'Tourniquet Killer' Before Death: 'I Wish I Could Undo the Past'

Anthony Allen Shore executed in Texas
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Jan 19, 2018 12:29 AM CST
Texas Executes 'Tourniquet Killer'
This photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Anthony Allen Shore.   (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP, File)

Texas carried out the nation's first execution of 2018 Thursday evening, giving a lethal injection to a man who became known as Houston's "Tourniquet Killer" because of his signature murder technique on four female victims. Anthony Allen Shore was put to death for one of those slayings, the 1992 killing of 21-year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada, whose body was dumped in the drive-thru of a Houston Dairy Queen. In his final statement, Shore, 55, was apologetic and his voice cracked with emotion, the AP reports. "No amount of words or apology could ever undo what I've done," Shore said. "I wish I could undo the past, but it is what it is." Shore, who strangled his victims with a homemade tourniquet, was pronounced dead at 6:28pm CST.

Shore's attorneys, who argued in appeals he suffered brain damage early in life that went undiscovered by his trial attorneys, said his appeals were exhausted and filed no last-minute attempts to try to halt his execution. Besides Estrada, Shore confessed to the slayings of Laurie Tremblay, 15, found beside a trash bin outside a Houston restaurant in 1986; Diana Rebollar, 9, abducted while walking to a neighborhood grocery store in 1994; and Dana Sanchez, 16, who disappeared in 1995 while hitchhiking to her boyfriend's home in Houston. At least three victims were raped. Shore's execution originally was set for last October but was delayed for an investigation after another Texas death row inmate concocted a scheme to get Shore to take responsibility for his crimes.

(More execution stories.)

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