Member-only story
Charles Albright: The Real-Life Norman Bates
The Eyeball Killer murdered and mutilated sex workers in Texas.
When police in Dallas, Texas started to discover the badly mutilated bodies of sex workers in the early 1990s, they knew they were dealing with a particularly depraved serial killer. Yet when the perpetrator was unmasked as a mild-mannered brainiac, his friends were so shocked they refused to believe it.
However, the story of Charles Albright suggests his unusual past and propensity for petty crime hid a dark side that he eventually succumbed to.
The making of Charles Albright
Charles Albright’s story began with his adoption at three weeks old. An exclusive interview with Texas Monthly from 1993 states that his birth mother had been just 16 when she became pregnant and that she was ordered to give up the baby when her father found out.
The new parents — Delle and Fred Albright — were doting but especially protective, particularly the mother. She would change his clothes if he became remotely dirty and took him to a polio hospital to warn him what might happen if he touched dog faeces.
There were also more alarming episodes of behaviour from Delle. She shut him in dark rooms and tied him to his bed as punishment and, as he got older, told him his father was too “greedy” with sex.
She homeschooled him so vigorously he was moved up two grades at elementary school and made him go to bed at 8PM throughout his teens, even going so far as to chaperone him on dates. So closely guarded was Albright that he said he began to get headaches.
When Albright was 11, his mother signed him up to a mail-order taxidermy course and helped him work meticulously on dead birds. However, although he coveted the taxidermy shop’s realistic eyes for his subjects, his frugal mother said they were too expensive and instead made him sew on buttons.
To encourage entrepreneurship in their son, the Albrights bought him a piece of property that he later sold to buy more. He even earned a headline in the Dallas Times Herald, accompanied by an article showing off his real estate nest egg.
