Charles Albright： An Unhinged Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Charles Albright： An Unhinged Killer - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
In the early nineties, Dallas working girls became the target
of a twisted killer.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
They're living out there, they're working out there, and now
they're dying out there.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
The brutal murderer was putting on a show.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
He wanted his work to be seen. He was like
an artist, laying out the bodies for the public to.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
View, collecting grotesque souvenirs.

Speaker 4 (00:23):
The first thing we did then is opened us eye socket.

Speaker 5 (00:26):
Then they saw that her eyes was missing.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
His desire that would become insatiable.

Speaker 6 (00:32):
They knew that he would strike again. That is the
worst nightmare for its active.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
But what was driving is heenus violence.

Speaker 7 (00:40):
There's very few times you can look at someone and
truly feel an evil person and was.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
He born to kill? In the nineteen nineties, Dallas, Texas

(01:25):
was a successful, booming metropolis looking towards a prosperous future.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
The city leaders of Dallas always would promote this city
as the gleaming, shining symbol of the Southwest, pure beautiful,
great skyscrapers. Everyone was successful. But at the same time
Dallas had this great shiny image. Lurking in the background
was crime.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Dallas was a very violent city. As matter of fact,
the early nineties, we had our largest rate of homicide
that we ever had. In nineteen ninety one, we had
over five hundred homicides in this city of Dallas.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
And one formerly middle class district to the south of
the city had become the center of Dallas's cd under.

Speaker 6 (02:20):
Belly Oa Cliff had gone downhill.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
It was crime rate.

Speaker 6 (02:28):
You had lots of crime, You had lots of prostitution,
you had lots of drugs.

Speaker 8 (02:32):
It was not a place that you really wanted to
be unless you were down there for a purpose.

Speaker 9 (02:38):
Oh Cliff was his desert Rundowntown. It was full for
one degenerate. It was a part of Dallas at Dallas.
It was probably a shame of it at that time.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
For Beachcombs, Regina Smith, and John Matthews, one aspect of
the streets would require their undivided attention.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
In the middle of the day, you would see prostitutes
walking in and out of the street, in and out
of stores.

Speaker 10 (03:06):
Most of the girls that were out there as prostitutes
had a drug problem. Our drugs were the crux of
their existence.

Speaker 5 (03:17):
We had established rapport with these girls.

Speaker 10 (03:20):
You know, we cared about them, and we didn't see
them just as prostitutes.

Speaker 5 (03:24):
We saw them as human beings.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
One of the troubled women working in the area was
thirty three year old mother Mary Prutt.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Mary was a girl that had worked the streets for
quite a while. She grew up not very far from
North oak Cliff and her family still lived just outside
of the city of Dallas.

Speaker 7 (03:49):
She uh loved her family. She has so much great love,
and Mary wanted out a life really bad.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
The twelfth of December nineteen ninety appeared to be a
standard night in oak Cliff's red light district. Mary had
been amongst the scores of girls playing their trade on
the notorious Jefferson Boulevard, But the following morning, a gruesome
discovery in a nearby residential area would mark the tragic

(04:30):
end to a young woman's life.

Speaker 10 (04:33):
The body was found right here in this area, and
she was partially nude. She had been shot and she
splayed out with her arms over her head.

Speaker 4 (04:48):
When we got there, it was probably three or four
o'clock in the morning, best I can remember, and the
body was just left in the street.

Speaker 10 (04:58):
As you can see, this isn't in a remote area
where no one could see it. There's homes all around
here of people coming and going all the time. It
was put here for someone to discover.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
The victim would be identified as prostitute Mary Pratt. Despite
the displaying of her body, her murder was not initially
viewed as out of the ordinary.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
It was not unusual for street prostitutes to be beaten
up to be shot. It just seemed to be a
standard case.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
However, the victim's autopsy would reveal that this was anything
but a run of the mill murder.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
The medical examiner opened the eyelids to write down the
color of the eyes in his autopsy report.

Speaker 6 (05:49):
And in this particular case, the medical examiner was shot
to find that the eyeballs were gone.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
The eyes had had been cut out so precisely that
when the eyelids were shut, there were no scars, there
was no bleeding, no sign of any bleeding. It was
surgically precise.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
The FBI would confirm to police that the killers macabre
m was unprecedented.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
The eyeball situation.

Speaker 8 (06:23):
We didn't hear of murders that were sick.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Like that was like a.

Speaker 8 (06:27):
Trophy or souvenir.

Speaker 11 (06:29):
When someone's going through the trouble to meticulously cut out
an eyeball it tells us killing alone is not psychosexually sufficient.
They have to go above and beyond that and do
what gratifies them, even placing themselves at risk for apprehension.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Fifty years earlier, the streets of South Dallas had been
far removed from such brutal crimes. Oakcliffe had been a
safe haven for a young couple raising their newly adopted sum.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
Charles was born in nineteen thirty three and adopted three
weeks later by Fred and Dell Albright, a couple that
lived in the heart of oak Cliff. Fred was a
grocer in Dallas. Dell was a stay at home mom,
and she was very much a stay at home mom.

Speaker 6 (07:21):
She ran the house. His father, Fred was kind of
in the background and she doated on him, but she
was also extremely strict on him.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
She was very concerned about him getting in trouble, getting sick,
not eating the right foods. She kept goats in the
backyard so he would have goat milk instead of cow milk.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Although Charles's mother had a caring side, he would later
recall a strict set of rules.

Speaker 6 (07:50):
She would force him to practice the piano. She would
have him follow her strict rules of manners. If he
didn't drink his milk, if he didn't finish his meals,
he was severely punished.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
There was occasions where if he wouldn't sleep and take
his nap, she would tie him down in bed. If
he did something wrong, she would punish him by leaving
him in a dark room.

Speaker 12 (08:15):
Her domination would have affected him. There might have been
anger brewing, especially as she controlled him, But she also
was very supportive, so there would have been love, so
he would have had a lot of mixed feelings about women.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
Although the Old Bright household was run as a strict regime,
the mother and son spend any downtime indulging a shared
passion for taxidermy.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
They would go get dead animals in the neighborhood, like
squirrels and birds, and they would work meticulously on restoring
the animals, taking out their insides, sewing them back up,
and then the final part of the taxidermy was to
take these beautiful little fake eyes that you could order

(09:09):
and place them into the animal's eyes.

Speaker 6 (09:13):
But his mother was a very frugal woman. She wouldn't
pay for these rather expensive marbles for the eyes, so
she would just force him to use buttons from her
showing collection.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
And he would take a bus down to a local
taxidermy shop and he would run his fingers through the
boxes of eyes, just staring at the eyes, but never
able to buy them to put on his animals.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Fifty years later, Charles Albright's neighborhood had just suffered the
gruesome murder of prostitute Mary Pratt, but as detectives searched
for a lead, the killer was already planning his neck attack.

(10:09):
In December nineteen ninety, the shocking discovery was made on
the streets of oak Cliffe, Dallas. Thirty three year old
prostitute Mary Pratt had been brutally murdered and grotesquely mutilated
by the surgical removal of her eyes. As police searched

(10:32):
for clues, beat cops Regina Smith and John Matthews turned
to the local girls working the red light district on
Jefferson Boulevard.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
They know the streets better than anyone. They're living out there,
they're working out there, and now they're dying out there.
The word on the street from the girls was that
they felt the murderer had to be somebody that Mary knew,
someone that had probably been out there on the street
for a significant amount of time.

Speaker 10 (11:02):
What the girls were saying, they would think of their
worst customers that had treated them badly, and none of
it fit the profile of what we were seeing. You know,
some of them were just, you know, totally way off.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Police were further baffled by the dumping of Mary's body.
She was known to have been working around Jefferson Boulevard,
but her body had been discovered in a residential area
some distance away.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Mary, like most of the girls, would turn their tricks
only in a very small geographic area. They wanted to
stay close to their pimp and close to where they
had friends, and having the body discovered a long way
away from the Jefferson area was quite extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Although officers Smith and Matthews had little to go on,
an encounter with local prostitute Veronica Rodriguez appeared to offer
a break.

Speaker 5 (11:59):
I saw this on her throat and a gash on
her head, and I said, what happened to you? And
she said, you know, I almost got killed.

Speaker 10 (12:08):
I had to jump in a drain to get away
from him, and so we were like really.

Speaker 1 (12:17):
Veronica claimed she had been with Mary Pratt on the
night of her murder.

Speaker 10 (12:22):
She said that she and Mary double dated this John,
and that it had attacked him, and that she got
away but Mary did not.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
The destroyed prostitute would then describe a terrifying ordeal as
she fled the scene.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
She ran barefoot and partially closed across an open field,
and she was a very small, thin girl, and she
fit inside a drainage fight, and she heard the attacker
yelling her name, trying to find her.

Speaker 10 (13:00):
She found her way to the house of someone she knew,
and that that person saved her.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
Despite Veronica's dramatic version of events, her drug induced state
put doubt in the officer's minds.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
They just thought the story was the kind of story
that Veronica told all the time. But she did definitely
look like she had been beaten up.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
However, just two days later, officers Smith and Matthews would
cross paths with Veronica once again, whilst checking out a
suspicious truck parked up in Oak Cliff's Red light district.

Speaker 10 (13:41):
We've swung open the doors and that's when we saw
Veronica in the car doing business with Exton Schindler.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Shindler was a local truck driver renting a house in
the area.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Veronica was very agitated. She was very upset, and she
kept saying, well, he saved me. Leave them a let
him go, don't.

Speaker 5 (14:02):
Arrest him, don't arrest him. That's the guy I told
you about that save me. He saved me.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
But he really didn't kind of verify the story at
the time.

Speaker 6 (14:11):
That she said, but they took his identification and action.
Schindler listed his residence as an Oak Cliff.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
Although police didn't know it yet Axton Schindler had actually
given the address of his landlord, a local man who
had grown up in the neighborhood, fifty seven year old
Charles Albright. As a child in the forties, Charles had
experienced a strict regime at home. It appeared that this

(14:49):
disciplined upbringing had paid off at school.

Speaker 6 (14:52):
He was very gifted in science. He was a gifted athlete.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
If you met him as a boy, you would think
he's going a long way.

Speaker 6 (15:03):
He was smart and did well in class. But he
also was the type of person who did pranks. I
want to get in trouble a lot. He was a
good thief. He would steal the test exams and make
copies for his friends.

Speaker 11 (15:16):
For him going through the proper channels, like taking your
classes graduating. That wasn't the way he wanted to run
his life. He sees the world as a place where
you have to always get over on him.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
As Albright hit his late teens, his mischievous behavior started
to spiral out of control.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
He was arrested for breaking into a jewelry store as
a boy and stealing a watch. A juvenile probation officer
came to see him and did interviews with him. He
had never before met a teenager who was able to
divorce reality from falsehood.

Speaker 6 (15:56):
Albright could convince himself he hadn't committed a crime to
himself and be very convinced.

Speaker 1 (16:03):
Charlie's delinquent behavior would continue to escalate and he would
eventually be imprisoned for a year age just seventeen. However,
on his release, he appeared to have mended his ways.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
So he goes to Arkansas State Teachers College. He becomes
president of the French Club. He becomes editor of the yearbook.
He's on the student council. He tries out for the
football team, even though he's never played organized football before,
and becomes the starting halfback.

Speaker 6 (16:37):
He was very charismatic, very laid back, seeing it get
along with everyone lots of superficial charm.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
The colorful Albright would also gain notoriety for his outlandish pranks.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Charlie had a friend in college named Andrew who was
dating the most beautiful girl on campus. She broke up
with him. In a fit of despair, he wore up
her pictures. Charlie slipped into his room, grabbed the photos
from the wastebasket, cut out the eyes, and began pasting
them on the ceiling above Andrew's bed in the bathroom

(17:16):
where Andrew use So wherever Andrew went, there were these
photos of the ex girlfriend's eyes staring at him. It
was a hilarious prank. Good old Charlie doing a prank
with eyeballs.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
Forty years later, local prostitutes were still working oak Cliff's
red light district, despite the twisted murder and mutilation of
cool girl Mary Pratt.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
The girls will get picked up, some will get beat
some will get raped, and some will get murdered. That's
kind of the life of a typical prostitute.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
But Oakcliffe was about to suffer another brutal killing that
would strike an ominous cord with investigating officers.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
In February nineteen ninety one, two months after Mary Pratt's
body was found, the body of another woman was found
on the same street in South Dallas.

Speaker 10 (18:29):
Right here in this vicinity was where the body of
Susan Peterson was found. Her body was partially nude, she
had been shot, and she was laying here displayed.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
The prostitute's murder bore marked similarities to that of working
girl Mary Pratt.

Speaker 6 (18:55):
Both bodies were dumped in the same neighborhood, both bodies
were both bodies were displayed in the same way as
if the killer wanted them to be discovered quickly.

Speaker 12 (19:08):
When a killer just dumps the body, they are first
of all calling the victim garbage, just dumping them in
the streets for pickup, also as a brazen statement against
the community itself, as as one of yours deal with it.

Speaker 7 (19:26):
They were not just people to be thrown in the
streets like that. The pictures I saw on in me
forever they still do. So what they did that it
didn't give anyone the right to take their life from them.
Nobody the right to take their life from them.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Although Susan's murder had come under a different jurisdiction, on
hearing the News Dannis. Detectives feared her autopsy would reveal
the same hideous mutilation inflicting on the face of Mary Pratt.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
They immediately called the medical examiner and said checked the eyes,
and they got a call back that said the eyes
are missing. That moment, the alarms went on because now
they knew they had a serial killer.

Speaker 6 (20:27):
They knew that he would strike again. That is the
worst nightmare for an executive.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
He loved clearly taunting the cops. He wanted his work
to be seen. He was like an artist, cutting out
their eyes and disappearing into the night.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
The mutilation of the two innocent women was evidence of
a most twisted mind at work. Detectives would soon discover
that the killers lust for trophies was far from over.

(21:10):
In February nineteen ninety one, police had established a serial
killer and was murdering prostitutes on the streets of Oakcliffe, Dallas.
Both Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson had been mutilated in
the most horrific manner, their eyes surgically removed during the
twisted attacks.

Speaker 6 (21:28):
They had to get word out to the prostitutes on
the street to warned them that there was a killer
out there. And that the bodies were mutilated in a
certain way.

Speaker 5 (21:40):
Everybody was scared.

Speaker 10 (21:41):
You know, if you say a serial killer that's cutting
out prostitutes eyes, it's on the loose.

Speaker 5 (21:47):
It casts a great concern.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
But despite police warnings, many girls were left with little choice.

Speaker 8 (22:00):
Remained out. Many of them had drug addictions. They needed money.
I felt sorry for them because they were stuck in
a situation that they couldn't get out of.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
Amidst an atmosphere of fear. One oak Cliffe resident had
had to work nights as a paperboy to make ends meet.
It was the latest in a long line of jobs
for the colorful Charles Albright.

Speaker 6 (22:26):
Albright he couldn't seem to hold the job more than
three months or he would lose interest in it.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
At one point, he bothered lathe and made baseball bats
that he sold.

Speaker 6 (22:37):
He told people that he was a bullfighter at one
time and gone to Mexico.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
He got a beautician's degree and caught himself mister Charlie.
He was an artist. At one point. A guy that
worked with him at the beauty shop asked him to
paint a portrait of his wife, and Charlie spent hours
working on the portrait. Finally, the guy said, Charlie, when
are you gonna get done with a portrait? And Charlie said,
I have just one thing left to do. And the

(23:04):
man looked at the portrait and it was a perfect
rendition of his wife, except that the eyes were missing.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
But Albright's eccentric demeanor hid a life of petty crime.
Twenty two years earlier, in nineteen sixty nine, he created
fake qualifications to land a job as head of biology
at a high school east of Dallas.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
From there, he coached the football team. High school girl
swooned over him. High school boys wanted to be like it.
They would come to him for counseling.

Speaker 12 (23:41):
He was gregarious, he was charismatic. It was very easy
to take people in and make them believe whatever he wanted.
That would have made him feel superior.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Having eventually been sacked from his teaching post, Charles Ulbright
continued to commit a series of minor offenses throughout the seventies,
but nineteen eighty one would mark a disturbing addition to
his criminal record.

Speaker 6 (24:05):
He showed up at this church and then suddenly became
quite active in this particular Catholic church, and he befriended
a family who had a young daughter.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
He liked to talk to the girl and he would
take her to the playground, and at one point the
parents realized after talking to the girl that Charlie had
sexually molested her.

Speaker 6 (24:26):
The family didn't want to put their daughter through a trial,
and the prosecution reached a plea bargain with him and
he was placed on probation.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Charlie was able to keep this completely quiet. It never
made the newspapers, so in his world in oak Cliff,
he was still good time Charlie. At this church he
went to in East Dallas, he was a depraved sexual madiac.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Ten years later, in nineteen ninety one, panic had set
in throughout the wider community of oak Cliffe following the
brutal slaying of two white prostitutes.

Speaker 13 (25:09):
By the time the second murder had occurred, it was
it was the kind of thing that the newspapers were
going to pick up on.

Speaker 4 (25:17):
We had people colony and trying to turn in ex
husbands and friends, and it made a lot more lead
for us to have to run down that we later
found out that weren't good.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Once it became a media sensation, one of our concerns
was that the killer made change his om.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Mole, which is exactly what happened. On March nineteenth, nineteen
ninety one, one month after Susan Peterson was.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Found, the body of a third prostitute had been discovered
in a residential street. Although the victims profession matched that
of Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson, the killer's choice of
target had seemingly evolved.

Speaker 4 (26:02):
There was a couple differences in this case. The first
two had been white females, and Shirley Williams was a
black female.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
The killer's change of mo had resulted in tragedy for
the forty five year old, who, despite police warnings, had
remained out working the streets.

Speaker 11 (26:20):
When you look at serial sexual murders, in seventy percent
of the cases, they experiment at a crime scene and
do something very very different that they didn't do before.
So if you have a series of five murders and
four of the women are white and one is African American,
that does not surprise me.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Despite any differences, the killer's brazen brutality was still evident.

Speaker 10 (26:44):
When the officers arrived, they found her completely nude and
her face was mutilated. Her body was near a school
and she was left where all those children could see her.

Speaker 4 (27:01):
She had been shot several times and it was a
bloody scene.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
With the cause of death established, there was only one
thing weighing on the detective's mind.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Of course.

Speaker 4 (27:13):
The first thing we did then is opened the eye socket.

Speaker 5 (27:19):
They checked and they saw that her eyes was missing.

Speaker 4 (27:25):
We knew then that we had a third one.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
As with the other two motives, the eyeballs had been
removed from the scene, but this time the killer appeared
to have acted in a frenzy.

Speaker 5 (27:46):
Whereas with Mary and Susan, their eyes had been.

Speaker 10 (27:50):
Surgically removed, but Shirley lay here and there were marks
around her eyes.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
This time the killer didn't have as much time to
precisely get those eyeballs out, and he left part of
an exacto blade in one of the ice sockets.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
As police chased down their leads, Oakcliffe resident Charles Albright
remained under their radar. Despite his checkered past, the charismatic
fifty seven year old had become a popular member of
the community. Forensic scientist doctor Irving Stone recalls the fifty
seven year old as a welcome addition to his seniors

(28:34):
softball team.

Speaker 13 (28:37):
Charlie Albright was kind of a happy, go lucky fella.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Looked like a fire hydrant.

Speaker 13 (28:42):
He was wide shouldered, strong, He had a great sense
of humor, and I think the fellas on the team
generally liked Charlie.

Speaker 6 (28:51):
If there was ever any tension or a conflict on
the softball field, even amongst these old guys get pretty competitive,
Charlie was the first to back down. He didn't seem
like physical confrontation.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Alongside his busy social life, Charles also seemed to be
living in domestic bliss.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
He met a woman, a widow from Arkansas named Dixie,
who he woos and says he wants to marry.

Speaker 6 (29:20):
She fell victim to his charms and they eventually moved
in together. Dixie thought she was living with Prince Charming,
who she would come home to and he could read
poetry to her and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Increasingly out of work, Albright's main income was from a
string of rental houses passed down from his parents, but
as the financial pressure mounted, Dixie was forced to become
the main breadwinner, unaware that her partner was leading a
double life.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
What Dixie could not imagine was that when she was
at work at a gift shop during the day that
Charlie would get in his car and drive ten minutes
away to the horror motels out by the end interstate
and visit prostitutes and sometimes bring them back to one
of his rental houses.

Speaker 12 (30:09):
He was very smart, so he had the ability to
live in a variety of compartments, and each of those
compartments would have its own sense of morality and sense
of identity, and it would depend on what situation he
was in or what mood he was in as to
what he was going to do.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
The working girls who knew him recall a client who
liked to take charge.

Speaker 4 (30:34):
He went out and bought drugs for women.

Speaker 7 (30:37):
Said he didn't want him on the streets because he
worried about him.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Oh, y'all are my girls. Oh I'll get some drugs.

Speaker 7 (30:44):
I would hate to have anything happen to you.

Speaker 6 (30:48):
He would pay for some of their meals or they
needed money, he would give them one hundred dollars and
that would even necessarily for sex. He wanted to help
these friendships with them, so they looked at him as
someone who was safe be with.

Speaker 7 (31:02):
Oh, he was charming when he wanted to be. He
told me I had lovely eyes.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
But his acquaintances in the red light district experienced a
change in Charles Albright's behavior.

Speaker 6 (31:21):
With some of the prostitutes. He began to develop a
sadistic relationship.

Speaker 7 (31:28):
You saw two different sides, and he saw a charming,
nice side, and he saw an angering side.

Speaker 6 (31:36):
He began tying them up. He would hit some of
them with rope or with an extension cord. He would
yell at him, he would cuss at them. He got
very rough in his sexual activities.

Speaker 7 (31:48):
I worked as a psychiatric for a long time because
I had been I had been a nurse, and I
knew something was wrong.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
Although Albright's secret life remained hidden, one unexpected episode would
leave his softball buddies in a state of shock.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Two young women drove slowly past the softball team, right
as a game had come to an end, and some
men just said, as a joke, I bet their prostitutes. Hey, Charlie,
why don't you go have a taste of that? And
Charlie turned and looked at that man and said, I
hate prostitutes. If I had my choice, I'd kill them all.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
One year later, in March nineteen ninety one, the twisted
murder of a third prostitute had shut down oak Cliff's
red light district.

Speaker 10 (32:45):
You could not find a prostitute of any race on
the street.

Speaker 5 (32:50):
It cleared the streets period in.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
An atmosphere of fear beat cops Smith and Matthews would
glean some crucial information from go Brenda White.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Brenda told us a story about this older white male
driving a station wagon who had picked her up.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
He was very strong, very muscular.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
He had salt and pepper hair.

Speaker 6 (33:14):
He wanted to take her down to some property head
down south. She, being a veteran prostitute, knew not to go.

Speaker 10 (33:22):
He became enraged, and she was so frightened that she
had to maas him in order to get out of
the car.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
On hearing Brenda's description of her assailant, the officers then
reconsidered an earlier witness statement from another Oakcliffe prostitute.

Speaker 10 (33:44):
That brought to mind Veronica's story, because she said her
attacker had salt and pepper hair as well.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Veronica Rodriguez had insisted she had witnessed the brutal murder
of Mary Pratt before fleeing to the rental house of
middle aged resident Axton Schindler.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
Axton was a small guy, a very kind of shy
and passive individual, not someone that could overpower these girls.
We knew Axton wasn't the killer, but.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
When Officer Matthews checked out the address Axton had provided,
he discovered it was a property near to where Shirley
Williams's body had been discovered. Having eliminated Shindler from the inquiry,
police turned their attention to his landlord. Further investigation revealed
that he owned more than one property within the immediate area.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
I started to run a tax record and discovered there
were actually three pieces of property, one near Shirley's dumbsite,
two near Mary and Susan's dumbsite, all owned by the
same person with the last name of Albright.

Speaker 10 (34:51):
As a cop, I was said, this is a sum
a bitch right here, that's who is doing this.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
But as police closed the net around Charles Albright, they
were about to learn they were dealing with an elusive
and calculating adversary. During nineteen ninety one, a depraved serial
killer had struck at the heart of oak Cliffe's red

(35:19):
light district, having connected the three murders by the bizarre
removal of the victim's eyes. Danas police finally believed they
had their man. Fifty seven year old Charles Albright, fit
a witness description and owned several houses within close proximity
to where the victim's bodies had been found.

Speaker 10 (35:41):
The arrest happened in the wee hours of the morning.
The tactical team had lined up and were in position
surrounding the home.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
They burst in. They grabbed Charlie, who says he has
no idea what they're here for.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Having broken the case of a Matthews and Smith were
tasked with taking the suspect in for questioning.

Speaker 10 (36:06):
The atmosphere in the car was just as eerie as
one can imagine.

Speaker 5 (36:12):
It was total silence in the car.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
The one thing that I remember is looking back and
seeing the darkness in his eyes. It wasn't even like
looking into a real person's eyes. It was absolutely amazing
and at the same time absolutely terrifying.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
All of the victims had been shot and had bizarrely
had their eyeballs removed, but as detectives searched Albright's house,
little evidence came to light.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
When we started searching the house, we found a fireplace
that had a secret cover over the top of it,
and once we took that cover off, there were like
seven or eight guns in there, none.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
Of which were used in the murders of the prostitutes.
They do find some exactal blades, but they can't connect
them to any of the murders. They do not find
the eyeballs.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
Forensic scientist Doctor Irving Stone was also part of the
investigative team that night. Although his search drew a blank,
one item found in the living room would leave him
in a state of shock.

Speaker 13 (37:29):
On the floor in the corner there was a baseball cap.
And I looked at that baseball cap and I said,
what's this guy's name? And the fellaws said Charles Albright,
and I said, he's the right fielder on my softball team.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
On his return to police headquarters, Dr Stone came face
to face with his former teammate.

Speaker 13 (37:59):
The elevator opened and Charlie Albright was ushered out manacled
and then shackles with two detectives.

Speaker 4 (38:05):
And he saw me.

Speaker 13 (38:07):
He beamed a big smile and he opened his arms
and he said, erv come.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
Give me a hug.

Speaker 13 (38:14):
I looked at Charlie and I just shook my head
and I moved into the laboratory. But that was that's
the kind of guy Charlie was.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
In custody, Oulbright would remain unperturbed whilst police searched his
other properties, desperate to track down the missing body pods.

Speaker 10 (38:32):
When we had to search that, y'all gone barn and
it was like a scene from Silence of the Lamb
with lizards and snakes and noots. He had them lined
up all in that barn, and we thought the eyeballs
were gonna be in there.

Speaker 4 (38:46):
I know that we saw some pickled animals and it
on one of them it even resembled eyes, But it
turned out to be I think of a pig's eyes.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Although the evidence against Albright was still lacking, officers Smith
and Matthews would locate the site of Shirley Williams murder
following a tip off from a local prostitute. The discovery
of her coat at the scene provided the turning point
in the case.

Speaker 10 (39:20):
That directly tied Alright to Shirley Williams.

Speaker 6 (39:26):
They found a hair on the raincoat that they couldn't
identify it at first, And the interesting thing was they
found the same type of hair in the vacuum cleaner
from Albright's house, and they actually had to go to
the zoo and have their experts look at it, and
they identified it as a squirrel.

Speaker 4 (39:44):
Here they knew that he had vacuumed a truck or
something in order for those hairs to get in that
vacuum cleaner.

Speaker 6 (39:52):
So that became a crucial piece of evidence.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
At trial. Albright would deny he had even for Quinn
the Red Light District, but ultimately the jury found him
guilty of the killing of Shirley Williams. Although he wasn't
officially charged with their murders, the cases of Mary Pratt
and Susan Peterson were detailed in court. As Charles Albright

(40:17):
faced life in prison, the shattered community of Oakcliffe would
try to comprehend why this one time petty criminal had
targeted Oakcliffe's working girls in such a brutal manner.

Speaker 4 (40:29):
He was adopted, we knew that, and his birth mother
might have been a prostitute, and with him living with
the thought that his mother was a prostitute, you know,
it might have just festered over the years or something
like that.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
But for many it was Albright's unprecedented m o to
mutilate his victim's eyes that was truly unfathomable.

Speaker 6 (40:55):
Albright had never really accomplished a thing in his life,
and I think this may have been a way, you know,
he was going to make his mark in the world.

Speaker 11 (41:06):
There was incidents in his early life that his mother
used buttons for eyes in their stuffed animals.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
And I usually am.

Speaker 11 (41:14):
Very reluctant to attribute future behavior as an adult to
events in childhood, but in this particular case, I really
think it applies.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
He will talk at length about his obsession with eyes
to this day. In his prison cell, he reportedly had
drawings that he had made a beautiful women's eyes, taped
one after another across the wall.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
In the aftermath of his twisted brutality, one question remained,
was Charles Albright born to kill?

Speaker 3 (41:49):
I think the key to Charlie is to understand, despite
oz charm and all his cleverness, and that he had
from the beginning an antisocial personality. His adoptive mother, Dell
perhaps since it, and maybe that's why she raised him
so diligently. She knew that her son was going to

(42:10):
spiral out of control.

Speaker 12 (42:13):
I think Albright was born to be a con artist,
to be a person who would do whatever he wanted,
and so if murder was something that appealed to him,
he was ready to do it.

Speaker 6 (42:25):
Even though he had a strange childhood. He wasn't abused
in any way. He wasn't sexually abused, he wasn't physically abused. Really,
I think it was more genetic.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
For many, the memory of the brutal murders has faded away,
but those who were there would always remember the innocent
women who lost their lives.

Speaker 7 (42:53):
Uh, this is my friend, Phil. I could have done something.
How dare this person come and take their life.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
And cut it short?

Speaker 7 (43:08):
There was something wrong about it from the beginning. There's
just very few times in your life that you can
look at someone and truly feel an evil person. And
that's the scariest feeling you'll ever get.