After He Killed Them, He Removed Their Eyes | World's Most Evil Killers | Forensic Files

[music playing] NARRATOR: In December 1990, 33-year-old sex worker Mary Pratt was discovered murdered in Dallas, Texas.
Homicide was rife in the city at the time. But there was one thing about Mary's murder
that stood out from the rest. The eyes had been removed, and not just removed, not just gouged out
in like, some violent attack. The eyes had been surgically removed. NARRATOR: Two more victims followed.
Both Susan Peterson and Shirley Williams also had their eyeballs removed. It was becoming more and more likely that a man was
hunting sex workers, killing them and eerily collecting their eyes. After Shirley Williams was killed,
Dallas knew that they had a serial killer on their hands. NARRATOR: Evidence would lead detectives
to the door of 57-year-old career criminal Charles Albright, a man with a talent for taxidermy.
So he had those skills. And in fact, the medical examiner said he's getting better every time he does.
NARRATOR: Charles Albright had been exposed as one of the world's most evil killers.
[dramatic music] In December 1990, the body of a sex worker was found mutilated on the streets of Dallas.
Not only had her eyes been removed, they were never found, leaving investigators
to wonder if the killer had kept them as a sadistic trophy. The Eyeball Killer was only just getting started.
And over the next three months, two more victims were found in similar circumstances.
Women from the sex-working community feared for their lives, wondering if they might be next.
Police officer John Matthews worked the beat that included Dallas's red light district.
JOHN MATTHEWS: One of the things in law enforcement is, you get to know everyone on your beat--
the good people and the criminals. And we figured we probably had a serial killer,
and if we didn't catch him, more bodies were going to turn up. It changed the entire mood on the street.
The girls now became terrified. They now knew that they were the prey, that a hunter was out there looking for them,
wanting to kill them. And they were terrified at not only being murdered, but it losing their eyes.
NARRATOR: Prosecutor Toby Shook had the difficult task of trying to convict Albright.
Albright is an intriguing individual. But when you think about his crime it's, you know,
very frightening that someone could, in a cold-blooded way, pick out their victims up, murder them,
and then mutilate the bodies in that way. JOHN MATTHEWS: I'm in my 38th year of law enforcement now.
And I've seen just about everything that you can see. But that case, the-- how terrible it was, how horrific it was,
how high profile it was, really is probably, the biggest case of my career, and one that I'm
never, ever going to forget. NARRATOR: This killer's story begins in Amarillo, Texas.
Charles Albright was born on the 10th of August 1933, and was almost immediately given up for adoption
by his birth parents. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Albright was adopted when he was just a few weeks old.
And this was during the 1930s, so the period of the Great Depression. So him being adopted by a relatively nice,
middle-class family was something that would have been seen as quite fortunate for him.
He's now given an opportunity in life that he perhaps, wouldn't have had otherwise.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: The couple that adopted him were Dell and Fred Albright. No children of their own.
We don't know his birth mother's name, indeed, we know very little about her. But what we do know is that Dell was an exceptionally
overprotective mother. She spoiled, fussed over, mollycoddled her adopted son from a very, very early age.
NARRATOR: Growing up in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, Charles excelled at school.
And his mother soon found an interesting hobby for her son. TOBY SHOOK: So one of the things she got him involved
in at an early age was taxidermy, and had him enter some courses. And he learned how to take small animals,
like birds and squirrels and raccoons, and actually mount them. BRANDON BIRMINGHAM: They would go to the taxidermy store
there in Oak Cliff. And the one thing that Albright's mother never bought for him though were these beautiful marble eyes.
They were just too expensive. So if you were to go to Charlie Albright's house when he was growing up, you would
see different animals that he had mounted and stuffed. But instead of marble eyes, he would have these Black buttons
sewn on them. NARRATOR: During his teenage years, Albright was a popular classmate who would often
play tricks on his teachers. But there was a darker side to some of his antics. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: As a youngster,
Albright was a bit mischievous. He was a prankster at school. So he was always pushing the boundaries.
But as he gets older, he starts to engage in criminal behavior-- there's burglaries,
there's thefts, that kind of thing. GEOFFREY WANSELL: At the age of 17, he had his first real brush with the law.
It was a series of robberies. He was sentenced to two years in jail, but only served one.
But if anything, that encouraged him rather than discouraged him from petty crime.
NARRATOR: After his release in 1952, the 18-year-old enrolled at Arkansas State Teacher's College.
Albright remained a prankster, however, and some of his practical jokes took a more sinister turn.
TOBY SHOOK: So when he-- he was at school in college in Arkansas, his roommate was dating a beautiful girl.
And she broke up with him. And apparently, she had very pretty eyes. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Now, this friend gets the new girlfriend,
and what Albright does next is particularly strange. He cuts out the eyes from the picture of the old girlfriend
and puts them on the picture of the new girlfriend. So this is a very specific, very detailed thing for him to do.
And it really is quite chilling. NARRATOR: By 1969, Albright had been married, had a daughter,
but was separated from his wife. He'd dropped out of college after getting caught stealing.
But that didn't stop the 36-year-old from forging a diploma and finding a job as a biology teacher in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: That is Albright all over. I don't have to bother to actually do it.
I don't have to actually take the exams. I don't have to graduate. No, I'm going to fake it because I can,
because I can get away with it. And indeed he does. And he gets a job. NARRATOR: After being found to be a fraud,
Albright lost his teaching role and was given a year's probation. He bounced around from job to job,
but crime was still his major source of income. After spending six months in prison for theft in 1980,
his personal life would change dramatically. GEOFFREY WANSELL: In 1981, his mother, Dell,
dies suddenly of cancer, and everything changes. She was cooking supper and fell unconscious and died.
It was, in many ways, probably the most traumatic moment in Charles Albright's life.
If there was a watershed in Albright's story, that was it-- Dell's sudden death.
NARRATOR: Albright had lost the one constant in his life. He moved back into the family home with his father,
and appeared to be a pillar of the Oak Cliff community. GEOFFREY WANSELL: He went-- attended church regularly,
and he was incredibly popular in the neighborhood. The neighbors would ask him to babysit for them.
He was everybody's best friend. I think they used to call him "good old Charlie."
He was that reliable. You would have described him as the perfect neighbor if you'd happen to be living next door to him.
NARRATOR: But Charles Albright was far from the ideal neighbor. By 1985, an historic crime, which
didn't fit in with his usual type of offenses, finally caught up with the 51-year-old churchgoer.
ELIZABETH YARDLEY: The first sex crime that we know of occurred in February 1981,
where Albright sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl. And this was a girl who was known to him.
He had gotten to know this girl through her family through the church. And they trusted him.
The whole community trusted him because he'd done such a convincing job of playing
this role as the regular guy. NARRATOR: In March 1985, four years after the shocking crime,
Albright pleaded guilty to molesting the nine-year-old girl. Astonishingly, he was given just 10 years probation and ordered
to attend counseling. He served no time behind bars. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: So this is a relatively lenient sentence.
And I think this sends a message to him. It says that violence against girls and women
is something that's not taken particularly seriously. You can do this thing. You can get caught.
You can plead guilty, and you can get away with it. NARRATOR: By October 1990, 57-year-old Charles Albright
was living in the home he'd inherited from his adopted parents in El Dorado Avenue in Dallas, Texas.
He'd found work delivering newspapers for the "Dallas Times-Herald," which would have been full
of stories about the ever-increasing local crime rate. JOHN MATTHEWS: Early '90s, the late '80s in Dallas
was a very violent period. The crack cocaine epidemic was going on. We had gang warfare throughout the city.
Every day, we had car thefts, burglaries. We had armed robberies on the beat constantly.
And we had murder. NARRATOR: One of those murders occurred on the 13th of December 1990, when 33-year-old sex worker
Mary Pratt was found dead. TOBY SHOOK: Mary Pratt's body was found in the early morning
down in the Cotton Valley area. She was just displayed on her back with her arms out,
her shirt pulled up, and no other clothes on, and had been shot in the head. It didn't appear that the murder had happened there.
There was no struggle. There was no blood. It looked like the body had been dumped.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: Mary Lou Pratt was a very likeable young woman. In fact, I think the day she was killed
she was returning home to go to a funeral with her parents. She was well liked. NARRATOR: Mary had been shot with a 44-caliber revolver.
But when her body was found, there was seemingly nothing remarkable about her murder.
There were over 400 homicides in Dallas in 1990. And beat cop John Matthews had seen it all before.
JOHN MATTHEWS: Mary Pratt worked out of the Star Motel. She worked the Jefferson Boulevard area.
We had seen her on multiple occasions. She was quiet. She was shy. She got into drugs at a young age during high school,
and then turned to prostitution, like many of the girls did, to pay for her drug habit.
Prostitutes being murdered is not uncommon. Prostitutes disappearing is not uncommon.
They have a very vagrant lifestyle. And so one disappearing, or one being found dead,
really wasn't a very uncommon occurrence. It wasn't unusual at all. NARRATOR: But there was one thing considerably different
about the murder of Mary Pratt. TOBY SHOOK: The medical examiner began her autopsy examination.
JOHN MATTHEWS: And one of the things you have to do is open the eyes to check them.
And it was at that time that the diener was working on her, which is the assistant to the medical examiner,
that she noticed something very odd and called the medical examiner over and said,
she doesn't have any eyes. And the medical examiner said, no, no, no. She probably does.
But many times when there's blunt trauma to the head, the eyes fall back and you kind of just don't see them.
But when they opened up the sockets and did a further examination, they found something that absolutely horrified them,
something they had never, ever seen before, that the eyes had been removed. And not just removed, not just gouged out
in like, some violent attack, that the eyes had been surgically removed. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: So this would have
taken quite a period of time to do, and skill and expertise to do. But also, somebody who does this, isn't disgusted at having
to deal with a corpse, is perfectly OK in terms of spending time with that corpse
and mutilating it. So this shows somebody that really is incredibly cold, incredibly detached, and completely
lacks empathy for the victim. NARRATOR: Although the murder of Mary Pratt stood out from many others, the police had no leads.
JOHN MATTHEWS: After Mary's murder, you really didn't know who the killer was. We had very little details, very little clues.
And again, the biggest thing that struck everybody were the eyes being removed. Who could have the knowledge to do that?
NARRATOR: Around the same time as Mary's murder, another sex worker named Veronica
was attacked in Dallas. The 26-year-old lived to tell her story to John. JOHN MATTHEWS: She was known as Flaco on the street,
which is "skinny" in Spanish. And she was a very, very skinny, small, Hispanic female.
And Veronica came running up to me and started just, very animated and very excited
telling me about this horrific night of hers and this horrific experience. And she told us--
and she was covered with mud, and her hair was dirty and muddy-- and she said that someone attacked
her, that someone tried to kill her, that she barely got away. TOBY SHOOK: And she related this strange tale of being picked up
by this white guy and taking-- tied up and taken to this location down south. And what she described was the Cotton Valley area.
That he drugged her, had her over his shoulder. JOHN MATTHEWS: She wasn't sure where it was.
But there were lots of open fields and lots of trees and that her attacker had chased her,
said he was gonna kill her, had fired a gun into the air. But it was dark. It was in the middle of the night.
She was absolutely terrified. She thought she was going to die that night. NARRATOR: Veronica told John that she
was rescued by one of her regulars, a man named Axton Schindler. By chance, a few days later, John was on patrol
and happened to pull Axton over. Veronica was with him. JOHN MATTHEWS: I got his driver's
license, got him out of the truck, found out who he was, ID'd him. But Veronica again, kept telling this detail.
And she said, he's the one that helped me escape, and that he's the one that brought me back here.
And when we questioned him about it, he wouldn't give us any details. He wouldn't give us any information.
I don't know what she's talking about. But I believed her story and that over the next week's
and months, she would repeat that story over and over again with the same precise details.
NARRATOR: Schindler's driving license listed his address as El Dorado Avenue. But he was no longer living there.
He was, in fact, renting a different property from the home owner, Charles Albright.
Albright was living in the house on El Dorado Avenue, with his long-term girlfriend, Dixie.
And behind the scenes, he appeared to be the perfect partner. TOBY SHOOK: She was a very sweet lady, but very naive.
People that knew her-- she thought Charlie was nice, and he would drop her off to work in the mornings
and pick her up at night. And then, she just thought he stayed at home. While he was this loving, sweet man to her that
gave her little gifts and surprised her at work with little acts of kindness, while she was working
or asleep, he was out doing something he shouldn't have been doing. NARRATOR: Albright's job of delivering newspapers
in the early hours of the morning allowed him to partake in his latest hobby. By this point, Albright is indulging his appetite
for sex workers in Dallas, while at the same time professing his delight in the company of Dixie.
On the surface, a man you can absolutely trust, and yet in reality, you can't trust at all.
NARRATOR: In February 1991, another sex worker was found dead on the streets of Dallas.
27-year-old Susan Peterson had been shot three times with a 32-caliber gun and left on the same road
where Mary Pratt's body had been discovered two months earlier. JOHN MATTHEWS: She again, disappeared
just like Mary had disappeared. And like Mary, Susan was found about 20 minutes away
at the very Southern edge of Dallas. She, too, was found by a citizen in the street.
She was also posed, her arms raised above her head, left for anyone passing by to see her.
NARRATOR: And there was another chilling similarity between the murders of Susan
Peterson and Mary Pratt. BRANDON BIRMINGHAM: Once the body was taken to the medical examiner's office,
they did their autopsy again, starting with the external examination. And then they looked again, at the eyes,
as they do in all autopsies. And they noticed this was the second time the eyes had been removed from this victim as well.
JOHN MATTHEWS: Whoever the killer was not only knew what they were doing and how to remove the eyes post
mortem, but then they took them with them, possibly as souvenirs. So there were all kinds of theories.
Was it a doctor? Was it somebody with a medical background that would have the knowledge to not only kill the prostitute,
but to surgically remove her eyes and then take them as a prize? NARRATOR: Despite the eerie connection between the two
murders, homicide detectives were still no nearer to finding Mary and Susan's killer.
TOBY SHOOK: The police had no leads. You know, they collected the physical evidence,
but no one had seen these two victims with anybody at the time, which is not unusual for a prostitute.
They-- they walk the streets and have these quick interactions and get in cars with men, usually.
But they had no leads to deal with. After they found Susan Peterson, since they had a second victim,
start talking and warning the prostitutes about, hey, you need to be careful. There's someone out there after you.
NARRATOR: As fear amongst the sex workers on the streets of Dallas grew, the police
were faced with the realization that they were likely dealing with a serial killer.
JOHN MATTHEWS: Once Susan was discovered murdered, the entire investigation changed.
This wasn't a one-off prostitute that was killed maybe by an irate trick, right,
or somebody that just got mad. All of a sudden, we knew two women that worked the same area of North Oak Cliff on my beat
were picked up, were taken to a remote location. They were shot. They were killed.
They were posed on the street. And their eyes were surgically removed. It tied the two cases together.
We had somebody that was now working the streets, a hunter that was hunting down these women,
killing them, and then torturing them and removing their eyes. NARRATOR: An active serial killer
was on the loose and prowling the red light district of Dallas. But investigators were no nearer to catching him.
Any woman working the streets could be next. Dallas police officer John Matthews was working the beat,
trying to crack the case before another woman was killed. JOHN MATTHEWS: I had a little notebook
that I carried with me. And I made meticulous notes, just writing down any piece
of information that I could. And many times, I didn't even know if it was pertinent at the time.
I was trying to figure out who could the killer be, someone that knew the area extremely well, that had access
to the backstreets and the side alleys, that could maneuver in and out of the prostitutes
and the pimps. That had to be someone that really knew the streets well, someone that lived there, someone that grew up there,
someone that worked in the area. And all of this information was going into our-- a notebook.
BRANDON BIRMINGHAM: Every location of every murder will tell you something about who did it.
It's most likely that a person who was going to kill and dispose of a body is going to do that in an area that they're familiar with.
That's their comfort zone. It's very unlikely that a person is going to travel from a great distance away to a place they're totally
unfamiliar with in order to dispose of a body, because there's a great chance that they might get caught.
And if you're trying to get away with murder, the quickest way to go to prison for a really long time
is to get caught with the body. NARRATOR: The killer soon struck again. On the 19th of March 1991, the body of 37-year-old Shirley
Williams was found on a residential street in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. Like Mary and Susan, Shirley had been shot,
and her eyes had been removed. JOHN MATTHEWS: The attack on Shirley was totally different than the attack on Mary and on Susan.
Shirley was beaten very, very badly. She was stabbed multiple times. He had actually broken off an X-Acto knife
that we feel that he used to remove the girl's eyes in her cheekbone. And when we found her, the broken piece
of the X-Acto knife was still protruding from her cheek. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: The removal of Shirley's eyes
is something that-- that wasn't done as meticulously as he'd done in the previous cases.
So this is perhaps, a bit rushed. This is perhaps a little bit frantic. And I think there's a sense in which Shirley
has rattled him a little bit. There's something that's happened within the course
of this murder that he wasn't anticipating, you know, perhaps she's fought back with some real ferocity.
And it has really unsettled him. And we see that come out in the behavior. JOHN MATTHEWS: He then took Shirley.
He stripped her down. He drove her to a street in the middle of the Oak Cliff right down from an elementary school.
And he literally dumped her body in the middle of the street in-- in-- in just this horrific manner,
this naked female beaten, tortured, gunshot, left in the middle of the street so that the moms and kids
walking to the elementary school would find this horrific scene. NARRATOR: Shirley had become the third tragic victim of
the mysterious Eyeball Killer. TOBY SHOOK: She'd been a mom, but had fallen into the drug lifestyle.
She was last seen alive in the early morning hours of March 19. She was working outside the Avalon Hotel, which
was off Fort Worth Avenue. A friend of hers named Tina had seen her out working the Avalon with her.
And they had been talking. And the last she saw her, she was wearing a-- a yellow raincoat that she had given her.
NARRATOR: When Shirley's body was found, there was no yellow raincoat in sight. It was a glimmer of hope for investigators--
find the raincoat, and they may find the killer. But they knew they had to work fast.
JOHN MATTHEWS: The time frame in between murders was decreasing. That meant that he was probably spinning
out of control, that he was evolving, or maybe even devolving. And so for investigators, for the officers,
for us on the street, not only did we know that the girls were being hunted, but they were being hunted at a greater
frequency than before. And we really didn't know when the next body was gonna turn up.
BRANDON BIRMINGHAM: Dallas knew that they had a serial killer on their hands. They didn't have the-- sort of the tools that we have today.
So they had to go do what they call good old-fashioned police work. NARRATOR: Sensing sex workers were growing
fearful for their lives, officer John Matthews spoke to many women on his beat. And one of them, 37-year-old Brenda,
told him that she had a terrifying altercation with a man just days before the murder of Shirley Williams.
JOHN MATTHEWS: She was another long-term prostitute. I had known her for a very long time at this point.
Brenda was very open in exchanging information with us. She wanted to keep plying her trade.
She wanted her girls to keep plying her trade. And it was impacting them economically.
She told us a story about how someone had picked her up, someone in a station wagon,
an older, white male. TOBY SHOOK: She said that he pulled up and-- and wanted a date of prostitution.
So she got in the car. And she told him to go around the corner to a hotel she used.
And he said, no, I've got a place I'd like to go to. And she said, well, if you want to go to your place,
just turn around the corner and drop my tail off right here. He became very, very angry and started yelling at her
and said, "I hate you, whores." I want to kill all you whores." And she knew she was in trouble and then.
JOHN MATTHEWS: He attacked her in the car. Brenda, being very street smart, pulled
out Mace that she had inside her clothing, maced her attacker. So Brenda again, had a very dramatic story about being
attacked by this person. NARRATOR: Brenda's story reminded John of one he'd heard a few months previously, an attack
on 26-year-old Veronica. JOHN MATTHEWS: So now, we have Veronica's story and Brenda's story.
And that all ties in with that huge notebook of information that I was keeping to try to figure out,
who is this guy that is out on my beat, plying his trade and attacking these women?
NARRATOR: John revisited his notes on Axton Schindler, the man who Veronica claimed had saved her life.
Schindler wasn't living at his listed address, El Dorado Avenue. The registered homeowner was in fact,
a man named Charles Albright. BRANDON BIRMINGHAM: They did a little background, an investigation into Charles Albright.
Who was he? Where did he come from? Well, he had been arrested before, and that meant that police officers now had
mug shots of Charles Albright. NARRATOR: John Matthews presented Brenda with six
mug shots of different men. She immediately picked out 57-year-old convicted child
molester Charles Albright as her attacker. Meanwhile, another investigator arranged to meet with Veronica.
TOBY SHOOK: And when she saw Albright's photo, she freaked out completely, got very scared,
said I won't look at these. And he could tell by her reaction she recognized him.
And said, it's fine. And she said, no, he'll kill me. He'll kill me if I pick him.
And he said, no, no. Just turn the photo over. And she did, but she was terribly frightened by it all.
JOHN MATTHEWS: Then I thought, this is it. What are the chances that somebody owns property down
in the country where Veronica was attacked, where two bodies were found, property close to where
the girls were being picked up? And I just knew I'd found the murderer. NARRATOR: Convinced he'd cracked the case
of the mysterious Eyeball Killer, John decided to present his evidence to detectives.
JOHN MATTHEWS: I was a street cop. And very rarely in the history of serial killers in the United States is it
a street cop who investigates and finds a serial killer. So homicide was not very receptive.
They listened to me. I laid out the case and everything and said, listen, this is who it is.
And if we don't do something right now, there could be another killing tonight. They finally went to their chief.
The chief came out and said, we'll look into it. I said, no. We need to get a warrant.
We need to do it now. I mean, I'm 100% into this, and I will take the blame if it's the wrong person.
NARRATOR: At 2:30 AM on the 22nd of March 1991, a swarm of officers descended upon El Dorado Avenue.
JOHN MATTHEWS: We assembled a tactical team, went out there, and raided his house, used stun grenades
and literally blew him and his common-law wife out of their bed, and made the arrest of Dallas's
first serial killer. NARRATOR: Charles Albright was finally in custody. The killer who was so obsessed with eyes
gave nothing away in his own. JOHN MATTHEWS: Once we arrested him and placed him in the car,
I mean, he was totally stoic. He was absolutely emotionless. You'd think somebody would be upset.
You know, we're arresting you for multiple murders. We're arresting you for torture and mutilation and killing
women and taking their eyeballs. And he was absolutely stone cold quiet, stoic, calm.
It was really, really unnerving. TOBY SHOOK: And his only response was, "I really fucked up this time."
And they took him off to jail after that. NARRATOR: Investigators knew Albright was the man responsible for the attacks on Veronica and Brenda.
But if they were going to charge him with murder, they needed to gather the evidence
that proved he was the serial killer they'd been looking for. On the 22nd of March 1991, Charles Albright
had been arrested on suspicion of three murders. The 57-year-old denied that he was a killer.
And if investigators were going to charge Albright, they needed to gather the evidence to prove it.
JOHN MATTHEWS: After the arrest, there was still a tremendous amount of police work
that had to be done. And one of the most satisfying parts of the case was working with Toby Shook, the main prosecutor at the district
attorney's office. TOBY SHOOK: We felt that there had to be a lot more evidence out there.
And so it's obviously Albright, if he's killing prostitutes, he's going to be in contact with prostitutes.
JOHN MATTHEWS: And together, we worked for months putting the case together, getting
testimony from the girls. And again, the prostitutes, because of the relationship
that we had built with them, the information that we gathered, they were very forthcoming, telling us
about how Albright was a regular of theirs, many, many of the girls. We think that he was with a prostitute three, five times
a week, maybe more, that he often loved to hear them scream. He would pay them more to torture them.
He would pay them more to turn tricks if it was two or more of the girls. And so all of this information came out
in this post-arrest investigation, this very sordid and lurid story of this killer
who spent night after night with prostitutes, and during the day, was a con man.
NARRATOR: Background checks revealed that Albright wasn't just a suspected killer.
He'd also continued the lifestyle of theft that had defined him for decades. JOHN MATTHEWS: During the post-arrest investigation,
you know, lots of key pieces of evidence came out. We were really able to put the puzzle together
of where he got his money. We had figured out that he had assumed his dad's identity, that he was cashing his pension
checks and Social Security. So now we knew where the cash was coming from. NARRATOR: Investigators searched Albright's home
in El Dorado Avenue, for any clues to link him to the murders. They were looking for weapons.
They found a bunch of long rifles inside a hiding place inside his fireplace. But none of them wound up to be related to the crime.
He had lots of vehicles, about four or five, six different cars on the property.
They took blankets out of those vehicles. NARRATOR: As the man who'd helped uncover
the main suspect, John Matthews was tasked with going out on the beat and trying to find more women who'd
encountered Charles Albright. He spoke with Tina, who'd given Shirley Williams her yellow raincoat on the night that she was killed.
Albright had been one of Tina's regulars. JOHN MATTHEWS: Tina, one of the prostitutes
that we fully believe he was hunting the night of the third killing, told us that she
had been working with Shirley. Shirley was wearing the yellow raincoat. Where they were working on Fort Worth Avenue.
And really led us to the site where the raincoat was found out there on Fort Worth Avenue.
The raincoat that eventually had some of the hair evidence that we used to convict the killer, hair evidence that was
found on the raincoat and in the vacuum cleaner bag in the living room of Charles Albright's house.
TOBY SHOOK: And that became a significant part of our case, a lot of it was hair evidence.
Now, hair is not like DNA. The analysts will look, and he can look at the suspect's hair
and the hair recovered from the crime scene and see if it's the same type of hair, the same characteristics.
He can eliminate people, and he can say, no, this person, or he can say this person has the same exact characteristics.
He can't say, like DNA, it's that person. But what we had is multiple matches in this case with different pieces of evidence.
And the more matches we had made a stronger case. NARRATOR: It was the evidence that detectives
had been so desperate to find. They could now directly link Charles Albright to Shirley Williams.
TOBY SHOOK: He'd been indicted on three murders. But we were just trying him on Shirley Williams murder.
That was our strongest case. But the judge had ruled that we could get into the other two murders of Mary
Pratt and Susan Peterson. We linked him to those murders as well. And also, there was hair found on blankets
in his cars had the same characteristics of those two victims. So he was charged with murder.
And in Albright pled not guilty. NARRATOR: The trial began on the 13th of December 1991
in Dallas. Proving that Albright had killed Shirley Williams would be a tough task for prosecutor Toby Shook.
So the case was presented as a circumstantial evidence case. Told the jury, it's like a jigsaw puzzle, not one piece
of evidence alone is going to convince you of his guilt. You have to put them all together then stand back
and look at the whole picture. Yeah, one hair would be nothing, but the fact that there's
five found on Shirley Williams' body, the fact that they're found in his vacuum cleaner,
that they're found on a raincoat, that they're found on a blanket all adds up that the two
other prostitute's hairs were found on blankets in his vehicles, that the earrings were
found in the vacuum cleaner-- all that adds up. NARRATOR: The prosecution's main witnesses
were the Dallas sex workers who'd encountered and survived Charles Albright. TOBY SHOOK: The defense tried to say they're not credible.
They're drug addicts. They're prostitutes. And we worried about that. But in this case, they all came across
as very credible witnesses because they were talking about their life. They were talking about what they knew,
and they were talking about their friends. And it was obviously they weren't lying.
JOHN MATTHEWS: They went up there and they took the stand. And they were very open and honest.
And they say, I may be a prostitute, and I may have stolen, and I may be a convicted felon.
But the one thing that I can tell you is, I don't deserve to die. NARRATOR: Toby and his team also needed
to prove that Albright was capable of removing the eyeballs of another human being with clinical precision.
TOBY SHOOK: The way these eyes were removed was very significant. We called a Special Agent from the FBI.
And he told the jury that they'd check their database at the time these killings occurred,
and there was no mutilation like this. There was no eyeballs that had ever been removed in the years they'd been keeping track of it.
NARRATOR: Prosecutors had learned about Albright's past and his taxidermy experience.
As a child, he'd never been allowed the expensive marble eyeballs, and had to make do with buttons.
TOBY SHOOK: So he had those skills. And we had a physician from the eye bank come in
and testify how you remove the eyes. He said, if you were being careful, or removal medically,
it takes 15 minutes, but you can get it done at 10. In fact, the medical examiner said he's getting
better every time he does it. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: The removal of The eyes is the signature in this case.
This is what distinguishes him from other serial killers. The eyes are symbolic in so many different ways.
So they are the windows to somebody's soul. They're part of their identity. they're
part of their personality. And by taking that away from a victim, you are dehumanizing them.
You are devaluing them. There's also the fact that the eyes that he has kept and that he has taken out are the eyes that
have seen the real Albright. They've witnessed the man behind the veneer. They've seen the real monster.
So the fact that he wants to obtain these, he wants to hide them from other people,
I think that does speak to that undercurrent of shame that runs within him. NARRATOR: On the 18th of December 1991,
Charles Albright was found guilty of the murder of Shirley Williams. He was sentenced to life in prison.
JOHN MATTHEWS: I can remember after the conviction, going home and being kind of exhilarated, right?
We got the killer. And not only do we have him, we convicted him. You know, he's going to jail for the rest of his life.
And I was really happy about it. And my son came up to me. And he was about six years old at the time.
And he said, Daddy, why are you so happy? And I said, well, we convicted the bad man
that killed those girls. And he said, oh, that's really good. Were you able to bring the girls back?
Even though I was excited about getting a killer off the street, you know, my son really put it in perspective
because I wasn't able to bring the girls back and still had to live with that. NARRATOR: Charles Albright never confessed
to the murders of Shirley Williams, Mary Pratt, or Susan Peterson. In a May 1993 interview, he claimed,
"If I had decided to be a serial killer, I sure would have been a good one. You can ask anybody about anything I've ever done.
I tried to be the best at what I did." He died in August 2020 at the age of 87. JOHN MATTHEWS: The best way that I could describe
Charles Albright is pure evil. He had no empathy for those women. It was a game to him.
It was him, his power, and his control over them. And to kill another person is absolutely terrible.
But to kill them, to mutilate them, to surgically remove their eyes, and to keep the eyes
is your own personal prize-- I can't think of anything more horrific or more evil
than that type of killer. NARRATOR: Charles Albright's entire life revolved around crime.
He graduated from being a small time crook into a child molester, and then evolved into a serial killer.
Not only did he take the innocent lives of his victims, but he surgically removed their eyeballs, a horrific defilement
that undoubtedly makes Albright one of the world's most evil killers. [music playing]

Season 7, Episode 12

Charles Albright's entire life revolved around crime. He graduated from being a small-time crook, into a child-molester and then evolved into a serial killer. Not only did he take the innocent lives of his victims, but he removed their eyes, a horrific defilement that undoubtedly makes Albright, one of the world's most evil killers.

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Brief Summary

The Eyeball Killer, Charles Albright, murdered three sex workers in Dallas, surgically removing their eyes, leading to a chilling investigation.

Key points

The Eyeball Killer Emerges. In December 1990, the murder of Mary Pratt reveals a chilling pattern of eye removals.
Fear Grips Dallas Sex Workers. As the murders continue, sex workers live in terror of becoming the next victim.
Albright's Dark Past. Charles Albright's history reveals a troubling pattern of criminal behavior and deception.
The Eyeball Killer Strikes Again. Shirley Williams becomes the third victim of the Eyeball Killer, found brutally murdered.
Brenda's Terrifying Encounter. A sex worker recounts a near-fatal encounter with a man who threatened her life.
The Arrest of Charles Albright. Dallas's first serial killer is apprehended after a tactical raid on his home.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

They now knew that they were the prey.

John Matthews on the fear sex workers felt after the murders.

2:45WatchJan 26, 2023

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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