Have You Heard of the Eyeball Killer and His Connection With Amarillo?

I am fascinated with serial killers, heck killers in general. I have studied many of them. I even have a favorite serial killer, which should really be a red flag, right? Really it's not.

One of my favorite channels to watch is Investigation Discovery, that shouldn't be a surprise at all. So as I was reading about different serial killers I ran across the Eyeball Killer.

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I remember watching some shows about him. His name was Charles Albright and he murdered women of the night in Dallas. He would surgically remove their eyes and take them with him as a souvenir.

Growing up Charles got his first gun as a teenager. He would use that gun to kill animals, now that there is a red flag. He would take those animals home and stuff them. That is where his fascination with taxidermy began. He would use buttons for the rabbit's and squirrels' eyes because he could not afford the glass eyes that taxidermists would actually use.

Maybe that is where his fascination with eyeballs began. Charles has been linked to three murders in the Dallas area in the early nineties, all of them with their eyeballs missing. Authorities think he was responsible for another unsolved murder in the late eighties.

He was arrested on March 23, 1991. Once his trial began in December of 1991 he was only found guilty of one murder of Shirley Williams. He was sentenced to life in prison at the John Montford Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock. While incarcerated, Albright died at the West Texas Regional Medical Facility in  Lubbock in August 2020. Charles was 87.

So what is this Charles Albright, the Eyeball Killer's, connection to Amarillo? He was born here. His birth mom abandoned him and he was in an orphanage until he was adopted. His adoptive parents raised him in the Oakcliff area in Dallas.

According to his Wikipedia page:

Born in Amarillo, Texas, Albright was adopted from an orphanage by Delle and Fred Albright. His adoptive mother, who was a schoolteacher, was very strict and overprotective of him. She accelerated his education and helped him skip two grades.

I wonder how his life may have been different if he had been raised here in Amarillo. It's one of those things that you just have to wonder.