See No Evil
How does a perfect gentleman become a vicious murderer? For Charles Albright, it all began with an obsession with eyes.
(Page 5 of 8)
As John Matthews and Regina Smith sat in their squad car reading the front-page newspaper stories about the prostitutes’ deaths, they too were shaken. These were women from their beat, women they were supposed to protect. They knew Susan Peterson: She used to be the most beautiful white prostitute in Oak Cliff. Although her five years on the street had taken their toll – her once-alluring smile had turned winter-hard and her body had grown plump – she was still able to put on her brown go-go boots and denim miniskirt and pick up ten to twelve tricks a night. And she was a fearless hooker. She threatened other prostitutes who tried to work too close to her corner. She even cursed Matthews and Smith when they tried to move her off Jefferson Boulevard. Like a good pickpocket, she was an expert at clipping a trick – stealing money from his billfold while he was having sex with her. If the killer could get Peterson, Matthews and Smith said, then he could get any of the women. They surmised that the killer knew every corner of the whore district, all the alleys and all the streets. He was able to pick up Peterson and vanish within seconds. He also must have been one of her regular customers. Otherwise she never would have let her guard down. Certainly she wouldn’t have allowed him to shoot her three times. She would have pulled out a razor and fought back.
This time when Matthews and Smith pulled up to the Star, the prostitutes didn’t keep their distance. They poured out of their rooms, surrounded the squad car, and began to pass on their own personal lists of suspects. The women talked about their kinkiest tricks, the men who wanted to tie them up or whip them. Smith made her usual impassioned speech, asking the girls to get off the street, but the black prostitutes, at least, were not buying it. “He’s after the white girls, honey, not us,” they said. Oddly enough, the black prostitutes saw the killings as an opportunity for them to get more business.
And then there was Veronica Rodriguez. Rodriguez had been telling a lot of people – reporters, other prostitutes, and Matthews and Smith, as well as other officers – any number of stories since the killings began. At first, she said she had witnessed Mary Pratt being shot. Then she said she had met a man who had only bragged about having killed Pratt. Then she said she knew nothing at all about Pratt’s death. About her own rape in the south Dallas field, she no longer said the killer was white; now he was Hispanic. Then she said he might have been black. Almost everyone who spoke with her thought she was “brain-fried” from drugs.
What bothered Matthews, however, was that Rodriguez had never changed her basic story about being attacked. Usually, she would forget whatever pity story she had told the day before. Did someone really try to kill her in that field? Could the man who supposedly saved her, Axton Schindler of 1035 Eldorado, know the killer too? Or could Schindler have something to do with the killing himself? Could it be that the real reason Rodriguez was changing her story was simply because she was afraid?
Matthews and Smith didn’t know what to do next. They had already told the homicide division that Rodriguez claimed to have information about Mary Pratt. They had mentioned the attack and the possible Axton Schindler connection. With that, they figured they had done their job; it would have been way out of line for the two young officers to cross into homicide’s territory and conduct a murder investigation on their own. Later, Westphalen would say that he never got the officers’ tips. Among all the phone calls, all the messages, all the reports flooding in, the name “Axton Schindler” never crossed his desk, he said.
Whatever the case, a potential break was slipping away – and the killer was preparing to strike again.
March 1985: Dark Secrets
The incident was kept very, very quiet. There would be no trial, no headlines. The district attorney had arranged for him to serve a probated sentence of ten years, which meant no jail time. Probation was fine with him – just as it was in 1971, when he was arrested for forging some cashier’s checks, and in 1979, when he was caught shoplifting two bottles of perfume. In 1980, when he was sent to prison for stealing a saw from a Handy Dan, he had to serve six months. But then, at least, his mother could tell everyone that he was leaving Dallas temporarily to take an important job at a nuclear power plant in Florida.
This case, however, was different. If the news got out, it could humiliate him. Not that he was guilty, he kept saying over and over. He had never touched that little girl. The girl’s family was just looking for a scapegoat – and they had picked him, Charlie Albright, one of the most dedicated members of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in East Dallas. He had first met the family in 1979, when he began singing in the church choir. People admired his voice, even if it was untrained. In one hushed service, he performed the tenor solo, “Comfort Ye My People,” from Handel’s Messiah. Soon he was acting as a Eucharistic minister, standing before the altar in a robe, reading Bible passages, helping with Communion – almost like an assistant priest, for goodness sake. He loved to help people; everyone knew that. The monsignor at St. Bernard’s called him Good Old Charlie. Albright was known to slip a $100 bill to someone who was down on his luck. After he met the little girl’s family, he brought them a big box of steaks. He dressed up as Santa Claus and gave the girl and her siblings presents. Did anyone seriously believe he would sneak into her bedroom and molest her?
The girl’s parents tried to keep the matter quiet – especially at the church – because they did not want to stigmatize their daughter. But they also wanted Good Old Charlie to pay. Albright worried that if he fought them, the story would leak. So on March 25, 1985, in a nearly empty Dallas courtroom, he stood before a judge and confessed to “knowingly and intentionally engaging in deviate sexual intercourse” with a girl under the age of 14. He was 51.
For the first time, Charles Albright’s mask seemingly had slipped. Was there, on the other side of his gentlemanly Jekyll-like personality, a kind of sexually perverted Hyde? Women who heard the story couldn’t believe it. After Albright dissolved what he called his loveless marriage to Bettye in 1975, 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 music boxes and candy. To one woman, he recited from memory all 42 verses of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” by John Keats. To another, he gave a slew of presents, along with a fully decorated Christmas tree. Women found him virile and sexy; one said he could do six hundred pushups without stopping. Yet Albright never made a sexual advance toward a woman until she asked him to first – at least that’s what he proudly told his friends.
In late 1985, Albright fell in love with Dixie Austin, a pretty, shy widow whom he had met on a trip to Arkansas. It was one of the most romantic times of his life. At dinner, he charmed Dixie with stories about nature and art. He showed her the autographs he had collected from Ronald Reagan, Marlene Dietrich, and Bob Hope. He took her hunting in the country for salamanders. His dream, he told her, was to find a new species of salamander that could be named after him. Sex with Albright, Dixie later said, was gentle and satisfying. He never talked dirty to her, and he 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, Charles Albright had already created another life for himself. Although he masterfully hid his secret from everyone who knew him, he was a veteran of red-light districts all over Dallas. To some prostitutes, he was a whoremonger – a regular trick. To others, like Susan Peterson, he was even a sugar daddy. At Ranger Bail Bonds, the company she used to bail her out of jail, Peterson listed Charles Albright as her cosigner on bond applications. On one form, she listed him as her best friend in the event that she skipped town and the bondsmen had to hunt her down.
There is also evidence that Albright was a friend of Mary Pratt’s long before she became a prostitute. In the early eighties, Mary lived in a south Dallas neighborhood where Albright’s parents had long ago invested in cheap rental property. 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 and Pratt over to his house for parties.
Other prostitutes say that when Pratt started turning tricks at the Star, Albright became one of her customers. Pratt told them that “Old Man Albright” was a good trick, willing to pay a little more than the going rate. Soon Albright was making the rounds. With some of the girls, he had a platonic relationship. He would pick them up, talk to them, take them to get a hamburger, and drop them back off, never even attempting sex. With others, he had standing sexual appointments – always in the afternoons, when Dixie was at work as a sales clerk at a gift shop in Redbird Mall.
Every Friday afternoon, for instance, he had sex with a married woman who hit the streets after her husband had gone to work and her children were at school. Albright, whom she called Pappy, felt sorry for her, she said: “He was a sweet gentleman. If I ever needed extra money, I would call him and he would drop it off.” But the married woman said that by late 1987 she had to put an end to her dates with Albright because he began to get more and more aggressive. She said he asked her to beat him – “to spank him like a child.” Another prostitute, Edna Russell, remembered meeting Albright when her friend Susan Peterson asked her to do a “double.” She said she and Peterson went with Albright into a motel room. There, he handcuffed them to the bed and began hitting them with a belt and an extension cord, all the while shouting, “Scream, bitch! You know you like it!”
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