In August 1976, a shooting inside a $6 million Fort Worth mansion left a 12-year-old girl dead, a former college basketball player killed, and a socialite wounded. The man accused of the attack was T. Cullen Davis, an oil tycoon worth an estimated $100 million to $500 million. He became the richest man in American history to stand trial for murder.
The woman at the center of the case was Priscilla Davis. She had climbed from a childhood of poverty to become the wife of one of Texas’s wealthiest men. Her life unraveled publicly during a bitter divorce, and the violence that followed made national headlines.
Priscilla Lee Childers was born in Dublin, Texas. Her father abandoned the family when she was young. Her mother raised three children with help from a bachelor uncle, and money was always scarce. Priscilla later recalled the hard choices of her childhood, including whether to buy food or cigarettes with a single quarter.
At 15, she was raped by a boy she knew. By 16, she was married with a six-month-old daughter. That marriage ended quickly, and she later married Jack Wilborn, a Houston used car dealer. The couple moved up the Fort Worth social ladder, but Priscilla’s life took a turn when she met T. Cullen Davis at a country club tennis match.
Cullen was the middle son of the founder of Ken Davis Industries International, a petroleum empire. He proposed to Priscilla from New York during a company Christmas party. They married on August 29, 1968, the same day Cullen’s father died.
The couple became a fixture in Fort Worth society. Priscilla embraced the wealth, wearing revealing clothes and undergoing cosmetic surgery. Cullen reportedly enjoyed showing her off. In 1972, he began building her a dream mansion on 180 acres near the Colonial Country Club.
The Stonegate mansion took three and a half years to complete and cost $6 million. It had five bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, and more than 17,000 square feet. There was an indoor pool with glass walls, a bathroom with hot pink mirrors, and a sunken marble tub. The house also included surveillance cameras, tunnels, and security systems that Cullen personally oversaw.
The marriage turned violent. Priscilla later testified that Cullen broke her nose twice and her collarbone once. She said he beat her with her own crutch while she recovered from a skiing injury. She also testified that he killed the family cat by throwing it against the floor.
In 1974, on her birthday, Priscilla discovered her jewelry was missing. She confronted Cullen and demanded a divorce. He replied that he had been through a divorce before.
The divorce dragged on for two years. On August 2, 1976, a judge increased Priscilla’s temporary alimony from $3,500 to $5,000 per month and ordered Cullen to pay tens of thousands in legal fees and household expenses. Priscilla was seeking nearly $50 million in the settlement.
That evening, Priscilla’s 12-year-old daughter, Andrea Wilborn, had just returned to the mansion from a Bible camp trip. She was alone in the house. Priscilla and her boyfriend, Stan Farr, a 6-foot-9 former TCU basketball player, returned around 12:30 a.m.
The security locks were off. The basement door was open. Priscilla saw blood on the walls near the kitchen. A figure emerged from the darkness, dressed in black, wearing a crooked black wig, with hands wrapped in plastic garbage bags. He said, “Hi,” and fired.
The bullet struck Priscilla between the breasts. Stan came down the stairs and struggled with the shooter. He was shot through a door and then hit with more bullets as he fell. He died on the floor. In the basement, police found Andrea, shot once in the chest at point-blank range. She had bled to death alone in the dark.
Three eyewitnesses identified Cullen Davis as the shooter. Priscilla said she looked into his face as he pulled the trigger. The prosecution had motive, opportunity, and witnesses. But the trial was moved to Amarillo, Texas, where defense attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes built a different case.
Haynes was a legendary lawyer known for constructing alternative narratives. He put Priscilla on trial instead of Cullen. He questioned her about her sexual history, her clothing, her use of prescription painkillers, and sex toys found in the mansion. He introduced a diamond necklace that spelled “rich bitch” as evidence of her character.
The strategy worked. After about four hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. One juror reportedly said, “We just couldn’t believe he would do something like that. He doesn’t look like a murderer.”
Four months later, Cullen was arrested again. An FBI sting caught him on tape allegedly paying $25,000 to a man he believed had killed the judge and Priscilla. The informant wore a hidden microphone. But Haynes brought in a linguistics professor who testified that the word “good” in the conversation might not have meant what it appeared to mean. Two trials ended in hung juries, and the charges were dropped.
In 1987, Jack Wilborn, Andrea’s biological father, filed a wrongful death civil suit. The jury voted 8 to 4 that Cullen was liable, but Texas law required 10 votes for a civil verdict. The judge declared a mistrial. Cullen agreed to pay about $5 million in settlement, then declared bankruptcy. Priscilla received virtually nothing.
By 1990, Priscilla was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Dallas. She worked as a fragrance model at Neiman Marcus, spraying perfume samples for customers. Her older daughter struggled with addiction and spent years in and out of prison. Priscilla took custody of her granddaughter.
In August 1999, Priscilla found a lump in her breast, the same breast shot 23 years earlier. She was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She died on February 19, 2001, at age 59. She maintained until her final breath that Cullen Davis killed her child.
Cullen Davis became a born-again Christian and preached alongside televangelists. He remarried and continued to maintain his innocence. He never served a day in prison. Andrea Wilborn has been dead for nearly 50 years, and the man she identified as her killer lived out his life in freedom.