Skeletal remains discovered at a Queens parking are believed to belong to a 69-year-old nurse who vanished without a trace — a mystery that sent his wife on a frantic four-year quest to find out what happened to him.
A survey team hired by the city found the remains, which included a skull, leg bone and hip bone, in some brush just outside the parking lot on 20th Ave. near 132nd St. in College Point about 3:50 p.m. Monday. The lot is across the street from stores including Target, Home Goods and ShopRite.
Also found among the remains was a wallet that belonged to Richard “Max” Albright, who has been missing since Oct. 14, 2021, a police source said.
Investigators, with the help of the city Medical Examiner’s office, are in the process of confirming the bones belong to the 6-foot-3 Albright and determining how he died.
Albright’s wife of 23 years, Cathy Albright, told PIX11 Tuesday that cops told her the remains were her husband’s.
“I’m shocked but I’m also very glad. The not knowing is the hardest part. It’s been almost four years,” she told the outlet Tuesday, adding that nothing was missing from her husband’s wallet.
Cathy doesn’t believe her husband, who had three open-heart surgeries and was on medication, was the victim of foul play.
“I knew he had passed, but to have his remains and to know what happened is really what I want,” she told PIX11.
It’s not immediately clear how his remains ended in the thicket of shrubs on the side of a parking lot about four miles from the couple’s home.
Richard was last seen leaving his Jackson Heights home on Junction Blvd. about 11:15 a.m. the day he vanished.
Police recovered surveillance footage showing Richard, wearing slippers, shuffling out of his building. Cops later confirmed he took a bus and bought a 30-day MetroCard on the day he disappeared.
When he left, he told his wife that he would be back soon because his feet were hurting him.
But he never returned. Cathy said her husband would always reach out to her, which made his disappearance even more disturbing.
“He would crawl through broken glass and swim through a river of hot lava to let me know where he was,” Cathy told PIX11 a week after her husband’s disappearance. “He’s a devoted husband.”
Cops accessed Richard’s Google searches on the day he disappeared and learned he had pulled up information on a museum in Flushing, Queens, he wanted to visit. But investigators were unable to track Albright’s phone, which died shortly after he disappeared.
The son of Southern Baptist missionaries, Richard grew up in South Africa. He went to college in Kentucky, where he earned dual degrees in journalism and nursing.
He was a business editor for the “Amarillo Globe” in Texas, where he met his wife. After they married, they moved to New York City.
Richard worked for the Hospital for Special Surgery on the Upper East Side for 16 years before his disappearance. During the pandemic, he cared for COVID patients in a special wing opened up by the hospital.
“He is an extremely devoted nurse (and) he has called out less than 10 times in the the 16 years he has worked there,” Cathy wrote in a 2011 GoFundMe post that raised over $8,000 to help fund the search for her husband, including the hiring of a private detective.
As time wore on without any new information, Cathy felt the NYPD wasn’t doing enough to find her beloved.
“He asked more questions than the NYPD!” Cathy said about the private detective she hired in an update to the GoFundMe post on Oct. 27, 2021. “Other than the initial report, neither the Detective at 115th Precinct nor the Missing Persons Detective have asked a single question.”
As more weeks passed, the loss of her husband continued to take a toll.
“Every day a million ideas swirl in my mind about what has happened to him. Nothing makes sense,” she pleaded in a Nov. 12, 2021, GoFundMe update.
“I have lost my faith in God. Is my despair not deep enough? Does my desperation not have enough gnashing of teeth? Should my knees be more bloody from throwing myself at the alter of every church I pass, begging God to bring Max home?”
A spokeswoman for the city Medical Examiner’s office said Tuesday that the agency’s forensic anthropologists are working on identifying the remains.
“The matter is under investigation,” the spokeswoman said.
With Sheetal Banchariya
