Shore was born on June 25, 1962 and worked as a telephone company technician in Houston. He was a musician and a father of two, and had been investigated in 1998 over the sexual abuse of his own daughters, to which he pleaded no contest and received probation. The DNA sample taken then is what eventually convicted him.
Between 1986 and 1995 he killed Laurie Tremblay, fifteen; Maria del Carmen Estrada, twenty-one; Diana Rebollar, nine; and Dana Sanchez, sixteen. He raped them and strangled them with a ligature wound tight with a piece of wood or a pen, a method distinctive enough to link the cases once they were compared. The Houston press called him the Strangler.
In 2003 Houston ran unsolved cases against the state database and matched the sample from the 1998 probation case. He confessed to four killings on arrest.
He was convicted and sentenced to death on November 15, 2004. In 2010, while on death row, he was found to have concocted a false confession to the murder of Melissa Trotter, for which Larry Swearingen was convicted and later executed; Shore admitted he had done it to disrupt the system. That episode is why his statements are treated with care.
He was executed by lethal injection in Texas on January 18, 2018. The count of four to five reflects a fifth killing attributed to him and never charged.