Blood Will Sell
Two decades after his acquittal on multiple murder charges shocked Texas, Cullen Davis is alive and well and living in Colleyville, where he has repackaged himself as a devoted husband, a devout Christian, and a determined peddler of skin cream.
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“Fire away,” I think to myself. “Cullen Davis has just told me to fire away.”
He was born and raised in Fort Worth, the middle of three sons born to the fierce Fort Worth oilman Kenneth W. “Stinky” Davis, who made his fortune by purchasing oil-field supply companies on the cheap and putting them under an umbrella corporation called Kendavis Industries International. After graduating from Texas A&M University, Cullen went to work for the family business, and in 1968, when his father died, he and his two brothers took it over, increasing sales over the next ten years from $300 million to $1.03 billion. Unlike tightfisted Stinky, Cullen loved the high life, showering women with jewels and furs and taking them on trips in his jet. In time Cullen’s younger brother, Bill, got tired of his freewheeling ways and sued him, claiming he’d run up personal debts of at least $16 million and was using Kendavis’ assets as collateral for obtaining personal loans. The lawsuit was settled, and Cullen and his older brother, Ken, bought out Bill’s interest in the business. (Decades later, Cullen and Bill are still not speaking.)
Cullen was best known around Fort Worth, however, for his way with women. His first wife, Sandra, whom he married in 1962, accused him of slapping her in public and beating her in private until she had bruises covering her face. Before they divorced, he met feisty, flirtatious Priscilla Wilborn, whose platinum hair and revealing halter tops (which gave men a good view of what they called her “balcony”) made her the talk of the town. Completely smitten, Cullen wooed her away from her husband, a used-car dealer named Jack Wilborn. They married in 1968, and soon after, he commissioned a six-by-eight-foot oil painting of them—him in a business suit, her in a low-cut dress with a high hemline—and hung it in the foyer of the mansion.
Their lives seemed like something out of a prime-time soap opera. In happy times Priscilla would wear a necklace with the phrase “Rich Bitch” spelled out in diamonds. She decorated their skybox at Texas Stadium completely in pink. Reportedly, she once slipped under the table at a Dallas restaurant, unzipped Cullen’s pants, and performed a sex act. But in 1974 she filed for divorce, telling similar stories to the ones that Sandra had told. She said Cullen often beat her and kicked her, even as she curled up in a ball trying to protect herself. She claimed he broke her nose on one occasion and her collarbone on another. Her eldest daughter, Dee, said Cullen hit her too, beating her so badly at one point that there was blood in her urine; he was so cruel, she said, that he once picked up her new kitten and flung it to the floor, killing it. Initially, the judge in their divorce case ordered Cullen to move out of the mansion and to pay Priscilla $3,500 a month in living expenses. Then, on August 2, 1976, the judge increased Cullen’s payments to $5,000 a month and ordered him to give Priscilla an additional $27,000 to pay bills she had accumulated and $25,000 more to cover legal expenses.
That night, Priscilla later told police officers, she and her new boyfriend, Stan Farr, a former basketball player at TCU, ate dinner at a restaurant and had a few drinks at a nightclub. When they got home, there was a man wearing black clothing and a woman’s shoulder-length black wig in the kitchen. It was Cullen, she insisted. He walked right up to her, coolly said, “Hi,” shot her in the chest, and then shot Stan four times. Priscilla was able to escape: She ran to a neighbor’s house and, according to witnesses, screamed that Cullen was trying to kill her. While all this was going on, some friends of Priscilla’s, Beverly Bass and Bubba Gavrel, were just getting out of their car in front of the mansion and heading toward the door. They also saw a man in black, and they later told the police they had no doubt it was Cullen. In fact, when the man shot Bubba, paralyzing him from the waist down, Beverly said she called out, “It’s me, Cullen. It’s Bev! Please don’t shoot me!” She then ran from the mansion, flagged down a passing car, and told the driver that Cullen was the one doing the shooting.
When the police arrived, they found Stan dead in the kitchen. Elsewhere in the house, they found the body of Priscilla’s twelve-year-old daughter, Andrea Wilborn. Her death had been particularly horrible: She was taken into a basement utility room, shot through the chest, and left to die.
Hours later, Cullen was arrested and charged with capital murder. His guilt was taken for granted by almost everyone investigating the case. The police learned that when Cullen’s brother Ken called and woke him that night to tell him about the shootings, Cullen calmly said, “Well, I guess I’m going back to bed.” A Fort Worth detective told reporters that when he asked Cullen why so many people had to be shot at the mansion, he replied, “Sometimes, a man doesn’t need a reason.” The detective would later say that he took that statement to be a confession.
It seemed impossible to imagine that Cullen would be acquitted, even when he hired the great Richard “Racehorse” Haynes of Houston, a marvel of bombast and fiery cross-examination, to defend him. But then Racehorse went after the prosecution’s witnesses. He kept Priscilla on the stand for several days, firing questions at her about her use of the prescription painkiller Percodan and her sexual relations with other men, implying she was not morally fit to be trusted. He insinuated that Priscilla and Beverly Bass had concocted their story to keep the real killer from coming after them and to help Priscilla get Cullen’s millions in the divorce. He called several witnesses who swore that they had seen Stan Farr associating with drug dealers, raising the possibility that the gunman was a druggie who did the shooting because of a deal gone sour. Racehorse even called a surprise witness: the owner of a small Fort Worth nursery, who said he had sneaked onto the mansion’s grounds that fateful night to repossess some plants that hadn’t been paid for. The nursery owner said that he saw the man in black, but it wasn’t Cullen. Karen Master, meanwhile, testified that when she woke up, around twelve-forty in the morning, Cullen was sound asleep beside her (a detail she had neglected to mention when the police first interviewed her).
After two days of deliberation, the Amarillo jurors returned a verdict of not guilty—a moment that for Texans was as jaw-dropping as the O. J. Simpson verdict. The jury had actually believed the theory that Priscilla and Beverly had conspired to frame Cullen, even though they told different people that he was the killer before they had the chance to compare stories. Rich men don’t kill their wives, one female juror explained at a booze-laden victory party thrown by Cullen; they hire someone else to do it.
After the trial, Cullen returned to Fort Worth, showed up at society parties with Karen, and resumed his position running Kendavis Industries with his brother Ken. The company clearly had not suffered because of his notoriety: After-tax profits in 1977 were $57 million. Yet a mere nine months later, after the FBI caught him on tape discussing his hit list, he was arrested again, this time on a charge of soliciting capital murder. “Do the judge and then his wife,” Cullen was heard saying during a discussion with a federal informant who was posing as the liaison to a hit man. To make sure their case was airtight, federal agents faked the death of the judge, taking four photographs of him covered in ketchup and stuffed into the trunk of a car. They then had the informant show Cullen the photos and say, “I got Judge Eidson dead for you.” Cullen replied, “Good.” The informant said, “You want Beverly Bass killed next—quick, right?” Cullen answered, “All right.”
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