In December 1990 Mary Lou Pratt, thirty-three, a woman well known on the streets of Oak Cliff in south Dallas, was found dead wearing only a T-shirt and bra. She had been badly beaten and shot in the back of the head with a .44 Magnum, and the medical examiner found that both her eyes had been removed with surgical precision and taken away. On February 10, 1991, Susan Beth Peterson, twenty-seven, was found on the same street, just outside the Dallas city limits near DeSoto, shot three times, in the top of the head, the left breast and the back of the head. Her eyes were gone too, and investigators knew they were looking for a repeat killer. In March, Shirley Williams was found by a waitress near an elementary school, propped against a curb, with facial bruises, a broken nose and gunshot wounds to the face and the top of her head; a medical examiner's field agent pulled back her eyelids and found the eyes missing. All three women sold sex in Oak Cliff. The press called the killer the Eyeball Killer.
Charles Frederick Albright was born in Amarillo on August 10, 1933, and adopted from an orphanage by Delle and Fred Albright. His adoptive mother, a schoolteacher, was strict and overprotective, pushed him two grades ahead, and by the account in Texas Monthly taught him taxidermy. He was stealing by thirteen, finished high school at fifteen, started pre-medical studies at North Texas and did not finish, and at sixteen was caught with stolen petty cash, two handguns and a rifle and spent a year in jail. Expelled from Arkansas State Teachers College after stolen goods were found, he stole documents and forged signatures to give himself bachelor's and master's degrees, taught high school on them until he was caught forging checks, and was put on probation. He married a college girlfriend, Bettye, and they had a daughter; they separated in 1965 and divorced in 1974. He served less than six months of a two-year sentence for stealing from a hardware store. Neighbors trusted him enough to ask him to babysit. In 1981 he molested the fourteen-year-old daughter of friends, pleaded guilty and received probation; he later said he had pleaded only to avoid a hassle. In 1985 he met a woman named Dixie in Arkansas, who moved in with him and paid his bills, and he took a job delivering newspapers before dawn.
He was arrested on March 22, 1991, after a rookie officer, Regina Smith, and her partner, John Matthews, turned up evidence against him. A witness, Brenda White, had described a husky white man with salt-and-pepper hair, boots and jeans who approached her days after Williams's death. Hairs found on the bodies were said to match his head and pubic hair, fibers on Pratt and Peterson to match a blanket in his truck, and eight hairs in his vacuum cleaner bag to match Williams's. A woman who said he was a regular customer led police to a field off Fort Worth Boulevard where a bloodied yellow raincoat like the one Williams had last been seen wearing was found, with hairs said to match both of them. No eyes were ever recovered, and the ballistic evidence did not tie him to the weapon.
He was charged with four murders, the fourth being Rhonda K. Bowie, thirty, also from Oak Cliff, found in October 1988 stabbed more than twenty times. The trial for Williams's murder opened before Judge Phil Barker on December 13, 1991. Neighbors and friends testified that he was generous and a good neighbor. On December 18 the jury convicted him of that murder alone, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment; the charges in the other three deaths were dropped for lack of evidence, and he remained the prime suspect in them. A hair comparison expert had testified that hairs from the Williams scene matched his, and later DNA testing, by a Dallas radio report after his death, indicated that those hairs came from a dog. Hair comparison of that kind has since been widely discredited in American courts. He maintained his innocence throughout.
He was held at the John Montford Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock and died on August 22, 2020, aged eighty-seven; his place of death is given as University Medical Center and as the West Texas Regional Medical Facility. Matthews later wrote a book about the case with the journalist Christine Wicker, and in 2024 Lifetime made a film about Regina Smith's part in it.