Cold Case Files - REOPENED: The Tourniquet

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

It's the late 90's in Houston, Texas and a serial killer is on the loose, having already strangled at least three women to death. His signature? A ligature tied around the neck, and tightened with a tourniquet. 

This episode of Cold Case Files, the podcast, contains descriptions of sexual assault and murder of children. Listener discretion is advised. On April 16, 1992, Detective Ron Horowitz, a crime scene investigator, was working his shift in the homicide office in Houston, Texas. A call came in that the body of a woman had been discovered in the drive-thru lane of a local Dairy Queen. It wasn't long after he arrived that he realized that the woman had been sexually assaulted and choked. One-third of all murder cases in America remain open.

Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare cases. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. Her panties were dropped, pulled down to her knees, and she had this little rope tied around her neck with a piece of, I believe, dowel or wood. Detective Horowitz processed the scene. He first filmed the area and then collected and analyzed the physical evidence.

He collected semen from her mouth and scraped under her fingernails, hoping for some biological clue. They also sought to identify the victim, to give her a name, and to notify her family and friends of her tragic death. About an hour later, a news story breaks about a murder at Dairy Queen. They show footage of the scene, including the body that had been covered by a sheet. Barely peeking out from underneath the shroud was a pair of white and gold shoes. Rosa Agreda was watching the news. I looked at the TV, and the only thing I could see was her shoes. The shoes were identical to the ones owned by her friend, Maria del Carmen Estrada. The two women had made plans to meet at Rosa's house that very morning, but Maria hadn't made it.

In denial, Rosa gets into her car to go looking for her friend. First place that I started looking for her was right here, this place. That was a store. I came in there and I said, well, she probably went into the store to buy something. This is the street that she walked.

Rosa searched for 10 hours, checking one familiar location, and then another, and another. But she didn't find Maria anywhere. There was one place she hadn't looked. So, exhausted and defeated, she made her way to Dairy Queen. She spoke with one of the detectives at the scene, telling him about her missing friend and the white and gold shoes. He showed me some pictures. I just started crying a lot and saying, it's not her, it's not her. Then he asked me again because I was saying that.

Are you sure it is her? And I told him it is her. Rosa then completes one of the most difficult tasks that had ever been asked of her. She identified the body of her best friend. Yes, it was Maria Estrada. Houston Homicide began to investigate Maria's murder, checking on her boyfriend, but he had a solid alibi. They checked a list of known offenders in the area, but each was eliminated. The investigation stayed active for six months after her body had been discovered. After six months, though still an open investigation, her evidence was moved to permanent storage, a paper graveyard where cold cases are rarely resurrected.

Two years after Maria's assault and murder, the Houston Police Department received another call about a homicide. This time, a young girl's body had been discovered. This is Detective Bob King. I got called at 12.48 a.m. This time, a young girl's body had been discovered. This is Detective Bob King. I got called at 12.48 a.m. I was at home in bed asleep. The child's body had been left in an empty parking lot on the north side of Houston. It looked like her body had been carried and then laid on its right side.

All she had on was the T-shirt she had been wearing when she left her house. It was a Halloween T-shirt with a black cat and a pumpkin and a bat. The girl was identified as 9-year-old Diana Raboyer. She left home 12 hours earlier. She was walking to the grocery store to buy a sack of sugar for her mother. I'm sure that made her feel very grown up. This is Diana's mother, Virginia Pierda. For those who don't speak Spanish, Virginia said that she went to the store and was told

that her daughter had already left. So she went back home and told her husband to call the police, and they started looking for Diana, but they couldn't find her. On the way to the store, people had seen Diana. The store employee remembered selling her a bag of sugar. While she walked home, one neighbor saw Diana pass in front of his house while sitting on his front porch. Another neighbor spoke to the girl, joking that she needed to go home. She told him that she was. Diana couldn't have been more than two blocks from her home when she vanished. She'd been kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death. She was nine. This is Detective King again. The ligature was peculiar in that it was a tourniquet, a nylon cord, which turned out to be parachute cord, tightened with a bamboo stick.

Detective King believed that the tourniquet method of strangulation that the killer used could be their own unique signature. He shared the crime scene photos with other detectives to see if any of them had seen this particular M.O. before. Sergeant Rick Maxey said, well, whoever killed Rebiar killed Estrada. And I said, who's Estrada? And he said, well, we call her the Dairy Queen girl. She was murdered in April of 1992. He looks at the evidence in both investigations and finds a lot of similarities in the way the two victims had been assaulted and murdered. He also noticed similarities in the victims themselves.

Both had been strangled with the same peculiar tourniquet-style ligature. They were both Hispanic. They were both small in stature and young. Diana Reviar was 9, Maria Estrada was 21, but she was very small. The forensic testing on Diana's body didn't produce any useful evidence. Working under the assumption that the cases were connected, investigators did have a limited DNA profile from the semen that had been discovered in Maria's mouth. This time, investigators kept the case active for a year.

They investigated several suspects, but each one was cleared by DNA evidence. The unsolved assault and murder of two people, especially that of a child, isn't something an investigator forgets about easily. Detective King was struggling. This kind of case can take a heavy toll on you, and if you don't find him, it's going to keep on. And more girls are going to die. So it becomes a life and death matter. It would be the first thing I thought about when I got up in the morning, the last thing I thought about when I went to sleep at night,

and all hours during the day. Another call came in about this case a few years later. But it wasn't to police. It was to a TV newsroom. Barbara Magana worked the assignment desk for KPRC in Houston. She was responsible for answering the tip line. This is Barbara Magana. I said, this is the tip line. He said, I have a tip for you. And I said, what would that be? And he said, there's a serial killer on the loose. I said, okay, well, how can you prove this? And he said, I'm going to prove it to you.

I'm going to tell you where you can find a body. Barbara tried to clarify with the person on the other end of the line if they were the killer. However, the man she was talking to just sighed and hung up the phone. Barbara notified police and shared the call details. Detective Roger Wedworth from the Harris County Police Department, is assigned to the case. The killer had told Barbara that the body was in a field in a vacant area of the county. The detectives hoped that the call had been a tasteless prank. The inconvenience to their schedule would have been a better alternative to murder.

This is Detective Wedworth. So we went to the northwest part of this vacant area and as we were walking down smelled a foul odor which we recognized to be a decomposing flesh and we followed that smell. They found a body. It was severely decomposed. Around her neck they saw a rope that had been tightly bound with a toothbrush and some kind of demented makeshift tourniquet. The victim was identified as Dana Sanchez. She was 16. Dana had gone down the street to use a payphone,

and when she was finished, a stranger offered her a ride home. She never made it. Aware of the other victims that had been murdered in the same manner, the Harris County investigators called Houston and talked to Bob King. These girls are all strangled. They're all strangled with a tourniquet-style ligature. They're all young, 9, 16, 21 years old. They're all very small in stature. They all have long hair, which we

considered a factor for control. The investigators from the two areas decided that they should work the case together, pooling their resources. Sergeant Danny Billingsley is appointed to lead a task force made of both city and county investigators to find the tourniquet killer. This is Sergeant Billingsley. Well, you know, there was no doubt in our mind this guy was going to hit again, and we were just waiting for that to happen. I mean, our biggest fear was before we could get up on him, he was going to kill another woman. The task force was comprised of men who had more than 50 years of combined field experience, but yet after six months, they had nothing to show for their efforts. A wave of fresh crime had broken.

Experienced investigators were needed, so the task force was disbanded. The cases investigating the murders of Maria Estrada, Diana Rebojar, and Dana Sanchez were once again returned to storage. How the tourniquet killer gets untwisted, after the break. Seven years after the task force disbanded, and more than 12 years after Maria's body had been discovered at Dairy Queen,

Detective Wedgworth, along with his colleague, Detective Vicaris, still thinks about the victims of the tourniquet killer. This is Detective Vicaris. You won't ever forget about a homicide that you've worked on, but especially this case because you know that there's a serial killer that was responsible for these people. They decided to pull the cases out of storage and begin by reexamining the body of 16-year-old Dana. She'd been found decomposing in a field. The detectives came up with an idea on how they might be able to help

determine the identity of the killer. This is Detective Wedgworth. When her body was found, she was not clothed. And the only thing that was on her person was the ligature around her neck and a toothbrush that was used to tighten up that ligature. It was just one of those shots, you know, in the dark, hoping that we could get something out of that. It was a good idea to use new technology to process old evidence. But unfortunately, the samples from Dana were too degraded. Detective Wedgworth and Ficaras contacted the city police. They spoke to them about using new technology to process the evidence from the murders of Maria and Diana.

Detective King was happy to comply. Now the Harris County Homicide Detectives on the Cold Case Squad said we exclusively use orchid cell mark to test our evidence. And there is an analyst up there named Catherine Long, who is just great. And she can find this evidence. If there is DNA to be had, she will find it. DNA analyst Catherine Long received the evidence from the City Homicide Unit in September of 2003. She runs the first test on the fingernail clippings for Maria. This is Catherine Long.

Once we get the debris off of the fingernail, basically what we're doing is just opening up the cells and taking the DNA out, purifying it. She finds DNA from an unidentified man under Maria's fingernails, likely skin from the man who attacked her. When we finally got something that was male, especially under her fingernails, that's a pretty intimate sample, and it was a good feeling. She enters the information into the national database of DNA profiles from criminal offenders,

and an hour later, she has a match. The DNA profile actually matched somebody who was in the CODIS database, and that was Tony Shore. Tony Shore was 41 years old at the time, and the criminal offenses he'd been convicted of included molesting his own two daughters. Upon learning this, Detective Wedgworth thinks the investigation might finally be making some headway. Oh, I think somebody's going to jail. That's exactly what I think. On October 24, 2003, Officer Robert Farmer from the Houston City Police Department

answered a call on his police radio. A homicide detective had asked for backup while making an arrest. This is Officer Farmer. He just told me the man standing down the street wearing a black T-shirt is wanted for murder. Let's go get him. The suspect was Anthony Allen Shore, the man who had been linked by DNA to Maria's murder and was suspected of others.

Law enforcement then goes in to make their arrest. This is Officer Farmer again. I told him to put his hands behind his back to handcuff him, and I noticed he had a cigarette in his hand. I told him to drop it, behind his back to handcuff him, and I noticed he had a cigarette in his hand. I told him to drop it, and he wouldn't drop it, so I cracked him on the knuckles with a flashlight to knock the cigarette out of his hand. And after that, there was no further resistance. After Anthony Shore is brought in, he's interviewed by Sergeant John Swain, known for his skills in the interrogation room. For over an hour, the two men sit in a 10 by 12 room

while Sergeant Swain puts his skills to work. This is Sergeant Swain. So I showed him the scene photos, basically all of them, all of the scene photos in the Estrada case. I was looking at him to see what his reaction was to the photos, whether he was going to have a reaction to the photos, which he did not, which concerned me. Which, you know, I'm thinking, well, you know, it's going to be a long night.

It was a long night. Sergeant Swaim continued to question an unresponsive Anthony Shore while the memories of the murdered girls hung in the air. Then, for no obvious reason, right about midnight, Anthony Shore decides to talk. Here's Sergeant Swaim again. He puts his hand on the photos of the three cases we knew he did, and he says, John, I'm going to tell you about these cases,

and I'm going to give you a couple bonuses. What do you think about that? And, of course, I think that's great. That's wonderful. And he's kind of looking down the floor and then he looks up, looks right in my eyes and says, does the name Laura Tremblay mean anything to you, John? Laura Tremblay was 15 years old when she was raped and strangled to death. She'd been walking to school when Shore grabbed her. Her body was dumped behind a restaurant.

Sergeant Swaim had been on Laura's case, which had remained unsolved. Her memory continued to haunt him. You could have probably hit me with a feather and knocked me over because this was another case that I had worked on for many months and never had a clue who did it. Here's some audio from the interview that Sergeant Swain conducted with Anthony Allen Shore. Shore is graphic about his crimes

and uses inappropriate language, so sensitive listeners might want to skip through this part. Let's start with, at the start, and just tell me. First was Lori and Tremblay. I undid her bra. Everything got out of hand. She freaked out, and we got into a fight. I tried to knock her out because I just really freaked out.

It's not right. I took this cotton cord, and I tried to make sure that she would never, ever tell anybody, and I strangled her. And the cotton cord broke more than once. It wasn't working. That's all I had. Did you just use your hands or did you use some kind of... It was a cord ligature.

Yeah, I know, but I mean, did you use... Yeah, my hands. Did you use your hands? I f***ed up my finger and my fingers. F***ed up. In his original rape and murder, he had tried to use his finger to tighten a cord around 15-year-old Laura Tremblay, but he hurt himself.

He was apparently a musician. He played guitar, so the finger injury affected his performance. His injury was also his inspiration to use tourniquets when committing his later crimes. Anthony Shore wasn't finished, though. He wanted to tell Detective Swaim about another attack. When the detective asked what was compelling him to share this information, Anthony Shore told him that the victim was still alive. In this one situation, he was able to fight off the evilness and let the girl live.

Here's the audio from Shore's interview again. Got her cooperation and tied her up with electrical cord and raped her. I thought that I was going to do this again, but I promised myself that I wasn't going to take any more lives, no matter what. Sick and f***ed up as it sounds, I really, really, really was trying to get better in a really sick, demented way. I don't discount it. I'm not stupid. But I was trying not to do what I promised myself I wasn't going to do. Shore then provided the name of his victim,

which I'm not going to share because she's still alive today and entitled to her privacy. He then admits to the murders of Maria, Diana, and Dana. When Shore talks about Dana, his final victim, he sounds conflicted as if he was fighting a losing battle with a dark part of himself. This is Anthony with her and petting on her. She was joking, like, no, no, no, I got a boyfriend, this and that. So I grabbed her, pulled her into the back of the van. She was fighting so hard. And I didn't want it to happen.

And once again, I knew that I couldn't stop. I knew there was nothing I could do to get out of this. And I used a ligature. A year later, almost to the day, Anthony is on trial at the Harris County Courthouse. The prosecution is being led by attorney Therese Booth. This is Therese Booth. Anthony Shore is a psychopath.

He had for years permitted himself the pleasure of indulging in those psychopathic desires, and it was time to put an end to it. Therese decides to only charge Anthony Shore on one case, Maria del Carmen Estrada, the crime in which the strongest evidence was recovered. They had no idea that they were going to be hearing about a serial killer. On October 21, 2004, a jury found Anthony Shore guilty of capital murder. At a sentencing hearing,

the 14-year-old survivor testified. And after less than an hour of deliberation, Shore was sentenced to death. Investigators were not completely convinced that Shore had come clean about all of the transgressions in his past. If you've got a female, strangled, ligature, you've got evidence, check it against Shore. That's all I can tell you. The plan is that after he has been on death row for a while and he's forgotten and lonely, that maybe he'll want to talk to us and open up about any other crimes he might have committed. Anthony Shore was set to be executed on October 18, 2017, but because of a scandal caused by another inmate on death row,

he was given a 90-day stay of execution. The other inmate had asked Shore to confess on his behalf since he was already going to be executed anyway. On January 18, 2018, Anthony Allen Shore was put to death by lethal injection. He was the first person to be executed in 2018. He was 55 years old. Here's a final thought from Detective Wedgworth. It's like, finally, you're seeing some justice, you know, finally. And justice has been served with him. produced by Scott Brody, McKamey Lynn, and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're distributed by Podcast One.

The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com and by downloading the A&E app.