T. Cullen Davis

Thomas Cullen Davis was born on 22 September 1933 in Texas, the middle of three sons of Kenneth W. "Stinky" Davis, a well known Fort Worth oilman who founded KenDavis Industries International, Inc., a maker of products used in the petroleum industry. When his father died in 1968, Cullen Davis and his brothers each received an equal share of the family estate, and all three were described in the press as capable businessmen.

His first marriage, to Sandra Masters on 29 August 1962, produced two sons, Cullen Jr. and Brian. On 29 August 1968, hours after his father's death, he married Priscilla Lee Childers, who had three children from earlier marriages, including Andrea Wilborn.

With his brothers, Davis ran the family's KenDavis business interests, and by the mid 1970s his personal wealth was estimated at more than 100 million dollars. In 1972 he built Stonegate Mansion in southwest Fort Worth, a contemporary house of courtyards and balconies said to have cost about 6 million dollars.

Davis and Priscilla separated in 1974, and she was allowed to remain at the mansion during the divorce. On 2 August 1976, the day a judge increased his support payments to her, a gunman dressed in black entered the house. Andrea Wilborn, aged 12, and Stan Farr were shot dead; Priscilla Davis was wounded and Gus Gavrel Jr. was paralysed. Three survivors identified Cullen Davis, who was arrested that night at the home of his girlfriend, Karen Master, and said he had been at the cinema.

The first trial in Fort Worth was aborted over jury misconduct and moved to Amarillo. Led by the Houston lawyer Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, the defence stressed the absence of physical evidence and challenged the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. Davis did not testify and was acquitted in November 1977. Prosecutor Tim Curry said afterwards, "We were out-bought and out-thought."

In 1978 Davis was charged with soliciting the murders of Priscilla Davis and the judge presiding over the divorce, after recorded conversations with an FBI informant, David McCrory. A linguist testified for the defence that the recordings did not amount to solicitation, and Davis told the jury he had played along with a plot to frame him. He was acquitted again. In related civil cases he was found not liable for Andrea Wilborn's death, while Stan Farr's children received a 250,000 dollar settlement.

Davis married Karen Master in Fort Worth on 5 June 1979 and adopted her two sons, Trey and Chesley. In the oil recession of the 1980s he lost most of his fortune and filed for bankruptcy, and the couple sold their home and land to a developer in 1984. He became a born-again Christian and in the early 1980s was associated with the televangelist James Robison.

From the 1990s he lived in Colleyville, a suburb between Fort Worth and Dallas, and worked from home in industrial sales. He always maintained that he was innocent and dismissed books about the case as fiction. Karen Davis died in September 2016. In his final years he lived with his wife, Dana, and a 2026 profile in Fort Worth Magazine described him as frail but quick witted.

Cullen Davis died on Friday 6 November 2026 at his home in Colleyville, Texas, aged 93. His stepson, Trey Davis, confirmed the death on Sunday 8 November, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that the cause was not clear. No cause of death has been made public, and funeral arrangements had not been reported.

The 1976 Stonegate Mansion shootings remain officially unsolved, and the trials that followed are still cited as a landmark in debates about wealth, expensive legal defence and the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The 1978 case is noted as one of the first American trials in which forensic discourse analysis of recorded speech played a central role. Tarrant County chose in 2015 to keep the paper court files as historical documents.

The case has been told in books including Gary Cartwright's Blood Will Tell (1979) and Texas Justice, Mike Cochran's Texas vs. Davis, and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Final Justice, and on screen in the 1995 television film Texas Justice, starring Peter Strauss and Heather Locklear, and in documentary series such as American Justice and 48 Hours.