Wealth offers the illusion of protection. The gated driveways, the security systems, the attorneys on retainer. But money cannot insulate a woman from a husband who knows the codes, possesses the keys, and calculates that murder costs less than divorce when the settlement demands reach into the tens of millions.
Priscilla Davis was the platinum blonde wife of T. Cullen Davis, a Texas oil tycoon worth an estimated 100 to $500 million, making him one of the wealthiest men in America and the richest man ever to stand trial for murder in United States history. On the night of August 2nd, 1976, a man dressed entirely in black entered their Fort Worth mansion and executed Priscilla’s 12-year-old daughter with a single shot to the chest, killed her 6’9″ boyfriend with four bullets, shot Priscilla between the breasts, and left a young visitor paralyzed for life. Three
eyewitnesses identified the shooter as Cullen Davis, and Priscilla herself looked into his face as he pulled the trigger. Yet, a jury in Amarillo returned a verdict of not guilty after a legendary defense attorney spent weeks destroying her credibility by interrogating her about sex toys, prescription drugs, and a diamond necklace that spelled rich [ __ ] In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we expose how one woman clawed her way from poverty to a mansion worth $6 million only to watch her daughter murdered and her husband acquitted, then
spent her final years in a one-bedroom apartment while the man she accused of killing her child, preached alongside televangelists and never served a single day in prison, proving that in Texas, the price of justice depends entirely on who can afford the better lawyer. Priscilla Lee Childers entered the world in Dublin, Texas.
Born into a fractured family where poverty was the only constant, and her father proved to be an absent presence remembered chiefly through photographs he left behind when he abandoned them. I didn’t know my father, she later reflected. He forgot to do two things. Come home and send a check. Her mother became the guiding force of her childhood.
A Texas woman who had spent 10 childless years in California before divorcing and returning to Texas where she remarried and bore three children only to be abandoned once again by another man who could not stay. The household existed on the margins of survival, supported by a bachelor uncle whose generosity stretched thin across a crowded house outside Houston, where money was counted in quarters, and every expenditure required calculation.
Priscilla recalled the grim arithmetic of childhood deprivation. I used to get a quarter, and I could either get a pressed ham sandwich and a glass of water, or a pack of cigarettes. Finally, I’d just take my mother’s cigarettes. I did it so well I got mama to change to my brand. At 15, she experienced sexual violence that would reverberate through her adolescence, raped by a boy she liked, one who had promised otherwise, and whom she later saw leaving for the army, his lips moving through a train window. I’m
sorry. By 16, with a six-month-old daughter and no husband, she married Jasper Baker, recently returned from the Marines and widely sought after by young women, only to discover him dating a 24year-old car hop, a woman Priscilla, then only 16, considered an old woman. Abandoned and desperate, she took her infant daughter west to California, found only disappointment on the coast, and hitched a ride back to Houston with her belongings packed in a trailer behind a pickup truck.
A modern-day Steinbeck heroine in reverse. After two jobs and 10 months of survival, she married Jack Wilbornne, a Houston used car dealer whose financial stability offered escape from poverty, and the Wilborns gradually ascended the Fort Worth social ladder. In October 1961, at 20 years old, she was arrested for shoplifting.
A lady’s dress worth $45, a sweater for $69.95, and a skirt for $11.95, and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, paying a $50 fine. Then she met T. Cullen Davis at the Ridgler Country Club, playing tennis doubles against him and his wife, Sandra. Her team slaughtered them. Cullen was the middle of three sons of Kenneth Stinky Davis, founder of Ken Davis Industries International, a petroleum empire that had programmed him for dominance from childhood with his own 50 acre summer spread at Eagle Mountain Lake.
After both couples separated, Cullen proposed marriage from New York during a company Christmas party at the Waldorf Atoria. And Priscilla, stunned, accepted the offer that would transform her from a woman who stole cigarettes from her mother into the mistress of a fortress worth more than most people would earn in 10 lifetimes.
Priscilla and Cullen married on August 29th, 1968. The same day that Cullen’s father died, a theatrical synchronicity that set the tone for everything that followed. As morning relatives arrived to offer condolences, Cullen would introduce them to his new bride. I’d like for you to meet my wife. Their mouths fell open.
One friend later described them as the perfect couple. She was the exhibitionist and he was the voyer. Priscilla blossomed under Cullen’s wealth, undergoing cosmetic breast surgery and becoming a conspicuous fixture at Fort Worth society events, particularly at the Colonial Golf Tournament where male attendees craned their necks to observe her strategically stationed by the 9th and 18th Greens, sometimes in a leg cast, part of her just hanging out all over.
She favored exotically revealing clothes, miniskirts, hip huggers, plunging necklines, and rumors circulated about her that she dismissed with a smile, though she admitted to having once had her pubic hair shaved into a heart. Cullen relished displaying her, walking behind her a couple of steps, just to watch other men looking at what belonged to him.
One observer noted ominously, he treated her like a 1908 Ford. It was like everyone would like to have her, but he knew nobody else could bother with the upkeep. In 1972, Cullin initiated construction of Priscilla’s Dreamhouse on 180 acres, partially bordering the Colonial Country Club. The Stonegate mansion would cost $6 million, approximately 45 million in today’s currency, and took 3 and 1/2 years to complete.
The structure was a brutalist fortress designed by architect Albert Escomatsu. Five bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, over 17,000 square ft with a massive glasswalled indoor pool. Priscilla’s bathroom alone was larger than many bedrooms. Walls of hot pink mirrored beneath a huge crystal chandelier, a sunken marble tub where she could survey her domain.
But the mansion also included features designed for control. courtyard layouts, tunnels connecting various wings, surveillance cameras, and elaborate security systems with two console control points that Cullen had personally overseen. According to Priscilla’s later testimony at bond hearings following the murders, Cullen had beaten her repeatedly throughout the marriage.
He broke her nose twice and her collarbone once. He broke the nose of her older daughter, D. He beat Priscilla with her own crutch while she recovered from a skiing injury. In a fit of rage, he threw the family cat hard against the floor, killing it. The crisis came on Priscilla’s birthday in 1974 when she discovered her jewelry missing and confronted him.
She screamed, “You want a divorce? Well, you’re going to get one.” He replied coldly, “That’s all right. I’ve been there before.” “Priscilla, uh-uh, not like this, you haven’t.” On the afternoon of August 2nd, 1976, Judge Joe Edson issued his third consecutive increase in Priscilla’s temporary alimony, raising her monthly payment from $3,500 to $5,000 and ordering Cullen to pay 25,000 in legal fees and 24,000 in household expenses.
Two years into the divorce proceedings, Priscilla was asking for almost $50 million. And Cullen, banned from the mansion by restraining order, hemorrhaging money to attorneys, watching his fortune drain into the hands of a woman he despised, apparently interpreted the ruling as a breaking point.
That evening, Priscilla’s 12-year-old daughter, Andrea Wilbornne, had just returned to the mansion from an overnight Bible camp excursion. She was alone in the 17,000q ft fortress. The household staff dismissed for the evening. Stand far not yet home. Her mother still out at dinner. Andrea was quiet and bookish, somewhat shy compared to her older sister D, a pre-teen on the cusp of adolescence with no idea what awaited her in the basement.
Priscilla and Stan Far, her 6’9″ boyfriend, a former Texas Christian University basketball player and manager of the Rhinestone Cowboy nightclub, remembered by everyone who knew him as gentle, kind, and generous, returned to the mansion around 12:30 in the morning. The security locks were off. The basement door was standing open.
Priscilla saw bloody handprints and smears on the walls near the kitchen entrance as if someone had been moving through the house in a state of violent agitation. “I saw blood on the walls,” she later testified. “I screamed for Stan.” “A figure emerged from the darkness of the kitchen, dressed entirely in black, wearing a woman’s black wig at a crooked angle, hands wrapped in black plastic garbage bags. He was calm, eerily calm.
He looked at her and said with chilling casualness, “Hi.” Then he fired. The bullet entered Priscilla’s chest between her breasts, passing through her torso and barely missing vital organs. Stan came down the stairs, alerted by her scream. According to Priscilla’s testimony, Stan and Cullen struggled on either side of the door.
Cullen fired through the door and Stan cried out. Far opened the door and tried to grab his asalent. Davis pulled away and fired again. Stan fell to the floor and Davis pumped two more shots into his body. Priscilla’s worst moment came in the immediate aftermath. I watched his eyes. I watched him die. In the basement electrical room, police would find Andrea Wilbornne shot once in the chest at point blank range.
the bullet nearly severing her aorta, her small body curled on the cold floor where she had bled to death alone in the dark. And the man who had killed her was about to become the wealthiest defendant in American murder trial history. The trial was relocated to Amarillo, Texas, 360 mi north in the conservative panhandle, where defense attorney Richard Rayhorse Haynes wanted to try the case before jurors hostile to the kind of sensationalized wealth and sexual excess that defined Priscilla’s world. Haynes was a legend, a 5’7 fire
brand in ostrich skin cowboy boots who chain smoked a pipe, had won 163 drunk driving cases in a row between 1956 and 1968, and had mastered the art of constructing alternative narratives so compelling that jurors would embrace them over what seemed like obvious guilt. His philosophy bordered on nihilism as he once explained, “Say you sue me because you claim my dog bit you.
” Well, now this is my defense. My dog doesn’t bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don’t believe you really got bit. And fourth, I don’t have a dog. The prosecution had three eyewitnesses who identified Cullen Davis as the shooter. Priscilla herself, Gus Gavl Jr.
, who was paralyzed by a bullet to the spine and would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair until his death in 2018, and 16-year-old Beverly Bus, who fled screaming into the darkness. They had motive. The alimony increase issued hours before the murders. The divorce settlement demanding nearly $50 million. They had opportunity. Cullen knew the security codes and possessed intimate knowledge of the fortress he had designed and funded.
But Haynes put Priscilla on trial instead of Cullen. For weeks, he cross-examined her about her sexual history, the men in her life, the leather jumpsuits, and revealing clothing she wore to society events. He questioned her about Percodan use, a prescription painkiller containing oxycodone, implying she was a drug addict whose judgment and memory were unreliable under the trauma of being shot.
He grilled her about sex toys found in the mansion, had her describe her fantasies in graphic detail before a conservative Amarillo jury, and introduced the diamond necklace spelling rich [ __ ] as evidence of moral degeneracy rather than as a gift from the husband who had given it to her.
By attacking Priscilla’s credibility relentlessly, Haynes accomplished what seemed impossible. He convinced 12 jurors that a woman who dressed provocatively and admitted to multiple lovers was less believable than a soft-spoken oil tycoon who showed no emotion throughout the proceedings. On November 17th, 1977, after approximately 4 hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict, not guilty on the charge of murdering Andrea Wilbornne.
One juror reportedly told reporters afterward, “We just couldn’t believe he would do something like that. He doesn’t look like a murderer. Priscilla collapsed in the courtroom and within days, Cullen was seen shooting pool at the petroleum club in downtown Fort Worth as if the deaths of a 12-year-old girl and a 6’9 former athlete had never occurred.
But the legal battles were far from over. 4 months after his acquitt, Cullen was arrested again when an FBI sting operation caught him on tape, allegedly paying $25,000 to a man he believed had murdered Judge Idson and Priscilla. The informant, David McCroy, had worn a hidden microphone to a meeting in the parking lot of a Coco’s famous hamburgers restaurant near Fort Worth, where he told Cullen, “I got the judge dead for you.
” Cullen allegedly replied, “Good.” McCroy later said on tape, “This fair g murder business is a tough son of a bitch.” But Haynes returned with a Georgetown University linguistics professor named Roger Shuy, who testified that the word good might not have meant what it appeared to mean, that the context of the conversation could have been about something else entirely, perhaps even sunglasses.
The first jury deadlocked after 44 hours of deliberation. A second trial ended in a quiddle. All remaining charges related to the mansion murders were dropped and Cullen Davis walked free. In 1987, Priscilla and Andrea’s biological father, Jack Wilbornne, filed a wrongful death civil suit where the burden of proof was lower, preponderance of evidence rather than beyond reasonable doubt.
The jury voted 8 to4 that Cullen was liable for Andrea’s death, but Texas law required 10 votes for a civil verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial. Cullen agreed to pay approximately $5 million in settlement, but then declared bankruptcy when the oil recession devastated his holdings, and Priscilla received virtually nothing from the judgment.
By 1990, she was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Oak Lawn, Dallas. the woman who had worn diamonds now working as a fragrance model at Neiman Marcus spraying perfume on paper samples for customers. Her daughter D had spent 9 years in and out of prison on heroine charges and gave birth to a daughter, also named Priscilla, while incarcerated at Gatesville.
Priscilla took custody of her granddaughter and later reflected, “I think God gave her to me because he took Andrea away.” In August 1999, she discovered a lump in her breast, the same breast shot 23 years earlier, and received a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer metastasized to her spine, leg, and liver.
Priscilla Davis died on February 19th, 2001 at 59 years old, maintaining until her final breath. I will go to my grave knowing Cullen Davis killed my child. Cullen Davis, now in his early 90s, became a born-again Christian who preached alongside televangelist James Robinson, married Karen Master shortly after his acquitt, and continues to maintain his innocence from his home in the Fort Worth area, having never served a single day in prison, while the woman who survived his alleged attack died in poverty.
And the 12-year-old girl he allegedly executed in a basement has been dead for nearly 50 years now. Now, we’d love to see you in the comments. Did you know three witnesses identified Cullen, but he walked free? Let us know your thoughts below, and thanks for joining another episode of Old Money Allure.
