By day, Anthony Allen Shore was a mild-mannered Southwestern Bell telephone lineman driving a white work van through the neighborhoods of Houston. By night, he became one of Texas’s most sadistic predators — the Tourniquet Killer.
Between 1986 and 1995, Shore abducted, raped, and murdered at least four young girls and women using a homemade ligature device that allowed him to tighten and loosen the cord at will, prolonging their terror and giving him absolute control over life and death. He confessed in chilling detail during an eleven-hour interrogation. At trial, he stunned everyone by demanding the death penalty. On January 18, 2018, he became the first person executed in the United States that year—apologizing to his victims’ families, then declaring, “There is no others,” before the lethal drugs took effect.
Co-authored by Dr. Scott H. Belshaw, the court-appointed defense investigator who spent years on Shore’s team, and renowned criminologist Dr. Matt DeLisi, this gripping account draws on exclusive access: hundreds of handwritten letters from death row, face-to-face interviews, mitigation files, trial records, and the killer’s own words. Belshaw reveals the calculating intelligence behind Shore’s double life, his refinement of the tourniquet after injuring his hand on the first kill, and his startling pre-execution admission to approximately sixty additional rapes using the date-rape drug Rohypnol.
Most disturbing of all are the compelling circumstantial links to the unsolved Texas Killing Fields murders along the I-45 corridor—dozens of young women and girls abducted, sexually assaulted, and dumped near the very routes Shore traveled daily. Geography, victimology, method of operation, and Shore’s own vague hints paint a haunting picture of a predator who may have claimed far more victims than he ever admitted.
A chilling portrait of evil hiding in plain sight, The Tourniquet Killer is both a definitive account of a monstrous case and a disturbing look inside the mind of a killer who never lost control — even on the execution gurney.
“The full truth may never be known. He took it with him.”
— Dr. Scott H. Belshaw
