Texas oil tycoon T. Cullen Davis, cleared in two 1970s murder cases, dies at 93

T. Cullen Davis died Friday at his home in the Fort Worth suburb of Colleyville, his son Trey Davis confirmed Monday. He was 93. The Texas oil tycoon spent the 1970s in courtrooms, not boardrooms, fighting two separate murder cases and walking away from both a free man.

In August 1976, Davis and his second wife, Priscilla, were locked in a bitter divorce when a gunman dressed in black and a woman's black wig opened fire inside his secluded Fort Worth mansion. Priscilla's 12-year-old daughter, Andrea Wilborn, and her live-in boyfriend, Stan Farr, 30, were killed. Priscilla and a visitor, Gus "Bubba" Gavrel Jr., survived their wounds; Gavrel's date escaped untouched.

All three survivors named Cullen Davis as the shooter. He was tried for capital murder in Wilborn's death, defended by flamboyant Texas attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes. The first trial collapsed into a mistrial over juror misconduct; the second ended in acquittal in 1977. With an oil empire valued at $400 million, he was called the richest man to ever stand trial for murder.

Nine months after that verdict, Davis was arrested again and charged with solicitation of capital murder. An FBI informant swore Davis hired him to kill 15 people, including the judge handling his divorce and the three survivors of the mansion shooting. Haynes defended him once more, and a jury acquitted him a second time.

The mansion bloodshed became true-crime fodder — multiple books, TV shows, and a 1995 miniseries, "Texas Justice," with Heather Locklear playing Priscilla. By the mid-1980s Davis' oil-based fortune was crumbling; in the mid-1990s he blamed "the crash of the oil industry, not because of my trials" for his company's bankruptcy. Priscilla Davis died of breast cancer in 2001 at 59.

Trey Davis, adopted by Cullen Davis after his mother Karen Master became Cullen's third wife, remembered meeting him in the mid-1970s as "a fairly caustic person." That shifted, he said, after Davis converted to Christianity in 1981. "He was a man of virtue, integrity, grit and humility."