Houston serial killer faces execution this week

Houston’s “Tourniquet Killer” is on his way to the Texas death chamber.

Anthony Shore, the confessed serial rapist and strangler whose murders in the 1980s and 1990s went unsolved for more than a decade, is scheduled for execution Wednesday evening. The courts have shot down his latest appeals that argued a traumatic brain injury decreases his culpability, and a plea for relief to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was denied Monday afternoon.

Shore, 55, has been on death row since 2004, when he was convicted and sentenced to death in the 1992 rape and murder of 21-year-old Maria Del Carmen Estrada. The killing was one of four similar murders of young women and girls and one aggravated sexual assault where the girl was able to escape.

The murders took place between 1986 and 1995, according to court documents. All became cold cases in the years after the bodies of Estrada, 14-year-old Laurie Tremblay, 9-year-old Diana Rebollar and 16-year-old Dana Sanchez were found, dumped behind buildings or in a field, partially naked with rope or cord fastened around their necks like tourniquets.

Finally, in 2003, Houston police matched Shore’s DNA — on file from a 1997 no-contest plea of sexually molesting his two daughters — to Estrada’s murder, according to a court ruling. After hours of interrogation, Shore confessed to all of the killings, telling police he had an “evilness” in him.

“I think if I tell you what I’ve done that it will release the evilness, and I would feel better,” Shore told a police sergeant.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said Shore was a “true serial killer" after the trial court set his upcoming execution date in July.

“His crimes were predatory, and his victims the most vulnerable in society — women and children. For his brutal acts, the Death Penalty is appropriate,” she said in a statement.

Recently, Shore’s legal team has pointed to a previously undisclosed traumatic brain injury, likely obtained in a 1981 car accident, as a reason to stop the execution. Knox Nunnally, Shore’s court-appointed appellate lawyer, said he is not arguing that Shore is innocent or undeserving of punishment, but that courts should look at people with brain injuries the way they look at minors and the intellectually disabled — ineligible for execution based on decreased reasoning skills and culpability.

“We think if a jury had heard that evidence ... that it is possible a jury could at least change their decision that Mr. Shore deserves life instead of death,” Nunnally said, referring to the alternative sentence in a capital murder conviction. “Because by no means are we claiming that ... a head injury was the only reason he committed these crimes, we’re saying it was a contributing reason.”

The courts rejected Shore's appeal and the broader argument that brain-injured people are ineligible for execution. It’s a rejection that concerns Nunnally as a combat veteran, he said.

“My fear is that if we’re denying this for Anthony Shore, what’s gonna happen if we have a combat vet who comes up five or six years from now and he has suffered a severe injury from combat?” he said. “The state’s going to use Anthony Shore’s case as an example of precedent.”

On Monday morning, Nunnally said that his team was still looking at other possible appeals in the next two days before the execution but that nothing was currently pending. If it proceeds, Shore’s execution will be the seventh in Texas this year and 21st in the nation.