Daddy Knows Best: The Escape of the Tourniquet Girls | The Case of Tiffany Shore | UNSEEN

I'm Harvey Ghien, and this is Killer Stories. Every Monday, I'm cutting the lights. I'm telling you a bedtime story. Except, these stories are all real. We're talking brazen heist, devastating cons, serial murders, and cases that defy tidy categories. So join me for new episodes of Killer Stories with Harvey Ghien, every Monday. Strangely, two-fought lifehills, couldn't go along with anything. Do you think it kind of turned into a killer? Same thing, a pulled her out, and left like a bad out of hell. This is the voice of the infamous Turnikit Killer. Operating from Houston, he claims to have attacked over 60 girls using his signature weapon, a makeshift ligature, better known as a Turnikit, as his list of victims kept piling up. The panic in the community reached new heights. Many people took extra precautions to protect their children, but Anthony sure, a single father raising his two daughters, completely surrendered to the paranoia. My brother left his girls at home, locked in the house, and they're just dismissing it. Anthony had a very good reputation in the community, and many praised him for showing such resolve amidst the chaos. Now to a father who many say did what he had to do to protect his young daughter. But as years went by, Anthony revealed himself to be much more dangerous than he seemed. The longer that we lived with him, the more we were afraid. As each of the attacks of the Turnikit Killer grew closer and closer to their home, Anthony removed the girls from school, nailed shut his doors and windows, and trapped his daughter's Tiffany and Amber inside his house. He will barricade us in the house so that we couldn't leave. We were 100% locked in. On top of that, Anthony himself grew unstable, often disappearing in the middle of the night. Back then, I just accepted it as he had a long day at work, but in hindsight, it's just not realistic. But Tiffany refused to stay silent. Instead, she confronted her father and went on to play a pivotal role in bringing the Turnikit Killer to justice. Tiffany broke this entire case because she had the courage to stand up. In the city of Houston, Tiffany and her older sister, Amber, live a cozy life with their parents, Anthony and Gina. The man is a well-known musician, playing in multiple local jazz bands. Between his day job as a landline repairman and his musical career, he still manages to spend a lot of time with his two young daughters. We would go to like the Renaissance fare or do art, or just always something fun. But behind that perfect facade, the family has their problems. Gina and Anthony fight often, and their marriage is crumbling. Eventually, she meets someone else and files for divorce. She wants both Anthony and her daughters out of her life, so she gives him full custody. But Tiffany liked her father and didn't mind moving in with him. He was funny, he was smart, he was talented. He was all of those things. But unbeknownst to Tiffany, something sinister loomed in the neighborhood. In the past few years, two young girls had been murdered close to her home. It may not be as safe as it used to be so there was some concern among the community about the possible dangers to their children. Thursday, September 26, 1986, 14-year-old Laurie Tremblay, a teenage girl from Central Houston, vanishes. She was just walking to school in 1986, and she ended up missing. The following day, the police discovered her body. Laurie Tremblay was found in the parking lot of a restaurant behind the dumpster and had been strangled to death. The sole piece of evidence they have is her cause of death, knuckle joint impressions, and ligature marks around her neck. Suggest she was strangled with a rope or cord, with nothing else to go for, the case quickly goes cold. The investigation sort of runs its course, and they've chased down pretty much all the leads that they think they have. Thursday, April 16, 1992, around 10 a.m., a delivery man pulls into the parking lot of a West Houston dairy queen. When he jumps out of his truck, he stumbles upon a dead body by the drive-through. Detectives from the Houston Police Department homicide of his are immediately dispatched to the scene at the dairy queen. The police thoroughly examined the body, revealing visible evidence of sexual assault. Additionally, an object is found embedded into the victim's neck, a makeshift tourniquet. This wasn't some sort of like impulse grabbing somebody by the throat and strangling them. Somebody put some thought and effort into this. They spend the remainder of the day investigating the crime scene and gathering DNA samples. Finger nail clippings are taken from Maria's body and stored for later use while they're at it. An unexpected individual arrives at the location. Her father actually goes down to the scene where police are still documenting evidence and paedinifies her. Maria Dill Carmen Estrada was a young Hispanic woman who worked as a nanny in and around Spring Branch. After the news reported that the killer used a homemade weapon in the attack, a wave of paranoia hit the neighborhood. To strangle the victim with a tourniquet, allowed him to ensure that she was tortured, to ensure that the death was as slow or as fast as he wanted it to be. Her death and his surge in overall crime in the area put the community on edge. We were crime rigged. There were home invasions. People were getting logged and robbed. People were afraid to leave their house. The shores are no exception to this. However, Anthony, who's now a single father, goes a bit too far on how he tries to protect his daughters. This basically just convinced that nothing bad would happen to us if we were locked inside the house. He nailed down the windows in our room, and don't go outside because someone might kidnap you. As the situation worsens outside the house, so does Anthony's relationship with his daughters. He becomes increasingly controlling and manipulative, obsessing over order and perfection. His daughters begin to fear him, always on edge, and never knowing when he will lash out next. Our hair had to look a particular way. And our appearance had to be spotless and perfect all of the time. We had to talk and act a particular way. Everything was just like a show. But if it doesn't go the way he planned it, then all hell breaks loose. And everybody suffers in the house for it. A few months after the girls moved in with their father, the neighborhood is, once again, struck by two heavily mediatized crimes. Well, now we turn to breaking news in North Harris County and connection to a violent home invasion there. First, a masked man attacked Selma Janks, a 14-year-old student, after she was dropped off from school. So she comes home from school, and he's inside the house. He's disguised himself. The attacker, he binds her with duct tape, then rips her while she's screaming and crying. Selma describes her attacker as a white male with blue eyes, but the police are misled by the fact that she survived the attack. This was totally, completely off-emote. There was no reason for police to connect this incident with any of the other previous homicides. On Sunday, August 7, 1994, a nine-year-old named Diana Rebler goes missing. Her parents sent her to buy sugar at the neighborhood's mom-and-pop grocery store. A few minutes away from their home, 30 minutes later, her worried mother went to look for her. She was frantic, runs back to the house. She tells her husband, called 911. Diana's gone. Within hours of her disappearance, the police conduct a neighborhood search and deploy multiple helicopters in and around Houston. As the sun sets, the search for the missing nine-year-old is handed over to the night shift. We were griefed to be on the lookout for a little girl. A little after midnight, I decided to go check this abandoned warehouse. As I pulled up, I had my spotline toward the loading dots and some dumpsters from the distance. I see what I think is a small body. Homicide detectives arrive shortly after that, and then they go about inspecting the body. The forensic unit immediately notices something a rye about Diana's body. Another makeshift tourniquet is entangled with her neck. Even if the police try to keep this information to themselves, it isn't long before the news picks up on the story. Everybody in Houston was aware of what happened to this poor little girl. And everybody was just shocked, stunned, and yeah, they were angry. At the time, the police are still unaware that all the cases are linked. But they easily piece together that Diana's and Maria's murders have probably been committed by the same individual. But neither investigation had turned up any evidence that would carry forward in investigating either one of the cases. We worked on them for months and never got the feeling that we were getting anywhere. As the situation in the neighborhood deteriorates, Anthony's paranoia reaches new extremes. The girls aren't allowed to go out at all anymore. During the week, they're sometimes permitted to go to school but are mostly locked up in the house. On weekends, they play a game together that they call pretend rock band. Anthony dresses the girls in costumes and encourages them to dance around the house to loud music. At only 10 years old, the girls do not realize that their father has ulterior motives. He was very involved in our dress up moments. He liked to put us in outfits that were very suggested. And my dad definitely was always somewhere watching. Another one of Anthony's family traditions is the evening hot chocolate. At first, only Amber, the oldest of the two, is allowed to drink it. But eventually, he offers some to Tiffany too. My sister told us all the time, don't drink the hot chocolate. It tastes funny. And it's a taste funny. I remember that, but I just didn't think anything of it. I thought it was something like cheapness. off-brand of hot chocolate. The next thing you know it's morning, we were being drugged. As the year goes on, Anthony starts giving Tiffany hot chocolate more frequently, often several times a week. As a result, she gradually becomes accustomed to the effects of the drug. The first time she wakes up in the middle of the night, she is horrified by what is happening to her. I was in and out of consciousness. I remember waking up to that happening that I was totally naked and that he was doing stuff. And I pretended to be asleep because I was afraid. Although she and her sister usually share everything and rely on each other, Tiffany is too scared and embarrassed to confide in her about the near daily abuse. In a way, Tiffany believes she is safeguarding Amber by not telling her about it. I thought that if I took the brunt of it, she would be okay. She was my rock at the time. That's all we had in life. We had each other. Friday, July 14, 1995, Barbara Robertson, the editor of a local news station, receives an anonymous call right before noon. I said, "KPRC, how can I help you?" His first words were, "I have a tip for you." There's a serial killer on the loose. Unbeknownst to Barbara, a 16-year-old named Dana, was declared missing by her parents nine days prior. The police categorized her as a runaway from the get-go and didn't take her parents complaints seriously because she wasn't living with them at the time. The caller reveals the location of a dead body. Without knowing whom he's referring to, Barbara keeps asking him questions. In a 37-minute conversation, the caller goes into complete detail on how the body was laid. I said, "You are the killer." And he hung up. She immediately calls a North Harris sheriff and drives to the department to provide him with a statement. "I walked him through what was related to me in the phone call. I said he was looking for that spotlight. He gave me details that I know excited him to share with me." The police followed the caller's direction toward a dead end road past the I-45 North of Houston. There, they immediately locate the emplacement he described to Barbara, but after 10 days outside, the body is completely unrecognizable. Two pieces of evidence are discovered by the forensics team. The first item found is a homemade tourniquet embedded in the victim's neck. The second piece of evidence is a set of rings found on the victim's finger. Based on the autopsy report, it is determined that the body had been dumped over a week ago and the victim is estimated to be around 16 years old. After cross-referencing the timeline and age with missing person reports, the only individual who matches both criteria is Dana Sanchez. With this case added to the pile, the MO of the killer finally becomes clear to the detectives. As a last resort, they assemble a task force combining the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff's Department to reopen all of the cases. "In the case of Maria de Estrada, she was strangled to death with a tourniquet. Down on Rebbiar's case, you had a tourniquet. Dana Sanchez was also strangled." "They get everybody on board to try and figure out what's going on because they realize they've probably got a serial killer on the loose." Two years after the last victim was found, the situation changes dramatically in the Shore's house. Anthony's girlfriend moves in and he wants the girls out of the house for the summer. So he asks his sister, Gina Shore, to take them to their mother's place in California. Gina seizes the opportunity because she knows something is wrong within their household. "He was a bit more touchy-feely with his girls than what I thought he should be doing." Twice already, she has reported him to CPS. First in 1993 when she visited his new home for the first time. "Chop protective services was just very quick to dismiss it. They made me feel as if I was overreacting." Two years later, in 1995, she came over for Christmas. When she arrived, she was distressed to see that the situation somehow worsened since her last visit. "My brother left his girls at home, locked in the house. All the windows were nailed shut. No babysitter. They had no power, no running water." On top of Gina's second complaint, the CPS already had been contacted by Tiffany's teachers the year prior. And then again, Anthony fooled them, like he seemed to be fooling everybody. "He's very charismatic. He was very charming and very persuasive. And CPS, turning a blind eye." Back in California, Gina tries to encourage them to open up about Anthony and their situation in Houston, but they remain evasive and guarded. One day, towards the end of the summer, she casually asks Tiffany a question that shakes her to her core. "I'd had a really crappy day at work." I said, "Yeah, haven't you ever had something happen? You just felt was unjustified, where he just made you just want to punch somebody in the throat." Tiffany turned, she white. Started following her eyes out and started telling me all the things that my brother had been doing to her. He had been molesting her. Gina gathers Tiffany, her sister Amber, and their grandmother, Diana, to brief them on the situation. This is when Amber finally reveals her side of the story. Amber went ballistic. He promised he would never do that as long as she was compliant and let him do whatever he wanted to her. How dare him ever touch her baby sister." Gina and Diana then proceed to contact the authorities and press charges against Anthony. But once again, the system fails them. He left across the street from an elementary school. Sex offenders aren't supposed to be able to do that. All he had to do was just register that he had molested in daughters. Now on the sex offender list, Anthony gets away without any jail time. All he needs to do is provide the state with a sample of his DNA. "So when my sister and my grandmother and I found out that he was let back out, we felt like there was no sense of justice in the system. We were all really angry and also concerned again that he was going to come out and retaliate." Five years later, a new cutting-edge DNA lab opens in Dallas, and the Harris Sheriff's Department decides to reopen the tourniquet killer cases once again. With a focus on Maria Del Carmen Estrada, the only victim who was found with unknown DNA on her nails. "Nearing an assault, especially with a female, it's common to struggle and scratch, resulting in skin or blood being underneath the fingernails." But after reopening her case twice already, they are running low on samples. This may very well be their last chance. "I had DNA, but you use it up each time you test it. Do we want to use the rest of our finite sample on sending it to Dallas?" "It was decided that the fingernail samples would be submitted to see if there was DNA enough to match a suspect." Thursday, October 16, 2003, a breakthrough. Eleven years in the making finally comes through. "Nasingly, there's a match and it's a man in Houston." "They had a perfect DNA profile from her fingernails, which matches the DNA profile from the swabs of Anthony's show." Anthony is immediately arrested and questioned by investigators. He confesses to everything. "They ain't a soundtrack. How do they own a rebar of your case? Rimmelar, how do you say it?" "Rimmelar?" "Rimmelar. He told me her name was Carmen. Talk about another case that you don't know about." "Lori and Tremblay." He even fills the gap concerning Lori Tremblay, his first victim, whom the police never associated with the tourniquet killer because of its divergence from his usual MO. "He called me confessed to the killings of Maria, Lori, Dana, and Diana, and he also confessed to the f***ing of the 14-year-old." As this is happening, the Texas news circuit is covering the arrest. This is when Tiffany, now 18 years old, receives a phone call from Amber, would recently moved back to Houston. "And to the phone, and I was like, hey, and she was like, hey, dad's a serial killer. I don't even think she sugarcoded it in any way she performed." With the trial on its way, Tiffany flies back to Houston to testify against her father. The policemen are astounded to finally meet the girl who was instrumental in solving the case. "Tiffini broke this entire case wide open because she had the courage to stand up and tell law enforcement." The prosecution aims for the death penalty, so they gather the only survivors they have. Tiffany, Amber, and Selma. "Anthony Allen Shore, for the first time, walked into the courtroom that's likely to be the scene of his Capitol murder trial." "I think that they were bringing us in so that they could witness that he had a history of other types of violent crime and no remorse for those crimes, that he wasn't going to get any better and that the best solution was the death penalty." On January 18, 2018, Anthony Shore is executed by lethal injection. "I was just relieved and kind of surprised that it was finally over with. I think it was 13 years from the time he received the death penalty to he was finally executed, so I was I was glad that it was finally over." What Tiffany had to go through didn't suddenly dissipate after the execution. On the contrary, it was just another step on her continuous journey to recovery, but through therapy and support from her family, she's proud to finally be able to not see herself as a victim, but more so, as a survivor. "I do feel a lot more confident about my life and about myself as an individual. It's a daily work in progress." After the ordeal, Tiffany moves to Arizona to raise her own daughter as a single mother and provides her with all the love and support she needs to thrive and succeed. "I want to lead by example for my daughter. I want her to emulate the right things from Thank you very much. Tiffany has worked as a shearer's deputy, and later joined the Air National Guard on top of also studying forensic science. She wants to make a difference and hopes to fix the system from the inside. I know that one person can't change the world, but I think that if more people are aware of what goes on and more people that care are slowly worked into the system, maybe it can get better. And the only way to do that is to try. Remember these faces. This is who today is about. Anthony Allen Shore's reign of terror is officially over. [Music]