Strangler

by Corey Mitchell

  Shore reveled in his rebelliousness. “At the recital, everyone was amazed at my insolence but very pleased with the version I played nonetheless.

  “I was more of a composer than a player,” he recalled, “and failed to recognize the value of classical knowledge as a foundation for what I was trying so hard to accomplish. Besides . . . I wanted to play guitar anyway, not piano.”

  Tony could, in fact, play almost any musical instrument he picked up. The musical prodigy could grab an instrument he had never played before, listen to a song he had never heard before, and play the entire song within ten minutes. Whether it was heavy metal, salsa, jazz, or classical, it did not matter.

  Tony played trombone in the school band (and was “damn good,” by his own estimation) and bass guitar for his band on the side. He also dated the clarinet and flute player from the school band named Nadine. He claimed that Nadine was his “second major sexual encounter.”

  Tony also continued to get into trouble. He claimed he did not drink or smoke, but he definitely got bored. He and one of his friends, Rusty, would allegedly go out and steal Rusty’s father’s boat and take it out for a spin on Clear Lake.

  Tony experienced what he called “the Big Event,” which changed his life forever, when his dad came one day to pick him up from band practice instead of his mom. Apparently, Rob and Dea had split and Tony was going to be shipped back out to California to live with his aunt and uncle. He was excited because, as he said, “my mother had quit bothering me, so, in my mind, life was good and I had a huge ego.”

  During that summer he claimed to have discovered the Hare Krishna religion and vegetarianism.

  While in Irvine, California, Tony also ran into a childhood sweetheart. According to Shore, she was now a dropout, into drugs and rock and roll, and “would have nothing to do with me; however, I still had a major crush on her.”

  Tony continued down the wrong path while in California. He started running with a jock named Elton. He even slept with a friend’s “crazy sister.” He was also stealing guns and breaking into apartment duplexes.

  He got into trouble as a teenager, including, or so he said, involvement in the possible murder of a homeless man. He also developed a penchant for stalking and harassing pretty young girls.

  Tony soon moved again and this time ended up attending Del Campo High School. While there, he signed up for drama classes and played the lead role in “The Frog Prince.” He also met several young fellow students/ musicians. He claimed that sex and smoking pot were the order of the day and that he and his buddy Chris would regularly steal Chris’s mom’s Matador.

  But Tony still had a penchant for music and enough initiative to form a band called Foxfire, with Eric Wheeler on drums, Randy Wheeler on saxophone, a guy named Mike on guitar, Chuck Woake on bass guitar, and Tony on keyboards and trombone. He also played his Fender Rhodes ’73 vintage guitar.

  Tony was the youngest member of Foxfire and supposedly the most inexperienced when it came to women. He stated that he once hooked up with a beautiful young girl from the Philippines. The two went to make out and Tony “got a little breast action.” He then made the “fatal mistake of going back and telling my friends.” Once the girl found out he blabbed, she blew him off.

  But Tony bragged that he always had a girlfriend or a nymphomaniac sex partner to keep him occupied.

  During this time Tony’s mother held a job at Denny’s, where she met a man named Jon Teel, who, according to Tony, was this “great songwriter” and also a recent ex-convict.

  Tony claimed that he was forced to walk two miles every day with his trombone and schoolbooks in tow and that his mom would come home from work late at night and smoke pot and drink wine with him.

  Tony also acted in several plays. His band allegedly opened up for the female-fronted rock band Heart, one of the biggest musical acts at the time. He believed he was on his way to becoming a rock star.

  Tony’s junior year in high school, however, turned out to be a disaster. He dropped out of high school, and then his band broke up. Soon thereafter, he applied for and was granted emancipation from his mother, and then he signed up for and attended American River Junior College. He also took on two jobs, one working at Denny’s and the other working for Rueben’s Plant-house.

  Tony also claimed that he met a young girl named Vicki, with whom he fell in love and got engaged to on his eighteenth birthday. Vicki was from a religious family and did not believe in premarital sex, so Tony allegedly continued his trysts with his ménage à trois buddies, Patty and Christina.

  “I didn’t mind at the time,” Tony recalled, “because I was in love with Vicki and my sexual needs were still regularly met by Patty, Christina, and whoever else I might know or meet on the side that was willing.”

  During this time Dea Shore remarried. Tony did not like his stepfather and even accused the man of pulling a gun on him. He decided to get away and moved to a commune in Auburn, where he found Jesus. He later moved into a house with a friend, where they ran out of money and eventually ate all their meals from a fifty-pound bag of rice.

  Tony packed his bags one more time and headed back to Texas, with a goal to get his father to pay for his college tuition.

  CHAPTER 25

  Rob Shore’s memory of his marriage to Dea is slightly fuzzy. Same goes for his recollection of raising his children. He spent the majority of his kids’ formative years traveling and working. The family was constantly uprooted as Rob’s expertise in computers provided him with ample job opportunities, since he was one of only a handful of people at that time who worked with computers. He described the computers he worked on as the kind that were so huge they took up an entire office room.

  But Rob would be the first to admit that he was not much of a father. He believed Dea was much better suited for parenthood than he was.

  “Dea was a good mother,” Rob recalled much later. “I’m not positive she was, I just felt like she would be better for them than I would have been.

  “We didn’t ever really seem to have any trouble with the kids that I can recall. We weren’t called into school for anything.”

  * * *

  The adult Anthony Shore told a slightly different story about his upbringing.

  Shore claimed that his parents met at a bar. Allegedly, Dea was roommates with a young woman by the name of Jan Russo. Dea and Jan used to go out to bars with Rob and his friend Duke Holsworth. Jan and Duke also eventually married each other.

  Shore wrote that his mother called his father a “fighter.” Apparently, there were several Sioux Indians around the Air Force base and Rob used to get into all kinds of fights with them. Shore claimed his father had a very short temper and would pick a fight with an Indian for no reason whatsoever. Rob was also a Golden Gloves boxing champion, according to his son, so he knew how to use his hands for violence.

  In an autobiographical journal that he began to write on his birthday in 1998, Shore claimed to have been told exactly where and how he was conceived. He claimed that his mother told him, often, that she was raped by his father “on someone’s lawn.”

  Shore’s earliest memories involve his parents “fighting, yelling, and throwing stuff. I recalled being scared a lot of the time.” He also had memories of his sister Gina “as a baby and recall the privilege of holding the baby on occasion.”

  His sister Gina also claimed that their father was often abusive to Tony. She claimed that Rob Shore would grab “whatever was conveniently able to be picked up, be it a guitar or a belt.... My dad has a very bad temper.”

  In response to this accusation by his own daughter that he threw items at his son, Rob Shore tentatively stated, “I don’t remember.” He paused briefly. “I don’t recall ever doing that. But I don’t recall lots of things.” He laughed.

  Rob Shore claimed that his faulty memory was due to his focus on work. “I’m very conscientious about how I make my living.”

  When asked if he believed that Dea may have had any con
frontations with his son or the girls, he stated, “Only with Laurel,” much later in their relationship. “But I don’t recall her having any severe run-ins with Gina or Tony.”

  Gina backed up Rob Shore’s version of how Dea Shore treated the kids. She stated that Dea never even so much as spanked them. Dea’s method of discipline consisted of sitting her children down and talking to them about what they did wrong, why it was wrong, and what the kids needed to do to make it right.

  Gina also recalled that her father was not the only one in the family with a bad temper. She said she was prone to fits of rage as well.

  Young Tony, however, did display his share of deviant behavior. According to Gina, when he was five years old, Tony abducted the neighbor’s kitten. Apparently, Tony loved the little creature and wanted it to come live with his family. His sister told him that he couldn’t keep the kitten.

  “But I want him to come out and play,” the young boy pleaded.

  “No, Tony. He’s not yours. Take him back,” Gina ordered.

  Tony did not listen. Instead, he went into the kitchen with the kitten in tow, grabbed a sharp knife, and took the kitten back outside. He clutched the defenseless feline by the nape of its furry neck and jammed its face into the dirt of their backyard. He then took the long kitchen knife and pierced the kitten’s skull. He pushed so hard on the knife that it slid completely through the animal’s skull, past its jaw, pinning it to the ground.

  When Dea Shore discovered the bloody and mutilated kitten, she was mortified. She had no idea why Tony would lash out at the poor creature. She decided that it would be best if Tony received some help. She contacted her church’s priest and asked him to come speak to her son.

  Tony’s unusual behavior, however, did not cease after the meeting with the priest. According to Gina, Tony even lashed out at her one time. Apparently, Tony once pushed a screwdriver through the top of his sister’s head. She had no idea why he did it.

  By the time Tony entered sixth grade, he and the family packed their bags again. They headed to Florida, where they stayed for the next three years.

  “[Tony and I] would go for bicycle rides,” Gina recalled, “where he would have me go up and knock on people’s doors and have people’s daughters come out.” These were usually either young friends of Gina’s or female classmates of Tony’s. Gina stated that Tony liked to “grope them” and that he “tried to kiss them and stuff.”

  Gina also noticed a pattern of the type of girls that Tony preferred. They were usually skinny, attractive, and had long hair. They were also typically small-framed and not imposing in any way. Gina described these girls as “mousy.” She also noted that a lot of the girls tended to look like her.

  Tony continued to get Gina to play the bait-and-switch game with the young girls for several years. Eventually, however, Gina had had enough and decided to put an end to Tony’s behavior. It happened when Tony sent her out on yet another mission to a friend’s house. When Gina knocked on the neighbor’s door, one of her teachers opened it. Gina realized that if she was responsible for her teacher’s daughter getting groped by her big brother, it would come back to haunt her in some way.

  She said, “Tony, I can’t do it. I love going to school, and I don’t want any kind of problems.”

  Gina also responded to Tony’s claim that their mother practiced witchcraft. According to Gina, Dea Shore believed herself to be a good witch. It was not uncommon for Dea to burn sage in and around their home to ward off any potential evil spirits. Gina claimed that such behavior was culled from her mother’s Italian heritage.

  CHAPTER 26

  By 1983, Tony Shore moved back to Houston, Texas. He was twenty-one years old when he met the love of his life, an older woman by the name of Gina Worley.

  * * *

  Gina Lynn Worley was born in 1959 on Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Her father was a member of the U.S. Air Force for twenty-eight years, so she spent much of her infant and toddler years overseas in such European countries as Austria, Italy, and France. Her family settled in Texas when she was four years old, but the following year they moved to Arkansas.

  By 1973, however, Gina’s parents divorced and the majority of her family ended up in Houston, Texas. Her father moved there first; then Gina and her mother followed suit.

  In high school Gina was definitely not a social butterfly. She described herself as “quiet. Really, really quiet. Bookish.” She made good grades but did not have many friends. “Maybe one. I liked to read a lot and keep to myself.”

  Gina graduated from high school in 1977 and then attended the College of the Mainland in Texas City. But she soon dropped out and enrolled in paralegal school. She eventually earned her paralegal certification and landed a job with a Houston-based attorney.

  “I discovered I did not like attorneys,” Gina later declared. She especially did not like the fact that the family law attorney she worked for would look up dirt on people. “They’re evil.”

  Gina Worley married a young man named Robert in 1981 when she was twenty-two years old. She said that she “was too young to have any sense.” They were divorced in 1982, less than a year later, because “we were both too young and he was an idiot.”

  She met Tony Shore after Thanksgiving in 1983.

  “I was checking the mail in my mailbox and he ran down the stairs all flustered and introduced himself, saying, ‘Hi! I’m Tony Shore! I’m the nicest guy you’ll ever meet.’” Gina was smitten. “I thought he was charming. He is a charming guy. He was really a nice, open genuine person.”

  Shore asked her out then and there. The couple spent most of their time together gearing up for the Christmas holiday. He would take Gina in his big Impala, for which he paid $100, to the upscale Galleria in Houston for some serious Christmas shopping. Gina remembered she thought his car was cute with a peace sign sticker in the back window and a rusty scraped-up bumper.

  “It had an exhaust leak,” Gina remembered, “so [whenever] you drove more than ten minutes, man, you were happy [when] you got there.

  “It was really neat when we met. We had almost the same kind of books. At that point in time we were reading things like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, those types of books. So, we really hit it off. We really got along.”

  The young lovebirds wasted no time in tying the knot. They were married on March 25, 1984, just four months after they first met. Gina remembered the ceremony as a quiet, intimate affair. The couple was married by a justice of the peace at the courthouse annex. “Rob Shore was there and my mom and my friend Suzanne. And Tony’s stepbrother at the time, Kenny Hanks,” Gina recalled. “It was a real small ceremony. I was young and naive, and he was really charming. He was very well-spoken, intelligent, and articulate.”

  After the wedding the newlyweds traipsed to Sacramento, California, to visit Shore’s mother and sister. They stopped first, however, at Newport Beach, California, to visit a friend of Shore’s and stay at his condominium on the beach. Gina had a tough time. First she was stung by a jellyfish; then she suffered severe burns from the sun after she fell asleep outside; then she drank the water and caught a stomach virus. Their marriage was off to a rough start.

  Gina, however, still had fond memories of her early times with Tony Shore. “Those were the salad days. They were a lot of fun.” She talked about his interest in music. “We’d go to a Hilton and find one of the rooms where they kept instruments and Tony would start playing the piano. That is until they caught him,” referring to the hotel staff. “He was really good.”

  Tickling the ivories wasn’t the only thing that Shore was good at.

  One month after they were married, Gina got pregnant. After they returned from California, the couple moved into The Atrium apartment complex near the airport. Money was tight for the couple, so Gina, who already worked as an administrative assistant for Whataburger, took on a second job of delivering newspapers while she was seven months pregnant.

  Their first child, Amber, was born on April 9, 19
84. Gina took some time off from work to care for her daughter, but she eventually returned to her job at Whataburger while her husband remained at Southwestern Bell. Gina also maintained her second job delivering newspapers.

  “I would be home in time for him to get up and go to work,” Gina added, “and to take care of Amber. She was never left alone.”

  Despite the long work hours and money problems, Tony and Gina got along just fine. “We rarely argued,” Gina noted. “Mainly, we would sit around and play roleplaying games like Avalon Hill or Titan.” Shore did, however, seem to have a problem with Gina’s physical appearance after the birth of Amber. “He always called me fat,” she stated, “even though I barely weighed one hundred ten pounds.” This hurt Gina immensely.

  She recalled that when she lived in Arkansas as a young girl, she “was constantly tortured. The new kid, the fat kid, the smart kid, the dork kid, the retard kid. I was sensitive. That was one of the things when I had my own children I forbid them from name calling. No name calling in the house. Call them by their given name or something nice, nothing else.”

  * * *

  By the time their second child, Tiffany, was born, on June 5, 1985, Shore had received a promotion to customer representative, which allowed him to work inside the offices of Southwestern Bell. Gina still worked to help out on the financial front and then focused her attention on her daughters when she got home. Shore was not happy with the lack of attention.

  “Whenever I had given birth to Tiffany, she was nine pounds nine-and-a-half ounces. There’s that period of time where you have stitches and all that and he wanted to have sex. And I’m like, ‘No, are you crazy?’ He got really mad at me and he forced himself on me. It was very, very, very unforgiving. It was unpleasant.” She continued on with the painful memory of the spousal rape. “After that, our sex life was pretty sketchy.” She sometimes blamed it on the fact that Shore worked a lot and that she had to take care of both girls. But deep in her heart, she knew it was because he had frightened her. “It was really touch and go after that happened with me.”