Killer Signs: Forensic Semiotics and the Scene of the Crime
by Barbara Nickless
The night Susan Peterson’s path crossed with that of a serial killer, she’d been dancing at a club in Dallas, Texas. Hours later, on a chilly February morning in 1991, her partially clothed body was found on a quiet residential street in south Dallas. She’d died
from multiple gunshot wounds. It wasn’t until a pathologist began an examination of the victim that the case took a turn toward the morbid.
Susan Peterson’s eyes were gone.
The orbs had been surgically removed with a precision that left the lids untouched.
Peterson, the police realized, was the second victim of a man soon nicknamed the “Eyeball Killer.” Two other women also died at the killer’s hands, and they, too, had their eyes removed with surgical exactness.
As the police began their hunt for a killer, numerous theories were put forth to explain why the murderer took his victims’ eyes. Perhaps he believed that eyes are the mirror of the soul and he was robbing his victims not only of their lives, but of their very essence. Maybe he believed that the last thing a person sees is imprinted on their eyes.
For a forensic semiotician, this kind of gruesome “calling card” can be critical to understanding a killer’s motivation. Motivation, in turn, can help find the killer and explain his actions to a jury.
So, what, exactly, is a forensic semiotician?
If you’ve looked at the symbol on a bathroom door to decide which door you should enter, you’ve performed an act of semiotics.
Semioticians look at how meaning is created through signs, symbols, and language, and explore how different forms of communication are used to convey meaning in various contexts. They analyze and interpret the use of signs and symbols in language, literature, art, media, and other cultural mediums. They examine how meanings are constructed and how they change over time, as well as how signs and symbols are used to create and reinforce cultural values and beliefs.
Forensic semiotics is an emerging field that combines the study of semiotics with forensic science. A serial killer may use a particular ritual during the murders. Or he might leave a symbol at the scene of a crime—think of the smiley faces left near the bodies of hundreds of young men who drowned during the 1990s or the pentagram the Night Stalker drew near his victims, and you’ll have some idea of the role a forensic semiotician plays in interpretating symbols and understanding what they mean to the
killer.
When it comes to identifying suspects, a forensic semiotician might be able to use an analysis of a suspect’s tattoos or other body art to identify possible gang affiliations or other criminal connections.
And then there’s writing in all its forms. Encoded letters to the police. Handwriting content and style. Even texting. In 2005, Howard Simmerson was convicted for the murder of Julie Turner after a forensic semiotician demonstrated through analysis of a series of texts—purportedly written by Julie and sent to her husband—that Simmerson had written the texts using Julie’s phone. Simmerson was hoping to delay a police investigation until he could hide Julie’s body.
…
Back in 1990s Dallas, the “Eyeball Killer” continued to stump police. They had no murder weapon, no fingerprints, and no witnesses. With his third victim, the killer revealed he was willing to cross racial lines, unusual for serial killers. He had also branched out geographically, leaving the body in a different part of Dallas, close to an elementary school.
And he was getting sloppy. A pathologist found a broken X-Acto blade in the skin near the third victim’s right eye.
Three bodies, and the investigation was going nowhere fast.
Then came a break. A sex worker told police that she’d had to mace a customer in the face when he refused to go to a hotel but instead wanted to take her somewhere private. He turned violent when she refused. She’d sprayed him with mace and fled on foot.
She gave the police a description of the man.
The description matched the photo of the owner of a house at an address that had come up earlier in the investigation but had, at that point in the search, been deemed unrelated.
Now, suddenly, the dots began to connect.
A Dallas County deputy constable mentioned that he’d received a call from another sex worker who’d seen the killer’s first victim go with a man whom the caller had also dated.
This man, she said, had a thing for eyes.
This is where a forensic semiotician would get involved. What did the theft of the eyes mean to the killer? And who, among any suspects, had—as the woman said—a thing for eyes?
…
Some of literature’s greatest detectives are forensic semioticians, even if that term hadn’t yet been coined. C. Auguste Dupin, the detective created by Edgar Allan Poe is a semiotician. Sherlock Holmes is another.
Umberto Eco, himself a professional semiotician, uses semiotics in his novel, The Name of the Rose (later made into a movie starring Sean Connery). The narrator, a young Benedictine monk named Adso, is the scribe and disciple of Brother William of Baskerville (no doubt a nod to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). As William and Adso approach an abbey where William has been asked to help solve a murder, they encounter a search party. Adso watches in astonishment as his master not only identifies what the search party seeks (the abbot’s runaway horse) but tells them where to find the beast—along with a list of details about the horse which William has deduced from clues invisible to everyone else. When Adso asks how William figured out so much about the horse, sight unseen, William replies: “My good Adso, during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book…I’m almost embarrassed to repeat to you what you should know.”
…
In Dallas, the police identified the man whose description matched that put forth by the sex workers: a married man named Charles Albright who made his living managing his father’s properties and delivering newspapers in the wee hours of the morning.
A job that would give him the nighttime solitude necessary to commit murder.
They pulled up Albright’s criminal record. The rap sheet included forgeries, thefts, burglaries. And a charge of sexual intercourse with a child. After another sex worker picked Albright out of a mug shot book, he was arrested. Ultimately, he was convicted based on witness testimony and an apparent match of Albright’s hairs and the victim’s hairs in various places (this was before the age of DNA).
No motivation was ever revealed, and the stolen eyes of Albright’s victims were never found.
But a forensic semiotician could look at Albright’s history and spot the trail of breadcrumbs. As a child, Albright’s mother—a controlling woman with whom Albright had a difficult relationship—taught him taxidermy. One of the aspects he did especially well was removing the birds’ real eyes with a scalpel. The young Albright longed to give his birds beautiful, glossy taxidermy eyes. But his mother said the eyes were too expensive and refused to buy them. So, Albright’s birds remained eyeless save for little black buttons his mother sewed on in place of more realistic ones. The boy visited taxidermy shops, fondling the shiny polished eyeballs he wasn’t allowed to own.
According to Albright’s friends, there were other indications of Albright’s obsession with eyes, a fascination that followed him throughout his life. Maybe this brilliant man who was a beloved science teacher as well as a star football player at Arkansas State Teacher’s College—maybe his choice to take the eyes was a comment on the idea that eyes signal intelligence. Or maybe he feared being cursed by the “evil eye” of the women he was said to solicit and ultimately murder.
Maybe he still longed for the life-like eyes he had once dreamed of as a boy.
Albright protested his innocence to the end and died in prison at the age of eighty-seven.
His strange longings went with him to the grave.
Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of the Evan Wilding books—a series about a forensic semiotician who consults on Chicago’s grisliest murder cases.