Between December 1990 and March 1991, three women who worked as prostitutes in the Oak Cliff section of south Dallas were found shot dead: Mary Lou Pratt, Susan Beth Peterson and Shirley Williams. Dallas police and sheriff's detectives linked the deaths, and the case drew calls from reporters across the country. On March 22, 1991, police arrested Charles Albright, an Oak Cliff man known to his friends as a gentleman, a churchgoer and a gifted amateur painter, but who also had a record going back to his teens.
In December 1991 a Dallas County jury convicted him of the murder of Shirley Williams and he was sentenced to life. The case rested largely on hair comparison; Texas Monthly called it the first murder conviction in the history of the Dallas County district attorney's office to rest on hair evidence alone. He was never tried for the other deaths investigators attributed to him. Albright never testified and never confessed, and in prison he blamed the crime lab. He died in state custody in 2020, at 87.
Albright was adopted in 1933, when he was about three weeks old, by a Dallas grocer and his wife. He grew up in Oak Cliff, then a middle-class, all-white neighborhood south of downtown Dallas. Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote the longest account of his life for Texas Monthly in 1993, described the boy's adoptive mother as strict, frugal and overprotective. She punished him with confinement and spankings, taught him manners and respect for women, and pushed his schooling hard. He practiced the piano every day and skipped two grades in elementary school. At eleven, with her help, he took a taxidermy course by mail.
Friends remembered him as a charming child, a "Pied Piper" figure, in one friend's phrase. He graduated from Adamson High School at fifteen; the Oak Cliff Advocate gives his graduation year as 1949. The Dallas Times Herald once ran a story on him as a young real estate investor. But he was also in trouble. He played pranks, was caught breaking into a church and a store, and forged report cards to hide bad grades from his parents.
He enrolled at North Texas State College in Denton and was arrested during his freshman year as part of a student burglary ring. He said he had not known the goods were stolen. He served about a year, and spent his eighteenth birthday behind bars. His mother tried to repay the store owners and keep the matter quiet, Texas Monthly reported.
He moved on to Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway, where he joined clubs and played sports, was popular, and was known as a prankster. There he dated the woman he would later marry, and he talked about becoming a surgeon. He left the college under a cloud after he was caught at a train station with stolen school property.
He never earned a bachelor's degree. He forged academic records at East Texas State University, including a master's degree, and in 1969, at 36, was hired to teach high school science in Crandall, east of Dallas, where he also coached football. When the forgery came to light he admitted it, pleaded guilty to a fraud charge and received a year of probation. The university kept the story out of the newspapers.
He and his wife had a daughter; they divorced in 1975, according to Texas Monthly. Through the 1970s he moved from job to job: aircraft design work, patent illustration, carpentry, hair styling after he earned a beautician's license, and, briefly, bullfighting. He was a self-taught painter who had won a prize at the state fair and painted portraits. Friends saw a man of real talent who could not hold a steady job.
The record kept growing. He was arrested in 1971 for forging cashier's checks, caught shoplifting perfume in 1979, and in 1980 served six months for stealing a saw from a hardware store, the magazine reported.
His adoptive mother died of cancer in 1981. Their relationship had been strained, but he wept at her funeral and bought the dress she was buried in. His adoptive father died of a heart attack in 1986; the two had grown close in his last years. Albright inherited at least $96,000 and his parents' rental properties in south Dallas, which remained in his father's name. One of the houses was let to a truck driver.
He was active at St. Bernard's Catholic Church in East Dallas, where friends called him "Good Old Charlie." In March 1985, at 51, he pleaded guilty in a nearly empty courtroom to a charge involving a girl under 14. He received a ten-year probated sentence and served no time; he continued to insist he was innocent, and the case attracted little notice.
Late in 1985, on a trip to Arkansas, he met a widow who became his companion. She later lived with him in his parents' old house in Oak Cliff and was described as his common-law wife. To her and to many others he was a "perfect gentleman." Friends called him a Renaissance man who spoke French and Spanish, sang in churches and played piano and organ. A softball teammate said he would back down rather than fight, and others said he often gave gifts and money to people who needed them. At his trial, neighbors and friends testified that he was a good neighbor who handed out presents and did electrical work for free, the Oak Cliff Advocate reported.
There was another side to his life that his companion did not see. Women who worked the streets of Oak Cliff told police he was a regular customer of several of them, according to Texas Monthly, including two of the three women later killed. On October 1, 1990, he took a job delivering the Dallas Times Herald on an Oak Cliff route in the middle of the night. He told his companion he would be home by about a quarter past six each morning.
Mary Lou Pratt was 33. She had worked for years around a motel in Oak Cliff and was well liked and quiet on her corner, other women told Texas Monthly. Her parents, retired and living in the Dallas suburb of Lancaster, did not know how she made her living. Years earlier she had lived near a rental property that Albright's parents owned, and he had brought her to parties at his house. Women on the street later told police that he had become one of her customers.
Her body was found in far south Dallas on December 13, 1990. She had been shot. John Westphalen, a Dallas police homicide detective, and his partner, Stan McNear, took the case. Westphalen, known in the department for his persistence and for hard interrogations, attended the autopsy, sought data from the FBI, kept detailed notebooks and ran stakeouts and license plate checks. With no witness and no weapon, he called it a "dumped body" case. The medical examiner's findings in her case were unusual, and they would later tie it to the next death.
Susan Beth Peterson was 27. She had worked the streets of Oak Cliff for about five years and was known as fearless and quick to fight. Albright had cosigned her applications for bail bonds, and on one form she listed him as her best friend, Texas Monthly reported.
She was found on a Sunday morning in February 1991, just outside the Dallas city limits. She had been shot. Because she was found outside the city, Dallas County Sheriff's detective Larry Oliver took charge of the scene. When the pathologist saw that her injuries matched those in the Pratt case, Oliver called Westphalen, and the two deaths were linked. Westphalen began calling the killer "a repeater."
Homicide supervisors decided to go public. Police held press briefings and posted flyers at the motel where Pratt had worked, asking women to stay off the streets. The supervisors judged that warning the women mattered more than the risk that publicity would lead the killer to change his habits.
Two patrol officers had been on the edges of the case from its first day. John Matthews, 28, the son of a New York state patrol officer, had been with the Dallas police since he was 21. Regina Smith, 31, a single mother who had worked as a supermarket cashier and earned a degree in fashion merchandising, had entered the police academy in 1988. Both were assigned to a newly created beat on Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff that took in the area where women worked near the motel. They started their shift on December 13, 1990, a few hours after Pratt's body had been found, without knowing of her death.
Each morning they drove Jefferson and moved the women back toward the motel. Smith built a rapport with them and kept a book of their mug shots. That winter the officers found a woman who said she had been attacked and nearly killed. They doubted her at first. Two days later they saw her riding in a truck with a truck driver, and she told them he had rescued her. They arrested her on a prostitution charge and him on unpaid traffic tickets, and they reported the story to homicide. Westphalen later said that tip never reached him.
After Peterson's death the women surrounded the officers' patrol car to pass on the names of men they suspected, according to Texas Monthly.
Shirley Williams worked by day as a maid at a motel and picked up customers on the street at night. The Oak Cliff Advocate gave her age as 41. In the early hours of March 19, 1991, another woman saw her on the sidewalk wearing jeans and a yellow raincoat. She was found shot dead in Oak Cliff at 6:20 that morning, Texas Monthly reported. The killer had changed his pattern, the magazine observed: she was not found in the area of south Dallas where the first two women had been found.
Days after Williams's death, a woman on the officers' beat told Matthews and Smith about a customer who had threatened to kill prostitutes a few days earlier. The officers went back to the address of the truck driver whose story they had reported in the winter. With the help of Deputy Constable Walter Cook, they ran it through county records. The house belonged on paper to Albright's late adoptive father, and the records led on to other family property in south Dallas.
Cook then remembered a call he had taken from a woman who said that a friend of Mary Lou Pratt had dated a man with an unusual interest in eyes. The name she had given was Charles Albright. Cook pulled his records, which showed his Oak Cliff address and his 1985 conviction involving a child. D Magazine, telling the story in 2023 as Matthews recounts it, describes the tip as coming from a former girlfriend.
Matthews and Smith took Albright's mug shot to Westphalen, who assembled a lineup of six photographs. The woman who had described the threatening customer picked Albright. The woman the officers had found in the winter shook and at first refused to choose. After Westphalen questioned her at the station, telling her the killer had to be stopped, she picked Albright's photograph and signed the back of it.
At about 2:30 a.m. on March 22, 1991, a Dallas police tactical team arrested Albright at his home in Oak Cliff. Matthews put the handcuffs on him, according to D Magazine. His companion screamed. Albright said nothing as he was led away, and he made no confession during an all-night interrogation by Westphalen; he acted as if he did not know the dead women's names, Texas Monthly reported.
Police searched the Oak Cliff house six times and also searched the south Dallas properties. The FBI brought a device that could see through walls. The searches turned up tools and blades, an anatomy textbook, true crime books and hidden guns. They did not turn up the murder weapon or any physical remains connected with the killings.
The Dallas city crime lab reported that hairs recovered from the three women were similar to Albright's. Hairs on blankets in his pickup truck were said to match Pratt and Peterson, and hairs in his vacuum cleaner were said to match Williams. A woman who said Albright had taken her to a field led officers there, and in the field they found a yellow raincoat like the one Williams had been wearing when she was last seen, together with a blanket. Hairs on both were said to match Albright.
Texas Monthly cautioned in 1993 that hair is not as conclusive as fingerprints and that other gray-haired men could have similar hair. Prosecutors also relied on testimony from other women who worked as prostitutes, according to KRLD's 2020 report.
Westphalen wanted to file an attempted murder charge based on the identification by the woman found in the winter, and the account of the other woman could have supported a misdemeanor assault charge, Texas Monthly reported. Albright was charged with murder. The deaths of Pratt and Peterson were never tried, and no verdict was ever given in them.
The trial for the murder of Shirley Williams was held in Dallas County in late 1991. Toby Shook, a 33-year-old assistant district attorney, led the prosecution. His case rested on the hair evidence and on the tip that had led the officers to Albright. He described Albright to the jury as a former biology teacher and warned jurors not to underestimate him, telling them that Albright had grown smarter as the trial went on.
Brad Lollar defended him. He called the evidence flimsy and circumstantial and told the jury that the likely killer was the truck driver who rented the family's south Dallas house. The truck driver left town the week of the trial. He had denied rescuing the woman found in the winter and said another man had brought her to his door. That woman testified for the defense: she said she had never been with Albright and that Westphalen had pressured her into identifying him.
Albright's companion testified that on the nights in question he had not left early for his paper route and had always come home on time. Friends and neighbors described a generous man and a good neighbor. Albright himself did not testify. He sat quietly through the trial, shoulders slumped, Texas Monthly reported.
The jury found him guilty of the murder of Shirley Williams and assessed a life sentence. Texas Monthly gives the date as December 19, 1991. His companion collapsed in the courtroom. Lollar told reporters that it was always a miscarriage of justice when an innocent man was convicted. Texas Monthly described the verdict as the first murder conviction in the history of the Dallas County district attorney's office to rest on hair evidence alone.
KRLD, reporting his death in 2020, described the sentence as life without parole. Texas Monthly reported a life sentence.
Hollandsworth interviewed Albright in prison for his 1993 article. Albright was 59, gray haired and, despite his prison clothes, distinguished looking; they spoke through glass. He said he expected to win on appeal. He read about two books a week on the Civil War and was researching a book about the wives of Civil War generals. He worked as a carpenter in the prison woodworking shop, coached the prison softball team and wrote letters to his companion. He denied the killings and suggested that the forensic lab, not he, was responsible for what had been found on the bodies. He never offered an explanation for the crimes.
He remained in state custody until his death.
At the 1991 trial a hair comparison expert testified that hair samples found in Albright's car matched Williams's hair. No DNA testing was available then. In September 2020 KRLD reported that the conviction integrity units of the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and the Dallas County Public Defender's Office had recently sent hair samples from the case to a laboratory. According to Lollar, the lab reported that the samples were not human hair. He quoted the lab as saying, "These are dog hairs." KRLD did not report any court action on the results.
Lollar, by 2020 a capital murder public defender, said he had always felt uneasy about the case. He remembered Albright as a Renaissance man who sang in churches, played piano and organ, and painted, and he allowed that Albright might have been the man who killed the women. Matthews, asked at a public talk in 2023 whether police had caught the right man, answered that all he knew was that the killing stopped.
Albright died in state custody in 2020, at the age of 87. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said he died at the West Texas Regional Medical Facility in Lubbock. No cause of death was given; a department spokesman, Robert Hurst, said there was no evidence that he had COVID-19. KRLD reported the death on September 10, 2020.
John Matthews, by then a former Dallas police officer, had planted grapes in Ovilla, south of Dallas, and was giving public talks about the case in 2023, according to D Magazine. Regina Smith was a lieutenant in the Dallas Police Department by 2013, the Oak Cliff Advocate reported. She and Toby Shook were both interviewed for a 2013 Investigation Discovery episode about the case, which the Advocate covered as a story of Oak Cliff history.
Albright was convicted of one murder, Shirley Williams's. The deaths of Mary Lou Pratt and Susan Peterson were attributed to him by investigators, and the hair evidence presented at trial was said to connect him to both, but he was never tried for either.
He denied all of the killings to the end. At trial his lawyer named another man as the likely killer; that man was never charged.
The central forensic evidence has been questioned. Texas Monthly noted in 1993 that hair comparison is less certain than fingerprints. By Lollar's account in 2020, later testing found that hair samples in the case were dog hair. The identification by the woman found in the winter was disputed by the woman herself, who told the jury she had been pressured.
There are also differences in the record. Texas Monthly dates the verdict December 19, 1991, while a 2024 report says he was tried in November 1991, and reports give Williams's age as 41 and as 45. KRLD described his sentence as life without parole, while Texas Monthly described a life sentence. A 2023 magazine article gives his death as August 22, 2022, which conflicts with the 2020 report of his death by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
1933: Adopted at about three weeks old by a Dallas grocer and his wife; grows up in Oak Cliff. 1949: Graduates from Adamson High School (Oak Cliff Advocate), at fifteen (Texas Monthly). As a college freshman: Arrested at North Texas State College in a burglary ring; serves about a year. 1969: Hired to teach science at Crandall on forged academic records; pleads guilty to fraud; one year of probation. 1971: Arrested for forging cashier's checks. 1975: Divorced. 1979: Caught shoplifting. 1980: Serves six months for stealing a saw. 1981: His adoptive mother dies. March 1985: Pleads guilty to a charge involving a girl under 14; ten years' probation. Late 1985: Meets the widow who becomes his companion. 1986: His adoptive father dies; he inherits money and rental property. October 1, 1990: Begins a night newspaper delivery route in Oak Cliff. December 13, 1990: Mary Lou Pratt, 33, is found shot dead in south Dallas. February 1991: Susan Beth Peterson, 27, is found shot dead just outside the Dallas city limits; the two deaths are linked. March 19, 1991: Shirley Williams is seen in the early morning hours; she is found shot dead in Oak Cliff. March 22, 1991: Albright is arrested at his Oak Cliff home. December 19, 1991: Convicted of the murder of Shirley Williams; life sentence (Texas Monthly). May 1993: Texas Monthly publishes Skip Hollandsworth's "See No Evil." 2013: Investigation Discovery broadcasts an episode on the case. By September 2020: The Dallas County conviction integrity units have sent hair samples for testing; his former lawyer says the lab found dog hair. 2020: Dies in custody in Lubbock, aged 87 (reported September 10, 2020).