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and the freaky thing is that I knew the guy slightly during the period he was an active serial killer. Somehow I missed his arrest and trial, and it wasn't till he got a stay last year that I realized he was somebody I knew from blues jams in the Houston area in the 1990s, a keyboard player. I didn't frequent the weekly jams he went to most often, you usually pick one that fits into your week and become a regular there so that you're a known quantity--musically, anyway. Several women I know totally freaked when they heard what this dude had done, because they'd had quite normal conversations with him.
I talked to him very little because I thought he was obnoxious, frankly. Those jams are a good personality litmus test insofar as you can see who tries to make other people sound good, or is only out to garner adulation for himself. Tony Shore fell into the latter category: it was always The Tony Show whenever he took a solo, with lots of hamming for the audience, and he often brought a cheering section along, which admittedly is good for business, but I did not believe the hype. He never struck me as a deep-dish blues keyboardist who had learned backing parts for different styles of the music, which takes a lot of study to master, same as knowing real backing guitar does; he'd play much the same stuff on anything, just biding time till his solo. I do remember when he started bringing his second wife out to do jam sets with her singing: she was 18 and he was 35 or something and I thought it was just creepy. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, it just looked like a control freak in action. I was not at all surprised to learn that he kept her locked up in their house most of the time while he was at work; their sets struck as very orchestrated things that he controlled. They were trying to get gigs but never got traction and he got arrested for abusing his daughters from his first marriage.
You don't really want to read about that, or what his sister said he was like as a kid. Killing people's pets, etc. But he was famous in their neighborhood as a classroom and musical prodigy, so he got away with all the serial killer warning signs. Nonetheless, he didn't strike me as particularly odd, at least by the standards of the jam scene.
He apparently had taken enough formal music education to sound knowledgeable in conversation in that scene, which stood out in that context, but after being an obvious musical prodigy as a child, instead of buckling down to get into Berklee or the equivalent, he'd wound up a wrecker driver. I don't look down on wrecker drivers, but the guy was reportedly very book smart too, and you have to wonder why someone like that didn't become a professional in music or industry or academia, or at least go into a higher-paid craft like plumbing or climate control.
Obviously driving the wrecker helped him find victims. But I've come to think that one predictor of the criminal mind is having some things come too easy, as a result of talent. Being clever, but not wanting to work hard to apply it, settling for a lower plateau instead. They find a viable way to get by and then devote their spare mental energy to crime, thinking it's clever to steal bikes rather than work to buy them, for example.
Anyway, as often as I see people on the forum wanting to end criminals' lives, here at last is the end of one. A very clever guy who might have done great things in life, but didn't want to do the work. Meeting a serial killer wasn't on my bucket list, but I'll cross it off anyway.
