Button Eyes and Bloodshed: The Tale of the Eyeball Killer

Charles Albright was born in Amarillo, Texas, on August 10, 1933. His biological mother dropped him off at an orphanage where he was later adopted by Fred and Delle Albright. It’s said that Delle Albright was a fiercely protective and somewhat overbearing mother. She ruled the household with an iron fist and for the young Charles, there was little reprieve outside of the household as well. Delle was a school teacher and took an avid, almost overzealous approach, to Charles’ education. Through her tutoring and encouragement, Charles skipped two full school years and ended up graduating from high school when he was only fifteen years old.

Listen to this episode here: https://www.10minutemurder.com/button-eyes-and-bloodshed-the-tale-of-the-eyeball-killer/

But before Charles would achieve this great accomplishment, there was trouble brewing on the horizon. Rumors suggest that when Charles was still an infant and would be left in the care of his equally overbearing aunt, she would make him wear dresses and take away his toys, leaving him only dolls to play with.

And when Charles turned into a teenager, he was given his first gun. From then on, one of the ways Charles would pass the time would be to go out hunting small animals like squirrels and rabbits. He then enjoyed bringing them home where he would try his hand at stuffing and preserving them.

Far from outraged by her son’s new pastime, Delle jumped right into encouraging him to pursue it as a career. The young Charles was easily persuaded and now had it in his head to become a taxidermist. He and Delle would spend hours together in the evenings, taxiderming (yes, I think I'm making that word up) Charles’ kills. It’s also said that during this time, the Albrights couldn’t afford to buy the glass eyes usually used in preserving animal remains and so Delle would tell Charles to use buttons or other household items instead.

Many believe that it is this childhood moment that later inspired and cemented Charles’ fascination with eyes.

At the tender age of only thirteen, Charles was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. He was already known to locals and law enforcement for being a petty thief, but they believed a short stay in a detention center would set the young delinquent straight.

And for the most part, it seemed to do the trick.

Clearly bright and talented for his age, Charles then graduated from high school and enrolled in North Texas University. Remember, he was still only fifteen when he made it into university, making him possibly the youngest student to attend that year.

Not that management at the university knew that themselves, however. It is rumored that Charles forged his documentation when applying to North Texas, another crime that would litter his criminal record for the rest of his life.

At school, Charles began taking pre-med training in order to become a doctor and a surgeon. He did well in his classes and seemed to have a natural skill and talent for his chosen profession, but Charles would never finish his degree. 

Charles was expelled only a year later when police caught him with stolen money, and perhaps more importantly, stolen firearms. Charles had two handguns and a rifle in his possession when the police arrested him that day and this time they wanted Charles to take the warning more seriously.

He spent a year in jail. His crimes and conviction brought to light his true age and his criminal background and North Texas University wouldn’t let him back in when he was released.

Undeterred, Charles then enrolled in pre-med training in Arkansas State Teachers College. Teachers and other students at the school remembered Charles to be an excellent student and an active participant in several school clubs and activities. 

Perhaps, Charles had just needed some time to mature before stepping into the world of academics. Perhaps it was all too good to be true.

To support himself on this journey, Charles had a number of odd jobs, like being a baseball bat manufacturer, a carpenter, a hairstylist and at one point even a bullfighter, but he couldn’t leave behind the thrill of petty thievery.

During his first year in college, Charles broke into the girls’ dormitory and stole naked pictures of them. Other friends and roommates would later recall seeing some of these pictures hanging up on Charles’ wall. He had cut out the eyes from one photo and glued them to another.

When he was nineteen, Charles then befriended a girl named Bettye Nestor. Friendship blossomed into a relationship, which then turned into marriage only a year later, but not before Bettye had given Charles an important set of keys. Bettye worked at the Arkansas State Teachers College, and so she had a set of keys that would let her in and out of the building in order to do her job.

With Bettye firmly in his back pocket, Charles now had the keys to the castle. He often broke in and stole from the school, but it didn’t take staff members very long to figure out what was going on.

Charles was caught in possession of stolen equipment and was expelled. The school didn’t press charges, but it was clear that his run in the academic world had come to an end.

Almost unbelievably, the threat of spending more time in jail didn’t stop Charles or put him on the right track. He and Bettye had just had a daughter when Charles found himself on the wrong side of the law yet again.

At this point he was still in his early twenties when he let himself into the college building for the last time. He stole all the documentation needed to falsify a degree and forged his own papers. According to these documents, Charles now not only had a bachelor’s degree, but a master’s as well.

The local high school believed that they were lucky to hire someone as qualified as Charles Albright was. Pumped up by this new success, Charles then began forging checks, but was quickly found out.

His new job and his fictitious degrees went up in smoke, and Charles was placed on probation. Seeing the writing on the wall, Bettye packed up and left with their daughter. They weren’t officially divorced until nine years later, but it was clear that Bettye was done with Charles.

Charles was then caught stealing again from a hardware store, and this time the value of his stolen goods ranged in the hundreds of dollars. He was sentenced to two years behind bars, but only served around six months before he was released again.

This time around, Charles really seemed to make a change. He made friends with neighbors and became active in his local community. Slowly but surely, the people around him began to trust Charles. Some of them even asked him to babysit their children. 

Gone was the petty thief and burgeoning criminal. Charles Albright was now a man who had turned a new leaf.

That was until 1981, when his adoptive mother Delle passed away. This was a blow to Charles to begin with, but then after a visit with his biological mother that same year, Charles seemed to become unhinged. 

While visiting with friends, Charles molested their fourteen-year-old daughter. Some reports say that the girl was actually nine years old at the time of the assault. The former friends pressed charges and Charles pleaded guilty. He received probation, but later went on to say that he was innocent and had only pleaded guilty to avoid “the hassle” of going to court.

Perhaps it was this conviction for child molestation, perhaps it was his growing fascination with collecting eyes from dolls and photographs, but in 1984, when Charles applied to become a leader in the Boy Scouts of America, his application was denied.

It was a year after that that Charles met Dixie. The two quickly moved in together, with Dixie taking on the lion’s share of the expenses, even though Charles had just come into 100,000 dollars worth of inheritance from the death of Fred Albright. He also claimed to get a job working on a paper route, but this was a lie Charles used to cover up the fact that he was visiting prostitutes in the early hours of the morning.

And then someone began attacking local sex workers.

The first was Rhonda Bowie, a thirty-year-old woman who worked around Oak Cliff. Her killer had stabbed her over twenty times.

Then was Mary Lou Pratt, a thirty-three-year-old woman who was also known to work around Oak Cliff. She was found lying on her back, wearing only her t-shirt and her bra, but they had both been pulled up to reveal her breasts. She had been shot in the back of the head and her eyes had been removed with what the coroner later determined to be almost surgical precision.

Then Susan Peterson, a twenty-seven-year old woman, was found on the exact same street that Mary Lou had been killed on. Her t-shirt had been pulled up to reveal her breasts, and she had been shot three times. Once in the chest, once through the top of her head and once in the back. Her eyes had been removed as well.

Then there was Shirley Williams who was found naked on the street near an elementary school. Her face had been beaten and she’d been shot twice. Once through her face and the other through the top of her head. Her eyes had also been removed.

Shortly after that, a woman came forward and told investigators that Mary Lou Pratt had known Charles Albright who was known locally to be obsessed with eyes. Several other sex workers also approached police to complain that Charles had started to become violent with them.

Charles was arrested that very same day, and a search of his home uncovered the same type of condom that had been found at Shirley Williams’ crime scene. This discovery, testimony from sex workers, and the fact that several dolls in Charles’ home had had their eyes removed were all the prosecution needed to hear to take Charles to court. There, they told the jury that hair samples recovered at Shirley’s crime scene were a match to Charles.

It turned out through later testing that these hairs had actually belonged to a dog, but by then it was already too late.

Charles was sentenced to life without parole and died behind bars in 2020 at the age of eighty-seven.