas Rangers questioned him and ultimately determined he was no longer a suspect in the slayings.

"He was playing, just probing around," said one source familiar with the case. "With this guy who knows what he's going to say. You know he's done more crimes than he's been caught doing. The question is what crimes and where."

None of his family attended the execution.

While Texas led the nation in executions last year, for the first time in more than three decades no Harris County killers were put to death. In 2017, 23 convicted killers were put to death in the U.S., seven of them in Texas, more than any another state. Five more inmates are scheduled to die in Texas this year.