Strangler

by Corey Mitchell

  “And when he would come into treatment,” Dr. Burns expounded on Shore, “the narcissist wants to be noticed. That’s part of it, too, wanting to adopt that role because he wanted to be seen as ‘Look how important I am. Look how much I know, and I’m in a much better place than you guys because I don’t have the problems that y’all have.’”

  “Is part of that also that superficially charming demeanor that he’s got?” the assistant district attorney asked.

  “He also had repressed anger,” Dr. Burns added. “So, if he got angry, you wouldn’t see it unless you just saw minute clinching of the jaw and different facial features, like a tic or something, you can see when somebody is angry and they say they’re not. A clinched jaw, little things like that.

  “If he didn’t want to deal with an issue, he would shut down and become very complimentary. He was always very complimentary.”

  “When he is complimentary, what is he doing?” Buess wondered.

  “The term that we use is called ‘grooming.’ Grooming is something we all engage in,” the doctor began to explain. “I’m sure you’ve all been involved in a job interview or you want to go out with someone, and so what you did was presented your best side and you presented what that person wanted to hear. If you didn’t like the painting on the wall and you’re in a job interview, you don’t say, ‘That’s an ugly painting.’ If they like it, probably, ‘Oh, that’s very nice. And I like this about you and I like that.’ You would present yourself to be what they want.”

  “Personality functioning,” Terese Buess changed test categories. “Was it very clear from the test results that Anthony Shore knew what was socially acceptable and what was not?”

  “He definitely showed awareness of that, not only in the testing but throughout the time in treatment,” Dr. Burns responded.

  “Let’s talk a little bit about criminal characteristics. Is that something that typically is evaluated as part of the admissions process?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Tell the jury what a criminal characteristic is.”

  “A criminal characteristic is something that you would see. Like, we see characteristics that might be similar among teachers or among coaches or among rock players. Criminals often have characteristics that are similar among each other,” Dr. Burns explained. “For instance, they’re interested in what they can get. They may be opportunistic, that when an opportunity for whatever crime is their choice occurs, that they are able to jump right in there and take advantage of it. That’s a real strong criminal characteristic.”

  “And did Anthony Shore test high in that area?”

  “He did.”

  “The ability to break a law when you think you can get away with it?”

  “Right. And on that particular test, I think one of the statements is that as long as he thought he would get away with it, that he would be willing to engage in a criminal behavior.”

  “Was it clearly determined that he was going to be a manipulator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is part of that degree of intelligence that you are dealing with here,” Buess asked, “and part of the personality quirks that you were looking at, the narcissism that ‘I’m more important than anybody else,’ did Anthony Shore perceive himself as being treated unjustly?”

  “He did,” Dr. Burns agreed. “There was an entire page that he wrote in 1999 in drug treatment that talks about how unfairly the criminal justice system had treated him, how they made lots of promises that he would not be subjected to the same kind of standard of supervision that the other sex offenders were, that he would be treated differently.

  “And he was. In the page he wrote, he was quite distressed. He finally kind of just blew the whole thing off with anger, because it was something that he was seeing he wasn’t getting out of.

  “He actually spent three weeks in jail for not complying, for not getting with the program.”

  “Let’s talk a little bit about how he tested in the area of sexual functioning. Are there questions about rape in that?”

  “There are.”

  “And how did he respond to those?”

  “He denied having any characteristics.”

  “Is he given an opportunity to provide you with a picture of him as a sexual being or as a nonsexual being?”

  “Most people would admit to having sexual desires and would admit attraction to age-appropriate adults of the sex that they preferred to be with. When someone is trying to fake on that test, they present themselves as what’s known as asexual. All it means is without sexual interest.”

  “In other words, ‘I’m here for sex offender treatment because my probation has made me be here, but I’m really not a sexual person and, therefore, I don’t need this’?” Buess asked.

  “‘How could I need this if I’m not sexual?’” Dr. Burns responded, as if speaking about Shore.

  “Do you believe that test score?”

  “No. I usually tell people maybe we need to call the coroner,” which elicited chuckles from the gallery and some members of the jury.

  “As a result of all these tests that were administered, was there a warning that was noted in Anthony Shore’s file for your purposes for the therapist?”

  “Yes. It warned us to be careful with him because he was of superior intelligence and that he would try to use his reasoning and verbal and social skills to—or, criminal is actually what they were—to manipulate our perception of him and how he was doing in treatment.”

  “Once he’s accepted for sex offender treatment, is there a contract that is signed?”

  “There is.”

  “And did Anthony Shore sign a contract?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Are there a set of rules that are in writing as part of that contract that he’s supposed to be abiding by?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “And part of it is in conjunction with the conditions of probation he’s not allowed to use any alcohol or drugs?”

  “Correct.”

  “The rules that were given to him in writing, is he required to keep them in a workbook?” Buess questioned.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And is he ordered, as part of the treatment program, not to have contact with any minors, any children?”

  “Yes, without therapist approval, and that was never given in this case.”

  “So, Anthony Shore never had therapist approval to live with a minor?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “Part of the contract agreement for sex offender treatment, was it that he has to be honest and candid and truthful as he goes through his therapy?”

  “That’s a requirement for successful intervention.”

  “Because without that, the whole thing is kind of pointless, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “If no progress is noted,” Buess asked, “if someone’s just sitting there and not admitting to anything and not working within the group, what happens?”

  “We give them time to work through it,” Dr. Burns responded. “But then there comes a time that they’re unsatisfactorily discharged. Now, a requirement of sex offender probation is that they successfully participate . . . and so, they must talk. Otherwise, I don’t know what they’re thinking and cannot successfully work with them. So, they run the risk of being unsatisfactorily discharged, which is a technical violation, which sets them up for possible revocation of their probation.”

  “Revocation on a felony case, meaning they’re going to prison?” the ADA clarified.

  “Exactly.”

  “In Anthony Shore’s case, were there frequent times when he was hitting that point where there was no progress and he was informed that a report was going to be sent to his probation officer that he was not in compliance with his treatment program?”

  “Absolutely. We try to encourage them. And one of the ways that we do that is to say, ‘Look, we’re going to have to send this. These are the risks you run. So, you need to
get honest. You need to start talking.’”

  Terese Buess took a good long look at the jury, and then she turned to Dr. Burns.

  “I want to talk with the jury and with you very briefly about your observations of Anthony Shore’s participation and progress in sex offender treatment throughout the years that he was there. That would be 1998 up to 2003. Did he ever properly disclose? And that’s important, is it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like an alcoholic standing up and saying, ‘I am an alcoholic’ as the first step. Do you require full disclosure of the offense that brought them to your treatment?”

  “Yes. And it is extremely important that they do,” Dr. Burns agreed.

  “When things would get a little hot in your sessions, in other words, he’s about to get kicked out, what would Anthony Shore do?”

  “Anthony was taking a lot of time in what I call coming out of denial. At that time . . . we weren’t always given all the details of the original offense. We kind of had to pull it out piece by piece.” Dr. Burns paused and looked at her former client. “And in this process, after long periods of denial, Anthony finally admitted that his daughters had been drinking, had snuck out of the house, they came home drunk, that he was trying to help them sober up. And for his older daughter, he got her in the shower. She had been sick on herself and so he said he took her clothes off of her and that in the process he noticed that she was developing and she passed out and he did touch her breast and her vagina. And finally, even longer after that, that perhaps he did digitally penetrate her vagina.”

  “From total denial,” Buess began, “which is where he was when he started, to getting to that point, how many years did that take?”

  “It varied because what would happen is he would come to a point where he would admit it and then he would start working on it and then he would go back in denial.”

  “Did he blame others for what had happened?”

  “Mostly, he minimized. It’s like saying that you’ve only drank and drove one time when you’ve done it a thousand [times], or that you only touched the breasts when you actually had full intercourse.”

  “So, he was minimizing?”

  “All the way through.”

  “Did he blame others for what he had done, for other things?”

  “He blamed the courts for the situation that he was in. It was their fault because he really didn’t do anything. He blamed his ex-wife because he said that she put his daughters up to saying that, just because she was angry at him and that he really didn’t do anything. So, he was always the victim.”

  “You mentioned that there was a warning that Anthony Shore could become a cotherapist, controlling. Did that actually happen?” Buess asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Burns answered, along with a nod of her head. “Some of the guys say they got things from what Anthony Shore said to them. They would learn because he was good at saying the right things. Like, it’s wrong to rape.”

  “Tell the jury, please, what Anthony Shore’s response was to any attempts to get him to show empathy for his victims.”

  “He would say things like, ‘They’re not going to be able to have their dad around.’ He envisioned having his daughters become rock stars and now the fact that he had done what he had done, they weren’t able to be around him, so they lost out on that opportunity to become rock stars, and they were really wonderful kids.”

  “Tell the jury what’s wrong with that.”

  “What’s wrong with that is that that’s the least of their concerns, that they lost out on an opportunity to become a rock star,” Dr. Burns stated incredulously. “They lost out on an opportunity to have a life in which they could raise their children and love their husband and be loved by their husband and even others.” The gallery looked appalled as they shot daggers into Shore’s skull. “Victims . . . always question why others want to be around them. ‘What do they want from me?’ Especially if the perpetrator’s a male and they’re a female and they’re heterosexual.”

  Terese Buess pulled out a leather-bound notebook. “Ms. Burns, I’m showing you what’s been admitted into evidence as State’s Exhibit 211. What is that?”

  “That’s Anthony Shore’s treatment book.”

  “On October 21, 2003, did you come into possession of that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “How did you come to have it?”

  “Mr. Shore left it at his last treatment session before he was arrested.”

  “And was that book opened up to try and figure out who it belonged to?”

  “Yes. My associate and I opened the book and went through it, recognized it was Anthony’s and went through it a little bit more.”

  “Tell the jury, please, aside from the assignments that you found in there, what else was in there”

  “There were images of nude females with shaved pubic hair and a conversational Spanish/English translation book.”

  Terese Buess held up the pictures of the naked women found in Shore’s treatment book. “Tell me about these. Are these within your rules and regulations?”

  “They are a definite violation.”

  “And, specifically, you mentioned the shaving of the pubic hair. Was that important to you?”

  “In my training, that indicates someone who has an interest in children will ask that their partner shave their pubic hair. Many pornographers will use shaved pubic hair in the images for that reason, so they look younger.” (This, despite the fact that many young men and women prefer themselves and/or their partners to be shaven so there is less interference when performing cunnilingus or fellatio.)

  “As a result of finding those images in Anthony Shore’s book, was a decision made at your program concerning his attendance and participation?”

  “This to me said—him writing in his treatment manual—[that] he didn’t have any interest in the program or what we were teaching.”

  “Was it significant to you that those images were actually in that binder?”

  “It was significant to me,” Dr. Burns replied.

  “What did that say to you?”

  “There’s another part that we haven’t talked about Mr. Anthony Shore, and that’s the nature of his personality disorder. The narcissism, the grandiosity. ‘See how I can carry this. And I’m sitting in group and you don’t even know I have it.’”

  “‘So, I can get away with it?’” Buess added.

  “‘I can get away with it. I can do what I want to do.’ And this book gets pulled open many times and papers are pulled out. So, it could have fallen out, but he had no concern about that. He would just sit there with it in his lap. The whole time he’s sitting in group, he knew that was there. It was kind of thumbing his nose at everything we were doing, because he’s sitting there going, ‘Look, I’ve got this.’”

  “Is it a violation of the contract to possess pornography?”

  “It certainly is.”

  Buess then referred to the large box of porn that was discovered in Lynda White’s garage when Shore was arrested. Buess mentioned the fact that not all of the magazines in the large box were pornographic.

  “The magazines that were not porn did seem to be all of Hispanic origin,” Dr. Burns informed.

  “The pornography that’s in here, was there a type of pornography that seems to be mostly?”

  “It’s mostly nude females and many of them do have shaved pubic hair. Some of them had physical damage to particularly the breast area.”

  Prosecutor Buess then directed Dr. Burns toward some of Tony Shore’s collages, which the police discovered in Lynda White’s garage. “Did we look at a variety of things that Anthony Shore has cut and worked on?”

  “Yes, ma’am, we did.”

  Buess pointed to one of Shore’s naked-women collages that was discovered in his box of porn. “They’re all women, are they not?”

  “They are all that we saw.”

  The prosecutor asked her to describe one of Shore’s collages.
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  “It looks like he cut each image as if you would a paper doll—paper doll clothes. You know how you have to cut out exactly the edge of it. They’re cut, just the image itself, and then he pieced the images together side by side so they’re all interlocking with just this collage. All you see are women and their bodies.”

  “Is that easy to do?” Buess pondered.

  “It doesn’t look very easy, and I’ve done some collages.”

  “Tell the jury, please, what does that indicate to you, the amount of time and effort and the amount—we went through all those items and the envelopes of pictures and thousands of women that have been cut out. What does that tell you about Anthony Shore?” Buess wanted to know.

  “Where you spend your time and your energy is where your interests are, and he spent a lot of time and energy on those pictures,” Dr. Burns answered.

  “Is this art?”

  “I guess it depends on the person’s individual perception.”

  “There were a few items that you and I separated from the massive cut pictures.” She pointed to one of the pieces of evidence. “What does that contain?”

  “These are varying young-looking girls,” Dr. Burns responded in regard to a photograph from a magazine of a nude woman. “Again, the shaved pubic hair. She looks fourteen. They are very young and there’s the word ‘fresh.’”

  “I’m going to show you now what’s inside the envelope marked State’s Exhibit 215. What is that?”

  “This is hard-core pornography showing intercourse between a man and a female. She’s got on ankle socks and that is associated with young girls. Young girls frequently go to gyms. They might have on shorts. They’ve got their sneakers on. They might wear socks. So, certainly, things like pleated skirts, bobby socks, are associated with young females.”

  “And finally I’m going to show you what’s inside State’s Exhibit 217. What are those?”

  “These are pictures of breasts that have been harmed. There are bruise marks.”

  “Why would someone keep pictures like that?”

  “Because, again, of an interest in that particular behavior that’s associated with that. That would be appealing to someone into inflicting pain on other individuals.”