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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But Charlie never stopped playing the role of class clown. Of all his great pranks, no one would forget the one he played on his friend Andrew (not his real name). In a fit of anger, Andrew had broken up with the most beautiful girl on campus, a woman with almond-shaped eyes. After the separation, he tore up several photographs of her and threw them in a trash can in his dorm room. Weeks later, Andrew got a new girlfriend and asked her for a photo. One night, while Andrew was staring at his new girlfriend’s picture, he realized that something was wrong. He looked closer. It seemed that her eyeballs had been cut out and replaced with – Good Lord! – the eyeballs of his old girlfriend. In disbelief, Andrew looked up at the ceiling. There staring down at him, was another pair of his old girlfriend’s eyeballs. More eyeballs were above the urinal in the 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 soon raced through school. That jokester Charlie Albright had pulled the old photographs out of the trash and saved her eyeballs for just the right moment. Did any of his fellow students, in retrospect, find the stunt a bit strange? Of course not, they said. It was pure Charlie. Who else could have been so inventive?
“Why do you think they eyeballs were missing?” I asked.
“I don’t understand either.” He sighed. “Why the eyeballs?”
“Well, what kind of person would be able to cut out the eyeballs of some hooker?”
“Someone who is sadistic? Just one mean son of a gun? I don’t know the purpose behind it, unless that person thought the women wouldn’t be able to see without their eyes in the next world – which is sort of ignorant.”
December 1990: A Clue
Because the police had not released any information about Mary Pratt’s missing eyeballs, her death had only warranted a two-paragraph story in the back sections of the local newspapers. In fact, when patrol officers John Matthews and Regina Smith began their daytime shift on December 13, just a few hours after Pratt’s body was found, they had not even heard about the crime.
Only two and a half months before, the two officers had been assigned to a newly created beat on Jefferson Boulevard that included Pratt’s streetwalking territory. Once the most popular shopping district in Oak Cliff, Jefferson had deteriorated over the previous 25 years, a victim of urban blight. Some storefronts were shuttered; others were barely profitable. The Texas Theater, infamous for being the site where Lee Harvey Oswald hid out after the Kennedy assassination, was padlocked. Matthews and Smith’s assignment was to provide a police presence for the area – to become acquainted with the merchants, shake a lot of hands, and crack down on small-time crime such as burglary, car theft, shoplifting, and prostitution. In police circles, it was far from a glamorous beat. Other officers used to the action of the streets, considered it more of a public relations position.
Each morning, Matthews and Smith began their day by cruising down Jefferson, herding the prostitutes back toward the Star Motel. On a busy day, about forty women – mostly black, some white, and a few Hispanic – worked the area, charging anywhere from $15 to $50 for a “flatback” (straight sex). The Star was not a high-class call girl operation; Matthews snidely called the forty-room motel “the prostitute condominium.” The women there, most of them drug addicts, would have sex in a customer’s car in a nearby alley or use a room shared with other prostitutes. Then, money in hand, they would walk down a well-worn dirt path to one of the nearby dope houses and purchase heroin or crack. After a quick hit, they would be out on the street again. Some hookers would work nonstop for two or three days – never changing their clothes, never even taking the time to eat – until they finally crashed back at the motel or in the house of their “sugar daddy” (a regular customer who cared for the woman enough to provide her with food, clothes, and a place to sleep).
Such a dreary scene did not faze Matthews, a stocky, no-nonsense 28-year-old; little on the streets did. The son of a patrol officer in New York State, he had grown up with cops-and-robbers stories. He had been with the Dallas Police Department since he was 21, when he went to work patrolling Harry Hines Boulevard, one of the city’s high crime and prostitution areas. On the other hand, when 31-year-old Regina Smith decided to become a police officer, she had never fired a gun, seen a dead person, or even been in a fight. She was a former supermarket cashier, a graduate of a two-year fashion merchandising college, and the single mother of a 6-year-old child. Nonetheless, inspired by a newspaper story about the need for more black female police officers, she entered the Dallas Police Academy in 1988. Her instructors berated her for wearing too much jewelry, mocked the way she shot a gun, and laughed when she couldn’t finish her push-ups, but she refused to quit. After graduation she was assigned to one of the rougher night shifts – and still she wouldn’t quit.
On the Jefferson beat, Smith discovered she had a knack for talking to prostitutes. She wanted to talk to them; she felt it was her duty as a police officer to try to improve people’s lives. “Tell me, girl,” she would say to a new prostitute, “what are you doing whoring out here? You know you can make more money working at Burger King than you do here.” She even started a “hook book,” a kind of photo album that contained the mug shots of the whores on the street. She would wistfully leaf through her hook book the way some people pore over their high school annuals.
On this particular morning, Smith was not surprised to see Veronica Rodriguez, a brazen charcoal-eyed prostitute who would try to flag down tricks even when she knew the cops were watching. Usually, when she spotted Matthews, she would lean forward so he could see her cleavage and say, “How ya doing, Officer?” Rodriguez, barely 26 years old, had lived a miserable life. She had been arrested for prostitution numerous times, once when she was nine months pregnant. Although that baby was stillborn, she was the mother of at least one child – a baby born on a raggedy bed in a whore motel down the road from the Star.
As Matthews pulled the squad car alongside Rodriguez, Smith rolled down her window. She noticed a nasty gash across Rodriguez’s forehead and what looked like a thin knife cut across the front of her neck. “Girl, what happened to you?” she asked. “Don’t arrest me,” Rodriguez gasped. “I almost got killed!”
Rodriguez told the officers that the previous night, she had been picked up by a trick, driven a long way south to a field, and raped. The man – a white man, she said – then tried to kill her, but she escaped and ran toward a house. 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 gave each other a look. Rodriguez was a notorious liar. No doubt she had been in some kind of fight, but in the middle of nowhere she ran right into the house of someone she knew? This was probably another of Rodriguez’s “pity stories,” which she often told the cops so they would feel sorry for her and leave her alone.
Yet two days later, on an afternoon drive past the Star, Matthews and Smith saw Rodriguez again. She was sitting with a balding middle-aged white man in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. While Matthews went to one side of the truck to get Rodriguez and escort her to 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 was Axton Schindler, of 1035 Eldorado. When Smith ran Schindler’s name through the computer, he came up clean, except for some unpaid traffic tickets. Suddenly, Rodriguez started shouting, “Oh, don’t arrest him! That’s the man who saved me from the killer! That’s him!”
The officers looked at the address again: 1035 Eldorado. It was not out in south Dallas, where Rodriguez’s attack allegedly took place. It was in an Oak Cliff neighborhood, just a five-minute drive from the Star. The man – a sort of nervous guy who spoke incredibly fast – said he had no idea what Rodriguez was talking about. He said he had known her for years and was just giving her a ride to the motel. He didn’t protect her from any killer. He didn’t even have sex with her. He was just a long-distance truck driver doing her a favor. Rodriguez, the officers decided, was lying once again. They carted her to jail for prostitution and hauled Schindler in for his unpaid tickets.
Although Matthews and Smith would not know it for months, a clue to the murderer’s identity had fallen right in their laps.
September 1969: Con Man
Charles Albright was 36 when he began teaching high school science in Crandall, a small town east of Dallas. The principal at Crandall, who had been looking for a teacher the entire summer, was ecstatic when the astute young man called him up right before the school year was to begin. According to his college records, Charles Albright had a master’s degree in biology from East Texas State University and was working on another master’s in counseling and guidance. He was also about to enter ETSU’s Ph.D. program in biology.
Albright’s students found him fascinating. On field trips, he could recite, in flawless Latin, the scientific name for every plant he came across; he could split open a rotted log and talk about each insect he found inside. He drove a green Corvette to school and wore lizard-skin shoes. (A few girls, smitten by his charm and masculine looks, wrote him love letters.) He even helped coach the football team. After a heroic play by one Crandall player won a game for the school, Albright lifted him up and carried him off the field.
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