True Crime Campfire - Eye of the Beholder: Serial Killer Charles Albright, Pt. 2

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

When we left you at the end of part 1, taxidermy enthusiast, landlord and former bullfighter Charles Albright had begun living a double life. By day, a loving and gentlemanly boyfriend, a considerate friend and a fun-loving softball teammate. By night, a regular in the red-light districts of Dallas—sometimes kind and generous to the sex workers he encountered, sometimes cruel and sadistic. And in December of 1990, the brutal murder of one of those woman had just rocked the community to its core. Mary Pratt had been beaten and shot, and her killer had left a disturbing signature: He’d removed her eyes with surgical precision. As Dallas investigators began their hunt for the killer, they had the sinking feeling that a monster like this doesn’t tend to stop with just one. And they were about to find out how right they were. Join us now for part two of this bizarre true story.Sources:Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/see-no-evil-3/Mara Bovson, Daily News: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/dallas-eyeball-killer-murdered-women-removed-eyes-article-1.3769218https://murderpedia.org/male.A/a/albright-charles.htmhttps://www.oxygen.com/mark-of-a-killer/charles-albright-eyeball-killer-serial-killer-sex-workersdallas-texas-90sBritish true crime show "Born to Kill," episode "Charles Albright"Oxygen's "Mark of a Killer," episode "An Eye for Murder"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Albrighthttps://www.audacy.com/krld/articles/news/dallas-historys-notorious-killer-of-prostitutes-has-diedhttps://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/dallas-eyeball-killer-murdered-women-removed-eyes-article-1.3769218https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/lucille-baller-rapping-dallas-police-lt-regina-smith-suspended/2070872/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. When we left you at the end of part one, taxidermy enthusiast, landlord, and former bullfighter, Charles Albright had begun living a double life. By day, a loving and gentlemanly boyfriend, a considerate friend, and a fun-loving softball teammate. By night, a regular in the red light districts of Dallas, sometimes kind and generous to the sex workers he encountered, sometimes cruel and sadistic. And in December of 1990,

the brutal murder of one of those women had just rocked the community to its core. Mary Pratt had been beaten and shot, and her killer had left a disturbing signature. He'd removed her eyes with surgical precision. As Dallas investigators began their hunt for the killer, they had the sinking feeling that a monster like this doesn't tend to stop with just one. And they were about to find out how right they were. Join us now for Part 2 of Eye of the Beholder, Serial Killer Charles Albright. One of the interesting things to me about this case is how it's almost like there were two investigations going on at the same time. There was lead investigator John Westphalen, a veteran homicide detective who got one look at the Mary Pratt case and realized it was going to be a long shot.

A young woman in a high-risk profession clearly murdered somewhere else and dumped in the spot where she was found. And then there were two rookie beat cops, John Matthews and Regina Smith, low on the totem pole, assigned to a beat that most police officers would consider. her a total grind. Now, Officer Matthews came from a family of cops, but Regina Smith was brand new to the job. She'd been a cashier and a student in fashion before she read an article about how few black women officers the Dallas PD had on the force and just decided to sign up for the academy. Her fellow officers didn't make it easy for her at first, which probably is not going to surprise any of the women or people of color listening right now, I suspect. They made fun of the way she held her gun, laughed at her when she couldn't keep up with them at push-ups, because

you know, I'm sure cops have to do just loads of push-ups in the ordinary course of a day's work, right? Suspect says he didn't do it, challenge him to a push-up contest. If you win, he has to confess. Happens all the time, right? And if that doesn't work, you challenge them to the fitness gram pacer test. And if that doesn't work, it's you versus them in a game of Red Rover. It's in the police handbook. Oh, man. So, despite the bullshit, she had to put. put up with from the dude bros she worked with, Regina Smith hung in there, and she soon realized she had a talent for relating to people. She got pretty close to a lot of the sex workers on her beat especially. She's a single mom of a six-year-old, and she felt protective toward these

girls. She cared about them. She told true crime legend Skip Hollinsworth that she kept a photo album full of their mugshots, look through it in her spare time, thinking about her girls and what she could do to help them find their way to happier, more secure lives. A lot of them came to trust her and tell her things. Patrolling the neighborhood on the morning of December 13th, 1990, before officers Regina Smith and John Matthews knew anything about Mary Pratt's body turning up in a vacant lot, they caught sight of a young sex worker named Veronica Rodriguez. Veronica had had a rough life.

She was only in her early 20s, but she'd been heavily, heavily addicted to drugs for years already, had given birth to a stillborn baby, and was universally known as being as the street slang went, brain fried. As Matthews and Smith stopped their squad car and called over to her, Veronica came running, and it was quickly obvious that something bad had happened to her. She had a nasty cut on her forehead, another one across her throat. Officer Smith said, girl, what happened to you? Don't arrest me, Veronica said.

I almost got murdered last night. She launched into a dramatic story. She said a man had picked her up and Mary Pratt for a double date. He'd driven him way out to a field, way further than either one of them would usually go with a customer, and then suddenly he got rough, she said. Scary. He started attacking Mary, beating her up. Half-naked and barefoot, Veronica, ran.

In the dark, she stumbled through the field, terrified he was going to catch her. She lucked into finding a drainage pipe, and because she was so tiny, she was able to squeeze herself into it and hide. She could hear him looking for her, calling for her, and her heart just pounding. She huddled inside that little drain pipe until she didn't hear him anymore, and then she ran for it again. She could see a house a little way away, and she hauled asked for it,

hammered on the door, and when it opened, she couldn't believe her look. She knew the sky. She'd picked him up a few times before. So he let her in, and she finally breathed a sigh of relief. But it was a narrow escape, and she was lucky to be alive. Now, here was the thing about Veronica Rodriguez. She had a tendency to lie, like more than a tendency. In his article, See No Evil, Skip Hollinsworth wrote that she was, quote, a notorious liar.

She had a reputation on the street for making up stories for sympathy, and she was always telling the cop some kind of sad tale or another in hopes they'd feel bad for her and not take her to jail. And she tended to go off on tangents that didn't make a lot of sense. She wasn't always super coherent. So she's telling them a story, and Officer Smith and Officer Matthews are kind of thinking, hmm. They didn't not believe her per se, but they just didn't really know what to think. If it had been anybody else, it wouldn't have been an issue. But with Veronica, they weren't so sure. Yeah, I mean, everybody that they talked to about, like, everybody that anybody who wrote any of the source articles that we've read, everybody they talked to would say that same thing about Veronica Rodriguez.

That she was, you know, we've all known those people who are just kind of fantasists and who just like, spin-in-wild stories. They can be really fun to listen to, but you're never sure what's true and what's not. I mean, it was obvious she'd been in a scrap of some kind, but the story she was telling sounded pretty far out. I mean, this guy drove her way out to a neighborhood she didn't know, and she just lucked into running into somebody she knew. It didn't seem likely. And remember, the officers didn't know anything yet about Mary Pratt's murder. Even after her body was discovered, it barely made the news. The investigation, hadn't released the detail of the missing eyes, so the press hadn't picked up the story in any

major way yet. So they were kind of like, okay, Veronica, well, we're glad you're all right. But then, a couple days later, they saw her again. This time, she was right in the middle of a transaction with a dude, sitting in the passenger seat of his big rig truck. So they pulled over and got Veronica and her customer out of the truck, and Veronica said, Officer Smith, don't arrest this guy. He's the one who saved me the other night. The guy's name was Axton Schindler. an odd duck who went by the nickname Speedy because of his rapid-fire mouth. He gave his address as 1035 Eldorado Avenue. This caught Regina Smith attention right away.

It didn't fit with what Veronica had told him about where her attack took place. Yeah, and although these two officers didn't know about Mary Pratt's murder yet, it didn't fit with where her body was found either. That was a neighborhood across townaways from El Dorado Avenue, and that was the same neighborhood where Veronica said she was attacked. Right. Schindler didn't have a criminal history, just a bunch of unpaid parking tickets. And when they sat him down in an interview room and asked him about Veronica Rodriguez's story,

he denied everything. He didn't know what the hell they were talking about, he said. He didn't rescue anybody from anything. All he was doing when they ran into him earlier that night was giving her a ride back to the hotel where she lived. He'd known her for years. He was just trying to help her out. He wasn't trying to hire her for sex, either. Schindler seemed kind of nervous, but he was adamant that Veronica Reggie.

Rodriguez was full of shit. And the fact was, she often was. Smith and Matthews turned all this information over to the homicide detectives, but they never heard back. It was a missed opportunity that would cost at least two more women in their lives. A few months went by before the second victim turned up, a 27-year-old sex worker named Susan Peterson. And she turned up on the same street where Mary Pratt had been found in December. The body was almost totally naked, dumped unceremoniously in a heap like you'd drop a bag of garbage. She'd been shot several times in her chest, in her belly, in her head. Now, although she was found on the same street as Mary Pratt,

she was far enough down the road that she fell underneath a different police jurisdiction, Dallas County, and it just so happened that the homicide detectives who responded hadn't heard about Mary Pratt's murder yet. If the investigators from Mary's murder had been there to see what happened next, it would have seemed like some kind of grisly deja vu. The body went to the medical examines. and when the Emmy gently pried open her eyelids, he got the shock of his life. Empty sockets. The eyes carefully removed with surgical skill.

Now, fortunately for the detectives in that case, the Emmy had actually heard about the Mary Pratt case a few months before. Soon, the lead detective Larry Oliver was making contact with Detective Westphalen in the Pratt case. And although they weren't quite ready to admit it out loud yet, the phrase serial killer started running through the detective's minds. The cases were just much too similar to be unrelated. We've got two women, both sex workers, both shot and dumped on the same street, and both with that same chilling signature, the kind of thing even experienced murder detectives only see once in a career, if that. There was some debate about whether to keep the story on the QT at first for fear that the killer would pick up and move to another area. But as much as they worried about that, they worried more about the women walking the streets every night, unaware of the danger that was stalking them.

They had a right to know what was going on, so they made up some flyers and distributed them all around the red light districts. The flyers were pretty sparse on specific details. There was nothing on there about the missing eyes, but they did warn the sex workers that there had been a couple of murders in the area and advised them to get off the street. Of course, that's a lot easier said than done, now isn't it? A lot of the women felt trapped. They were scared, but they had to keep making money to support their addictions or feed their kids. Although the police didn't make any official statements to the press about the killer's unique signature, it didn't take long for it to leak.

Which is always the way, isn't it? Seems like literally every police department in the world has got at least one doofus with loose lips and a desire to impress some reporter. And once the media got wind of the macabre little detail of the surgically removed eyes, the murders were suddenly huge news. Although they weren't homicide detectives, not even close, beat cops' officers. Matthews and Smith were obsessed with the case. They took it personally. This is their world. These were their girls. The latest victim, Susan Peterson, was the kind of woman who stood out. She was gorgeous, for one thing. Deep brown eyes, high cheekbones, dark hair, porcelain skin. She looked

like snow white. She was tireless, seeing as many as a dozen clients a night. And she was brave. In her earlier life, she'd been in the military and ensign in the Navy and her training had given her an edge of tough assertiveness. If another girl tried encroaching on her territory, she'd make her regret it. And Susan was a bit of an accomplished pickpocket, too, sometimes lifting a little extra money off a customer while he was, you know, distracted. She carried a straight razor in case a client got out of control, and she wasn't afraid to use it. Regina Smith's feeling was, if this killer could get past Susan's street smart defenses, he was a dangerous creature indeed. And because Smith knew Susan. She knew this killer must have been irregular in the neighborhood,

probably a regular client of Susan's. Otherwise, he could never have flown under her radar enough to murder her. If Susan had seen him come in, she'd have fought like a tiger. The murders were all anybody was talking about in the neighborhood. Smith and Matthews would pull up to the corner and instead of scattering to the winds like they normally would at the side of a squad car, the women would run over to talk to them. There was one guy last week, they'd say, wanted to tie me up and whip me. I saw a guy last month who gave me a bad feeling. Oh, and this dude? He told me I had pretty eyes. Smith took it all down in her notebook, pages and pages of possible monsters. Ladies, she'd tell them, you've got to get off the street until they catch this guy.

I don't want to see any more of y'all's name in the paper. Veronica Rodriguez was still telling her story to anybody who would listen. The details changed. Sometimes the guy had picked up her and Mary pratt together, sometimes it was just Veronica alone. Sometimes she'd seen Mary's murder, sometimes she'd met a guy who bragged about killing her. Sometimes the attacker was white, sometimes Hispanic, sometimes black. She was all over the place, but something kept plucking at Regina Smith's mind. Usually when Veronica made up a sob story, she'd forget all about it in a day or two, and beyond the next thing. Smith had never seen her stick so consistently to a story. true she changed some of the details but she always had insisted she'd been attacked and had to run for her life

that wasn't typical for veronica it made smith think there was probably a grain of truth in there she wondered maybe she keeps changing some of the details because she's scared could that axon shinler guy know who the killer is she kept thinking back to shinler and that address he'd given 1035 al dorado across town from where mary pratt's body was found and from where veronica Rodriguez and said her attack took place. Her gut was telling her there was something to this, but she and Matthews had already told the homicide detectives about

Veronica's story. Turned them on to Axton Schindler. They never heard a peep. Later, Detective Westphalen would say he never got the tip. Do we believe that? Who the hell knows? What I definitely do believe is that Officer Smith and Matthews turned in that information.

Now, whether it made it into the proper hands after that, I have no idea, but it really doesn't make Dallas PD look great either way. Yeah, and I mean, remember, Smith and Matthews weren't detectives. They were rookie beat cops. They didn't feel like they could just storm into the homicide unit and be like, hello, what's happening with that tip we gave you? Right, of course.

While Smith and Matthews patrolled the Red Light District and tried to keep a watchful eye on the women still working there, the detective John Westfalen reached out to the profilers of the FBI's behavioral analysis unit. They quickly confirmed what he already suspected, that this killer's surgical removal of the victim's eyes was unique. They'd never seen it before, and it was a signature element, meaning it was somehow psychologically fulfilling to him. M.O. or modus operandi, the details of how a murder is carried out, can sometimes change according to circumstance. For example, a killer might sometimes use a gun, sometimes blunt force trauma, or strangulation. He might sometimes dump his victim in a vacant lot, other times out in the woods.

but the signature, the thing that makes killing satisfying to him, is not going to change. He needs to do it. Otherwise, there's no point in the murder. Eyes were important to this killer. The profiler said he was most likely taking them as a trophy, a way of reliving the crimes later on. And they issued a warning. A killer like this is going to keep on killing until you stop him. He's not going to be satisfied with two.

He was not. Just a month after Susan Peterson's body turned up, on March 19th, the killer struck again. The newest victim was Shirley Williams, a hotel housekeeper and sex worker who had been last seen leaving work the night before. The killer had dumped her, totally naked, on the street in front of an elementary school. There was a condom in its wrapper on the ground next to her body. I can only imagine what that was like for the kids who were just walking to school and came across that scene. Just horrendous. Now, this time, the medical examiner at the scene

checked the eyes right away, and once again, they were missing. Another one. Their guy was officially a serial killer now. And one who wanted the world to see his handiwork, obviously. I mean, you don't leave a body right in front of an elementary school by accident. There were a couple things about this murder that were a little bit different. First, his victim came from a different part of town. This was exactly what the investigators had worried about when the the story broke in the press, that he'd get squirrelly and change locations.

That was going to make him harder to catch. In addition to that, where the previous eye removals had been done with flawless precision, this one seemed to have been done in a hurry. The cuts rougher with some visible damage to the area around the eyes. Shirley had apparently realized she was in danger and had time to fight back. There had been a struggle. So possibly in a hurry or possibly just flustered from having to subdue his victim, the killer had not been as careful as usual.

And lastly, this victim was black. The first two were white. Later that day, an autopsy revealed a little sharp metal triangle embedded in the victim's skull near one of her eye sockets. When they removed it, they realized what they were looking at. It was the tip of an exacto knife. This was a fascinating find, not only as a piece of physical evidence that they might be able to match up later, but also because it suggested that the killer probably was not, in fact,

a surgeon as they'd suspected. I mean, a doctor would have access to a better cutting tool, one that was designed specifically for this purpose. So that broadened the field a little bit. If he wasn't a doctor, what was he? What other professions would give a killer the skill to remove an eye without damaging the socket? Butcher maybe, mortician, a hunter?

A taxidermist? When Shirley Williams' murder hit the news, the fear in the red light neighborhoods ramping up exponentially. Because Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson were both white, the black sex workers had just about convinced themselves they were safe. And it actually wasn't a totally unreasonable conclusion to draw. I mean, serial killers do tend to take victims from their own race. Not always, but it's a tendency. And the black women were so sure that they were in the clear, in fact, that they'd actually taken it as a chance to pick up more clients. But now,

with the discovery of Shirley Williams' body, they had no such security anymore. Everybody was scared. The women who could were either picking up stakes and leaving Dallas, moving in together in groups to try and keep an eye on each other, or just getting off the streets entirely. But, of course, that wasn't an option for everybody. One evening, not long after Shirley Williams' murder, Officer Smith and Matthews ran into a woman named Brenda White. Brenda had been a fixture in the neighborhood for over 15 years. And because she had a habit of staking out a corner kind of geographically far away from the main strip, Regina Smith was worried that she might not have heard about the murders yet. So she called her over to the car and said, Brenda, honey, you need to get

off the street. Haven't you heard there's a killer out here? He's killing the black girls now too, you know. Yeah, she knew, Brenda said. Matter of fact, she had to pepper spray a guy just the other night. Girl boss moves. Yeah. So Officer Smith's like, oh yeah? Well, tell us about it. What do you do? Well, he'd picked her up in a dark colored car, she said. White guy, olive complexion, kind of built maybe 50s, salt and pepper hair. Brenda, always took clients to a motel, so she asked him to drive her there, but he didn't want that. He said he had a place of his own he wanted to go. Now, this was against Brenda's golden rule.

She didn't go to random places with clients. It was either the motel or it wasn't going to happen. So she shut it down. Nope, she said, let me out of the car. At that, the guy flashed instantly from polite courtesy to total red-faced rage. He lunged at her and said, I hate whores. I'm going to kill all you motherfucking whores. And Brenda, who is a badass and has final girl energy oozing out every pore, apparently had her mace out of her purse in two seconds flat.

She sprayed him right in the eyes, flung open that car door, jumped, rolled, and ran. Damn. And it felt like a very close call. Hell yes, Brenda. Mm-hmm. This story made a strong impression on Regina Smith. Salt and pepper hair was a good detail, the kind of thing that could narrow down a suspect wool. Oh, yeah.

She and Matthews talked it over, stacking Brenda's story up against some of the things they'd heard from other sex workers they'd talked to over the past few weeks. And eventually, the conversation drifted back to Veronica Rodriguez and her narrow escape. Smith said, I want to take another look at that Axton Schindler guy, she said, rescued her from the killer. Let's go use the computers over the constable's office in Dallas County and see what we can find out. They ran the address he'd given them, 1035 El Dorado Avenue. and right away a name popped up as the owner of the property, Frederick Albright. Hmm.

Okay, maybe this was Schindler's landlord. They dug around a little more and found that this Fred Albright also owned property in another neighborhood. The neighborhood, in fact, where the first two victims were found, and where Veronica Rodriguez alleged she'd been attacked by Mary Pratt's killer. Uh-huh. This was getting interesting. Who was this Frederick Albright? They kept searching through public records. They found his voting record.

And then his death certificate. Damn. Just when they were starting to think they were on to something. But then, one of the deputy constables in the office heard them talking, and he said, Hey, you know what? I know that name. Albright. Hang on a second.

He disappeared for a few moments and then came running back with a notebook. Yep, he said, I thought so. Charles Albright. A few weeks earlier, C, this will make. had called the office with an anonymous tip. She seemed nervous, didn't want to give her name. But she said she'd been close with Mary Pratt. Mary had had a regular client who was really sweet to her, the tipster said. Total gentleman. She liked him so much she had him listed as her emergency contact in her wallet. Mary had introduced her to the guy, the tipster said, and they'd hit

it off. They did for a little while. After Mary Pratt turned up murdered with her eyes cut out, something had nagged at the back of the tipster's mind. so much that she finally felt like she had to call and tell the police. The guy had been obsessed with eyes, she said, like to the point where it was weird. And he had a huge collection of Xacto knives. The guy's name? Charles Albright. Smith typed that name to the computer and her eyes lit up at the address that popped up on the screen.

1035 El Dorado. Albright had inherited the property from his father, Frederick. He lived there, not Axton Schindler. Yeah, later it would come out that Schindler just gave that out as his own address because he didn't want the government up in his business, which I guess, you know, knowing where you live is the government being up in your business. It's so bizarre to me. He and Charlie knew each other through a mutual friend,

and Charlie was his landlord, rented him one of his other properties. In, guess where, the neighborhood where Mary Pratt's body turned up, and where Susan Peterson's body turned up, and where Veronica Rodriguez was attacked. But Charlie and Dixie were the ones actually living at 1035 El Dorado. Smith quickly saw that Albright had a criminal history too, a rap sheet full of frauds and thefts and the 10-year probation for sexual abuse of a child. Regina Smith held her breath.

She said to the constable, Can we see his most recent mugshot? And there it was. The olive skin and salt and pepper hair Brenda White had described. Regina Smith whispered, I think this is it. I think he's the killer. Oh, man.

Their next move, obviously, was to run all this by Detective Westphalen. They were nervous. I mean, here they were, two relatively inexperienced beat cops about to burst in on this veteran homicide detective and tell them they felt sure they had the killer. But it had to be done. And as it happened, Detective Westphalen was pretty cool about it. He sat and listened, and then he was like, yeah, this seems like something. Why don't you show Brenda White a photo lineup? see if she picks out Albright.

Well, campers, she did. It didn't take her two seconds. Yep, that's him. That's the guy I maced in the face. And then, they tracked down Veronica Rodriguez. The moment she saw Albright's face in that photo array, Veronica started to shake and well up with tears. She was obviously terrified,

and she didn't want any part of making an ID. So Smith and Matthews took her down to homicide to see Detective Westphalen. He sat her down in an interview room and laid out the photo array, and as Veronica trembled and cried, he talked to her about the victims. How this guy they were looking for had taken their lives and dumped him like trash, taken him away from their families forever. He didn't have the right to do that. And if they were going to catch him and make sure he could never do it again, they needed Veronica. If she saw the guy who attacked her in this lineup, she needed to tell him.

After a while, Veronica sat up in her chair. And silently, she reached for the picture of Charles Albright, picked up. the pen the detective had put in front of her and signed her name on the back. This was a big deal. Brenda White's encounter with Albright was at worst assault, but Veronica Rodriguez was alleging attempted murder. Her ID was enough for two warrants, one to search Albright's house and one to arrest him. So in the wee hours of the night of March 22nd, as Charlie Albright slept peacefully beside his girlfriend Dixie Austin, all hell broke loose. A team of officers kicked the front

door in and a moment later it was all flashlights and guns and handcuffs and chaos. Dixie woken up from a dead sleep to find this bizarre nightmare unfolding in front of her and just screamed and screamed. Poor, poor Dixie. It wasn't her fault. For his part, Charlie didn't have shit to say. He just jumped out of bed and silently offered his wrists for the cuffs. Waren, by the way, nothing but a pair of tight, bright red underpants. Who to thunk it? I had him down as a yellowing, tidy, witty guy myself. Mm-hmm. Oh, definitely.

Don't y'all bet Del was rolling in her grave at the side of those red underwear? Like, they must have been something. I mean, years after the fact, years, Officer Regina Smith still remembered those red underpants well enough to describe him to investigation discovery. So, foo. Now I have to think about what I wear in bed in case some plucky self-starter like Regina remembers it in an ID show in 20 years. It's me undies, for the record, is what I wear it a bed. Not a sponsor. They're just super comfortable.

Well, I would suggest you that you only have to worry about that if you murder someone. Or possibly are sleeping in the same bed as someone who murdered someone. That's fair. Fair enough. Everybody makes sure you got clean underwear on and that it's not completely ridiculous. So it was an emotional moment for Regina White and John Matthews, especially when one of the officers putting the gravis on Charlie handed him over to him over to him. him and said, here, you deserve to do this. Which, hell yeah, they did. And what investigators found in Charlie's house was basically a tantalizing buffet of circumstantial

evidence. In a hidden compartment in a fireplace, a stash of guns, which as a convicted felon, he was not supposed to have. None of them ended up a ballistics match for any of the bullets were covered at the scenes, though. And the man had a huge collection of exacto knives. The things were just all over the house. Every time he'd open a door, boom, exacto knife. just like the tipster slash ex-girlfriend had said. I don't mean to judge anyone's collection because I do have just a bunch of animal bones and pinned insects in my house, all of which are ethically sourced, mind you. But I feel like there's an upper limit on an acceptable amount of Xacto knives that are acceptable to collect.

It's less than 10, for the record. Okay, good to know. I'll pencil that down. They found well-worn, well-thumbed books on human anatomy. They also found a pretty hefty collection of true crime books, but I don't really feel like I can say much about that, since I have three bookshelves full of them myself, plus several boxes in the attic, plus like the Kindleful and Audible Library, and anyway, you get my point. I mean, I never killed anybody. Yet, I'm just kidding. And when they discovered, when they discovered paperwork for a storage unit a few miles away, the detectives,

left cartoon speed lines with how fast they hauled ass over there. Every single investigator who gathered around that storage unit door thought they were going to open that puppy up and find those eyeballs. And when they slid open the door, it looked like they were probably right. The storage unit was like a scene from a horror movie, or something you'd expect to find in Ed Gein's living room. There were jars of specimens all over the room, mysterious creatures at different stages of development floating in preservative.

There were skulls, there were taxidermied animals, but although the crepe factor was dialed up to 11 and the place gave the cops a bad case of the Wiggins, they ended up disappointed. No eyeballs in sight. No human ones, anyway. Damn. Albright denied everything. Detective Westphalen went at him for hours and hours, but Charlie didn't give an itch. He'd never been with a sex worker in his life. He didn't know the murdered women. Yeah, I guess Mary Pratt just had him listed as her emergency contact for no reason, huh Charles? Must have been some other Charles Albright, I guess. At one point they were transporting him from the interrogation room to a cell, and he caught sight of his softball buddy, Dr. Irv Stone, the head of the Forensic Science Department of Dallas County. Charlie's eyes lit up.

Hey, Irv, he said, give me a hug. What? Dr. Stone couldn't believe it. He was like, yeah, I'm going to pass, Charlie. And he thought back to an interaction he'd had with Charlie once at a softball game. Apparently, under the impression that Dr. Stone was an MD, which he wasn't, he said, my superorbital foreman's been bothering me. Dr. Stone was like, you're what now?

And Charlie ran his finger around his eye socket. It's like this part, the ridge here where the ophthalmic divvents. vision of the trigeminal nerve connects to the eyebrow, it's really been hurting. Whoa. Dr. Stone was a forensics guy, not a medical doctor, an ME. So he had no idea what my dude was talking about. And Charlie got all salty about it later with true crime writer Skip Hollinsworth. He was like, I was really surprised he didn't know his anatomy.

Okay, he doesn't need to know his anatomy, dipshit. His job is fingerprints and DNA and shit. But this is really interesting because I'm betting if you, lined up a hundred random people off the street and asked him where their trigiminal nerve is. Not one of them is going to have the faintest idea what the hell you're on about. But Charlie obviously knew his eyeball architecture. Interesting. Very, yes.

I think he got a lot of pleasure in being the smartest guy in the room. He clearly said it so he could feel superior to someone he felt was better than him, which is just pathetic, Charlie. Yeah, that's sad. So as Charlie sat in jail with the attempted murder charge for the attack on Veronica Rodriguez and the assault charge on Brenda White, investigators searched the ever-loving shit out of his house and all the rental properties they could find in his name. They tore it up. One of the things they did was take the bag from his vacuum cleaner. The CSIs had found a strange hair on Shirley Williams's body. They could tell it was an animal hair, but they weren't sure what kind.

Ended up having to send it to some specialists who eventually sent were that it came from a squirrel's tail. Now, that's not something you see every day, but get this. When they went through the vacuum bag they'd taken from Charlie's house, guess what they found in there? Squirrel hairs, campers. Huh. Now, most of us, you vacuum our houses, you ain't going to find squirrel hair one.

It's just not the kind of thing we typically have in our houses, but of course, most of us aren't taxidermists. This was red-hot physical evidence. They also found some gray hairs consistent with Charlie's. on two of the three victims' bodies and some hair matching Shirley Williams'es in the vacuum cleaner bag. Now, hair isn't definitive evidence. Unless you've got a bulb and can do a DNA test, all you can really do is say that the hairs

are consistent. But add that to the mounting pile of circumstantial stuff, and Charlie Albright was looking royally boned. It was enough to charge him with Shirley Williams' murder. The only one he'd ever be tried for at the end of the day, the only case they felt they had enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And as if Regina Smith and John Matthews hadn't already done enough for the homicide detectives on this case, they had yet one more gift to bestow.

They found a woman named Tina Connolly, who told him that Charlie was one of her regular clients. Usually she saw him in the afternoon, but there was one exception. The one night she spotted him at night was the night Shirley Williams was murdered. Tina took officer Smith and Matthews to the field where she and Charlie used to go for their trists, and there, lying in the grass, was a yellow raincoat. Just like the one Shirley Williams was wearing the last time anybody saw her alive. Whoa. Holy shitballs, what a fine.

And it actually did turn out to be hers. They found a blanket on the ground, too. And when they sent both pieces of evidence to the lab, guess what they found? Little strands of Charlie Albright's hair. Well, well, well. Charlie didn't take the stand at his trial. He let his defense attorney speak for him, and they had a few. fairly good foundation to build on. The case was largely circumstantial. Hair evidence isn't strong

enough to overcome reasonable doubts what they were asserting anyway. The killer was probably that weirdo, Axton Schindler, etc. All of which is pretty fair. I mean, Schindler was an odd duck, and he mysteriously disappeared the week the trial started. He never admitted to being the one who rescued Veronica Rodriguez the night of Mary Pratt's murder. His story was that some dude named Joe and just brought her to his house that night. All he did was let her come in. She's just the weirdest. This guy Joe brought her over. Like, why are you talking?

That's the weirdest story. Anyway, and Veronica, bless her heart, had flipped by now and decided to testify for the defense, which I suspect she did just because she was scared out of her mind. She claimed she'd never been with Charles Albright, and that Detective Westphalen bullied her into picking out his picture from the lineup. And I think the reason why she was so scared is because the general buzz at the time was that this was a really weak case. So I think people were really doubtful that he was going to get convicted.

And I think she felt like if I rat this guy out, he's going to come after me, which is a reasonable fear. So here was the problem with all of that, though. The prosecution paraded a whole string of sex workers in front of the jury, and by a string, I mean literally like dozens of women. All of whom knew Charlie Albright, said he was irregular, but not one of whom knew Axton Schindler from Adams. ass cheat. Never seen the guy. And nobody who'd ever met Axton's Speedy Schindler could possibly look at that jury with a straight face and suggest that that man would have the surgical skill necessary to take out somebody's eyeball with such perfect precision. It was just a non-starter. And

on December 19th, 1991, our boy was convicted of Shirley Williams' murder. And poor Dixie just fell apart. She really thought he was innocent, which is really sad. And it's funny, his defense attorney at the time was like, this has been a miscarriage of justice, he was crestfallen, like this is an innocent man. Later, though, years later, I think

after Charlie had passed away in prison, he was singing a little bit of a different tune. And I think the way he put it in an interview was he may have been the Texas eyeball killer. You know, he wasn't saying, oh, he was definitely innocent. He was kind of like, well, he might have been

guilty. And he had quite a story to tell. And he had quite a story to tell about one time when for some reason he brought his wife to meet Charles in jail, like while they were preparing for trial. And Charles Albright looked right at this defense attorney's wife. And I swear to God, his first words to her were, oh, you have beautiful eyes. Oh, my God. Charlie. What the hell, man. No. And the defense attorney was like, oh, geez. That was his quote. Oh, geez. Like, oh, oh, crap. Oh, no. Oh, no.

It's like he couldn't help himself. God. How did he think that was a good idea to say that to his whole year's a wife? If I were the defense attorney, I would have dropped his ass right then and there. Like, honey, get in the car. We're leaving. From behind bars, Charles Albright denied his guilt until his dying breath. Last year, in fact, at age 87.

Really chaps my ass how often evil pieces of shit like him get to live to be super old. As just about every killer on the planet does these days, Charlie has his supporters, people who think maybe he was railroaded and Axton Schindler was the real killer. I don't buy that for a hot second. Yeah, me either. I think Charlie was a man of masks. So totally controlled, 99% of the time, but with that smoldering white-hot rage that most of these guys have, buried deep, deep down underneath all those layers of pretense.

When the murder started in 1990, he'd recently lost both his parents, and he was having financial problems. Now, profilers call those precipitating stressors, and if you look at most serial killers, you're going to see stuff just like that crop up right before the killing begins. Yep. I think he worked hard to cultivate his image as a renaissance man. The kind of man mother would approve of. But it wasn't who he was, and that pressure got to be too much. A note, by the way, about Charlie's biological mom, the one he told his softball friends was a quote-unquote prostitute. After his arrest, investigators discovered that he'd actually tracked her down years earlier.

She was a nurse in Wichita Falls. He'd visited her a bunch of times, brought her presence, told people he was happy to meet her. So, what the fuck? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Skip Hollinsworth writes about the idea of the Madonna Hoare dichotomy. We talked about that a little bit in part one. and that idea that, you know, some women are flawless saints and some are disgusting horrors and there's no in between and that the horrors deserve to be punished.

And I think there's probably a lot to that. And I definitely think he had some complicated Norman Batesian feelings about his mom, obviously, you know, love, hate. And if you add to that an inability to feel genuine empathy for other people and being completely allergic to following society's rules as we know he was because he had years and years of fraud and theft and sexual abuse of that little girl. And, you know, we know criminal versatility is a hallmark of psychopathy. So you've got all that and then a growing rage at not being able to be his real self. And I don't know, maybe it's just

as simple as that. And there's definitely something to the way he left his victims displayed in the most degrading way possible in public, residential places where God and everybody could see them. I mean, that's not only hostile towards the victims, it's hostile towards the whole community. Yeah, definitely. I mean, he's a scary guy, and I think he would have kept on killing and probably would have escalated quite a bit. And if you think about it, I mean, they talk about a cooling off period for serial killers. There was only one month cooling off period between that second and third murder. So if it had gotten any worse, we would have had him killing, what, one person a week, something like that.

think it could have gotten a lot worse. And there was actually one other murder that he was suspected of committing. In fact, in some of the sources that you see on this case, it'll say he killed four women instead of three. But there is some debate about whether it was him or not. And if I remember correctly, that's because the eyes weren't cut out. So I'm not sure if I buy it as, you know, an Albright victim or not. Speaking of which, one thing that is going to forever haunt me about this case, and I almost don't even want to bring it up. but what did he do with the eyes, y'all?

They never found him. I mean, did he just stash him somewhere and the police just never happened to find him? Maybe he had properties we didn't know about. I have a hard time imagining he just threw them away because they were so important to him. So I just hope to God it wasn't something horrible, like eating them or something,

which doesn't really seem to fit him, in my opinion, but like, it haunts me. Generally, cannibalistic tendencies start earlier in life than when Charlie started killing. But, I mean, even in the best of conditions, eyeballs aren't exactly shelf stable. Like, they can keep. They have been kept. But if Charlie didn't perfectly preserve them, they'd have degraded in a few months. And I'm wondering if that was part of his pattern, if he would see the victim's eyeballs losing shape or clouding over and he'd be compelled to kill again.

Oh, my God. So that could have been part of the impetus. Maybe that's why the cooling off period was so short. That's fucking terrifying. Anyway, so a little post script, by the way, about Officer Regina Smith. Now, she was married to another police officer, senior corporal Norm Smith. And in 2009, sadly, Norm was killed in the line of duty. He was serving a warrant and he got shot to death. And a few years later, Regina started a music company in his honor. Apparently, she has some talent as a rapper. under the name, get ready for this, Lucille Baller. So good. Freckin' hats off. That's an awesome name. And she wrote a rap song about her husband's death. And she posted a video of her performing it on her website, and Dallas PD decided this was degrading to the badge, and they suspended her.

Apparently, she was, quote, dressed provocatively in holding her service weapon. Now, I haven't seen this video, okay? Because it got taken down shortly after all this cruffle in the news, but I kind of feel like this is some bullshit. To be honest with you. I mean, this lady was instrumental in catching one of the biggest serial killers in U.S. history. She loses her husband in the line of duty. She serves with distinction in the Dallas PD for 25 years.

And this is what y'all do? Really? Because she's trying to express herself about her husband's death. That's just some BS, if he asked me. And also, by the way, the poor lady got robbed at her husband's grave in 2013. Like she had left her car parked and, like, her car got broken into it. Like, for God's sakes. So, Regina, if you're listening, you know, we think you're the bee's knees.

And we're sorry, you got treated like that. And if you were not the smart, capable lady you are, Charlie Albright would have kept right on killing for God knows how long. I mean, I really credit her with the lion's share of the credit for this case. Absolutely. Because she was smart because she had relationships with those women in that neighborhood. She listened and she remembered details. And she followed her hunches. And look where she got us.

So that was a wild one, right campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Deborah, Ciarra, Dylan, Kim, Allison, and Amy. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And y'all, if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes two,

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