Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Shore: Residence -- Atrium Apartments

 << Previous Post in This Series: Residence -- Renwick Drive

From Strangler: "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."

With no more than that to go on, I searched endlessly (or thereabouts) for any apartment complex having anything like the name Atrium near any of the numerous large and small airports in the Houston area. I came up empty. I assumed the apartment complex had been renamed or torn down.

Once Victor Jackson and I joined forces to investigate Shore, we soon figured out where Shore lived after moving out of the apartments on Renwick Drive. I had been guessing that Anthony Allen Shore had moved in with his father, Robert Shore somewhere in the League City area. I asked Victor if he could find an address for Robert Shore. Victor came up with an address of 9150 Gulf Fwy, Houston.

After a little confusion in Google Maps, which randomly shows one of two locations for that address, I found this overhead view.


That's William P. Hobby Airport nearby, so the address looked promising. I checked Google street view and found this:


I suggested that this could have been the location of the Atrium Apartments. In other words, instead of finding where Robert Shore had lived, Victor may have found where Anthony and Gina Shore lived after their wedding and honeymoon.

Victor quickly came up with this compelling bit of information.


Notice that the nearby property at 9100 Gulf Fwy is owned by Atrium Finance LLP. It is worth $19,008,940. Perhaps it is the large hotel to the north, the Houston Marriott South at Hobby Airport. In any case, I am convinced that we have located Shore's second Houston residence.

Notice that Victor did all the real work in finding these addresses.

I believe that Gina and Anthony Shore may have lived in the Atrium Apartments at 9150 Gulf Fwy, Houston, TX 77017 from April 1983 to October 1985. The April 83 date is based on the Gina and Anthony's wedding. The October 85 date is based on when I believe they moved into a house on Tallulah Lane, to be discussed in a separate post soon in the series. Those dates are not definite.

This date range encompasses several unsolved strangulation murders of young women along the Gulf Freeway. These unsolved murders of young women are often referred to as the I-45 murders. The area has become known as The Killing Fields. A field near the corner of Calder Road and Ervin in League City is particularly well known, since the bodies of four female victims have been found there. Two of those victims are Jane Does. The other two were abducted 11 months apart from the were last seen at the same convenience store pay phone. That is a signature consistent with Anthony Allen Shore.

The convenience store is 14 miles south of Shore's 9150 Gulf Freeway residence. That's substantially beyond Shore's normal prey radius. For that and other reasons, I've been disinclined to believe Shore was responsible for any of the I-45 killings. Certain recent events are causing me to reconsider. I'm not yet free to discuss those events, and I haven't yet completed enough research and analysis on the I-45 killings to justify including them in this series. I therefore intend still to limit this series to cases ranging from the murder of Laurie Tremblay (26 Sep 86) to the murder of Melissa Trotter (Dec 98).

Perhaps after this series, I'll consider a series on Anthony Allen Shore and the I-45 murders.