Summer's Almost Over

We’ve had a heat advisory every day for weeks. It’s currently 100 degrees and the air is so still you can’t be sure if you’re breathing. Such are the humid summers of Texas and today’s serial killer was born in August of 1933 in Dallas.

Charlie was a precocious boy. His overprotective mother made sure he could speak French and Spanish, tap dance and play the piano, and was such an apt pupil that he skipped up two grades all before he was eleven years old.

Smart kid.

At eleven he begged his mother to play sports or race bikes with the other boys. But Delle was afraid her son would be hurt. Instead, she looked into correspondence classes and settled on one that would be a precursor to murder— the Northwesterner School of Taxidermy.

Charlie spent his evenings after school sitting in his room at a built-in desk working on dead birds with his mother. She demonstrated proper tool usage and showed him how to use the little spoon to scoop out the eyes. He was good at it, as he was with most things he tried, and learned to do the work on his own. But there was one problem. He needed glass eyes to finish each project. But Delle insisted they were too expensive and gave him buttons from her sewing kit instead. Displayed in their living room was his art - beautifully done except for the button eyes.

He graduated from Adamson High School at fifteen. By then he had set fire to his chemistry teacher’s dress, forged report cards, broken into a church, and stolen a watch from a store. Through all of this, he kept his reputation as a popular jokester. But right after he enrolled in North Texas State University in Denton, he was arrested as part of a student burglary ring. He explained to his mother and the authorities that he didn’t know the items were stolen. Other boys had asked him to keep them in his dorm. Neither the police nor the judge believed him and Charlie went to prison for a year.

Then at Arkansas State Teacher’s College, his pranks continued. Andrew, his roommate had a girlfriend that broke up with him. In anger, Andrew threw away all of her photos. Unbeknownst to him Charlie secreted them away. When Andrew’s new girlfriend provided him with new photos Charlie got an idea. He cut the eyes out of every picture and replaced them with the first girlfriend’s eyes.

Weird.

More things happen, but Charlie skates out of them without any legal consequences until he marries and moves back to Dallas. Even then he forged his transcripts and began teaching Science at Crandall High School. After the fraud was discovered he received a year’s probation.

By now Charlie and his college sweetheart Bettye were married and had a daughter. They had moved back into his old neighborhood down the street from his parents’ home. He was thought of as a highly educated, monied, and a gentleman.

When his parents passed he inherited a large sum of money and all their rental properties which he kept in his father’s name.

Then his mask slipped. Now divorced, at 51 he was convicted of “knowingly and intentionally engaging in deviate sexual intercourse” with a girl under the age of 14 and the family wanted it kept quiet. Since the Sex Offender Registry didn’t start in Texas until 1991 his luck held. He was sentenced to ten years probation.

Rhonda Bowie, a sex worker in Oak Cliff, was found dead in October of 1988. She had been stabbed 22 times.

In December of 1990 Mary Pratt, a known south Dallas prostitute, was found beaten and naked killed by a .44 bullet to the head. The odd thing about the body was that someone had removed her eyes so carefully that her eyelids were still in place. The killer had cut the six muscles holding each eye in its socket and the optical nerve. With the eyes closed you couldn’t tell the eyes were gone.

And then in February of 1991, Susan Peterson’s naked body was found on the same road in south Dallas as Mary Pratt. Beaten, shot, and her eyes removed with surgical precision.

In March of 1991, Shirley Williams’ body was found in much the same way, but on a different street. The eye removal had been hurried though and the tip of an X-Acto blade was left behind and she was left half a block from an elementary school.

Charlie had been using the excuse of delivering newspapers to be on the streets between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. where he would also visit the sex workers of south Dallas. An unknown woman called into the station to say that she had been a friend of Mary Pratt and one of her regulars was a man who was obsessed with eyes, She said he even told her that he kept X-Acto blades in the attic.

Brenda White, another sex worker, came forward about a man who picked her up and when she didn’t want to leave the area with him, became enraged and attacked her. She reported he had screamed about killing whores before she sprayed him in the face with mace and escaped. Both she and Veronica Rodriguez, who had been sexually assaulted, were able to identify Charles Albright as the perpetrator.

Charlie died in the John Montford Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock, Texas on August 22, 2020, without ever admitting guilt.

But what did he do with the eyes?

So lock your doors and remember that nothing good happens after 2 a.m., at least that’s what my momma always told me. Be safe and stay spooked.