Serial Killers

By Lora Johnson

Serial killers gain their notoriety in several ways... by the bizarre or brutal methods they use to single out and kill their victims, or by the sheer number of killings they carry out. The majority act alone. Many are crazy psychopaths. Just pray to God one doesn't cross your path, or anyone in your family.
This book contains the most deadly ones. If you are a lover of mystery thriller crime stories then this is the book for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kristen Laurence
• Release date: Jan 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310227479

Book preview

Serial Killers

Lora Johnson

Smashwords Edition

Copyrights 2013 Author

All rights reserved

Smashwords edition, License notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Serial Killers

Smashwords edition, License notes

The Eye Ball Killer

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos

Herb Baumeister

Rodney Alcala: Extreme Serial Killer

Pedro Lopez: The Monster of the Andes

Benjamin Tony Atkins, the ‘Woodward Corridor Killer’

Chinese Serial Killer’s

Joe Ball: The Butcher Of Elmendorf

The Devil's Trail

Velma Margie Barfield

The Story Of Anatoly Onoprienko

Thank You For Reading

The Eye Ball Killer

The Dallas police had no idea what had begun when they collected the body of a murdered prostitute on December 13, 1990. She was found in plain sight on the 8800 block of Beckleyview in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, according to the Dallas Morning News. The kids who first saw her thought they'd stumbled across a mannequin. Instead, it was the nearly nude body of a dark-haired woman, lying face-up, wearing only a T-shirt and shot in the back of the head with a .44-caliber bullet. In footage shown on HBO's Autopsy program, there was blood on her face and shirt.

Detective John Westphalen took over the case and learned from another officer that the victim had been Mary Lou Pratt, 33 (another source says 35), a known prostitute who worked that area. On Autopsy, the area was described as a hangout for drug dealers, drug addicts, and prostitutes. (Matthews and Wicker indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald retreated to a movie theater here after shooting President Kennedy.) To the police that day, the murder just seemed like one of the routine risks of the shady business of prostitution. Yet it was soon discovered that this one went beyond the reactive type of killing from anger or over money. There was something more deviant about it.

Dr. Elizabeth Peacock, the medical examiner, was going over the body to ascertain the cause and manner of death when she placed her hands on the dead woman's face and prepared to look at the condition of the eyes. She touched the stiffening lid and pushed it open. To her surprise, she saw only muscle and gore. No eye. In fact, it appeared that the eyeball had been removed with surgical care, and not merely gouged out in anger with someone's thumbs. Moving to the other eye, she opened the lid and saw the same thing. This killer had removed both eyes without making much of a mark on the lids and apparently had taken them with him.

Given the bizarre nature of the crime, Westphalen contacted the FBI's VICAP unit, with their Violent Criminals Apprehension Program, a computerized database that provides details about prior crimes or criminals who may have some predictive association with the one under study. Matthews and Wicker describe their report in The Eyeball Killer. Given the apparent ritual involved in the incident, the criminal behavior specialists suggested that the killer had murdered for pleasure and had taken the eyes as souvenirs to help him relive the erotic sensations of his violence. In the way of all such killers, eventually the vividness of his memory would diminish, along with the sense of power he had gained, and he likely would seek to renew it. Hence, he would be prowling the streets, looking for an opportunity to kill again.

The police placed this information in a file. They were aware of the danger but had no real evidence from the scene to provide any leads. It was rumored that Mary Lou Pratt and another prostitute, Susan Peterson, had ripped off stolen goods from a warehouse belonging to one of their customers. It seemed logical to believe that the man had gotten his revenge. But investigators could not discover who he was. The mutilation was kept from the media and the back-page report of the crime was soon forgotten.

The case went cold. While two Hispanic brothers were questioned, based on a tip, there was no evidence against them. Two months passed before the police had reason to think of it again, and when they did, they recalled an incident that had happened around the same time.

Veronica, a prostitute nicknamed Flaca for her unnaturally skinny frame, was familiar to officers John Matthews and Regina Williams, who patrolled as partners along Oak Cliff's Jefferson Boulevard. Matthews would later pen The Eyeball Killer about the case and his part in helping to solve it.

He'd spotted Veronica at the Star 8 motel in mid-December, where the street girls often brought customers. She'd looked pretty bad that night and she told the officers that on the previous evening a man who had picked her up had tried to kill her. Indeed, he'd raped her. She had a wound on her head to show how brutal he'd been. She had barely escaped, she said, and had hidden from him until she could get to a friend's place for help.

Violence was just part of the lifestyle, so there was not much the officers could do for her, nor any reason they should link her incident with what had happened to Mary Lou Pratt. But when they saw her in a light-blue truck on December 15 and tried to arrest the man, she insisted that he was the one who had saved her from her attacker and ought to be let go. The driver was a man who called himself SpeeDee and the address on his driver's license listed a home on Eldorado Avenue, not far from there. He said he had a wife, Dixie, and that he and Veronica were just friends. The officers passed the story on to the Homicide unit, just in case it proved to be significant in some way.

They would eventually have cause to remember it, because on February 10, 1991, another prostitute, 27-year-old Susan Peterson, was found murdered.

Peterson was nearly nude, with her T-shirt pulled up to display her breasts in the same manner as Pratt. She'd been shot three times: in the top of the head, in the left breast and point-blank in the back of the head. One bullet had pierced her heart and another entered her brain. A clump of her hair lay on her chest. She had been dumped in south Dallas, just outside city limits, and the ME found that this victim bore another grisly similarity: her eyes had been surgically removed. There had been no bleeding, Matthews points out, and only two small cuts.

So now they knew they had a repeat killer, one who apparently operated from ritual, just as the FBI report had said. Even worse, two days before her murder, Peterson had indicated to a patrol officer that she might know who Mary Lou Pratt's killer was. She hadn't offered an identification then, and now that information was gone along with her. But it appeared that the offender had taken Peterson to the same place to kill her as he had taken Pratt. That helped to establish what geographical profilers would term his zone of familiarity. He likely lived or worked in the area, and was almost certainly a resident of Dallas, rather than a roving stranger passing through town.

Matthews and Williams thought about what Veronica had said — and she was still telling the same story about how she had nearly been killed. She was a known liar and generally made little sense, but her consistency made her story more credible. Then she added that she had actually witnessed Pratt being murdered. But she could not identify the house to where she had been taken to be raped and beaten, so she proved to be a useless source. Leads came in from people who had seen or who knew someone whom they suspected to be the killer, but nothing panned out. The media soon dubbed the vicious attacker The Dallas Ripper.

The area hookers and the police believed that the killer was probably white and would therefore only target white prostitutes, as he had done twice already. Special Agent Judd Ray, the FBI supervisor for that region, was on the case. In an interview for HBO, he said that in general, the killers are intra-racial, i.e., they stick with their own kind. But there were rare cases in which they crossed over. Because profiles are based on probabilities, this killer was probably white and any future victims would be as well. Ray knew that the killer who mutilates might have other strange fetishes as well, such as drinking blood, so it was possible that he had a history of mental instability.

Several detectives also believed that the offender had some medical background, but no one could locate a case in which this type of mutilation had occurred before. Two squad cars were assigned to the area to keep watch over the late-night activities. Because the first two murders had been two months apart, they wondered if they might see another such incident in April. But the killer took them by surprise.

On March 18, despite stepped-up police patrols, a black part-time prostitute, Shirley Williams, 41, was murdered. Her nude body was found lying on its side near a school, and blood pooled from her face onto the street. The medical examiner who came to the scene rolled back her eyelids, fearing the worst, and discovered that this was the third victim in this series: the eyes were gone. Williams also had facial bruises and a broken nose, probably from being punched, and she had been shot through the top of her head and in the face.

Again, there were no fingerprints and no semen. If the killer had had sex with these women, he had been careful to use a condom. In fact, an unwrapped condom lay next to the body. But he had not been nearly as careful this time as he removed the eyes. He'd slashed at her face as if he did not know quite how to perform this deed, and in the eye socket, he'd broken off the tip of what turned out to be an X-Acto knife. Perhaps he'd been rushed, someone speculated. It had been late when she'd disappeared.

A background check indicated that Williams had been with friends the night before, getting high on drugs. She had also told her daughter that she would be home that night. It was raining at the time, so Williams had put on a yellow slicker. The friends said that she had gotten into a car and that was the last that anyone had seen of her.

Another prostitute, identified in Matthews' book as Brenda, said that a few evenings before Williams had been murdered, a white man had tried to kill her. She offered a description of an older man with salt-and-pepper hair who drove a green or brown station wagon. She thought she recalled a mustache and slight beard stubble. His skin had been brownish, but he was not African American. He'd invited her into his car and wanted to take her somewhere to have sex. She'd resisted because she had her own idea of where to go and was careful never to leave familiar territory. That had made him angry. He'd shouted about whores doing him wrong and had acted in such a way that she'd felt forced to spray him with Mace. But he kept driving, so she'd jumped from the car while it was still moving. The experience had shaken her.

The police believed that Williams had been murdered in the area, probably outside somewhere, and that meant her clothing ought to turn up. A yellow slicker would not be difficult to spot, so they set about scouring likely spots to have sex in private, kill, and perform this mutilation. They searched a field about a mile away, but came up with nothing.

In any event, whether or not she was even his actual target for that night, Shirley Williams was the victim of a serial killer — and one who did not stick with a specific victim type. That would make the investigation more complicated. The Dallas police force now had to face this fact, and the FBI got more fully involved.

The body, too, is a crime scene, and the criminalists at the lab would go over it with precision instruments to try to collect even some small bit of evidence. They would also look at each piece of potential evidence that police officers picked up from the scene. Criminalist Charlie Linch took over this aspect of the investigation. He had looked at Williams' body prior to the autopsy and, with tape, had removed hairs from the back of her neck. He then placed them under a microscope to examine their pattern, shape, and consistency. Different races yield different types of hair, as do different parts of a body. Linch identified the hair found on Williams as a pubic hair from a Caucasian. That meant it was not from the victim. It wasn't much, and it didn't help the police to track someone down, but it would come in handy once a suspect was identified.

Helpfully, the gun that had killed Mary Lou Pratt was identified by the ballistics labs as the same one that had killed Shirley Williams. That was good, because the Williams mutilation could have easily been problematic in court for a linkage analysis. And while a different gun had been used on the second victim, her mutilation was so similar to Pratt's that there would be no trouble claiming that those crimes were linked to a single offender. Anyone could have more than one gun. There was nothing unusual about that in Texas.

Given three murders in their territory, Matthews and Smith thought about what they'd heard on the streets over the past month and turned their attention to the story that Veronica had told about seeing Mary Lou Pratt murdered. They recalled the man they had stopped, SpeeDee, and decided to run a check on his address. Yet when they researched it, they found that the property was listed in the name of Fred Albright, who owned some properties near where the first body had been found. But Albright was deceased. That was curious, as was the next thing they learned.

A few days earlier, a frightened woman had called the deputy constable to discuss a man named Charles Albright — who was Fred's son. She once had worked in a clothing store at the mall and Albright, a customer, had come in frequently and given her gifts. Her fellow workers had disliked him, but she had decided to go out with him. She soon had reason to regret that decision, and she considered him to be dangerous. As Matthews and Wicker tell it, Albright revealed to her that he was a professional con man and that he possessed a lot of stolen property. Although he was married, he'd convinced this woman to move into one of his rental properties, where he then came for sex. She said that his demands became weirder until he outright scared her, especially his obsession with knives and eyes. She moved out, got married and moved on with her life, but remained afraid, even years later, that Albright would find her and kill her. The best piece of information she offered was that she was aware that Mary Lou Pratt and Albright had been acquainted.

When the officers looked into SpeeDee's history, it turned out that he had a long criminal record, including a conviction for aggravated assault on a child. Not only that, a woman named Dixie popped up in the records, and the officers recalled that SpeeDee had said that was his wife's name. The facts and associations were growing more compelling by the minute. They knew they had to check this guy out.

Detective Westphalen advised Matthews and Smith to show Brenda some photos to see if she could pick out the man who had picked her up and threatened her. She looked over the collection of mugs and without hesitation, pointed to a photo of Charles Albright.

The next step was to contact Veronica and show her the photos. She was in prison and it was difficult to get her to cooperate, but in the end she, too, selected Albright as her attacker. That was two for two — good corroboration, even if these reports were from prostitutes with drug habits. It was time to move in on Albright.

Only four days after Shirley Williams had been brought to the morgue, the police had a warrant in hand for Albright's arrest and a plan to apprehend him. At that time, thanks to the prostitutes, he could be charged with attempted murder and attempted assault. They could hold him and search for better evidence against him in the three murders.

A couple of hours after midnight on March 22, members of the elite tactical squad came together to surround Albright's Oak Cliff home on Eldorado. They spotted a station wagon in the driveway similar to the one described by Brenda. They called the house to make sure a male was inside, and a man answered. At the signal, they moved in. A window was smashed and stun grenades were tossed inside. (Albright would later complain about this procedure and ask why they hadn't just knocked.) Others broke in through the door and rousted Albright and his wife from bed. Dixie began to scream and demanded to know what they were doing.

They asked Albright where SpeeDee was, but he seemed confused by the question. Later they realized that, fortuitously, SpeeDee had simply used Albright's address on his license. He did not live there. Albright and Dixie were hustled off to the police station for interrogation, while investigators searched his house and prepared to look at other properties listed under his deceased father's name.

One item of interest found in Albright's home was a collection of red condoms, since that same color of condom had been found next to Shirley Williams' body. Albright also had a collection of books about serial killers and some Nazi literature. According to the Autopsy program (but no other source), the results of the search in his home turned up an obsession with dolls and eyeless masks, and Hollandsworth said there was a collection of female Lladro figurines. The HBO producers indicate that the police believed this obsession with dolls was connected with what would be learned about Albright: he had a fascination with eyes.

The police also recovered debris from his vacuum cleaner, and a collection of guns from his secret hiding place. At first he'd said he owned no guns, but caught in a lie, he had told them where to look. One weapon was a Smith & Wesson .44-caliber revolver, the type of gun they were looking for. But they had to test it to be certain it was the murder weapon. At another of Albright's properties, they discovered several X-Acto knives with razor sharp blades that could have been used to perform the precision surgery

Reviews for Serial Killers

[Tina Carr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was intrigued by the information, and the thoughtfulness of the author, to keep the chapters short.