THE EYE BALL SERIAL KILLER

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome, Welcome to Inside the Criminal Mind podcast, where we
analyze some of the most notorious criminal cases with psychology
and criminology combined. Here's your host, Doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to our first episode Inside the Criminal Mind. I'm
doctor Carlos, professor of forensic Psychology. I teach criminal psychopathology
as well as other courses of forensic psychology. My specialty
comes the psychology of criminal organizations such as terrorist recruitment
and cartels.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Decided to do this podcast because I also.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Quite like searching into the minds of criminals, and I
know there is a fascination out there with serial tires.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
So we're going to.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Set off with our first one, an unusual serial killer
by the name of Charles Albright. But before we get started,
if you enjoy these podcasts, yes, please to share polight
get subscribed because this helps our algorithm and get the
word out.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
We truly appreciate your support. So let's get started with
the Eye Killer. You're all talk. We begin with a
quote with an all Bright friend. In most cases, serial
killers are brutal.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Woefully uneducated young men, lifelong sadists who kill for their
own twisted reasons. How then, could someone so charming, so
exceedingly polite, suddenly decide in the later years of his
life to become a bloodthirsty sex monster.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Look, I've known Charlie for thirty years.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
I'm a retired Baptist minister, and all the time, I
think I would have seen his dark side slip out
at least once. Believe me, if he was a really
psychotic killer, he couldn't have kept it a secret all
this time. Cold We're going to find out if he could,
and we're going to do a psychological analysis.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
We're going to look at his childhood.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
We're going to look at some of the crimes and
see what Charles Albright was all about. See Charles Atubright
was a serial killer in Texas between nineteen ninety and
nineteen ninety one. He murdered several female prostitutes, engaging in
paraphilic sexual behavior, auto erotic asphyxia, he choked him, and
ritualistic trophy taking, surgically removing the eyeballs of his victims.

(02:38):
At the time of the murders, Charlie was a fifty
seven year old husband and father, Though he had an
earlier history of juvenile delinquency, property crimes, and prior in
concerate incarcerations, which is quite common with serial killers. As
a child, he experienced mental and emotion abuse, including rejection,
which is one of the biggest factors and it comes

(03:00):
to themes in Syria killer's childhood as a rejection factor
as well as the emotional and mental abuse. He lived
in an unstable home environment, and Charles developed an intense
hatred for women, though as an adult he often florided
with members of the opposite opposite sex and enjoyed impressing
them with his varied artistic talents. He was a skill

(03:23):
for painter and a musician, and women actually seem to
adore him. He was a moderately good looking guy with
a good personality, very intelligent.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
He was fluent.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
He could speak Latin, Spanish and French, or at least
he said he could, and he became a biology teacher
and a skilled taxidermist. Charles had a great sense of
humor and was portrayed as a clouds clown in college.
He was also athletic, enjoying football and playing slow pitch softball.
People knew him as an affable man and this, folks,

(03:58):
is what I have to warn you about many times
in the media, they'll try to portray these individuals.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
It's just a normal, everyday guy. It turns into a
serial killer.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Why Because it's a much more fascinating story than telling
of somebody who grew up in a traumatic childhood, who
committed many crimes as a child and continued.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
On throughout their life.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
So the story of a person who's normal of everyday
Joe was much more exciting, but obviously extremely misleading.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
See the seemingly faithful family man had a disturbing side
that wasn't seen by many.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
You can almost call him a modern day juckle and
hide personality.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
He was a liar and a con man.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Over time, he developed masochistic attitudes and carefully concealed his
history of thefts, forging his college transcripts to make it
appear that he had graduated. He was often unemployed and
frequented prostitutes. In fact, he once referred to as biological
Mond as a prostitute, although there was no proof of
his accusation. Later on, in some police interviews, he even

(05:06):
denied every meeting a prostitute. When he was fifty one
years old, he he raped a thirteen year old girl,
but he managed to minimize the incident. For becoming increasingly
sexually aggressive with women, Charles went on to murder several
female prostitutes. He derived great pleasure in bludgeting and shooting

(05:28):
his victims, and also developed a fascination and obsession for
their eyes, and you'll learn why as we go on
through with our story. He attempted to paint perfect eyes,
but would seldom sometimes do portraits without them because.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
He felt he could not do them justice.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
Autopsi's performed and his victims revealed that their eyeballs had
been removed without damaging the lids surgically.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
This trophy taking was his signature, and the eyes.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Were never recovered. So let's take a look through his
childhood a little bit. In December nineteen forty four. Life
with his mother, he was known as the most good natured,
eager to please at children, a precocious boy who could
just do about anything, name all the constellations in the sky,
and catch snakes without getting bitten. One childhood friend says

(06:17):
he was kind of like a pie piper to the
rest of us kids.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
We always want to see what he would do next.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
This is coming from an article in the Texas Monthly
Dot com In nineteen thirty three, when he was three
weeks old, Charles was adopted by a young, dark haired
woman named del.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Arbright and her husband, fred A Grosser.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
The all Brights lived in an all white, middle class
neighborhood of Oak Cliff in Texas Dallas, then a beautiful
residential area across the river from downtown. According to the story,
Dell would let her tell tell Charles his birth mother
was an exceptional law student, just sixteen year old sixteen
years old, who had secretly married another student to become pregnant.
When the girl's father found out, he demanded that she

(06:56):
had all her marriage and give up the baby for adoption.
This is Charles, otherwise he would cut her off from
the family. Miss Aubry made sure that Charles knews she
would never abandon him.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
She pampered her boy.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
She kept goats in the backyard so he could drink
goat's milk, which she said was better for him.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
Than cow's milk.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
It's so surprised a lot of people still do yet.
Sometimes Her mother went to extremes. When child Charles was
a small child, she occasionally put him in a little girl's.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Dress and gave him a doll to hold. We don't
know why.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Two or three times a day she would change his
clothes to keep the dirt off of him, Afraid.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
That he might touch dog feces and get polio.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
She took him to Parkland Hospital to see the polio
patients locked in huge iron lungs. You can spend the
rest of your life here, Dell said, trying to scare
him about the polio disease. When he was less than
a year old, Dell put him in a dark room
as punishment for chewing on her tape measure.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
When he wouldn't take a nap, she would tie him
to his bed.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
When he wouldn't drink his milk, she would spank him. Indeed,
people around their neighborhood talked about Dell Albright's odd and
grim nature. No one ever can remember her buying herself
a dress. She kept a scarf over her head and
wore clothes from goodwill. Although she and Fred were far
from being poor, she usually was scrimped on meal times,

(08:23):
even picking up old bones the local butcher threw in
a box for his dogs.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
She could use them, she said, for soup.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Not the Charles ever openly complained he always appreciated that
his mom taught him manners. Del All told him to
speak politely about other people or say nothing at all.
She told him to respect women, especially when it came
to sex. She lectured him about the way his father
acted greed he was sex whenever Fred saw her in
the bedroom and her bra and panties, he tried to

(08:54):
grab her. She was going to have none of that,
and she was going to make sure Charlie never tried
anything like that.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
With his girlfriends either.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
It's just one of the first indications we can see
that there might have been some kind of abuse going
on or domestic violence between the mother and the father.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
I'm I really sure exactly what was happening. We don't
get the whole.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Story, but just by the way it seems to have
affected her mother his mother here, we can speculate Charlie
never tried anything like that with his girlfriends either, at
least not in the beginning. As he grew older, she
insisted in chauffeuring him every time he was on a date.
She would even call the girl's parents to let another
son would not do anything untoward.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
So you can see this kind of over the top.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Obsession with respecting women, which is hey, look, it's a
great thing. But you can see here she's gone overboard,
continued chauffeuring him. She's really guarding him and protecting him.
She's over protective mother. And sometimes what that happens is
the person develops who kind of develops anxiety, a fear

(09:57):
of the world, paranoia, loss of control sometimes because what
happens is you have you start developing an external locus
of control things on the outside. It can hurt you
without you having any control over him. So Dell, as
we mentioned, was overprotective, and friend said sheerly she was
because she had never raised a job before. Charles himself
recognized how fiercely she wanted him to succeed. She taught

(10:21):
him so much reading and writing, in fact, that he
was moved up two grades early in elementary school. And
this is where the eyes come in. A Dell also
introduced Charles to the world of taxidermy when.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
He was eleven years old. She'd rolled him in the
male Order course. You're beginning to learn an art that
is second only to painting and sculpturing, and said Professor Elwood.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
And one of the first book of the lessons, a
true taxidermist must be an artist. As Charles set to
work on the dead birds, he found Dell's right beside him.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
She showed him how to use all the tools.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
The knife to use to cut the skull, and the
little spoon to scoop out the brains, and the forceps
to pull out the eyes.

Speaker 3 (11:00):
Respectfully and dutifully.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Charles spent hours on his taxidermy courses, stuffing and mounting birds.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
Then he would be ready for the crowning. Touch the eyes.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
He used to go to a taxidermy shop and stare
at the boxes and boxes full of gloriously fake eyes,
owl eyes and dear eyes.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
He loved their aridescent gleam. Yet Dell wouldn't let him collect.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
The eyes as much as Charles wanted to. Taxidermist's eyes
were just too expensive, and as frugal mother would say,
there was a better and cheap away.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
She would open her pursuwing kit, look for exactly what
she needed, and get to work. Then she and her
son would place.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
The birds in the oak china cabinet in the front
of the house. They were indeed Charles Arbright's first work
of art, Just as the mail order booklet had promised
everyone who came to the house would peer into the
cabin and see what he had done, and there peering
back would be his birds, beautiful, lifelike and blind.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
So you see, the bird had no eyes.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Instead, they were so entinly against her delicate feathered faces
were two dark buttons. The police officers we mentioned earlier
had asked him if you had ever met to prostitute?
You never knew a prostitute in Dallas. He shook his head,
baffled by the question, never, and knew absolutely none of them.
At the time I was arrested. I couldn't tell you
the names of the motels they stayed in, but in

(12:14):
fact he actually did. His first victim was an undeveloped,
almost forgotten the lower class area. Turned up in an undeveloped,
almost forgotten lower class area far south Dallas. She was
a large woman one hundred and fifty six pounds, naked
except for a T shirt and a brawl which had
been pushed up over her breasts. Her eyes were shut,
just like the birds, and her face and chests were

(12:35):
bradley bruised. The killer had thought it best to beat
her before firing forty four into her brain. It was
Mary Pratt, a thirty three year old veteran prostitute who
worked at the Star Hotel and O.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Cliff, Dallas.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
That was the first victim for mister Albright. They quickly
contacted the FBI when they had the unusual finding of
the victim having no eyes. The FBI I kept data
back then on the nation's most unusual and depraved mutilations
bodies chopped up or organs removed or whatnot, but they

(13:13):
found nothing about surgically precise cutting out of eyes. Longtime
Dallas cops take pride and acting utterly affected by anything
that comes their way, but this time West Faline, one
of the police officers on the case, couldn't help it.
Now we go back to Charlie's college days. What was

(13:35):
he like When he was a twenty year old college
Charlie Aubright transferred to Arkansas State Teachers College and Conway,
Arkansas didn't take him long to become one of the
school's most popular students.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
He was remarkably well rounded.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
President of the French Club, business Manager of the Year.
When he signed up for a drawing course, the OWT
professor was so impressed with Charlie's good looks that he
made him the class model. Frankly, Charlie Irbrady had to
feel some relief in being away from home. He was
considered a very bright bully in Dallas. He graduated from

(14:09):
high school at fifteen. He was something of a celebrity.
Charlie's love for mischief had tainted his reputation. He had
received bad deportment grades in school for shooting rubber bands
and crawling out of study hall.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
He accidentally supposedly.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Set fire to his chemistry teacher's dress and flunked a
few courses because he says he was too bored. Of course,
if his mother had found out, he would have never
heard the end of it. So he sneaked into the
school office, stole some report cards from a desk and
filled them in with all a's. Proudly showed them to
his parents, and all.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
The signatures were perfectly forged. It was all minor stuff.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
I guess it wasn't like he went to jail because
he wasn't kind, as Charlie himself will later explain, I
just didn't know what I was doing. If anybody tells
the truth, they will say I never did a.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Mean thing in all my life.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Well, there was a time he was caught breaking into
a neighborhood church. Then there was the top time he
was caught breaking into a little store of stealing a watch,
And there were the visits he and his mother received
from Alfred Jones, a twenty year old psychology student working
at part time as a juvenile probation officer.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
His recollection.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Charlie Arbright, he said, after being forty years in this
world of psychology, a well known psychologist at to dozens
of juveniles, the one he remembered most was Charlie Aubright.
He states, he could divorce reality sufficiently from his value
system so that he could tell you something false at
the time and at the time actually believe he was

(15:42):
telling you the truth, which is actually a common characteristic
among psychopaths. The psychopaths actually they know they're telling you
a lie. In the case of Charlie Ibright, he seems
to have balanced these two things out. One of Charlie's
relative said he Whilford thinks from stories because his mother
was so stingy. Maybe he just wanted to rebel against her.

(16:05):
We would never really know. Granted, Dale al Bright did
whatever she could to keep a close watch on her son.
As we mentioned, she was overprotective. She took him to
the Methodist church each Sunday. She made him go to
bed even when he was in his teens, at eight
each night. Whenever she chauffeured him on a date, she
washed him so closely he would joke about the way
she drove.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
Charlie loved his mother, was that much was clear. But
there were little things that sometimes bothered him.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
He was never certain, for example, that his biological mutter
had been the brilliant law student that Dell claimed. He
so hated Dale's cooking that he would stuff his food
on a ledge under the table or give it to
his dog. Dell fussed over him regularly, so much so
that he began to get headaches, and Dale decided that
headaches were from bad eyesight and promptly made Charles wear glasses,

(16:53):
even though he had twenty twenty vision. Yet Dale couldn't
protect Charlie the first time he left home. Right after
high school, he enrolled in North Texas State College in Denton,
but by the end of his freshman year, he was
arrested for being a member of a student burglary ring
that broke into three stores Charlie says he swore he
stole nothing, but we know.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
About his value system.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Til Albury went to the store owners and try to
reimburse them. She tried to persuade the judge to let
her act as Charlie's lawyer. She even asked if she'd
take his place in prison. He can see this obsessive
personality of his mother, who seemed to have a bad
case of OCD and IVAN the diagnosis OCD obsessive compulsive,
the compulsions coming from the constant cleaning and Charlie and

(17:38):
the obsession of keeping him safe and keeping him healthy,
protecting him. She will you wanted to protect his reputation.
She wanted to no one in the neighborhood to know
that he was a convicted felon. Sometimes you may wonder
if she's trying to protect herself. Many times children represent
the parents, and the parents don't want to be seen

(17:58):
in a bad light. We've seen this in other cultures.
It with honor killings. Right when the child, when the
female or where their daughter has behaved in an inappropriate fashion,
the father and some of these cultures will kill them
as an honor killing because of disgrace.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
The family.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
Arkansas State Teachers College was Charlie's chance for and he started.
As he told the probation officer, he was going to
mend his ways. We'll see about that. He began to
date a young woman by the name of Betty Hester
and many plans to marry her. He did truly brilliant
in science, although he hardly studied. He made an A
and is a human anatomy course. Now, folks, there is
one misnomer. A lot of people think serial killers have

(18:41):
above average intelligence, or psychopaths especially, and that's actually not
really the case. Many psychopaths, the aggregate of psychopaths, actually
have just average intelligence. The same thing with serial killers.
But Charlie was one side of that bell curve. He
was an anomaly.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Charlie never saw playing the role of class clown.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Of all his great pranks, someone forget the one he
play on his friend Andrew and a fate of anger.
Andrew had broken up with the most beautiful girl in
campus and woman with beautiful eyes. After the separation, he
tore up several photographs. Over weeks later, Andrew got a
new girlfriend asked for her photo. One night, will Andrew
was staring at his new girlfriend's picture. He realized that
something was wrong. He looked closely. It seemed that her
eyeballs had been cut out and replaced with good Lord,

(19:25):
the eyeballs of his old girlfriend, and disbelief, Andrew looked
up at the ceiling. They're staring down at him was
another pair of his old girlfriend's eyeballs. More eyeballs were
above the urinal in his men's bathroom down the hall.
No matter where Andrew turned, he was confronted by the
sight of his old girlfriend's almond shaped eyes. The story

(19:45):
raced through the school. The jokes are showing Arbright had
pulled the old photographs out of the trash.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
And saved the eyeballs. But did any of the students
find this a bit strange?

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Now?

Speaker 3 (19:58):
Most of them said it was just Charlie. He was
kind of inventive.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
The investigator asked him, why do you think the eyeballs
were missing? I don't understand either, decided why the eyeballs? Well,
what kind of person would be able to cut out
the eyeballs of some prostitute? Someone who's sadistic, just one
mean son of a gun. I don't know the purpose
behind it. The detective really couldn't get a handle on it.

(20:28):
As we continue on, the police found their first clue.
Charles Art right, but unfortunately slipped right through their fingers.
A prostitute, but thyme of Rodriguez told the officers of
the previous night she had been picked up by a trick,
driven a long way south to a field, and raped.
The tricks a person who picks up prostitute. The man

(20:49):
a white man, she said, and tried to kill her,
but she.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Escaped and ran.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
The man at the house just happened to be someone
she knew. He also just happened to know the man
who was trying to kill her. Matthews and Smith, the
officers gave me each other a look. Rodriguez was a
notorious liar. No doubt she had be in some kind
of fight, but in the middle of nowhere she ran
into the house of someone she knew.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
Kind of odd. This is probably one of.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Another of Rodriguez's petty stories. Unfortunately, this happens a lot
with prostitutes, either because of substance abuse, her lying or whatnot.
It's hard for the police to take their stories and
face value, and when something actually does happen a lot
of times he gets tossed aside. Two days later, on
an afternoon, driving past the Star, officers Matthews and Smith

(21:30):
saw Rodriguez again. She was sitting with a balding, middle
aged white man in the cab of an eighteen wheeler.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
Well.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Matthews went to one side of the truck to get
Rodriguez an escort of the squad car. Smith went to
the other side to speak to the man. She asked
him for his driver's license, which he produced. His name
and it was mister Schindler. Smith ran Schindler's name through
the computer. He came up clean except for some unpaid tickets.
But suddenly Rodriguez sorried.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Shouting, don't arrest him. That's the man who saved me
from the killer. That's him.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
The officers looked at the address again. It was not
out in South Dallas, where Rodriguez's attack allegedly took place.
It was in an old cliff neighborhood, just five minutes
away from the Star, which is where the other murder was.
The man is sort of a nervous guy who spoke
incredibly fast, said he had no idea what Rodriguez was
talking about. He said he had known her for years.

(22:22):
I was just giving her a ride.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
He didn't protect her from any killer.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
He didn't even have sex with her. Rodriguez, the officer, decided,
was just lying once again. They cartered her to jail. Unfortunately,
the officers Matthews and Smith, would not know it for
months at A clue to the murderer's identity was right
in front of their nose. September nineteen sixty nine. Charles

(22:47):
Arbright thirty six. At this time he began teaching high
school science in Crandell, small town I used to Dallas.
Charles Arbright had a master's degree in biology from East
Texas Texas University and was working on another master's and counseling.
He was also about to enter East Texas State University's
PhD program in biology. Albright students found him fascinating on

(23:10):
field trips. He could recite and flawless Latin, the scientific.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Name for every plan he came across. He drove a
green corvette to school and wore lizard like skin shoes.
A few girls, smitten by his charm and masculine looks,
wrote them love letters. He even helped the coach football.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
How in the world, the principal said, was anyone supposed
to know that the promising young teacher had forged.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
All those transcripts.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
That's right, he was simply fabrogasted when an etsu's official
told me that Oberated had never earned a bachelor's degree.
Everything his degrees, his teacher's certificate had all been forged.
Apparently had slipped into three different offices that exits the
East Texas State, grabbed all the necessary forms, copied them,
added his name, forged signatures, and then sneaked back into
the files. He had even stolen the registrars typewriter face

(24:00):
on his records would look to say had an East
Texas State University administer and not realized that he had
never met the Charles R. Bright whose name kept popping
up on the school's list of graduate students.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Albright probably would.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Have gone away with the scam. When Albright was confronted,
he grinned and admitted to the crime. He needed to
bend the rules a little, he explained, in order to
get a teaching job. You can tell here I was
rationalizing it by bending the rules a bit, even though
he committed a crime, quite a serious crime. After he
quit Arkansas State Teachers College, well okay. He was kicked

(24:35):
out for being caught down at the train station with
suitcases full of stolen school property, including his own football coaches,
golf clubs. He didn't think he was going to get
a second chance to prove how smart he was. By then,
he had married his college sweetheart, Betty if you remember
her from earlier, and she had given birth to their daughter. Frankly,
he didn't have time to begin Olibretty University. It was
a crying shame, he said. If only he could have

(24:57):
finished his degree there, maybe his things would have been different.
Because of forgery was a victimless crime, and Albright himself,
according to the one East Texas Ctate University administrated, it
was such a nice, repetant fellow.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
The university decided to keep the.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
Transcript scandal out of the newspapers. It was embarrassing after
all that the school got so bamboozled. As the seventies began,
Albright was back in his old Dallas neighborhood with his
wife and daughter, living in a house.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
Not far from his parents' home. Once again, no one
had any idea of what he had done that Charlie Albright.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
The neighbors knew it was a happy, go lucky figure
who could master anything but simply didn't care.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
But settling down a nine to five job.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
He had money from his parents and his wife had
a job as a high school English teacher. And this
is something I always tell people. You don't know really
who some people are.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
How many times have you spoken to your neighbor. Yeah,
some of you who might be in a rural area
in the country, of course, know most of your neighbors.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
But if you live in the suburbs or in the
urban areas, a lot of times most people don't. I
know countless people. I would say the majority of the
people that I know living in an urban area in California,
that most neighbors don't haven't even spoken to their neighbor
for more than thirty minutes in a year. A lot

(26:20):
of them don't even know their names. So it's really
hard to get an image of anybody. And we'll talk
about this as the series goes on inside the Criminal Mind,
because the media again will give you a false impression,
as they did with a lot of them.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Jared Lafner.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
They said family was wonderful in the first twenty four
hours of the case, and then later on we find
out that people had a lot of suspicions and weird
thoughts about them, just.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
Like other killers. So we continue on with our story.
When Albright told Albright promptly went off.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
To Bright's beauty school and not bright School beauty school
he got his beauticians life and then persuading the salon
to hire him with no experience at all. This is
another psychopathic trait. He's very charming, very manipulative, and lies
and rationalizes. This is the problem with psychopaths. Anyway, Albright

(27:19):
took to calling himself mister Charles. He would spend at
least an hour with each woman to get her hair
exactly right. When Albright told his stylist friend that he
was on, he was also an accomplished artist. The friend
paid him two hundred and fifty dollars to paint a
picture of his wife. Albright indeed was a good painter,
self taught. He had won a prize to the Texas
State Fair for his portrait of a dark haired woman

(27:40):
in a long green gown. Albright worked for weeks on
the woman's painting without finishing. He insisted that he needed
to keep working on one special feature. The most difficult
part of the feature. Tired of waiting, the friend decided
to go to Albright's house to look at the work
in progress. There in the living room was the six
by three foot portrait. It was richly colored, remarkably realistic.

Speaker 3 (28:04):
The woman's hair mouth knows.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Everything was finished except for one part, the eyes. After
all this time, Alibright hadn't even begun working on the eyes.
It was if something held him back, as if he
preferred the portrait to remain as it was on the
living room easel. Charles asked a friend, what are you
going to paint the eyes when I'm ready to? Months later,

(28:29):
Albright did finally paint the eyes. He painted them again
to get them just right. He painted the proper shadows
under the eyelashes. When Albright was finished, his friend could
not believe how well the painting had turned out.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
It was he realized the.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Mesmerizing portrait, especially the eyes. His wife's eyes were so
perfectly recreated they seemed to follow a person across the room.
There's no question you love eyes, the friend said, hmm.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
In nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
The second victim was found on Sunday morning on the
same South Dallas Road where Mary Pratt was dumped. Like Pratt,
she was mostly naked. Like Pratt, she was a prostitute.
Her name was Susan Peterson, age twenty seven. She also
had been shot in the head, chest, and stomach. This
time her eyelids, of course, were closed, because her body

(29:23):
was discovered on the other end of the road, just
outside the sety limits. The jurisdiction for the case fell
to the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, and a detective named
Larry Oliver, who had not heard about the Pratt killing,
was called to the scene. And this happens a lot,
at least back then, especially when they fall out of jurisdictions.
It takes a little longer to connect one crime to another,
and that's why some serial killers who like to travel

(29:46):
outside or travel to different locations are much harder to catch.
And we can go over that as we learn more
about serial killers. There are different ones. Some of the
killed in their old neighborhoods, some who like to travel outside.
Officer of the detective Oliver company in the body of
the autopsy room where a pathologist began the standard examination,

(30:06):
he was stunned when he saw it that the eyes
were missing. The pathologists mentioned that the Dallas Police Department
had a similar case, though Oliver did some checking. Within
twenty four hours, he traveled to the police department's homicide
office to see Detective Westphalen, the one who had first
found Mary Pratt. Soon there were meetings with sergeants and

(30:29):
lieutenants with the chief in charge. While police officers deliberately
avoided the phrase serial killings to describe what was happening,
west Falin kept referring to the killer as a repeater.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
Everyone in the room knew what he was. What he
referred to.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
At that point a contingent of the detective's favorite keeping
a lid in the story. If the press discovered that
the killings were linked and turned the spotlight on the
Star Hotel, the killer might just get nervous and start
picking up women from other areas. But homicide supervisors decided
that the police department had a greater obligation to warn
the computer the community that it might be in danger,
even if it meant warning prostitutes. Besides, publicizing the case

(31:09):
might bring in some leads.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
Lord knows, there was little else.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
To go on, as flyers were posted around the Star
Motel asking prostitutes to stay off the streets to Tectus
met with the press to discuss the two killings.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Although no information was officially divulged about.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
The missing eyes, Ward quickly lilked to the reporters that
the women's faces had him mutilated in an odd way.
Officers Matthew, Theughs and Regina Smith sat in their squad
car reading the front page newspaper about the prostitute's deaths.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
They too were shaken. There were women from the beat,
women they were supposed to protect. They knew Susan Peterson.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
She used to be one of the more beautiful prostitutes
in Oak Cliff, although her five years on the streets
had taken their toll. Her once alluring smile had turned
winter hard, and her body had grown plump. She even
cursed officers once, Matthews and Smith when they tried to
remove her off of Jefferson Boulevard. Like a good pickpocket,

(32:06):
she was an expert at clipping a trick person who
hires a prostitute stealing.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
Money from his billfol way he was having sex with her.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
If the killer could get Peterson, Matthews and Smith said,
then he can get any of the women.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
This time, officers Matthews.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
And Smith pulled up to the Star Motel, and the
prostitutes didn't keep their distance. They poured out of the room,
surrounded the squad car, and began to pass on their
personal list of suspects. The women talked about their kinkiest tricks.
The men who went in to wanted to tie them
up or whip them. Smith made her usual impassioned speech,
asking the girls just get off the street, but most

(32:42):
of them weren't buying it. And then there was Veronica Rodriguez.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
Remember her. She'd been telling a lot of.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
People, reporters, other prostitutes as well as other officers, any
number of stories since the killings began. At first, she
said she had witnessed Mary prop being shot. Then she
said she had met a man who had been brown,
only bragged about having killed Pratt. Now she said she
knew nothing at all about Pratt's death. About her own
rape in the South aust Field, she no longer said
the killer was white.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
Now he was Hispanic, and she said he might have
been black.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Almost everyone who spoke with her thought her brain is
fried from drugs.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
Boy bothered Matthew, however, was that Rodriguez had never changed
her basic story about being attacked.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Usually she would forget whatever pity story she had told
if someone really tried to kill her in that field.
Because the man who supposedly save her, Schindler, know the
killer too.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
Matthews and Smith didn't know what to do next.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
They already told the Homicide division that Rodriguez claimed to
have information about Mary Pratt. They had mentioned the attack
and the possible Shindler connection. With that, they figured they
had done their job. Later, Detective west Feathern would say
that he never got the officer's tips. Unfortunately, I'm on
all the phone calls and all the messages. The name
Schindler never crossed the desk. Whatever the case, the potential

(33:58):
break again was slipping away and the killer was preparing
to strike again.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
Back to Charlie, Now we'll look at some of his
darker secrets again. Most of these individuals have these.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
Dark secrets that don't get out to the public. Either
they don't share them, and it's hard to find it
corroborating evidence or people who knew them in a different way.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
So let's go back to March nineteen eighty five.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Now, Charlie is about home well fifty two. The incident
was kept very quiet. There would be no trial, no headlines.
The DA had arranged for him to serve a probated
sentence of ten years, which spent no jail time.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
Privation. Probation was fine with.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Him, just as it was in nineteen seventy nine, I
mean in nineteen seventy one when he was arrested for
forging cashiers checks, in nineteen seventy nine when.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
He was caught shoplifting two bottles of perfume.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
And in nineteen eighty when he was sent to prison
for stealing a saw from Handy Dan.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
You can see his perpetual inclination to steal.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
He lept a maniac, for instance, but he committed these
crimes constantly.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
Again, this could be back to his mother being so frugal.
He just wanted something. It's really a.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
Control issue for an individual like this. He just wants
to have control. He wants to be able to do things,
doesn't want to be restricted. Having an overprotective parent like
his mom really restricted him and took away a lot
of control. And this could have affected Charlie in a
very negative way. And he was just looking for ways
to get control and not to be restricted, to be

(35:30):
free in a sense, but that freedom had consequences because
he was breaking the law. When he was at to
prison for stealing a saw, he actually had to serve
six months.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
But then at least his mother.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Could tell everyone that he was leaving Downs temporarily to
take an important job and a nuclear power.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
Plant in Florida. You can see his mother lying isn't
helping either.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
This case, however, was a little different though if the
news got out, I could humiliate him, not that.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
He was guilty. He kept saying, over and over, I've
never touched that little girl.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
The family, his good girl's family was just looking for
a scapegoat, and they had picked him. And Charlie Bright
one of the most dedicated members of the Catholic church
in East Dallas. He had first met the family in
nineteen seventy nine when he began singing in the church choir.
People admired his voice, even if it was untrained. The

(36:19):
monsterenior at Saint Bernard's Church called them good Old Charlie.
Albright was known to slip one hundred dollars bill to
someone who was down on his luck, but after he
met the little girl's family, He brought them a big
box of stakes. He dressed up his Santa Claus and
gave the girl in her siblings presence. Did anyone seriously
believe he was sneaking into her bedroom in molester? The
girl's parents tried to keep the matter quiet, especially at

(36:40):
the church, because they didn't want to stigmatize their daughter,
but they also wanted good Old Charlie to pay Allbright
worried that if he fought them, the story would leak,
so on March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty five, in an
empty courthouse court room in Dallas, he stood before a
judge and confessed to knowingly and intentionally engaging in deviate
sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of fourteen.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
He was fifty one.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
For the first time, Charles Albright's mask was slipping away.
The gentlemanly, jecky like personality was actually a sexually perverted
hide that was kept hidden for many years.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Women who heard the story couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
After Albright dissolved what he called his loveless marriage to
Betty in seventy five, a decade before he developed a
reputation as an old fashioned ladies man, he was still
getting by with odd jobs and family money, but women
saw him as a grand romantic figure, someone who showered
them with flowers and charismatic charisma, music boxes and candies.

(37:44):
To one woman, he even recited from memory all forty
two verses of the Eve of Saint Agnes by John Keats.
To another, he gave a slew of presence. But in
late nineteen eighty five, Albright fell in love with Dixie Austin,
pretty shy widow, whom he had met on his trip
to Arkansas. It was one of the most romantic times

(38:04):
of his life, so he says. At dinner, he charmed
Dixie with stories about nature and art tony scholar photographs
he had collected from Reagan.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
And Hope Bob ho.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
He took her hunting in the county for salamanders. His dream,
he told her, was to.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Find a new species of salamon vanners that he could
name after him.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Dixie actually said that sex with Albright was gentle and satisfying.
He never talked to dirty to her, and never wanted
her to do anything that might be considered unconventional. He
certainly did not sneak off and have affairs. By the
time he met Dixie. However, Charlie Albrighton already created another
life for himself, although he masterifully hid his secret from
everyone who knew him. He was a veteran of red

(38:46):
light districts all over Dallas. To some prostitutes, he was
a horrmonger and a regular trick To others, like sugar
Susan pat Peterson second victim, he was even a sugar daddy.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
At Ranger Bail Bonds, the.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Company she used to bail her out used to bail
her out of jail, Peterson listed Shawls Albright.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
As her co signer.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
On one form she listed him as her best friend
in the event that she skipped town.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
There's also evidence that Albright was a.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Friend of Mary Pratt's long before she became a prostitute
in the early eighties. Albright's parents had long ago invested
in cheap rental property near where Mary lived, and at
the time Albright was temporarily living in one of the
rental homes. According to several sources, Albright had a brief
fling with one of Pratt's female friends and brought that
woman in.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Pratt over to his house for parties.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Other prostitutes say that when Pratt started turning tricks at
the Star. Albright became one of her customers. Pratt told
him that the old man Albright was a good trick,
willing to pay a little bit more than the going rate.
Soon Charlie Albright was making the rounds. Some of the
really girls he had a platonic relationship. He would just
pick him up and talk to them, take them to

(39:53):
get a burger, and drop them back off, not even
him running sex with them. Every Friday afternoon, for instance,
he had sex with a married woman who hit the
streets after her husband had gone to work.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
Aubright, whom she called Pappy, felt sorry for her. She
said he was a sweet gentleman.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
If I had ever needed extra money, I would call
him and he would drop it off. But the married
woman said that by late eighteen nineteen eighty seven, she
had to put an end to her dates with Albright
because he began to.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
Get more and more aggressive.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
She said he asked her to beat him, to spank
him like a child. Seems like at this point Charlie
Albright's mind was devolving even faster. Another prostitute by the
name of Edna Russell remembered meeting Albright when her friend
Peterson asked her to do a double she said She
and Peterson went with all Right into a militaria room.
There he handcuffed him to the bed and began hitting

(40:43):
them with a belt and an extension cord.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
All the while shouting screen you.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
Know you'll like it, and calling them derogatory names. Perhaps
there was no coincidence that Albright's life began to spend
out of control after the death of his parents, usually
a significant trigger. We see this a lot of times
as mass shooters as well. If you remember the South
lamb and Florida the shooter Parkland, Parkland shooter in Florida,
Nicholas Cruz, when his mother passed away a few months later,

(41:13):
think he was doing Valentine's Day, he had a breakdown
without them around to look out for him, he repressed.
Part of Albright may have finally unleashed itself. He and Dell,
who died of cancer in nineteen eighty one, were not
close In her last years. Dell was disappointed by the
way her son had turned out, while Albright found her
to be a past especially when she would bang on

(41:33):
his door early on Saturday mornings to get help to
fix up some little projects. But as his final gesture
of devotion to his mother, Albright went out and bought
a dress with the undertaker to put on her body,
the first new dress he had ever seen her wear. Surprisingly,
he did weep at her funeral, racked with grief or
maybe guilt over the way he had let her down,

(41:54):
We'll never know.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
He also cried a.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Frend's funeral his dad, except Foster adopted it a few
years later. Frankly had not been until after Dell's death
that Albright and his father became close. Albright remembered how
Dell constantly nagged, had acquired husband bickering with some bickering
with him by problems around the house.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
With over gone, Fred seemed a lot more relaxed.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
And Albright would actually take him to dinner in nearby cafeteria.
But Fred had a fatal heart attack in nineteen eighty six.
Albright inherited at least ninety six thousand dollars, along with
all of his parents' homes and property for what said
friends said were sentimental reasons. He kept the property in
his father's name. To bring in some money, he rented

(42:36):
one of the tiny ramshackle frame homes on.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
A street called Cotton Valley, and here we go, folks.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
He rented out one to the truck driver named Shindler,
none as Speedy because he talked so fast. Sindler was
a singularly weird individual. He stacked the rooms of his
house with trash up to three feet high. He put
in an automobile engine in the living room, maybe a hoarder.
He lived without electricity and running. He was a colman,
lantern for light and bottled water to try wash himself.

(43:05):
All Bright's friends said he should get another renter, that
Speedy was just a little bit too unusual, but they
always agreeable.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Albright Mitch Schindler through a female friend.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Well in nineteen ninety one, Shirley Williams was the next
victim for mister Albright. Especially on the Coven, units had
been sent out to stake out the prostitution areas and
run computer checks and the license plates of vehicles that
cruise by, just to see.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
If the owners might have any unusual criminal records.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
Everything added to nothing. This was a killer in total control,
a man who refused a panic.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
They thought, we've got to answer three questions. Why is
he after prostitutes? Why were both bodies.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Dumped on the same street and why are those eyes
cut out? In the early morning hours of March nineteenth,
the killer changed tactics, being Charlie.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
On fourth Worth, Bolivard.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Another horror came out a few miles from the Star
named Shirley Williams emerged from the Avalon Motel where she
worked as a maid, according to another prostitute, and saw her.
Shirley was wearing jeans and a yellow raincoat. She was
found at six twenty the next morning, dumped on a
residential street at half a block from elementary.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
School in the heart of Oak Cliff.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
As children whacked to school, they could see the naked
woman crumpled up against the curb.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
An unopened condom was beside her.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Go look at her eyes and tell me if they're there,
said his detective Westphalen.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
And the response was no, We've got number three, said
the detective.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
The autopsy and Shirley Williams would show that the body
the surgery had been hurried. The broken tip of an
ex act of blade was found embedded in the skin
near her right eye, but there were no witnesses, no
murder weapon, and no fingerprints. And now the killer had
changed and ethnicity is or a race. He killed a
black woman this time, and he had moved locations just

(45:05):
as the detectives had worried. The publicity about the case
sent the killer away from the story hotel to another one.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
In the autumn.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
Before the killings began, Charles Abright was the model of
domestic propriety during the day, he put his carpenter.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
Skills to use around the home.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
If he was prepared to become a modern day Ripper,
Jack the Ripper, none of his friends or family had
any idea. But we've seen a lot about Charlie. We've
seen a lot about his crimes. He even called his
mother a prostitute a time. He was not talking about Dell.
He said he was talking about his birth mother. The
other men were speechless. Was this just one of Albright's
tall tales, many people wondered. But this might be the

(45:44):
link of why he killed.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
Prostitutes.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Many people tried to verify the story of whether his
biological mother or Dell was a prostitute. Even the FBI
got involved. He learned that while his biological father could
not be traced, mother was actually a nurse who had
lived and died in which to tap falls. Maybe she
was never the brilliant law student her son had described,
but there's no way that they could determine she had
he ever been a prostitute. Albright's relatives, in fact, consisted

(46:14):
that after a lengthy search through record of records, Albert
had been thrilled to find his biological mother As an adult.
He actually visited her several times in which the top
falls and brought her gifts, and he even introduced her
to Fred Albright. Yet somewhere in Albright's mind, the connection
between prostitution and motherhood had been made. It is possible
that Charlie Albright was wrestling with a very twisted version

(46:36):
of the Madonna horror complex, unconsciously seeking revenge on the
mother figures who disappointed him by associating with prostitutes, the
worst possible women he could find. On one hand, he
seemingly cared for prostitutes like Susan Peterson and Mary Pratt.
Maybe they reminded them of his mother, or maybe they
were friends in the past. He would help them financially

(46:58):
and bought them dinner and gave them present, but he
also would punish them. Perhaps he hated what they had become.
Perhaps he hated what he had become. We won't never
know that. But there's only one flaw in Charlie Arbat's plan.
One all Bright didn't even know about. It was Charlie's

(47:18):
truck driving tenant Schindler. He had decided a few years
back not to list to South Dallas address on his
driver's licensees.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
He'd like to say he preferred to keep his privacy. Instead,
he put down one zero three to five El Dorado,
the address for Charlie Albright. Once word of Shirley William's
killing spread, the star Wartel turned into a ghost town.
Prostitutes total.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Officers Smith and Matthews that they were leaving Dallas. Others
said they were getting out of the business. A few
women so desperate for drug many that they couldn't leave.
Moved together to a street corner next to the home
of a man who promised to.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
Serve as their lookout.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Cruising the area, Matthews and Smith spied a black prostitute
by the name of Brenda White. She was seventeen year
veteran of the neighborhood, and White tended to work alone
in a street corn in front of a church. The
officers decided to stop and make sure she knew about
the murders. Her response, well, I'm going to get my

(48:14):
black ass out of here, so she said, I just
had to mace the man who.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
Jumped back on me the other night.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
White told the officer that a few days before, a
trick in a dark station wagon I pulled up along
beside her and she had gotten inside the car. He
was a husky looking white man with salt and pepper hair.
Let's go to a motel, she told him. No, He said,
I've got a spot we can use as a way
to protect herself. White never allowed a trick to take
her anywhere but a motel that was familiar to the prostitutes,
so she told him to drop her off.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
Immediately, suddenly a change came over his face. It was
like anger. He said, I hate prostitutes. I'm going to
kill all of you.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Before he had a chance to grab her, White shot
a stream of Mason to his face and.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
Threw open the door.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
For the rest of the day, Smith and Matthews cannot
shake white story from their minds.

Speaker 3 (48:58):
They flipped their notebooks.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
I was returned to Veronica Rodriguez's rambling talk about being raped,
the one that originally slipped through the fingers. The next morning,
as they were checking in for work at their police substation,
Smith said, we need to run a computer check on
that Schindler guy. Because county government computers contained more information
about citizens and city computers. Officer Smith and Matthews drove

(49:24):
down to a Dallas County Constable's office near Jefferson Boulevard.
They put in Schindler's name, and the name Fred Albright
popped up. Fred Albright? Where was Schindler?

Speaker 3 (49:37):
Cook punched in another code.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
It turned out that this Fred Albright also owned properties
on Cotton Valley. Wasn't Cotton Valley the neighborhood in South
Dallas where the first two prostitutes were found. Cook kept
typing Fred Albright, the computer reported was dead. Matthews and
Smith stared the screen and the only clue in the
case led them to a dead man. Maybe this something

(50:00):
to do with Charles Apright, said one of the.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
Officers several weeks before.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
Cook explained he had come to the office early one
morning and answered a call from a woman who would
not identify herself. The woman had been friends with Mary Pratt,
she said, and though Pratt had met a man whom
she briefly did. He was a very nice man. He
had an odd love for eyes. Cook also asked for
the man's name. She said it was Charles Opright now, Cook,

(50:31):
if you remember as the deputy constable that was on
duty who helped Officer Smith and Matthews.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
So now he's getting involved.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
If any other constable's deputy had been helping Matthews and
Smith that day, the link to Albright might have never
been made. So this time the luck fell on their side.
Cook typed in another code impersonal for information for Charles
Opbright popped on the screen. Somehow, They said Schindler and
Albright were connected, perhaps Albright's sul Schuiler's friend, the one

(51:05):
who had tried to kill Rodriguez, who had said that
he knew him. Their hearts racing, and they looked to
Albright's criminal record, and the officers discovered a string of thefts,
burglaryes and forgeries, and the charge of sexual intercourse with
a child. The clerk then pulled out a mugshot of Albright,
a photo of a rather handsome, well bellt man, just
like the man Brenda White had described. The clerk wondered

(51:29):
why Smyth Smith was so excited, and Smith responded, I think.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
We've got him.

Speaker 2 (51:37):
On the way to the homicide department, Matthews and Smith
rehearsed everything they wanted to say. Detective west Phalan greeted
them politely, and Matthew started and Smith interrupted, and soon
they were both talking at once. The detective said, calm down,
take it's low. A few minutes later, after they finished
their presentation, the detective decided.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
They were onto something. He put together in a photo
lineup of six.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Mug shots and told and told told the officers to
show it to Brenda White.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
Then they showed it to Veronica Rodriguez, who both immediately
pointed out it was Albright. Matthews called detective failed and
told them what happened. The only catch was all right,
Rodriguez shook visibly, but she refused to identify him. She
was so afraid of him she wouldn't pick out his picture.

(52:29):
So the detective said, come on down here, bring her
down here, let me talk to her.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
The detective knew if he could not get Rodriguez to break,
he wouldn't have the evidence to go after Charlie. Brenda
White's story offered only the prospect of a misdemeanor assault charge,
but if Rodriguez identified Albright, the Dallas police could file
charges for attempted murder and get a search war and
look through his house. They dragged down Miss Rodriguez, who
shook while she driving there, and shook while she was there.

(53:02):
Detective west Felin told Rodriguez about the.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
Three girls and how they were brutally killed.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
Slowly, Rodriguez looked over the mugshots while Detective of west
Falin another officer watched. She reached for Albright's pharroto, turned
it over and signed her name. At two thirty in
the morning on March twenty second, on Oak Cliff, a
team of tactical officers burst through the front door of
one zero three five El Dorado, Charlie Albright's address. One

(53:33):
cabinet was filled with exotic champagne glasses and other held delicate,
expensive figurines of pretty young women.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
One wall were Life magazines and.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Valuable Monroe movie posters. Charlie was handcuffed and led away.
He never said a word, stumbling out of bed and
her nightgown. Dixie Austin looked incredulously. Albright and then back
at the police. Unable to imagine what man she could
have what man she loved, could have done, she began
to scream.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
For a long time.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
After Charlie Albright's arrest, most everyone involved in this case
wondered whether the police had enough.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
Evidence to convict them.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Despite a withering all night interrogation by the detective West Failin,
Albright refused to confess to anything the actors. They've never
heard the names of any of these prostitutes. The FBI
even brought in a high tech machine that could see
through walls. Although the searches produced an array of interesting
items Carpenter's word working blades, and ex acto blades, copy

(54:27):
of Grey's anatomy, they could never find the eyeballs, nor
could anyone ever find anyone who would admit to seeing
Charlie with the three prostitutes and the knights that were killed.
Dixie claimed that on the knights in question, Charlie did
not leave the house early for his paper route, and
then he always came home on time. As the trial

(54:48):
date arrived, Veronica Rodriguez decided to testify as a witness
for the defense. She claimed that she and Aubry had
never been together and then whether detective Waste Failing had
coursed her to picking Albright's photograph. Schindler continued to deny
that he had saved Albright or Adigus from Albright. He
said it was a Hispanic man named Joe, but a

(55:11):
low key, thirty three year old prosecutor working for the
Dallas County DA's office had a trump card. For the
first time in its history of the DA's office was
going for a murder conviction based solely on controversial hair evidence.
Days after Albright's arrest, the city's forensic lab report that
hairs found on the bodies of the dead prostitutes were
similar to the hair samples taken from Albright's head and

(55:33):
pubic area. As evidence goes, hairs are not always conclusive
as fingerprints. It's impossible to tell how many other great
haired men might look similar to Albright's hairs under a microscope,
Yet in this case, the lab kept running tests. Lab
technicians said that the hair is found in the blankets
in the back of Albright's truck were similar to hair

(55:53):
samples from the first two prostitutes. Hairs found an Abright's
vacuum cleaner matched the hair from the third prostitute, and
then an additional piece of the puzzle came from officers
Matthews and Smith.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
The officers found.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
A prostitute named Tina Connolly, who claimed that Aubrey was
one of her regular afternoon customers. She never saw him
cruise after dark, she said, except for one time the
Knight Shirley Williams disappeared. Connolly took Matthews and Smith to
a secluded field near fort Worth, where supposedly Aubrey used
to take care for sex. There they spotted a yellow
rain coat just like the one Williams was last scene wearing,

(56:36):
and Harris on the coat and blanket and matched Albright's hair.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Albright's defend its.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Attorney tried to convince the jury at the case against
Albright depended on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence. The killer, he said,
was probably Schindler, which just happened to skip the.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
Town the week of the trial.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Admittedly, the police had many unanswered questions about Schindler, but
Detective west Finn, it's been hours interrogating him, trying to
truman if he assisted Albright or was always aware of
what Ibar was doing, but there was nothing to time
him to the case, except for an empty forty four
caliber bullet box found behind the house, which Albright himself
might have dropped there. When Schindler's and Albright's photos were

(57:14):
showing a dozens of prostitutes, nobody recognized Schindler, but many
recognized Alright.

Speaker 3 (57:21):
Albright never testified throughout the trial. He sat quietly in
his chair.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
His shoulder slumped like a weak, humbled figure shook. In
his closing argument, Durrisli called Albright the former biology teacher.

Speaker 3 (57:36):
Shook. Was the DA, by the way.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
Call a j a smart man who just can't seem
to have a job. The DA warned the jury not
to underestimate Albright, that he had grown much smarter during
this trial, that if he ever got out of jail,
he wouldn't make the.

Speaker 3 (57:49):
Same mistakes again.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
On the sign December nineteenth, when the jury returned with
a guilty verdict and a life sentence, his wife Dixie,
collapsed in the courtroom.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
Albright's friends of what of the.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Reporters, It was as if they did not want to
be blamed for having lived with a vicious killer, and
the defense attorney was stunned, who generally thought he was
going to get his client acquitted, just walked out of
the courtroom. So we see the case of Charlie Albright.
Many who claimed that he was such a great guy, and.

Speaker 3 (58:21):
He was to some, but he wasn't to others.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
He had the same characteristics or the same factors that
contributed possibly to his behavior, which was childhood trauma and
one of the main factors that keeps coming up for
serial killers rejection. Again, not all individuals who've been rejected

(58:46):
as children, who have been faced who faced abuse, become
serial killers.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
But we do have to take this at the consideration
that an overwhelming majority.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
Of serial killers have been abused, especially sexually abused, and
have suffered great rejection from their parents.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
It's hard. It's one hundred and sixty eight hours a week.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
How much information can we actually get from what the
parents are doing with their children. How do we know
if their children parents are ignoring their children and they
never look at them, they keep them in rooms, all
these little interactions that can affect self esteem that we
never see, calling them incompetent, stupid, whatever. We don't know
those things. So it's really hard to make a judgment.

(59:27):
But we can see similar patterns.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
Which was abuse.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Hopefully you like the psychological analysis and story of Charles Albright,
the Eyeball Killer,