CHAPTER 61
Wednesday, October 27, 2004,
Harris County Courthouse,
1201 Franklin Street,
Courtroom #337,
Houston, Texas.
The prosecution wanted to make sure the jury heard a clinical psychiatric evaluation of Anthony Allen Shore and what may have driven him to rape and kill young girls. Assistant District Attorney Terese Buess interviewed Dr. Sharon Burns, a registered sex offender treatment provider, and a professional counselor for Burns, Crimson & Associates, located in Houston, Texas.
Dr. Burns was a specialist in the field of “sex offender treatment.” To receive such a distinction, she had to conduct nearly four hundred hours of sex offender–specific training with various authorities, such as FBI agents, a psychopathy specialist, and renowned sex offender–treatment therapist, Dr. Robert Hare.
Dr. Burns was also a veteran of courtroom testimony. Buess asked the distinguished witness to “tell the jury, please, what sex offender treatment is.”
“Sex offender treatment is a cognitive behavioral program,” Dr. Burns asserted. “By cognitive, I mean the thoughts, thinking patterns. Behavior actually stems from how we perceive a situation and what we think about it.
“So, when we work with sex offenders,” she continued, “we work on helping them understand the offense and the victim’s point of view and what they’re really doing so that they can learn to control the behavior, because once the thoughts change about an action, our actions change, or the thoughts change about a situation or an individual, our actions change.”
“A lot of people that come for sex offender treatment,” Buess asked, “what kind of people are they? How is it they come to be in your program?”
“They’re all kinds of people,” Dr. Burns answered. “We do have both men and women. We have people as young as eleven years of age through their eighties. There’s no specific background as far as age, race, sex, kind of job, level of education, how much money they earn, or what part of the country they’ve lived in. It’s a behavior that crosses a lot of different boundaries.”
The doctor continued, “Many of them are incest offenses where they might have someone who, for whatever reason, became close with a child and used that child to meet needs that they weren’t meeting appropriately in other ways.”
“The people who come, who sign up for your course, do they do that just voluntarily on their own, come and pay their fee and take your course?” Buess asked. “Why are they there?”
“Actually, the vast majority—I’ve only had one voluntary client—the vast majority are court-ordered once they’ve been identified as having committed some type of sexual offense, anywhere from exposure to rape to incest. But the most we see have female victims, children and adults.”
“Incest and rape?”
“Primarily.”
“Is it about sex?” prosecutor Buess asked in regard to rape.
The doctor shook her head and said, “It’s about power and control. Most of the individuals don’t feel as though they have self-control and so they try to control others in their environment and they use others to meet their needs, however inappropriate that may be.”
“And is that even more so when it’s a child that’s the victim.”
“Yes, it is.”
Buess then had Dr. Burns lay out the normal testing procedure for a new patient. Dr. Burns informed the jury that she administers four tests to each patient. She tests intelligence levels, tolerance for drugs and alcohol, a personality test, and a social-functioning test. For sex offenders, Dr. Burns also includes a multiphasic sexual inventory, which helps her determine what may drive a sexual offender to commit such an act.
“Did you score and review the test results for Anthony Shore?” Terese Buess queried.
“Yes, ma’am, I did,” Dr. Burns answered.
“What year did he take that battery of tests?”
“I believe it was ’98.”
“Did he complete all of the tests that you asked?”
“He completed them all.”
“And tell the jury what level his intellectual functioning was at.”
“Superior range,” replied Dr. Burns. Shore briefly glanced up at the doctor and then glanced back down at the defense table. “Oddly enough, when you got somebody that’s on either end of the intellectual functioning range, you run into more problems.
“There are obvious problems whenever they’re in the mentally challenged range,” Dr. Burns declared, “because you have to repeat and repeat and repeat. And they may not understand things.
“On the other hand, the superior side, we run into problems because they think, ‘Well, I know more than anybody else. I know more than you, and I can play games with what you give me.’”
“What was the level of abstract reasoning that you saw for Anthony Shore?” Buess asked.
“Again, superior, extremely high.”
“Any evidence of any kind of biological brain damage?”
“There was no organic brain damage indicated at all.”
“Let’s talk a little bit about his emotional functioning,” Buess suggested. “Was that evaluated as part of the battery of tests?”
“That is in the personality assessment,” Dr. Burns confirmed.
“And what was the result on that?”
“That Mr. Shore liked to be in control, that he liked to align himself with—actually, it said that he would adopt a cotherapist’s role.”
“What does that mean?”
“Anthony is good at hearing information and saying it back,” Dr. Burns replied. “And what he would do is, if you align yourself with the therapist and you focus on the other members of the group—but if you put yourself in the therapist’s role and are pointing out other people’s problems, you can sound like you have a lot of knowledge and you can sound like you know the right material.”
“When you do that, does it elevate you away from the group of sex offenders that are there for treatment?”
“It does.”
“Talk to the jury, please, very briefly, about his personality functioning. What features were you seeing there?”
“Grandiosity.”
“What is that? What is grandiosity?”
“Which is, ‘I count more than you do. You don’t really matter. I’m what’s important.’ Most people realize . . . there’s a balance in that. Of course I want to elevate myself, but not to the extent that I think my needs are greater than yours. What I want matters to me and nothing about what you want matters.”
“What else did you see?”
“Narcissism. Narcissism is self-love taken to the extreme. That person—you put those two together and they know everything about everything and it’s about them. ‘I’m wonderful.’”
“Is there an example of behavior that you could give the jury of someone who’s narcissistic?”
“For the narcissist, it’s just about them. They don’t care about anybody else. They just want their life to be easy. And other people are really not people. There’s not enough importance attached to other people. They have trouble with relationships because it’s not ‘Well, honey, you don’t feel well today? Why aren’t you up taking care of me?’
“And when he would come into treatment,” Dr. Burns expounded on Shore, “the narcissist wants to be noticed. That’s part of it, too, wanting to adopt that role because he wanted to be seen as ‘Look how important I am. Look how much I know, and I’m in a much better place than you guys because I don’t have the problems that y’all have.’”
“Is part of that also that superficially charming demeanor that he’s got?” the assistant district attorney asked.
“He also had repressed anger,” Dr. Burns added. “So, if he got angry, you wouldn’t see it unless you just saw minute clinching of the jaw and different facial features, like a tic or something, you can see when somebody is angry and they say they’re not. A clinched jaw, little things like that.
“If he didn’t want to deal with an issue, he would shut down and become very complimentary. He was always very complimentary.”
“When he is complimentary, what is he doing?” Buess wondered.
“The term that we use is called ‘grooming.’ Grooming is something we all engage in,” the doctor began to explain. “I’m sure you’ve all been involved in a job interview or you want to go out with someone, and so what you did was presented your best side and you presented what that person wanted to hear. If you didn’t like the painting on the wall and you’re in a job interview, you don’t say, ‘That’s an ugly painting.’ If they like it, probably, ‘Oh, that’s very nice. And I like this about you and I like that.’ You would present yourself to be what they want.”
“Personality functioning,” Terese Buess changed test categories. “Was it very clear from the test results that Anthony Shore knew what was socially acceptable and what was not?”
“He definitely showed awareness of that, not only in the testing but throughout the time in treatment,” Dr. Burns responded.
“Let’s talk a little bit about criminal characteristics. Is that something that typically is evaluated as part of the admissions process?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Tell the jury what a criminal characteristic is.”
“A criminal characteristic is something that you would see. Like, we see characteristics that might be similar among teachers or among coaches or among rock players. Criminals often have characteristics that are similar among each other,” Dr. Burns explained. “For instance, they’re interested in what they can get. They may be opportunistic, that when an opportunity for whatever crime is their choice occurs, that they are able to jump right in there and take advantage of it. That’s a real strong criminal characteristic.”
“And did Anthony Shore test high in that area?”
“He did.”
“The ability to break a law when you think you can get away with it?”
“Right. And on that particular test, I think one of the statements is that as long as he thought he would get away with it, that he would be willing to engage in a criminal behavior.”
“Was it clearly determined that he was going to be a manipulator?”
“Yes.”
“Is part of that degree of intelligence that you are dealing with here,” Buess asked, “and part of the personality quirks that you were looking at, the narcissism that ‘I’m more important than anybody else,’ did Anthony Shore perceive himself as being treated unjustly?”
“He did,” Dr. Burns agreed. “There was an entire page that he wrote in 1999 in drug treatment that talks about how unfairly the criminal justice system had treated him, how they made lots of promises that he would not be subjected to the same kind of standard of supervision that the other sex offenders were, that he would be treated differently.
“And he was. In the page he wrote, he was quite distressed. He finally kind of just blew the whole thing off with anger, because it was something that he was seeing he wasn’t getting out of.
“He actually spent three weeks in jail for not complying, for not getting with the program.”
“Let’s talk a little bit about how he tested in the area of sexual functioning. Are there questions about rape in that?”
“There are.”
“And how did he respond to those?”
“He denied having any characteristics.”
“Is he given an opportunity to provide you with a picture of him as a sexual being or as a nonsexual being?”
“Most people would admit to having sexual desires and would admit attraction to age-appropriate adults of the sex that they preferred to be with. When someone is trying to fake on that test, they present themselves as what’s known as asexual. All it means is without sexual interest.”
“In other words, ‘I’m here for sex offender treatment because my probation has made me be here, but I’m really not a sexual person and, therefore, I don’t need this’?” Buess asked.
“‘How could I need this if I’m not sexual?’” Dr. Burns responded, as if speaking about Shore.
“Do you believe that test score?”
“No. I usually tell people maybe we need to call the coroner,” which elicited chuckles from the gallery and some members of the jury.
“As a result of all these tests that were administered, was there a warning that was noted in Anthony Shore’s file for your purposes for the therapist?”
“Yes. It warned us to be careful with him because he was of superior intelligence and that he would try to use his reasoning and verbal and social skills to—or, criminal is actually what they were—to manipulate our perception of him and how he was doing in treatment.”
“Once he’s accepted for sex offender treatment, is there a contract that is signed?”
“There is.”
“And did Anthony Shore sign a contract?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Are there a set of rules that are in writing as part of that contract that he’s supposed to be abiding by?”
“Most definitely.”
“And part of it is in conjunction with the conditions of probation he’s not allowed to use any alcohol or drugs?”
“Correct.”
“The rules that were given to him in writing, is he required to keep them in a workbook?” Buess questioned.
“Yes, he is.”
“And is he ordered, as part of the treatment program, not to have contact with any minors, any children?”
“Yes, without therapist approval, and that was never given in this case.”
“So, Anthony Shore never had therapist approval to live with a minor?”
“No, he did not.”
“Part of the contract agreement for sex offender treatment, was it that he has to be honest and candid and truthful as he goes through his therapy?”
“That’s a requirement for successful intervention.”
“Because without that, the whole thing is kind of pointless, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“If no progress is noted,” Buess asked, “if someone’s just sitting there and not admitting to anything and not working within the group, what happens?”
“We give them time to work through it,” Dr. Burns responded. “But then there comes a time that they’re unsatisfactorily discharged. Now, a requirement of sex offender probation is that they successfully participate . . . and so, they must talk. Otherwise, I don’t know what they’re thinking and cannot successfully work with them. So, they run the risk of being unsatisfactorily discharged, which is a technical violation, which sets them up for possible revocation of their probation.”
“Revocation on a felony case, meaning they’re going to prison?” the ADA clarified.
“Exactly.”
“In Anthony Shore’s case, were there frequent times when he was hitting that point where there was no progress and he was informed that a report was going to be sent to his probation officer that he was not in compliance with his treatment program?”
“Absolutely. We try to encourage them. And one of the ways that we do that is to say, ‘Look, we’re going to have to send this. These are the risks you run. So, you need to get honest. You need to start talking.’”
Terese Buess took a good long look at the jury, and then she turned to Dr. Burns.
“I want to talk with the jury and with you very briefly about your observations of Anthony Shore’s participation and progress in sex offender treatment throughout the years that he was there. That would be 1998 up to 2003. Did he ever properly disclose? And that’s important, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“Just like an alcoholic standing up and saying, ‘I am an alcoholic’ as the first step. Do you require full disclosure of the offense that brought them to your treatment?”
“Yes. And it is extremely important that they do,” Dr. Burns agreed.
“When things would get a little hot in your sessions, in other words, he’s about to get kicked out, what would Anthony Shore do?”
“Anthony was taking a lot of time in what I call coming out of denial. At that time . . . we weren’t always given all the details of the original offense. We kind of had to pull it out piece by piece.” Dr. Burns paused and looked at her former client. “And in this process, after long periods of denial, Anthony finally admitted that his daughters had been drinking, had snuck out of the house, they came home drunk, that he was trying to help them sober up. And for his older daughter, he got her in the shower. She had been sick on herself and so he said he took her clothes off of her and that in the process he noticed that she was developing and she passed out and he did touch her breast and her vagina. And finally, even longer after that, that perhaps he did digitally penetrate her vagina.”
“From total denial,” Buess began, “which is where he was when he started, to getting to that point, how many years did that take?”
“It varied because what would happen is he would come to a point where he would admit it and then he would start working on it and then he would go back in denial.”
“Did he blame others for what had happened?”
“Mostly, he minimized. It’s like saying that you’ve only drank and drove one time when you’ve done it a thousand [times], or that you only touched the breasts when you actually had full intercourse.”
“So, he was minimizing?”
“All the way through.”
“Did he blame others for what he had done, for other things?”
“He blamed the courts for the situation that he was in. It was their fault because he really didn’t do anything. He blamed his ex-wife because he said that she put his daughters up to saying that, just because she was angry at him and that he really didn’t do anything. So, he was always the victim.”
“You mentioned that there was a warning that Anthony Shore could become a cotherapist, controlling. Did that actually happen?” Buess asked.
“Yes, yes,” Dr. Burns answered, along with a nod of her head. “Some of the guys say they got things from what Anthony Shore said to them. They would learn because he was good at saying the right things. Like, it’s wrong to rape.”
“Tell the jury, please, what Anthony Shore’s response was to any attempts to get him to show empathy for his victims.”
“He would say things like, ‘They’re not going to be able to have their dad around.’ He envisioned having his daughters become rock stars and now the fact that he had done what he had done, they weren’t able to be around him, so they lost out on that opportunity to become rock stars, and they were really wonderful kids.”
“Tell the jury what’s wrong with that.”
“What’s wrong with that is that that’s the least of their concerns, that they lost out on an opportunity to become a rock star,” Dr. Burns stated incredulously. “They lost out on an opportunity to have a life in which they could raise their children and love their husband and be loved by their husband and even others.” The gallery looked appalled as they shot daggers into Shore’s skull. “Victims . . . always question why others want to be around them. ‘What do they want from me?’ Especially if the perpetrator’s a male and they’re a female and they’re heterosexual.”
Terese Buess pulled out a leather-bound notebook. “Ms. Burns, I’m showing you what’s been admitted into evidence as State’s Exhibit 211. What is that?”
“That’s Anthony Shore’s treatment book.”
“On October 21, 2003, did you come into possession of that?”
“Yes, I did.”
“How did you come to have it?”
“Mr. Shore left it at his last treatment session before he was arrested.”
“And was that book opened up to try and figure out who it belonged to?”
“Yes. My associate and I opened the book and went through it, recognized it was Anthony’s and went through it a little bit more.”
“Tell the jury, please, aside from the assignments that you found in there, what else was in there”
“There were images of nude females with shaved pubic hair and a conversational Spanish/English translation book.”
Terese Buess held up the pictures of the naked women found in Shore’s treatment book. “Tell me about these. Are these within your rules and regulations?”
“They are a definite violation.”
“And, specifically, you mentioned the shaving of the pubic hair. Was that important to you?”
“In my training, that indicates someone who has an interest in children will ask that their partner shave their pubic hair. Many pornographers will use shaved pubic hair in the images for that reason, so they look younger.” (This, despite the fact that many young men and women prefer themselves and/or their partners to be shaven so there is less interference when performing cunnilingus or fellatio.)
“As a result of finding those images in Anthony Shore’s book, was a decision made at your program concerning his attendance and participation?”
“This to me said—him writing in his treatment manual—[that] he didn’t have any interest in the program or what we were teaching.”
“Was it significant to you that those images were actually in that binder?”
“It was significant to me,” Dr. Burns replied.
“What did that say to you?”
“There’s another part that we haven’t talked about Mr. Anthony Shore, and that’s the nature of his personality disorder. The narcissism, the grandiosity. ‘See how I can carry this. And I’m sitting in group and you don’t even know I have it.’”
“‘So, I can get away with it?’” Buess added.
“‘I can get away with it. I can do what I want to do.’ And this book gets pulled open many times and papers are pulled out. So, it could have fallen out, but he had no concern about that. He would just sit there with it in his lap. The whole time he’s sitting in group, he knew that was there. It was kind of thumbing his nose at everything we were doing, because he’s sitting there going, ‘Look, I’ve got this.’”
“Is it a violation of the contract to possess pornography?”
“It certainly is.”
Buess then referred to the large box of porn that was discovered in Lynda White’s garage when Shore was arrested. Buess mentioned the fact that not all of the magazines in the large box were pornographic.
“The magazines that were not porn did seem to be all of Hispanic origin,” Dr. Burns informed.
“The pornography that’s in here, was there a type of pornography that seems to be mostly?”
“It’s mostly nude females and many of them do have shaved pubic hair. Some of them had physical damage to particularly the breast area.”
Prosecutor Buess then directed Dr. Burns toward some of Tony Shore’s collages, which the police discovered in Lynda White’s garage. “Did we look at a variety of things that Anthony Shore has cut and worked on?”
“Yes, ma’am, we did.”
Buess pointed to one of Shore’s naked-women collages that was discovered in his box of porn. “They’re all women, are they not?”
“They are all that we saw.”
The prosecutor asked her to describe one of Shore’s collages.
“It looks like he cut each image as if you would a paper doll—paper doll clothes. You know how you have to cut out exactly the edge of it. They’re cut, just the image itself, and then he pieced the images together side by side so they’re all interlocking with just this collage. All you see are women and their bodies.”
“Is that easy to do?” Buess pondered.
“It doesn’t look very easy, and I’ve done some collages.”
“Tell the jury, please, what does that indicate to you, the amount of time and effort and the amount—we went through all those items and the envelopes of pictures and thousands of women that have been cut out. What does that tell you about Anthony Shore?” Buess wanted to know.
“Where you spend your time and your energy is where your interests are, and he spent a lot of time and energy on those pictures,” Dr. Burns answered.
“Is this art?”
“I guess it depends on the person’s individual perception.”
“There were a few items that you and I separated from the massive cut pictures.” She pointed to one of the pieces of evidence. “What does that contain?”
“These are varying young-looking girls,” Dr. Burns responded in regard to a photograph from a magazine of a nude woman. “Again, the shaved pubic hair. She looks fourteen. They are very young and there’s the word ‘fresh.’”
“I’m going to show you now what’s inside the envelope marked State’s Exhibit 215. What is that?”
“This is hard-core pornography showing intercourse between a man and a female. She’s got on ankle socks and that is associated with young girls. Young girls frequently go to gyms. They might have on shorts. They’ve got their sneakers on. They might wear socks. So, certainly, things like pleated skirts, bobby socks, are associated with young females.”
“And finally I’m going to show you what’s inside State’s Exhibit 217. What are those?”
“These are pictures of breasts that have been harmed. There are bruise marks.”
“Why would someone keep pictures like that?”
“Because, again, of an interest in that particular behavior that’s associated with that. That would be appealing to someone into inflicting pain on other individuals.”
“We talked about rape not being about sex. Where does the pain come in to all this stuff?” Buess inquired.
“It’s about power and control and it goes even further, because the sadomasochistic individual likes the infliction of pain. It brings them pleasure.”
“So, it’s all about them?”
“Yes. Them.”
“During the time that you had Tony Shore involved with treatment, did he appear to know everything about everything?”
“He did. He’s an interesting individual to converse with.”
“On October 29, 2003, was Anthony Shore terminated from the program?”
“Yes, ma’am, he was.”
“Now, since that time, have you reviewed the offense reports that you didn’t have at that time of his offense against his own daughter?” Buess asked.
“Yes, I did.”
“Now that you know all of that information, did Anthony Shore ever fully disclose or even get close to it?”
“He never even got close,” Dr. Burns responded.
“You’ve read the statements of his girlfriend and his wife about the drugging and the choking and the sexual acts.”
“Yes, ma’am, I did.”
“Tell the jury what’s important about that to you. What’s going on there?”
“It seems like because he was being monitored, what he did was use the drugs to put these women and girls into a state simulating death. If someone is unconscious then and they’re drugged unconscious, you can move their body and you can do what you want with them and they have no awareness of it, much like a dead person.
“The statements also indicated,” Dr. Burns continued, “that the women would sometimes wake up with their throats and necks being sore and having a sore throat. Some would wake up with his hands around their throats. That was simulating the crimes he had committed.”
“Did you learn that the defendant killed an animal, a cat, when he was a very young age, four or five or six?”
“Yes, I did,” Dr. Burns answered.
“Is that significant to you?”
“Yes, it is in terms of the other aspects of psychopathy.”
“So, when we talk about a psychopath, we’re talking about someone who’s aware of society’s rules?”
“Yes.”
“But is above all of that?”
“Yes,” the doctor replied.
“And will do anything that they can, or want to, as long as they can get away with it?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Tell the jury, please, how do you become a psychopath?” the ADA posed.
“From all we can determine, it’s something that seems to be more of what they are than what they’ve become. And it’s not anything that’s short-term.”
“I want to go through the checklist of characteristics that are looked at [to determine whether or not a person is a psychopath]. Number one, glibness, superficial charm. There’s something that’s looked at?”
“That’s somebody who’s able to kind of sense what it is that you like and talk about the things that you like, a very charming individual. A lot of salesmen score high on that one.”
“Grandiose sense of self-worth,” Buess continued.
“That’s when the individual feels like they’re the king or queen and entitled to all sorts of things that the rest of us aren’t entitled to by the very fact that we don’t matter like they do.”
“Cunning or manipulative?”
“Using whatever means they can to kind of set the situation up so that it’s in their favor.”
“Lack of remorse or guilt?”
“That enables the person to continue engaging in a behavior that even just a little bit of guilt could stop somebody from doing it. The person who doesn’t have any remorse will go to the extreme that most people would stop way before ever getting there,” Dr. Burns elaborated.
“Where does Anthony Shore fall on this particular scale?”
“As far as I’ve been able to determine . . . he’s in the highest level.”
“Let’s talk a little bit about religion here. During the time that Anthony Shore was involved with treatment, was religion used as a crutch or as a topic of discussion for him or by him?”
“Anthony Shore talked about finding God several years back,” Dr. Burns recalled. “It is not unusual, in sex offender treatment or in basically any kind of offense, for people to find God. One of the people I trained under, Dr. Anna Salter, did a study and called it the ‘double life.’ How the sex offender would pretend to be one person in front of other people and then when no one was around was this entirely different person. And so they would just use the manipulation and cunning to present who they thought you wanted them to be. And that’s what he would do.”
“So, if Anthony Shore is now claiming that he’s found God since he’s been incarcerated for the last year, that’s nothing new to you, is it?” Buess wondered.
“No, he found God a while back.”
“Based on what you know about Anthony Shore’s behavior patterns, was it a surprise to find out that he asked this jury to give him the death penalty?”
“No, it wasn’t. That’s consistent with a psychopath.”
“Which part of that?”
“He would be in control if he asked for the death sentence and was awarded it on his behalf. It also could be a manipulation when, ‘If I ask for the death sentence and later I change my mind, I have a lot more ground to stand on than if you dictated for me.’
“Another thing is,” the doctor continued, “that’s a media catcher. His name would be dragged out in the limelight even more because it could catch people off guard. They would think, ‘Wow!’”
Dr. Sharon Burns then added, “It’s also a ploy for sympathy.”
“What does killing young girls—raping them and killing them—do for someone like Anthony Shore?”
“It’s an adrenaline rush. It’s a thrill. That’s the ultimate control—to have power over life and death—for an individual to have that power.”
“Do you have an opinion about whether Tony Shore presents a danger of committing violent acts in the future?”
“Yes, ma’am, I have. I do believe that he would. Everything that I’ve seen, he didn’t stop. He continued to engage in behaviors that were on the fringes of it. He drugged his girlfriends to simulate victims that he had murdered in the past. He carried pornography in his treatment notebook. It looks like he was just biding his time until there weren’t so many eyes watching him in order to act out again.”
“Even in a controlled environment like the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, do you think he’s a danger?” Buess inquired.
“Yes, I do.”
“Are women employees at TDCJ, in the prison system?”
“In the male system, yes, there are.”
“In your opinion, does Anthony Shore present a danger to these women that work in that system?”
“I believe that he is.”
“Pass the witness.” Prosecutor Buess was done with Dr. Burns.