As do many serial killers, Anthony Allen Shore prowled for his victims close to his home. It is therefore important to know where Shore lived when attempting to determine which of the unsolved (or incorrectly solved) crimes he may be responsible for.
I have, for some time now, been attempting to determine all of Shore's residences since he moved back to the Houston area. (He attended to Clear Lake High School in League City for one year, then moved to California, then moved back to Houston.) I've relied on the book Strangler, public records searches, and some clever research by Victor Jackson. (Victor Jackson is married to the mother of Monalisa Espinosa, one of Shore's possible victims.)
I'll describe Shore's residences in this and subsequent posts. I'll not give sufficient information to locate the specific house or apartment, since I don't want the current residents being bothered.
6114 Renwick Drive, Houston 77081
Shore probably lived at the Renwick address beginning sometime before 16 April 1981 and ending sometime after 25 March 1983.
On or about 16 April 1981, Anthony Allen Shore was in a traffic accident. He was named as a defendant in a civil suit regarding that accident. The petition, provided below, identified Shore as living at 6114 Renwick in Houston.
The plaintiff apparently tried to collect damages prior to filing a lawsuit. The Petition wasn't filed until 24 March 1983, as shown in the second page, provided below.
In what may be only a coincidence, Shore married his first wife, Gina Lynn Worley, only one day later, on 25 March 1983. In the quote from Strangler below, author Corey Mitchell overstates his years by one.
She met 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 an 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 Living Seagull, those types of books. So, we really hit it off. We really got along."
The young lovebirds wasted no time in trying the know. They were married in on March 25, 1984.
Later in his book, Mitchell provides dates that clarify Shore met Gina around Thanksgiving of 1982 and married in March 1983. Mitchell also explains that the couple moved to the Atrium Apartments near the airport soon after their marriage. Victor and I have recently figured out the specific location of that vague description. I'll be discussing the Atrium Apartments in the next post in this series.
Since Gina described Shore as running "down the stairs" while she was checking her mail, it sounds as if they were living nearby in the same apartment complex. The building at 6114 Renwick Drive is indeed a two-story apartment building. I offer an image from Google street view below.
Strangler author Corey Mitchell was not able to pin down when Shore returned to the Houston area after living in California. In his book, he left the issue vague. "By 1983," he wrote, "Tony Shore moved back to Houston, Texas. He was twenty-one years old when he met the love of his life, an older woman named Gina Worley."
By discovering the traffic accident in which Shore was involved, Victor Jackson has placed Shore's return to Houston two years earlier than Mitchell's approximation. This means that Shore may have been dismissed as a potential culprit for one or more unsolved attacks from perhaps as early as 1980 through 1983.
Here are two images of Shore as he appeared around that time.
If you have any information about an unsolved attack against a young woman in this area during this time frame, or you have any information about Tony Shore around this time period, please contact the Houston PD or email me.