Dallas in the early 90's was a booming city full of growth and prosperity in the south west but as every story has two sides, there was also a darker side to Dallas at this time. In 1991 there were over 500 homicides in the city of Dallas, their largest ever in a single year. As with most cities, there was one particular area of Dallas that was known for it's violent reputation, it was more seedy than the rest of the gleaming city and city officials at the time are believed to have been ashamed of the area, Oak Cliff, in the south of Dallas. It was a rundown area where the degenerates of Dallas seemed to flock to. During the day time hours prostitutes were seen commonly on the streets and as the sun set on Jefferson Boulevard, proceedings during the night did not get any more charming. Cops in the area monitored the area but the workers in the area were mainly known to police and many of them had drug problems which made it difficult to find help for them. Today we will be looking at three particular murders that took place in the Oak Cliff neighbourhood of Dallas in the early 90's and the man believed to be responsible for all three, even though he was only ever convicted of one, Charles Frederick Albright.
- Mary Lou Pratt - 13th December 1990
- Susan Beth Peterson - 10th February 1991
- Shirley Williams - 19th March 1991
Mary Lou Pratt was found in the early morning of December 13th 1990, she had been shot in the head and found partially nude with a gun shot would to the head. Her body had been dumped in a residential area and very little had been done to conceal the body of the 33 year old woman. Mary Lou had worked as a prostitute in the Oak Cliff are for a number of years and was known to police. She had grown up on Dallas and her family still resided in the Dallas area at the time of her murder. Unfortunately at the time, it was not unusual for prostitutes to be beaten and even killed by men they were conducting their business with. Police did not pay much particular attention to the murder until the medical examiner was taking a look at the body. When he pulled back her eyelids in order to note the colour of her eyes, he realised that they had been removed. Not only had they been removed but they had been taken very carefully, with very minimal damage to the surrounding area, leaving an almost surgical finish. This was different to the murders police were used to seeing, this murder had gone beyond the usual beating and killing of women. Examination of the scene did not turn up the missing eyes of Mary Lou Pratt and police realised that they were dealing with something grim and much darker to the usual cases they had at the time.
Police started to question other girls that worked on Jefferson Boulevard, where Mary had worked. It was unusual that her body had been dumped quite a distance from where she had been working. The girls would very rarely travel far from the boulevard as they felt safer if they stayed around the area, close to where they had friends and a pimp to call our for if they ran into any danger. Police interviewed another prostitute by the name of Veronica Rodriguez and when they noticed a gash on her throat she told them that she had almost been killed. Veronica claimed to have been with Mary on the night she was killed and that the two of them had been attacked by a man with greying hair, she had escaped while Mary had not. She ran barefoot and partially clothed and hid in a drainage pipe as the attacker called out for her. While Veronica did look as though she had been through an ordeal, she was thought to be an unreliable witness due to the fact she was a known drug user. She claimed to have escaped to a friend's house who went by the name of Axton Schindler.
Susan Beth Peterson was found on the same street as Mary Lou Pratt and had also worked the Oak Cliff red light district. When her body was found, just two months after Mary Lou, it had been partially stripped and she had been shot in the left breast and also in the head. Susan's body had been dumped further down the street than Mary Lou's, slightly closer to the city limits which put it into a different jurisdiction. Police instructed the medical examiner to immediately check the eyes, based on the area the body had been found. Once again police were disturbed to find that the eyeballs had been removed and this time a more grim feeling was felt among the police force as the same surgical precision had been used to carve the eyes of Susan and they came to the realisation that they now had a repeater on their hands. The mutilation of the girls went beyond murder.
Police had no option but to physically start walking the streets, warning the working girls in the area of what was happening. They urged girls to stay indoor and get off the streets. For many of the girls, the red light district was the only income they had and while they were in fear of what may happen to them, with crippling drug habits, many felt they had no option but to stay on the streets and keep working.
Shirley Williams was found by a waitress on March 19th 1991, one month after the body of Susan Beth Peterson had been discovered. Before the murder of Shirley, there was a panic among the working girls of Dallas and there was wide media coverage of the first two killings. Police were afraid that the vast coverage of the cases would create a sense of panic for the killer and possibly cause him to start changing his modus operandi. Police knew that if he stopped taking the eyes of the victims, due to lack of physical and DNA evidence in the first two cases, they might not ever get a conviction. The perpetrator did change his MO with the murder of Shirley Williams.
Shirley Williams also worked the red light district of Oak Cliff, she was a 45 year old woman but unlike the other two white females, Shirley was black. Her body was left completely nude and the beating to her face seemed to have escalated compared to the other two. The killer this time seems to have acted in a more frantic manner, the removal of the eyes had not been as precise and part of an Xacto blade had been left in the eye socket.
Charles Albright was born in 1933 and he was adopted by a couple from Texas, Delle and Fred. The couple stayed in Oak Cliff, Dallas with their new son and set about creating their perfect family. It is important to note that at this time, Oak Cliff was known as an up and coming new neighbourhood in the Dallas area. It was a place that young couples flocked to live in, just like the Albrights. Fred worked as a grocer and Delle worked as a school teacher though she became a stay at home mother after the adoption. She took great pride in teaching Charles beyond his usual school work and as a result, he skipped two grades and actually graduated from high school at only aged 15. Delle was very strict and insisted that her regime must be followed within the house. She was very concerned about his diet and of her son becoming sick, keeping goats in the yard so he could drink goat's milk rather than cow's milk. Delle is known to have been very overprotective of Charles and as he went through puberty he may have slightly rebelled against his mother's grasp on his life. He was picked up at aged 13 for petty theft and once again at aged 16 he was caught with some stolen cash and two handguns, for which he spent a year in jail. His parents allowed him to have a gun as a teenager and he routinely shot small animals like rabbits and squirrels. Delle, wanting to embrace (or possibly justify) her sons hobby introduced him to taxidermy. At aged 11, his mother enrolled him in an mail-order course where he would learn to pop an eyeball out of the socket without damaging the surrounding tissues.
Charles went on to study pre-med at college in Arkansas after his year in prison, where he also played half-back on the football team even though he's never played football. He was a good student and a great athlete. His year in prison seems to have had a major impact on his behaviour, he became president of the french club, editor of the year book, joins the student council. He was very involved in student life and appears to have been well liked by his fellow students and by academic staff also. While at college there, Charles cut out the eyes of photos belonging to his friend's ex girlfriend and placed the cut outs in strange places such as the ceiling and urinals where his friend would constantly be watch by the eyes of his ex. Charles seemed to think this was a very funny prank to play on his friend and Charles was known as a prankster.
However, he was thrown out of the college after he had been found with stolen items, the college however decided not to press charges and he was not prosecuted. Charles was unfazed by this and decided it was time to step up his career as a petty criminal and used the opportunity to falsify documents to claim he had actually graduated and was the holder of a degree. When he married his college girlfriend and she became pregnant with their daughter, he realised that he needed an income to support his family and started working as a teacher, using his false bachelor and master degrees to obtain the job. He worked as head of biology and coached the high school football team. However, when he was caught out he was placed on probation from work and he and his wife separated and eventually divorced.
After the divorce Charles found it increasingly difficult to hold down a job and regularly changed occupation, convinced that the next job would bring more satisfaction and meaning to his life. He was once again picked up for a theft involving a hardware store and served 6 months of a two year sentence. By 1981, Charles had become rather involved in a local catholic church, perhaps that last 6 months in prison had finally motivated him to change his ways. Although he was single, he would take interest in other families and children and he was even asked to babysit from time to time. He befriended the other families and they had a great deal of trust in him. On particular family allowed Charles to babysit their daughter who was 13 at the time but after talking to their daughter, they accused Charles Albright of molesting the young girl. The parents claimed they did not want to put their daughter through a trial but Charles pleaded guilty and was given a suspended sentence. He was placed on probation but as it was settled outside of court, news of the guilty Charles Albright was kept quiet and was never even reported in the media. To those who did not know the girl and family involved, Charles was the same good old Charlie as he always had been. A petty thief and fraud but nothing overly dark or menacing.
Charles Albright remained under the radar of police and he was even a member of an old age softball team alongside Irv Stone who was Head of The Dallas County Forensics Department. He claimed that Charles was a good character and if there was any kind of altercation or disagreement withing the team, Charles would most often be the first person to shy away from the confrontation. All agreed he was a welcome addition to the team. Charles met a woman from Arkansas named Dixie and the couple were living together. Dixie was a widow and thought the world of Charles, she would come home and he would recite poetry to her but Charles still found it difficult to keep a steady job. His main income was from a few rental homes that his adoptive parents had passed down to him. He topped up the rental income by doing some odd jobs including working as a paper delivery man in the early hours of the morning and Dixie also worked at a gift shop.
What Dixie did not know that while she was out working during the day, Charles would drive down to the red light district of Oak Cliff in his station wagon to visit prostitutes. He was protective of the girls he knew and would take them off the streets, bringing to one of the unrented houses his parents had left him. He said he would worry about them if they were on the streets and he would buy them drugs to gain their trust. He would refer to them as his girls and was known for "taking charge". He would buy them meals and give them extra money, beyond what he was paying for sex.
With some of the prostitutes Charles began to develop sadistic relationships. This came as a shock to the girls as they were used to seeing the sweeter and much more charming side of Charles. He began to get rough with them, tying them up, whipping them with rope or extension chords and hitting or slapping them.
Charles was quite good at keeping the great divide between his two lives and making sure that the two never crossed. One slight slip of this divide was one day while on the softball field a car with two women drove by and one of his teammates jokingly said that he thought they were prostitutes and Charlie should go over, in a slip of the moment, Charles answered that he hated prostitutes and if he had his way, he would kill them all. His teammates were rather alarmed and the strong of a reaction Charles had displayed at the joke but they brushed the feelings away and thought nothing further of the incident.
In march 1991 Brenda White was a prostitute who talked to police and described a time she had been picked up by an muscular gentleman who drove a station wagon with salt and pepper hair. He had wanted to take her to a property he owned but when Brenda did not want to go, he became enraged and she resorted to using pepper spray to escape from the man. Police began to think about an earlier statement from Veronica Rodriguez and the attempted attack on her life the night the Mary Lou Pratt had died. Police had originally disregarded her as an unreliable witness but now there was a another woman, with a claim similar to that of Veronica. Veronica had claimed that she had ran to the house of Axton Schindler on the night of her attack, based on the descriptions, Schindler was quite feeble looking compared to the physical and muscular build the women had described their attacker to have had. Schindler was almost immediately ruled out as a suspect as a result.
Police did note that Schindler was renting the property from Charles Albright and that the house was close to where Shirley's body was dumped. Police then looked into Charles, only to discover that he also owned other property close to where the bodies of Mary Lou and Susan were also dumped. Dallas police believed that they were moving in on their man.
Charles Albright was arrested in the early hours of March 22nd 1991 from his home in Oak Cliff, Dallas.
A search of his home led to very little evidence, they retrieved guns, of which none were used in the murders. They found Xacto blades but they could not be linked to the murders as they were a common item, they didn't find the eyeballs he had taken from the victims. Police searched the other homes of Charles Albright but the searches came up empty. All the evidence police had was circumstantial and the witness statements of two known prostitutes with drug problems that the defense would have no trouble in discrediting.
It wasn't until police located the scene of Shirley William's murder, thanks to a tip from another prostitute, police found her rain coat. Upon forensic examination a hair fibre belonging to an animal believed to be a squirrel was pulled from the coat and it matched a hair fibre that was found in the vacuum cleaner of Charles' home. Charles Albright was charged with the murder of Shirley Williams and although he was never charged with the murders of Mary Lou Pratt and Susan Peterson, they were used as evidence in the prosecution of Albright and there is wide acceptance that Albright was responsible for all three of the murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Shirley. Charles in now 87 years old and remains in prison in Texas.
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