Anthony Shore, 55, (shown above in his final prison mugshot taken in November, 2017) confessed to 60 other rapes before he was executed last Thursday for the murdering four people in the 1980s and 1990s
Tourniquet killer Anthony Shore confessed to another 60 rapes before he was executed in Texas last week.
Shore, 55, was executed on Thursday at the Huntsville Unit.
He had been on death row since 2004 when he was convicted of raping and murdering 21-year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada.
During his trial, he confessed to killing two other woman and a nine-year-old girl.
The attacks took place in the 80s and 90s in Houston, Texas, and terrorized the community.
Before he was put to death last Thursday, Shore blurted out that he was responsible for dozens of additional sexual attacks which he said happened when he was a teenager.
He could not provide details of the victims’ identities, but told police that in many cases, he drugged them with Rohypnol then raped them in the back of his van.
They happened in California and Texas, he said, before he moved on to murder.
Among the attacks he claimed responsibility for were two in the 1970s which were previously attributed to the East Area Rapist in California.
Only one of the women he claimed to have attacked has been accounted for. She chose to remain anonymous but told The Houston Chronicle: ‘I know that he drugged and date-raped me.’
Shore’s sister suspects he was telling the truth, as does a woman who became his pen pal while he was behind bars.
That woman, who gave her name only as Lea, began writing to him when she was a teenager.
Shore died last Thursday in the death chamber at the Huntsville Unit in Texas (above)
After evading capture for years, he was arrested in 2003 when police recovered his DNA from beneath the fingernail of one of his victim. He is pictured left, in an undated booking photo, and right, at his trial in 2004
She said that he told her in letters how she was the only person who loved him and claimed that he made reference to rapes which he carried out as a teenager in California, something one of the killer’s sisters had already expressed fears over.
She told police that she believed her brother and his friends may have been behind attacks in Sacramento and that it was likely they had copied the East Area Rapist, who has never been caught and who is also known as The Original Night Stalker.
Shore (seen above in another, undated photograph) told police he committed the first rapes as a teenager in California
‘Everywhere we lived there was a rapist,’ Shore’s sister Laurel Scheel said, alluding to the unlikelihood that it was someone else carrying out the attacks instead of her brother.
‘I doubt it ends at 60.’
Authorities are now reviewing the claims but have not commented on them.
Shore previously had his execution stalled by making bogus confessions to other crimes.
In those cases, he was trying to help a fellow death row inmate who was due to be executed for them go free.
It is not clear what his intentions behind confessing to the additional rapes was.
His attorneys confirmed that Shore made the admissions but that they did not know whether or not they were true.
‘He would allude to other things, but it was always an allusion – “If you guys only knew the whole story.” [etc].
‘But honestly, we were just trying not to ask questions we didn’t want the answers to,’ defense attorney Patrick McCann said.
Before he died last week, Shore appeared remorseful in his final words.
‘No amount of words or apology could ever undo what I’ve done. I wish I could undo the past, but it is what it is,’ he said while strapped to the gurney.
Laurie Tremblay, 14, (left) was killed by Shore in 1986. Maria Del Carmen Estrada, 21, died in 1992. Both women were taken by Shore into his van, raped and then strangled and had their bodies dumped back on the street
Nine-year-old Diana Rebollar (left) was abducted as she walked home from a convenience store in 1994 and was later murder. Fifteen-year-old Dana Sanchez (right) died after being cornered by Shore as she used a payphone in 1995
When the lethal injection was administered, he cried out: ‘Ooh! I can feel that!’ then went unconscious.
Shore evaded police for decades after murdering and raping a woman, two teenagers and a nine-year-old child, in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was finally brought to justice in 2003 when police recovered a small sample of his DNA from beneath the fingernail of Maria del Carmen Estrada, a 21-year-old Hispanic woman he attacked.
She was walking to work in April 1992 when she accepted a ride from him in his van. He raped then strangled her, using a homemade tourniquet to cut off her air supply.
This brutal form of murder became his signature and won him the name of The Tourniquet Killer.
After murdering Estrada, he dumped her naked body in the drive-thru of a Houston Dairy Queen.
Once he was arrested thanks to DNA testing, Shore confessed to three other killings.
The first was in 1986, when he attacked 14-year-old Laurie Tremblay. Laurie was found strangled near her home less than an hour after leaving to catch the schoolbus.
In 1994, he abducted nine-year-old Diana Rebollar as she walked home from a convenience store. Diana was later found with signs of sexual trauma.
Dana Sanchez, 15, was Shore’s last known victim. She was murdered in 1995 after he cornered her while she used a payphone.
He later claimed that he did not rape her or carry out any sexual assault on her.
Shore was the first person to be executed in the US in 2018 last week.