See No Evil
How does a perfect gentleman become a vicious murderer? For Charles Albright, it all began with an obsession with eyes.
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A police officer on the scene immediately recognized the woman as Mary Pratt, age 33, a veteran prostitute who worked the Star Motel in Oak Cliff. While it was not unusual for the “whores of Oak Cliff,” as the police called them, to get their share of beatings – almost nightly, a girl would complain about a trick “jumping bad” on her, punching her, kicking her, even trying to run her over with a car – for a whore to be murdered was unusual, especially when it happened to be someone as well liked as Mary Pratt. Mary wasn’t one of the brazen hookers who stood in the street and flagged down tricks. Because she rarely had any extra spending money – the money she got usually went for drugs – she never bought sexy clothes. Standing quietly on her corner she wore blue jeans, tennis shoes, and small T-shirts that showed off her breasts. Occasionally, at the end of a night, she asked one of her regulars to drive her to her parents’ home in the south Dallas suburb of Lancaster. Mary’s parents – older retired people – never knew about her other life. They would call out good night as she climbed into her childhood bed.
Pratt’s file was handed to John Westphalen, a short, ruddy-faced homicide detective at the Dallas Police Department. With his thick East Texas accent and a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco permanently packed in his cheek, Westphalen looked more like a rustic county sheriff than a street-smart urban cop. In homicide circles he was something of a character: Defense attorneys loved to complain about his blustery, intimidating interrogation tactics. But Westphalen was also one of the department’s most tenacious investigators. He took one look at the Pratt file and realized the case would depend more on good luck than on good detective work. Pratt’s killing was a “dumped body” case – one of the hardest types of murders to solve. She had obviously been killed in one location and dumped somewhere else. There were no witnesses to either the killing or the dumping, no murder weapon, little forensic evidence, no fingerprints, and no apparent motive. Considering the kind of felonious characters who nightly swing by the Star Motel, Mary Pratt could have been shot by just about anyone.
Accompanied by his partner, homicide detective Stan McNear, Westphalen drove to the Dallas County medical examiner’s office to watch the autopsy of Mary Pratt. It was a routine trip; both men knew the autopsy would show a gunshot wound as the cause of death. As Dr. Elizabeth Peacock, one of the staff’s younger pathologists, put down her coffee cup to begin the examination, Westphalen and McNear stood a short distance from the blue plastic cart where Pratt’s body lay. Peacock noted the needle tracks on Pratt’s arms, the Playboy bunny tattoo on her chest, the bullet hole in her head. She opened Pratt’s right eyelid. Then she opened the left.
“My god!” she exclaimed. “They’re gone!”
There were no eyeballs, no tissue – nothing. Mary Pratt’s eyes had been cut out and removed so carefully that her upper and lower eyelids were left undisturbed. Peacock was dumbfounded. This was not an operation taught in medical school. The killer had to know how to slip a knife around the eyes, making sure not to injure the adjoining skin, and then cut the six major muscles holding each eye in the socket, as well as the rope-tough optical nerve. With the eyelids shut, it was impossible to tell the eyes were missing. Surely, whoever did this had to have had a lot of practice on someone, or something, else.
Quickly Westphalen contacted the FBI’s Violent Crimes Apprehension Program unit. Through its computers, the FBI keeps data on the nation’s most unusual, depraved mutilations – bodies chopped up, organs removed, even eyes punctured with a knife as a result of a frenzied attack. But an FBI agent told Westphalen that he found no listing anywhere of such a surgically precise cutting.
Longtime Dallas cops take pride in acting utterly unaffected by anything that comes their way. But this time, Westphalen couldn’t help it.
“What kind of person,” he asked McNear, “would want a girl’s eyeballs?”
September 1952: Class Clown
When Charlie Albright transferred to Arkansas State Teacher’s College in Conway, Arkansas, it didn’t take him long to become one of the school’s most popular students. He was remarkably well rounded: president of the French club, business manager of the yearbook, member of the school choir, halfback on the football team. When he signed up for a drawing course, the art professor was so impressed with Charlie’s good looks that he made him the class model.
Yet Charlie wasn’t known as just a goody two-shoes. He was the all-American fraternity boy, a great college prankster. One time he sneaked into the home economics building, got a load of food out of the refrigerator, and cooked a steak dinner for his buddies. Another time, on a dare, he broke into a physics professor’s office in the middle of the day, picked the lock on his cabinet, stole what was known around school as “the unstealable physics test,” raced downtown to make a copy of it, and had the test back in its place within an hour. The professor, who was teaching a class next door, never suspected a thing.
Frankly, Charlie Albright had to feel some relief in being away from home. He was considered a very bright boy in Dallas – he graduated from Adamson High School at fifteen – and he was something of a celebrity. When Charlie was fourteen, Delle and Fred purchased a piece of property in their neighborhood and gave it to Charlie. Charlie sold it to buy more lots, and the Dallas Times Herald published a story about him under the headline WORLD’S YOUNGEST REAL ESTATE MAN AMASSING NEST EGG FOR COLLEGE. Yet 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. He had “accidentally” set fire to his chemistry teacher’s dress. And he had flunked a few courses because he was “too bored” to study. (Of course, if his mother had found out, he would never have heard the end of it. So he sneaked into the school office, filched some report cards from a desk, filled them in with all A’s, and proudly showed them to his parents – his teachers’ and principal’s signatures perfectly forged.)
It was minor stuff, really. It wasn’t like he went to jail. As Charlie himself would later explain, “I just didn’t know what I was doing. If anybody tells the truth, they will say I never did a mean thing in all my life. But I did a lot of mischievous things just to show off for the older kids.”
Well, there was the time he was caught breaking into a neighborhood church. Then there was the time he was caught breaking into a little store and stealing a watch. And there were the visits he and his mother received from Alfred Jones, a twenty-year-old psychology student working part-time as a Dallas County juvenile probation officer. But what did Jones know back then? And what right did Jones have to say, forty years later, when he was a well-known psychologist in Dallas, that of the dozens of juveniles he saw back in the forties, the one he remembered most clearly was Charlie Albright? “He could divorce reality sufficiently from his value system,” Jones said, “so that he could tell you something false and at the time actually believe he was telling you the truth.”
Maybe, one of Charlie’s relatives said, he pilfered things from stores because his mother was so stingy. Or maybe he just wanted to rebel against her. Granted, Delle Albright did whatever she could to keep a close watch on her son. 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 watched him so closely that he would joke about the way she drove “with her eyes on the rear-view mirror.” Charlie loved his mother – that much was clear. But there were little things that sometimes bothered him. He was never certain, for example, that his biological mother had been the brilliant law student that Delle claimed she was. He so hated Delle’s cooking that he would stuff his food on a ledge under the table or give it to his dog. Delle fussed over him so regularly, he said, that he began to get headaches. (Delle decided the headaches were from bad eyesight and promptly made Charles wear glasses, even though he had twenty-twenty vision.)
Yet Delle 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 and stole several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. Charlie swore he stole nothing. The other boys, he said, had asked him to keep some things in his dorm room for them. How was he to know the things were stolen?
Delle Albright went to the store owners and tried to reimburse them for what was taken. She tried to persuade the judge to let her act as Charlie’s lawyer. She even asked that she take his place in prison. Yet the boy went to prison for a year, spending his eighteenth birthday there. Delle, meanwhile, worked to keep the matter hushed up, so that no one in her neighborhood knew that Charlie Albright had become a convicted felon.
Arkansas State Teacher’s College was Charlie’s chance for a new start. As he told a probation officer, he was going to mend his ways. He began to date a lovely young English major, Bettye Hester, and made plans to marry her. He did truly brilliant work in science; although he hardly studied, he made an A in his human anatomy course. It was said around school that Charlie Albright was going to go far. He even talked about going to medical school and becoming a surgeon.
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