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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How, the principal would later ask, was anyone supposed to know that the promising young teacher had forged all of his transcripts? He was simply flabbergasted when an ETSU official told him that Albright had never even earned a bachelor’s degree. Everything – his degrees, his teacher’s certificate – had been faked. Apparently, he had slipped into three different offices at East Texas State, grabbed all the necessary forms, copied them, added his name, forged signatures, and then sneaked them back into the files. He had even stolen the registrar’s typewriter so the typeface on his records would look the same. Had an ETSU administrator not realized that he had never met the Charles Albright whose name kept popping up on the school’s list of graduate students, Albright would have gotten away with the scam.
When Albright was confronted, he grinned ruefully and admitted to the crime. He needed to bend the rules a little, he explained, in order to get a teaching job. After he quit Arkansas State Teacher’s College – well, okay, he was kicked out for being caught down at the train station with suitcases full of stolen school property, including his own football coach’s 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, Bettye, and she had given birth to their daughter. Frankly, he didn’t have time to begin all over at a university. It was a crying shame, he said. If only he could have finished his degree, there was a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who would have hired him to do biology research.
Because the forgery was a victimless crime – and because Albright himself, according to one ETSU administrator, was such a nice, repentant fellow – the university decided to keep the transcript scandal out of the newspapers. It was embarrassing, after all, that a school could get bamboozled. Albright pleaded guilty to a fraud charge and received a year’s probation.
As the seventies began, Albright was back in his old Dallas neighborhood with his wife and daughter, living in a house not far from his parents’ home. Once again, no one had any idea of what he had done. The Charlie Albright the neighbors knew was a happy-go-lucky figure who could master anything but simply didn’t care about settling down in a nine-to-five job. He had some money from his parents, and his wife had a job as a high school English teacher. He was free to latch on to one new project after another; he rarely had a job that lasted longer than three months. He worked as a designer for a company that built airplanes. He worked as an illustrator for a patent company. He was a well-regarded carpenter. He collected wine bottles from the famous Il Sorrento restaurant in Dallas, hoping to start his own winery. He bought a lathe and made baseball bats. He collected old movie posters. He regularly went to the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel to get autographs from the stars performing there. On a lark, he went to a Mexican border town and became a bullfighter – “Señor Albright from Dallas,” the posters read.
Albright still had a Pied Piper-like ability to captivate people. After visiting a friend who worked at the beauty salon in a Sanger Harris department store, Albright promptly went off to beauty school, got his beautician’s license, and then persuaded the salon to hire him, with no experience at all, as a stylist. Albright took to calling himself Mr. 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 also an accomplished artist, the friend paid him $250 to paint a picture of his wife. Albright was indeed a good painter; self-taught, he had won a prize at the Texas State Fair for his portrait of a dark-haired woman in a long green gown. His goal, he said, was to be like Dmitri Vail, the famous portrait artist of Dallas.
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 painting. 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 and remarkably realistic. The woman’s hair, her mouth, her nose, her ears, her neck – everything was finished. Well, not everything. The stylist stared curiously at his wife’s painting. In the center of his wife’s face were two round white holes.
After all this time, Albright hadn’t even begun working on the eyes. It was as if something held him back, as if he preferred the portrait to remain as it was on his living room easel. “Charles,” asked the friend, “when are you going to paint the eyes?”
“When I am ready to,” Albright replied.
Months later, Albright finally painted the eyes. He then painted them again, to get them just right. He painted the proper shadows under the eyelashes; he gave the eyelids just the right droop in the corners; he shaded the eyeballs to make them look perfectly round. When Albright was finished, his friend could not believe how well the painting had turned out. It was, he realized, a mesmerizing portrait – especially the eyes. His wife’s eyes were so perfectly recreated that they seemed to follow a person across the room
“There’s no question you love eyes,” I said.
“Well, I do want to paint fine eyes. That’s every other artist’s weakness – they can’t paint eyes.”
“Would you ever love eyes enough to –”
“No, no, I’ve never taken the eyes out of anything. I’ve never had the desire to. To me, what matters is what the eyeball looks like in the woman’s face, or the guy’s face – not what the eyeball itself would look like.”
“Could you figure why someone might want to keep the eyeballs? Would they want them as a sort of a souvenir?”
“I don’t think anybody would want to keep eyeballs. That would be the last thing I would want to keep out of a body. It would be a hand or a whole head, maybe, if you were a sick artist and you thought the woman was fabulous. You might not want to see that beauty go to waste.”
February 1991: Susan Peterson
The second victim was found on a 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 27. She had been shot in the head, chest, and stomach. Her eyelids were closed.
Because her body was discovered on the other end of the road, just outside the city limits, the jurisdiction for the case fell to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. A detective named Larry Oliver, who had not heard about the Pratt killing, was called to the scene. Eerily, the same scenario unfolded. Oliver accompanied the body to the autopsy room, where a pathologist began the standard external examination. The pathologist opened one eyelid, then the other. He motions for Oliver to come closer to the table. Oliver couldn’t believe what he was seeing: The dead woman’s eyes had been expertly cut out.
When the pathologist mentioned that the Dallas Police Department had had a similar case just two months earlier, Oliver did some checking. Within 24 hours he traveled to the police department’s homicide offices to see John Westphalen. Soon there were meetings with sergeants and lieutenants and with the chief in charge of homicide. While police officials deliberately avoided the phrase “serial killings” to describe what was happening – Westphalen kept referring to the killer as “a repeater” – everyone in the room knew what they were hunting for: a twisted, brilliant murderer, someone who dropped bodies on quiet residential streets, where they were certain to be found the next morning.
At that point, a contingent of detectives favored keeping a lid on the story. If the press discovered that the killings were linked and turned the spotlight on the Star Motel, the killer might 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 community that it might be in danger – even if it meant warning low-dollar hookers. Besides, publicizing the case might bring in some leads. Lord knows, there was little else to go on.
As flyers were posted around the Star asking prostitutes to stay off the streets, detectives met with the press to discuss the two killings. Although no information was officially divulged about the missing eyes, word quickly leaked to reporters that the women’s faces had been strangely mutilated. “The guy was almost surgical in the way he did it,” one detective told a reporter. To the police department’s dismay, a media frenzy ensued. The prostitute murders sent the city’s imagination into overdrive; calls came in from reporters all over the country.
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