THE GREAT TEXAS MURDER TRIALS A Compelling Account of the Sensational T. Cullen Davis Case

Hardback. The astonish8ing story of T. Cullen Davis, a Texas conglomerateur who had the bizarre distinction of being the richest man, (at the time), in America ever to be tried for murder. Davis, who expanded an inherited industrial empire into personal wealth of a quarter of a billion dollars, stunned his Fort Worth society friends when he married an ice-blonde sex bauble, Priscilla Wilborn. Priscilla's favourite pendant was one with "Rich Bitch" spelled out in diamonds. Then the marriage went awry. In August of 1976, Judge Joe Eidson, who had presided over 2 frustrating years of legal wrangling, postponed the divorce trial yet again and instructed Davis to increase Priscilla's monthly support payment to $5,000. Hours later, on a hot midnight, a man dressed in black and wearing a woman's wig went on a shooting spree in Priscilla's $6-million mansion. He shot Priscilla between her silicone breasts and killed her 12yr old daughter and Priscilla's live-in companion, a giant basketball player named Stan Farr. Priscilla survived the bullet as did a young man also shot when he chanced upon the bloody scene. Three eyewitnesses testified in court that Cullen Davis was the gunman. Maintaining his innocence, Davis hired the legendary courtroom genius Richard "Racehorse" Haynes to defend him. After the longest and most expensive murder trial in Texas history, Davis was acquitted. Nine months later, Davis was arrested again and indicted for solicitation of murder. As proof, FBI agents offered surreptitiously taped conversations between Davis and a man allegedly hired as a broker in a plot to kill Judge Eidson and 14 others on a hit list which included Priscilla. In late 1978, the multimillionaire spent his third consecutive birthday in what is known in Texas as the Cross-Bar Hotel waiting for the wily Racehorse Haynes to again convince a jury of his innocence. But the verdict would not be reached until the new year, and as it turned out, there was no verdict at all: on January 22, 1979 the trial ended in a hung jury. This is a modern frontier saga of sex, violence, and the degree to which some people believe money talks. Illus. 270pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. Vg. in sunned Nr. Vg. dw.