Living With A Serial Killer - Second Season

What happens when a charismatic killer...

It's classic.

Classic serial killer can make friends with anybody.

With a distinctive homicide technique...

This wasn't some sort of impulse grabbing somebody

by the throat and strangling them.

Who dumps the bodies of his victims

in empty parking lots...

Everybody in Houston was just shocked.

Stunned. They were angry.

- Goes undetected for years... - He is an evil person.

He is a guy that preyed on young women and girls.

Until his crimes closer to home bring his downfall.

He was just out murdering people

when you were sleeping in your bed at night.

- It's unspeakable. - It's unspeakable.

The person sitting there on the other side of the glass

was not my brother.

All I saw was a demon.

Despite knowing this predator closely,

his family didn't know

* *

Houston, Texas, the home of NASA Space Center

and oil exploration.

In the early 1990s,

Houston was going through a troublesome time.

People were afraid to leave their houses.

There were home invasions.

People were getting mugged and robbed.

We were crime-ridden.

The general attitude was it may not be

as safe as it used to be,

so there was some concern among the community

about the possible dangers to their children.

* *

Thursday, April 16th, 1992, 10:35 a.m.,

the parking lot of Dairy Queen restaurant

in Northwest Houston.

A guy pulled through to the drive-through and saw it.

And he couldn't believe his eyes.

There was a dead body.

Detectives from the Houston Police Department.

Homicide division are immediately dispatched

to the scene at the Daily Queen.

Once there, they find the body of a woman

dumped in the drive-through lot.

They turn her over.

She has long, black hair and her hair kind of falls away

and they realize that she's got a ligature around her neck.

She had been strangled with a tourniquet,

an object wrapped around the cord around her neck

and twisted until the tourniquet tightened.

This homicide technique is complex.

It suggests this might not be

the first time the killer has struck.

The killer knew what he was doing

and was prepared to commit the murder

at the time he abducted her.

This wasn't some sort of like impulse grabbing somebody

by the throat and strangling them.

Somebody put some thought and effort into this.

The deceased female is partially undressed.

It looked like you know, sexual assault

and not only that, but a brutal sexual assault.

There was obviously a monster around to do this.

Ten hours into their investigation,

detectives get an ID on the victim.

Her father actually goes down to the scene

where police are still, you know, documenting evidence.

And he identifies her.

21-year-old Maria Del Carmen Estrada

was a Hispanic woman who worked as a nanny.

Maria Del Carmen Estrada was a small woman.

She was, you know, very petite.

She had come to Houston from Mexico,

hoping to build a better life.

Maria had only been missing since that morning.

The local news had alerted her family to her tragic fate.

During an assault or an abduction,

especially with a female, it's common to struggle

and scratch her assailant resulting in skin

or blood being underneath the fingernails.

In 1992, DNA analysis is in its infancy,

but Houston PD thinks it could be useful in this case.

Swabs and fingernail clippings

are taken from the woman's body.

There was a predator out there.

Someone who would do violence, violence, violence to women.

Five miles east of the Dairy Queen

is the neighborhood of Houston Heights.

Here 30-year-old single dad Anthony Shore

is raising his young daughters.

* *

One woman who knows Anthony well

is his younger sister, Gina.

My brother and I probably became very close

while we were growing up.

And my sister was so much younger

that she really wasn't part of our little clique.

My brother, he sold himself very well.

He carried himself with the confidence,

very charismatic, but very arrogant.

He always felt that he was better than a lot of people.

In some respects, Anthony had reason to feel superior.

My brother was extremely gifted and talented.

Anything to do with the arts, just off the charts,

amazingly gifted.

He could hear something on the radio

and go and play it on the piano.

* *

But there's a flipside to this talented artist.

He'd always been kind of a control freak.

He's always been very structured

as to how he wanted things to be.

His clothes were always folded a certain way.

He liked things to be just so.

On his plate, at dinner, he didn't want his foods

touching each other on the plate.

Very much in control of the situation.

* *

As Anthony grew into a teenager,

he found a new focus for his controlling nature.

He would have me knock on somebody's door

and have the people's daughter or whatever come out

so that he could talk to him and then I would go home.

I don't think it had ever occurred to me

really completely what my brother was up to.

* *

Gina's teacher was the mother

of one of these neighborhood girls.

She told Gina

Anthony had been inappropriate with these young girls.

I really don't know for sure what all he did,

but I do know that he was probably being grabby

and kissy on them and that's not okay.

I was upset.

Nobody deserves to be objectified like that.

As Anthony got older,

he found new ways to entice young girls.

We're on our way to a huge mall in the Houston area

and he saw some girls sitting at a bus stop and he says,

"Oh, hang on. We're gonna go back and pick them up.

And the girls accepted the ride.

I'm sure that they probably would not have

had I not been sitting in there.

My brother dropped me off at the mall and he left.

It seems like he's still doing some of this wrong behavior.

If he's picking young girls up at bus stops,

that's not just boys being boys.

* *

Even as a 21-year-old married man,

Anthony's strange behavior persisted.

I had gone out and visited him a couple of times

when he was married and he was still doing that.

"Oh, here, I'm gonna drop you off.

I'm gonna go back and pick these people up."

It bothered me.

Within 18 months, Anthony had two children

of his own, Gina's nieces, Amber and Tiffany.

As Anthony's daughters play in Houston's quieter streets,

across town, detectives' hopes of solving

Maria Del Carmen Estrada's murder are fading fast.

The police interviewed everybody at Dairy Queen

who might have seen anything and they only came away

with a very bland description of a white man with dark hair.

But it wasn't enough to bring anybody in.

You follow every lead you got.

They didn't have any leads.

They had a body in a driveway and no suspects.

* *

But can the DNA evidence reveal more?

The lead investigator had DNA from her mouth

and had DNA from underneath their fingernails.

So he called in the sex crimes unit

and asked them, let's go through your database of DNA

and see if anything matches.

Unfortunately,

there is no hit on the suspect DNA.

Whoever strangled Maria is not on the database.

How will Houston PD find Maria's killer?

And could he strike again?

They were completely devastated.

I mean, who wouldn't be?

I would just pretend to be asleep

because I was afraid of what would happen.

Spring, 1992.

The body of 21-year-old Maria Del Carmen Estrada

has been found strangled,

sexually assaulted, and dumped.

* *

Houston PD have no suspects and no leads.

The initial investigation was very rigorous,

but eventually, it just gets put into folder as a cold case.

* *

But a forward-thinking detective makes sure

the evidence is carefully preserved.

Detective Kennedy was very insistent

that the property recovered

in Maria Del Carmen's case be kept.

Hopeful of a future chance to solve the case,