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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Immediately, Smith and Matthews tracked White down on her usual street corner and asked her if she recognized any of the men in the mug shots. White unhesitatingly pointed to Albright’s picture and said he was the man who had attacked her. A little while later, they showed the same lineup to Veronica Rodriguez. According to Matthews, when Rodriguez got to the third picture – Albright’s – she started trembling. Suddenly fearful, she refused to identify anyone. Matthews called Westphalen with the bad news. Rodriguez is so afraid of the killer, he said, that she won’t pick out his picture. “Bring her down here to see me,” Westphalen growled.
Westphalen knew if he could not get Rodriguez to break, he wouldn’t have the evidence to go after Charles Albright. Brenda White’s story offered only the prospect of a misdemeanor assault charge. But if Rodriguez identified Albright, the Dallas police could file charges for attempted murder, get a search warrant, and look through his house for evidence that might connect him to the three murders.
Smith and Matthews dragged Rodriguez downtown. In a small interrogation room, Westphalen stared with his icy blue eyes at the crack-addicted Rodriguez. Rodriguez began to shake again. Tears poured out of her eyes. She wouldn’t look at the pictures laid out before her. Trying to control his anger, Westphalen took a different tack. He told Rodriguez about the three girls, how they were brutally killer, how the police couldn’t get the killer off the street without her help. “This is so easy,” he said. “Pick out the picture of the guy who assaulted you, and we will get him and put him in jail, where he can’t hurt you.” Slowly, Rodriguez looked over the mug shots. While Westphalen and another officer watched, she reached for Albright’s photo, turned it over and signed her name.
At two-thirty in the morning on March 22, as a gentle rain fell on Oak Cliff, a team of tactical officers burst through the front door of 1035 Eldorado. Despite the home’s shabby exterior, the treasures of Charlie Albright’s eclectic life decorated room after room. One cabinet was filled with exotic champagne glasses, another held delicate expensive Lladro figurines of pretty young women. On one wall were Life magazine covers and valuable Marilyn Monroe movie posters.
As Charles Albright was handcuffed and led away, he never said a word. Stumbling out of bed in her nightgown, Dixie Austin looked incredulously at Albright and then back at the police. Unable to imagine what the man she loved could have done, she began to scream.
December 1991: Convicted
For a long time after Charles Albright’s arrest, most everyone involved in his case wondered whether the police had enough evidence to convict him of murder. Despite a withering all-night interrogation by Westphalen, Albright refused to confess to anything. He acted as if he had never heard the names of the murdered prostitutes. Police searched through every square inch of the south Dallas properties. They searched his Oak cliff house six times. The FBI even brought in a high-tech machine that could see through walls. Although the searches produced an array of interesting items – carpenters’ woodworking blades, X-Acto blades, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, at least a dozen true-crime books --- they never came up with the eyeballs. Behind Charlie’s hand-built fireplace mantel, police discovered a hidden compartment filled with pistols and rifles. None, however, turned out to be the murder weapon.
Nor could police find anyone who would admit to seeing Charlie with the three prostitutes on the nights they were killed. Dixie claimed that on the nights in question, Charlie did not leave the house early for his paper route and that he always came home on time. As the trial date arrived, Veronica Rodriguez decided to testify as a witness for the defense. She claimed that she and Albright had never been together and that Westphalen had coerced her into picking Albright’s photograph from the lineup. Axton Schindler continued to deny that he had saved Rodriguez from Albright. He said a Hispanic man named Joe had brought her to his door.
But Toby Shook, a low-key 33-year-old prosecutor working for the Dallas county district attorney’s office, had a trump card. For the first time in its history, the DA’s office was going for a murder conviction based solely on controversial hair evidence. Days after Albright’s arrest, the city’s forensic lab reported that hairs found on the bodies of the dead prostitutes were similar to hair samples taken from Albright’s head and pubic area. As evidence goes, hairs are not as conclusive as fingerprints – it’s impossible to tell how many other gray-haired men’s hairs might look similar to Albright’s hairs under a microscope – yet in this case, the lab kept running tests. Lab technicians said that hairs found on the blankets in the back of Albright’s pickup truck were similar to hair samples from the first two prostitutes killed, Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson. Hairs found in Albright’s vacuum cleaner matched the hair from the third prostitute killed, Shirley Williams.
An additional piece of the puzzle came from John Matthews and Regina Smith. The officers found a prostitute, Tina Connolly, who claimed that Albright was one of her regular afternoon customers on Fort Worth Boulevard. She never saw him cruise after dark, she said, except for one time – the night Shirley Williams disappeared. Connolly took Matthews and Smith to a secluded field near Fort Worth Boulevard where Albright used to take her for sex. There, they spotted a yellow raincoat, just like the one Williams was last seen wearing, and a blanket. Hairs on the coat and blanket matched Albright’s hair.
Albright’s defense attorney, Brad Lollar, tried to convince the jury that the case against Albright depended on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence. The killer, he said, was probably Axton Schindler, who just happened to skip town the week of the trial. Admittedly, the police had many unanswered questions about Schindler. Westphalen had spent hours interrogation him, trying to determine if he assisted Albright in the killings or was at least aware that Albright was murdering women on the rental property. But there was nothing to tie him to the case except for an empty .44-caliber bullet box found behind the house, which Albright might have dropped there himself. When Schindler’s and Albright’s photos were shown to dozens of prostitutes, none recognized Schindler, but many recognized Albright. Nor were there any hairs found on the dead prostitutes that could be linked to Schindler. Most important, no one who had ever met Axton Schindler could imagine he would have the slightest skill required to perfectly remove a set of human eyes.
Albright never testified. Throughout the trial, he sat quietly in his chair, his shoulders slumped, like a weak, humbled figure. Shook, in his closing argument, derisively called Albright “this former biology teacher, bullfighter, college ace, smart man who just can’t seem to have a job.” But Shook warned the jury not to underestimate Albright – that he had grown much smarter during this trial, that if he ever got out of jail, he wouldn’t make the same mistakes again.
On December 19, when the jury returned with a guilty verdict and a life sentence, Dixie collapsed in the courtroom. Albright’s friends avoided the reporters in the courthouse hallway; it was as if they did not want to be blamed for having lived with a vicious killer without recognizing him for what he was. But a stunned Brad Lollar, who genuinely thought he was going to get his client acquitted, strode tight-lipped out of the courtroom. “It’s always a miscarriage of justice,” he told the press, “when an innocent man is convicted.”
He was confident, he told me, that he would win his case on appeal. Another judge, he said, would see through the lies told at the first trial. He leaned forward in his chair and grinned optimistically. He couldn’t complain about prison life, he said. He was reading two books a week on the Civil War; he was taking notes for a book he wanted to write on the wives of Civil War generals. He was busy working as a carpenter in the prison woodworking shop, coaching the prison softball team, and writing letters to Dixie. He had just sent a request to Omni magazine for a back copy of its first issue because there was a painting on the cover that he liked. He grinned again and told terrifically funny stories about how crazy the other inmates acted. For a moment, it was hard for me to remember exactly what Charles Albright had been accused of doing.
But then I’d lock on the image of an eyeless young woman lying faceup on a neighborhood street. Why would such a kindly, lighthearted man want to cut out a prostitute’s eyes? Why was he so plagued by eyes, that potent and universal symbol, the windows to the soul? In the ancient myth, Oedipus tore out his own eyes after committing the transgression of sleeping with his mother. Did Charles Albright, a perverted Oedipus, tear out the eyes of women for committing the transgression of sleeping with men? Perhaps he removed their eyes out of some sudden need to show the world he could have been a great surgeon. Maybe he dumped that third body in front of the school to show his frustration over never having become a biology teacher. Or maybe a private demon had been lurking since his childhood, when the eyes were left off his little stuffed birds. Just as he long ago wanted to have a bagful of taxidermist’s eyes, maybe he decided to collect human eyes for himself.
“Oh, really, I have never touched an eyeball,” Albright declared again, for the first time becoming indignant with me. “I truly think – and this may sound farfetched – that the boys in the forensics lab cut out those eyes. I think the police said, ‘We want some sort of mutilation.’” Almost cheered by his reasoning, he returned to his psychologically impenetrable self. Whatever secrets he had would remain with him forever.
Weeks after that conversation, I remember Albright’s comment about wanting the first issue of Omni magazine. Intrigued, I went to look for it at the library. I opened a bound volume to the cover of the first issue, which was published in October 1978. There, staring out from the center of a dark page, was a solitary human eye, unmoored, as if floating in space. The eyelid slid down just to the top of the eyeball; the eyeball was lightly shaded; the eyelashes were curved like half-moons.
It was, I thought, exactly the kind of eye Charles Albright would wish he had painted. 
My Library
