The Texas Eyeball Killer

But his marriage fell apart. In 1965, he and his wife separated, finally divorcing in 1974 (although Bedford et al. claims it occurred in 1975). But while his marriage may have ended, his criminal activities did not. In fact, he grew even bolder.

Albright was caught stealing hundreds of dollars' worth of merchandise from a hardware store and received a two-year prison sentence. Yet he served less than six months before he was out again. He worked hard to become more presentable, converting to Catholicism and ingratiating himself with people from the parish. In 1981, when he was 48, his mother, Delle, died. Albright went to find his birth mother, whom Delle had told him was a married and brilliant law student, and managed to meet her (and she apparently had never been a law student). He would later tell someone that she was a prostitute, although there was no evidence for this.

That same year, while Albright was visiting some friends, he sexually molested their nine-year-old daughter. They reported him and he was prosecuted, but once again got away with his crime: he pled guilty and received only probation. He later claimed that he was innocent but had pled to avoid a hassle. Still, it went on his record and would come to haunt him in later years. He was now a sexual predator.

During those years, according to prostitutes in town, he frequented their hangouts and paid them well — most likely from the money he had inherited from his father's death. A friend admitted that he'd known about Albright's thefts, and said that many of the gifts he gave out were items he had stolen.

Then, in 1985, Albright met Dixie in Arkansas. After his father's death, he invited her to come and live in his home. It wasn't long before she was paying the bills from her menial job, even taking out a loan to do so. She accepted Albright's excuses for not working, despite his intelligence and accomplishments, and let him con her into taking care of him. The one "concession" he made was to take on a paper route that sent him out into the streets during the early morning hours. That may well have been so that he could continue to visit prostitutes without raising her suspicions.

Alfred Jones, Albright's juvenile probation officer from decades earlier, told Westphalen that Albright had a way of not facing up to reality or responsibility. He had his own sense of values and he could lie so easily that he'd convinced himself he was telling the truth. In other words, like many psychopaths, according to a theory offered by Al C. Carlisle, Albright compartmentalized: he did what he needed to deflect others from his secrets and set up different sets of values for different life frames. His secret life grew darker and more perverse because there was no accountability, save to his ideas and addictions. But the morality for his acts was entirely of his own making.