Searching for a Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story (Howard Braustein Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 9), just after the Lifetime movie Buried Alive and Survived, I kept Lifetime on for Searching for a Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story. I’d really wanted to see this one based on the promos, which featured a Black woman cop talking to prostitutes on the streets of Dallas, Texas (in Oak Cliff, Dallas’s lowest-status neighborhood and the birthplace of blues giant Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, who on his first records in 1929 was actually billed as “Oak Cliff T-Bone”), with them pleading with her to catch the serial killer that was terrorizing the neighborhood and killing them off. The film, directed by Wendy Ord from a script by Conor Allyn and Benjamin Anderson, is actually a good deal deeper and richer than that. It begins with Regina Smith (Karrueche Tran) struggling to raise herself and her daughter Nikki (Ella Quashie) as a single mother in Dallas, Texas following the breakup of her relationship with the girl’s father. One evening she sees a TV ad asking people to join the Dallas Police Department, and she immediately responds because she’s tired of feeding herself and Nikki macaroni and cheese for dinner every night and could use a steady job. She immediately enrolls in the Dallas Police Academy, where she’s put through a tough regime of training following an embarrassing incident in which she’s advised to wear something nice on her first day – and she puts on a faux fur coat and high heels. Then her car breaks down on the way and she’s forced to take off her shoes and carry them as she runs to her first day of classes. She’s put through a rigorous physical exercise regimen under a brutal, no-nonsense captain who predictably isn’t about to cut her any slack just because she’s both the only woman and the only African-American in the class.

Ultimately Smith makes it through the Academy and gets sworn in as a uniformed police officer. As such she’s assigned the graveyard shift and given a white male partner, James Rudolph (Paul Vos), where they drive through Oak Park every night and keep an eye on the prostitutes. They’re also supposed to be on the lookout for crack cocaine users and dealers, this being 1990 at the height of the crack epidemic. (Today the biggest drug issue for beat cops would be fentanyl.) Regina Smith heard the lectures about “community policing” at the Academy and, unlike most cops then or now, took them seriously. She decided it was part of her remit to get to know the regular street hookers and ultimately befriend them – much to the consternation of her partner, who’s one of those old-line cops that divides the world into people who live within the law and people who break it – and prostitutes are by definition lawbreakers. Then one of the hookers Smith befriended, Mary Pratt (Hannah Krostewitz), is found murdered, shot to death and dumped in a vacant yard. Though the police don’t release this detail to the media, Mary’s body is missing her eyeballs. Shortly thereafter another white prostitute, Susan Peterson (Lauren Jackson), is also found dead with her eyeballs removed. Officer Smith longs to investigate the cases herself, but her partner warns that that’s above her pay grade and she’s supposed to refer all her evidence to plainclothes detective Silva (Roark Critchlow), in charge of the investigation, who doesn’t want her help and makes that clear to her. Rudolph warns her that she could get fired if she tries to investigate the case herself. She’s also having to deal with complaints from the relative she’s paying to look after Nikki on her long nights out.

Regina Smith’s life looks up when she meets and starts dating Norm (Christopher Russell), a SWAT officer. She makes it clear that putting up with a daughter at the edge of teenagerhood is part of the deal, and when he says he’s O.K. with that they go on dinner dates. Things go well enough between them that they actually get married – and presumably Nikki is O.K. with suddenly having a white stepfather – but then Norm gets killed in the line of duty and Smith learns about it pretty much by accident. Undaunted, Smith continues her patrols around Oak Park and the prostitutes she’s befriended desperately plead with her to catch the man who’s been killing them – even while they also remain guarded around her. Smith’s patrols also attract the ire of Deshaun (Dallas Blake), a Black pimp who runs several of the “girls” of all races. We know who the killer is well before Smith or any of the other characters do when we see him driving a big old Cadillac, cruising the neighborhood and then coming home to his live-in girlfriend and doing the full-blown banality-of-evil number with her. He’s Charles Albright (Ted Cole), and in a scene with his girlfriend as he’s painting a replica eye, he explains why he’s doing the murders. It seems that his mother left home and became a prostitute herself; he’s never forgiven her for leaving him, and he’s painted her but without eyes. So he takes out his revenge by picking up hookers, driving them to deserted spots and killing them, then harvesting their eyes with skills he learned from his adoptive parents, who taught him taxidermy. Ironically, the one murder the real Albright was actually convicted of was his third, of a Black hooker named Shirley Williams who was 45 years old, considerably older than the two previous white victims. I’m not sure what the factual basis for this is, but the film depicts Williams ending up as the target just because the white hooker she was next to when Albright’s car pulled up decided she wanted to call it quits for the evening and sent Williams instead. When Williams’s body was found, her eyeballs were removed but more sloppily than those of the other two.

Regina Smith herself recounted how she identified Albright as the killer in an interview with A&E’s crime blog (https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/regina-smith-eyeball-killer): “We had been telling homicide since the night after Mary Pratt’s murder, [witness] Veronica Rodriguez had a big scar on her head and neck. We were about to arrest her for prostitution, and she said, ‘You know I saw Mary get killed.’ Some prostitutes lie to avoid getting arrested. We arrested her many times before, but I took notes on everything she was saying, and [my partner] and I immediately relayed that information to the homicide division. When Susan Peterson was killed, we let them know [again] what Veronica had said because she never deviated from her story. I made another arrest with her that was significant because she was with a [customer] in a truck. She told me, ‘Don’t arrest him, he’s the one that saved me the night Mary got killed.’ I took his information and relayed it to the homicide division. After the third murder [of Williams], I laid this out in front of homicide. I had taken copious notes of other girls telling us the different experiences they had. We had one prostitute, Brenda White, who told me she had a trick who went bad on her and she Maced him to get out of the car. She described him to me, and I went to the jail with that description and the information from Veronica Rodriguez. I put the information into the jail system and got Charles Albright’s criminal record and a photograph that fit who Brenda White said she had to Mace. We’d been telling homicide over and over, and they did not listen to us. So we went in person, and I showed them my notes.”

The detectives ultimately tracked down Albright and allowed Smith and her partner actually to make the arrest. Though Albright was charged with all three murders, he was just convicted of killing Williams because, as Smith explained to A&E, “The only reason he was convicted is because of the evidence I found in the field: a yellow raincoat Shirley was last seen wearing by another prostitute who gave it to her. [The other prostitute] saw her get in the car with her regular, whom she called ‘Pappy.’ I found that raincoat in the field where they said they did their tricks. That raincoat contained a squirrel tail hair – the same type found in a vacuum cleaner in Charles Albright’s home after his arrest.” Smith went on to a 26-year career with the Dallas Police Department before she retired at the rank of lieutenant, but she never forgot the Albright case. After he was convicted in 1991 he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the John Montfort Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock, Texas, where he remained until he died in 2020. Before that Smith tried to get in to see Albright to ask him what he did with the victims’ missing eyes, but by the time she got there he was in hospice care and she wasn’t allowed to see him. Smith told A&E, “I wanted to ask him, ‘Why did you do it? What did you do with those girls’ eyes?’ We will never know because he took that secret to his grave.” Lifetime’s dramatization of this grim story is pitch-perfect, especially in the dogged performance of Karrueche Tran as Regina Smith. Wendy Ord’s direction is vivid and dramatic, and the script betrays no hint of the “No Humans Involved” attitude police officers all too frequently betray when faced with crimes in which the victims were prostitutes. Searching for a Serial Killer is a dark tale, but it’s told eloquently well and this film is Lifetime at its infrequent best.