The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (39 page)

And so the I–45 murders continue. Twenty-two-year-old Tamara Ellen McCurry disappeared in Galveston on 1 July 1982 after being seen getting into an orange or yellow van. The headless body of a woman was found in a garbage bag in a state park in Galveston in April 1986. The victim remains unidentified.

Shelley Kathleen Sikes, a 19-year-old University of Texas student, was last seen just before midnight 24 May 1986, when she left work at Gaido’s beach-front restaurant in Galveston where she was a waitress. She was heading for her home in Texas City, but never made it. Her car was found at around two the next morning, stuck in the mud alongside the I–45 northbound feeder road just south of the Galveston causeway. The driver’s window was broken, and blood was spattered on the door and driver’s seat. Despite an intensive search, Sikes was never found. She was thought to be another victim of one of the I–45 serial killers. But then in June 1987 the police got a phone call from a local motel. Resident John Robert King was trying to kill himself and confessed to abducting Sikes and burying her body. He said he and a friend, Gerald Peter Zwarst, high on drugs, had run Shelley Sikes’ car off the road and abducted her. Safely in custody, both men blamed each other for Sikes’ death and admitted burying the body near King’s home. However, King reneged on his promise to tell police exactly where the body was buried. Zwarst was offered immunity from a murder charge in 1990 if he would help find Shelley Sikes’ body. Under hypnosis he drew a map of a field in San Leon near Galveston Bay, where he said he last saw Shelley Sikes, but her body was not found. Authorities uncovered a white blouse during the search, but lab tests could not prove it belonged to Sikes. However, her family remain convinced the petite, handmade blouse was hers. King and Zwarst were convicted of aggravated kidnapping in 1988 – the most severe charge prosecutors could pursue without a body – and they were sentenced to life imprisonment. However, the case remains open.

The murder of 15-year-old Laurie Lee Tremblay is another I–45 case that has been resolved recently. She was last seen alive walking from her family’s apartment to the bus stop, on 26 September 1986. Her body was later found behind a restaurant in the 10600 block of Westheimer Road, Houston. None of her jewellery or possessions were taken. So the motive was not robbery.

“We knew we had a serial killer working,” said Houston police detective Sergeant John Swain said. “I think that the Police Department danced around that. The powers that be didn’t want to admit that, didn’t want the public to panic.”

The case remained unsolved until 2003 when 41-year-old Anthony Allen Shore was arrested for the murder of Maria Del Carmen Estrada, 11 years before. The 21-year-old Hispanic brunette was last seen on 16 April 1992 when she left her apartment at 7200 Shadyvilla to walk to work. Her body was found hours later face down in the drive-through lane of a Dairy Queen restaurant at 6707 Westview, Houston. She was partially nude and had been sexually assaulted and strangled. “When he had finished having his way with her, he left her . . . like a piece of garbage,” said Kelly Siegler, the prosecutor at his trial. The police testified that the nylon cord around Maria Estrada’s neck was so tight that it was not even visible.

Advances in DNA testing led to a match being made between scrapings taken from under Maria Estrada’s fingernails and Shore, who has been a registered sex offender since January 1998 when he was given eight years probation for the sexual assault of two girls in his own family, aged 11 and 13. Consequently, his DNA was on file. Once in custody, Shore sprang a surprise on his captors.

“He told me he would give me something that I didn’t know about,” said Lieutenant Danny Billingsley of Harris Court Sheriff’s Office. “And that is when he gave me the Laurie Trembley case.”

Shore also confessed to murdering Dana Sanchez and Diana Rebollar. Sixteen-year-old Dana Sanchez was a Hispanic brunette like Estrada. She was last seen talking to her boyfriend on a payphone at West Cavalcade and Airline, Houston, on 6 July 1995. She told him that she was going to hitch-hike over to his home, but she never turned up. Her body was found on North View Park on 14 July. She had been beaten, raped and strangled. Diana Rebollar was another brunette, but she was only nine. Her mother had sent her to a nearby convenience store to buy sugar in the 6600 block of North Main. Diana’s body was found behind a vacant building at 1440 North Loop West on 7 August 1994. Again she had been beaten, raped and strangled. Shore was also charged with the 1993 sexual assault of a 14-year-old Houston girl who was attacked by a man who broke into her family’s home in the 1900 block of Portsmouth after she returned from school to find the suspect in the kitchen. He tied her up and raped her.

“He said in a calm voice, ‘I’m just here to rob your house,’” said the victim, now 25. Shore then covered her eyes and mouth with duct tape and bound her hands behind her back. “He used a knife to cut off my panties. As I was screaming, he got upset and told me I was being too loud.” Then she felt his hands around her throat. “I kind of came out of my stupor and realized I had to do something. If I don’t do something, I’m going to die.” She was able to kick him away, but he threatened her before leaving the house

“He said he knows everything about me,” she said. “He’d been watching me come home from school. He knew that I played soccer.” During the woman’s testimony, Shore leaned back in his chair and stared at a pen he was tapping on the defence table.

After Shore was convicted of the murder of Maria Del Carmen Estrada, he instructed his lawyers not to cross-examine witnesses or make any other effort to persuade jurors not to give him a death sentence for the murder of at least four females over a nine-year span.

“He believes it’s time for him to sacrifice his life for what he has done,” defence attorney Alvin Nunnery told jurors as the penalty phase of the capital murder trial began. Shore, then 42, wiped away a tear as his attorney explained that his client had instructed him to request the death sentence. Nunnery said: “He’s accepted the Lord into his life. He understands that while he would ultimately be free from the pain and the penalty of sin – that is, eternal damnation – he has to pay the consequences for what he did.”

Shore’s sister Regina Shore Belt testified for him at the penalty hearings. She said that her brother had always displayed a “high, genius-level” intelligence, particularly as a musician.

“He could pick up an instrument he’s never seen before and play it like he’s been playing it his whole life,” she said. But Belt did not ask the jury for mercy. “I and the rest of my family believe that he should have the death penalty,” she told the court.

“Evil lives among us,” said the prosecutors. “And sometimes evil, as the evidence will show, comes in the form of someone who looks completely normal.” But he was in fact “a monster, absolute horrendous monster, capable of things that made this jury cringe as we showed them this week”.

Shore was sentenced to death for the murder of Maria Del Carmen Estrada. Consequently he will not stand trial for the other three murders. He is now on death row in Texas and is free to boast about his musical prowess on the internet while soliciting for pen pals.

Shore is a suspect in other I–45 slayings but apparently has not been linked to any of the other cases. Many things point to him as a good suspect, however. He lived in League City until he was 13. He attended Clear Creek High School. Police questioned him in connection with the Calder Road Killings. Also, his past jobs as a telephone service man and a tow truck driver took him far and wide in the Houston area, giving him ample freedom and opportunity to stalk or kill. Shore also abducted Dana Sanchez and Diana Rebollar at or near convenience stores, an oddly common abduction method in the I–45 killings.

One case in particular intrigues investigators. It involves a set of bones found just blocks from where Shore was living when he was arrested. The medical examiner’s office was able to determine that they belonged to a young female, but little more. The victim was only wearing a T-shirt. A looped cord was found nearby. Shore used a ligature to strangle.

“We don’t have the person identified and until then there is not a lot that can be done,” said Lieutenant Billingsley. “There is not a lot in that regard except being able to tie it to some missing person’s report.”

There are plenty of other related I–45 cases that remain unsolved. In March 1997 a 13-year-old girl was abducted at gunpoint as she was walking home from a shopping centre. She leaped out of her abductor’s truck in 200 block of East Fairmont in La Porte, Texas, on Galveston Bay. A police officer driving saw the girl falling out of the pick-up. It made off, but the officer identified it as a green late-model Ford Ranger and the suspect was a man aged between 35 and 45, and between 6 feet and 6 feet 2 inches tall, with greying black hair and beard. Neither the truck nor the man were found.

Some other I–45 murders have been solved. In late January 1999, drifter William Ray Mathews walked into the office of Country Time Mobile homes in Shenandoah, Texas, some 30 miles north of Houston on the I–45. He was carrying a briefcase and sat down and wrote sales assistant Tracy Vickery a note. It said he had a gun and, if she did not do what he said, he would kill her. He forced Vickery into his truck, then he drove off down I–45. But she leapt from his speeding truck. He tried to pull her back in by her hair but he could not hold her. She got away and ran to the Gulf Coast Trades Center to save herself.

Just weeks earlier, on 17 January, 18-year-old blonde Wanda May Pitts had disappeared from the Lodge Motel on the other side of the I–45. She had worked there for about two months and did not have a car. She was on duty in the lobby when Mathews abducted her. He took her to one of the motel rooms and sexually assaulted her, later boasting that she had been a virgin. Within hours of abducting Wanda Pitts he strangled her. After he was arrested for the attempted abduction of Tracey Vickery, Mathews said that he could not remember where he had put Wanda Pitts’ body, but about a year later her remains were found off an abandoned gated driveway.

A plea bargain prevented him from being charged with Pitts’ murder, but he was convicted of attempting to abduct Tracy Vickery.

In the 21st century the I–45 killings continued. On 12 July 2001, 57-year-old Tot Tran Harriman, a brown-eyed Oriental with black hair streaked with grey, left her son’s home League City at around 5 a.m. to drive to Corpus Christi, Texas. She has not been seen since. Weighing 130 pounds and 4 foot 11 inches tall, she was driving a 1996 maroon Lincoln Continental with personalized Florida licence plate on the back, saying “TOTSY”. As Florida only requires a rear plate, she had a Navy Seal emblem where the front plate would normally be. Circumstances of her disappearance led police to suspect foul play.

At around 10.15 p.m. on 10 March 2002, 13-year-old Laura Ayala went to a convenience store in a Conoco gas station behind the apartment complex where she lived in southeast Houston to pick up a Sunday newspaper to complete a school project. When she did not return after several minutes, her mother went to the gas station to look for her. The clerk at the store told her that Laura had been there and left after buying the newspaper, alone. Laura’s family began a search and found the newspaper and Laura’s sandals lying on the ground on her route home. They called the Houston Police Department.

“The girl was gone for about five minutes,” said Houston Police Department Sergeant Mike Peters.

The police made an extensive search on foot and horseback throughout the Houston area. They questioned relatives, neighbours, friends, acquaintances and all registered sex offenders. Volunteer groups circulated fliers. The FBI joined the search. An Amber Alert was issued. Laura’s photograph was shown on the national television show
America’s Most Wanted
. She had braces on her teeth and was last seen wearing jeans and a blue and white checked dress.

Investigators then learned that a girl answering Laura’s description left Houston on a bus belonging to the El Expresso Bus Company bus between 10.30 and 11 p.m., three days after Laura Ayala disappeared. The bus company’s records showed that a ticket had been bought in the name Laura A. She was accompanied by a woman named Virginia Ramirez and a man named Julio Barrios. A second bus line may have taken the three passengers on to Reynosa, in Mexico.

In February 2003, the police linked Laura Ayala’s abduction to Walter Sorto, Edgardo Cubas and 15-year-old Eduardo Navarro, who had gone on a crime spree of robberies, murders and rapes in the Houston area where Laura lived. Sorto has since been convicted in the murders of 24-year-old Roxana Capulin and 39-year-old Teresa Rangel, who were abducted from the restaurant where they worked on 1 June 2002. DNA in drops of blood found in an SUV belonging to Cubas’ father matched Laura’s, but they will not discuss their involvement and have not been charged in the case.

Despite this, family and friends still believe Laura is alive and the police have her case listed as an endangered abduction and are continuing with the search. There is a $20,000 reward offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people who kidnapped Laura Ayala.

On the evening of 12 July 2002, 23-year-old blonde Sara Trusty, who used to work at the Gulf Greyhound Park, left her home of Avenue E in Algoa, Texas, six miles from the I–45, to go bicycle riding. She was last seen alive at around 11 p.m. near the Baptist church on Orange Avenue in Algoa. The following morning, the bike was found in the foyer of the church but there was no sign of her. On 28 July 2002, her body was discovered in a dike in Texas City, the other side of the I–45. She had been dead for over a week.

Some escape. On 29 July 2004 an unidentified teenage girl from northwest Houston was stranded with a flat tyre on the West Loop of the southwest Houston freeway near Interstate 10. A man with a tow-truck driver stopped to help. He changed the tyre, but then tried to sexually assault her. The girl managed to escape by stabbing the man in the shoulder and abdomen with a pocket knife. She described her attacker as tall, bald and clean-shaven with a tattoo of a spider web on his left shoulder. His vehicle was a faded black, older model Chevrolet pick-up with “Super Tow” in white letters on the side.