Ronald Shamburger was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Lori Davis
According to court documents Ronald Shamburger would break into Lori Davis home. Lori Davis would be tied up and fatally shot in the head. Shamburger would then kidnap her roommate and placed her in the trunk of his car but thankfully she was able to escape. Shamburger would set the house on fire before fleeing
Ronald Shamburger would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Ronald Shamburger would be executed by lethal injection on September 18 2002
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When Was Ronald Shamburger Executed
Ronald Shamburger was executed on September 18 2002
Ronald Shamburger Case
There isn’t much for an inmate to do on death row. Ron Shamburger, scheduled to be executed this evening for the 1994 murder of a fellow Texas A&M student, spends a lot of time listening to the radio and reading. “I usually listen to stations which play religious music or religious broadcasting,” he said in an interview several weeks ago at death row in Livingston.
One thing he doesn’t do much is think about Lori Baker, a girl he knew from Bible study classes at A&M. She also is the woman he murdered on the night of Sept. 30, 1994, and burned her body in an attempt to hide evidence of his guilt. “It’s not something I dwell a lot upon, but I do ask myself, ‘how did I place myself in this situation?'” he said. “Mentally preparing to talk about this eats at you. I try not to think about a lot because I want to be able to sleep at night.” Shamburger admits to killing Baker during a burglary attempt, saying, “I’d developed a pattern of doing things that were wrong.” He described his habit of breaking into houses as “an obsession,” and said he burglarized the same houses repeatedly.
Shamburger started breaking into Baker’s house after running into her on campus during the 1994 summer session. While he had known her since the fall of 1992, they hadn’t seen one another in a while. “She was more like a friend. We went dancing a few times,” he said. “It was kind of understood that it’d never be much more than friends. I asked her out a couple of times, and she turned me down.” In the days before the killing, he broke into her house and stole around $30, a credit card and a pair of her underwear. In his dozens of burglaries, Shamburger had never been confronted by anyone, even when he broke into houses where the residents were home at the time. “I wasn’t even considering the full effects of confrontation,” he said. “You just say, ‘this is never going to happen.'”
However, when Shamburger broke into Baker’s house on the night of the murder, he was armed with a 9 mm pistol, a gas can and a roll of duct tape. He said he didn’t remember much of what happened next, but information from authorities paints a clearer picture. Police saw Shamburger brake into the house through a spare bedroom window, then went into Baker’s room and bound her with the duct tape. Later, Baker’s roommate, Victoria Kohler, returned home; as soon as Shamburger heard her come in, he placed his gun to Baker’s head and fired, killing her instantly. He called the shooting “a reflex-type action.” “Was I in my right mind? No,” Shamburger said. “They’ll ask me things about what happened and I’ll say I don’t remember. “There may have been a few minutes (between the shooting and facing Kohler), but time takes on another meaning,” he said. “It slows down. It feels like an eternity. “Initially, the purpose of the confrontation was to kill (Kohler),” Shamburger said. “Then I thought, ‘I’m not going to kill her, I’m going to hide from her.'”
As it turned out, he knocked Kohler to the ground and asked her a series of bizarre questions. Instead of killing her, Shamburger covered her head with a blanket, taped her hands behind her back and put her in the trunk of his car. After driving her around for a few minutes, he stopped the car since he decided to go back to the house on foot and set it ablaze. Before setting the house on fire, Shamburger used a knife to cut into Baker’s head in an attempt to find the bullet and remove it. When he failed, he poured gasoline on her body and set the house on fire. As the blaze expanded, the house eventually exploded. “There was a growing realization of what is going on and what is happening,” he said. “It is an enormous situation. You see the devastation of your actions.”
Though he claims not to remember it, Ronald Shamburger began pacing around Baker’s back yard, gun in hand, muttering, “she’s dead.” One of the first people to see him was Baker’s next-door neighbor and brother, Mark, who rushed across to try to save her. As Mark Baker tried to force his way into the house, he heard a voice say, “she’s dead.” It was Shamburger, moving toward him with the gun still in his hand. Baker ran back to his house and locked the door.
After going to a nearby store, Ronald Shamburger called Steve Biles, the minister at his church, who convinced Shamburger he needed to turn himself in. Shamburger went to a nearby police station and turned himself in, flicking bullets out of the gun in the waiting room as he came inside.
Though the murder happened more than seven years ago, the memories of the crime are still fresh in the mind of many former A&M students and College Station residents. An individual on the Web site www.Texags.com, who identified himself as Mark Baker’s roommate, described their recollections of that night. Baker “was very attractive, yet she had a certain independence about her that you had to admire,” the person wrote in a post on the Web site recently. On the night of the murder, “The police, firemen, and ambulance came in about five minutes, sirens blaring. We watched them go in and out of Lori’s house.
“We repeatedly asked, ‘Is there anyone in there?” the writer continued. “They avoided answering. Finally, we got one officer to admit what he knew. Those words are etched in my memory forever. He said, ‘To be honest with you, yes there is a woman in there. And she’s gone.'” While it was noted Ronald Shamburger showed little remorse for Baker’s death during his trial, he says he is now a changed man. “I’ve learned the consequences of actions,” he said. “I know there are so may people I haven’t even met that I’ve caused pain to and suffering to.”
He said he would like to ask for forgiveness from the Bakers “face to face,” but added, “I’m very leery (about meeting them). I don’t want to add to their pain.” He also said he knows there is a required punishment for his actions. “My morality in this life has consequences in this life,” he said.
Mark Baker’s roommate knows full well the consequences of Ronald Shamburger’s actions. “You often hear people say, ‘live everyday to its fullest, because it could be your last,'” he wrote. “I try to do that each day, and when I do, I think of Lori.”
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