On August 2, 1976, a figure dressed in black, wearing a woman’s long wig and carrying a . 38 caliber revolver wrapped in a plastic bag to catch spent shell casings, entered the Stonegate mansion in Fort Worth, Texas. The intruder did not come for silver or art. He came to erase people.

In the basement laundry room, he found twelve-year-old Andrea Wilborn, home alone after returning from Bible camp. He forced her to kneel, placed the barrel against the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. The child died on the concrete floor. Not long after midnight, Priscilla Davis, the estranged wife of oil billionaire Cullen Davis, arrived home with her lover, Stan Farr, a former TCU basketball player.

As they entered the kitchen, the security alarm chimed. The figure in black emerged from the hallway. Priscilla recognized the face behind the wig and screamed her husband’s name. The gunman fired point-blank, striking her in the chest.

The bullet missed her heart by inches. Farr charged the shooter, taking multiple rounds, one shattering his arm, another piercing his chest, and a final shot to the back as he fell. He died in the kitchen. Two unexpected visitors, Bubba Gavrel and his girlfriend Beverly Bass, arrived at the mansion during the attack.

The gunman stepped onto the patio and fired, striking Gavrel in the spine and paralyzing him for life. When he turned the gun on Bass, the weapon clicked empty. She ran. So did Priscilla, bleeding heavily, scrambling over fences until she reached a neighbor’s house and screamed that her husband was killing everyone.

By the time police arrived, the killer was gone. In the basement they found Andrea’s body. Stan Farr lay dead in the kitchen. Three witnesses identified Cullen Davis without hesitation.

Cullen was found hours later at his girlfriend’s home, calm, asleep, claiming he had been sedated all night. He denied everything. The arrest made front-page news across the country. The richest man in Fort Worth stood accused of a mass murder that had shattered the city’s sense of order.

The empire behind Cullen Davis had been built by his father, Kenneth “Stinky” Davis, a barely educated World War I pilot from rural Pennsylvania who rose from poverty during the Great Depression. Kenneth recognized early that real money in the oil fields belonged not to the drillers but to the merchants selling the steel. He took over a struggling supply company and built Kendavis Industries International, a conglomerate of eighty companies controlling exploration, drilling, refining, and transportation of energy—a closed loop of profit. When he died in 1968, the empire was valued at $800 million.

He left it to his three sons. Kenneth had raised his boys not as a family but as assets. He taught them that the Davis name stood above the laws governing ordinary men, that money was the only scorecard, and that empathy was weakness. The second son, Thomas Cullen Davis, inherited a fortune he had done nothing to earn.

He was thirty-five when his father died and became the dark center of the dynasty. He earned the nickname “the Iceman” for his cold, quiet, controlling demeanor. He spoke in a low monotone, hid behind thick glasses, and viewed people as assets, liabilities, or obstacles. His marriage to Priscilla Lee Childers was a collision of incompatible forces.

They married hours after his father’s death in 1968, a gesture of breathtaking coldness. Priscilla was brash, loud, and unapologetically vulgar, wearing a diamond necklace that spelled out RICH BITCH. Cullen wanted a silent trophy wife; he got a hurricane. The marriage devolved into surveillance, violence, and rage.

Priscilla filed for divorce in 1974, launching one of the most acrimonious legal battles in American history. A judge ordered Cullen to vacate Stonegate, his $6 million mansion built to outdo his brother’s inheritance. Priscilla stayed in the house with her lover and her daughter while the divorce dragged on, financially threatening to strip Cullen of the fortune that defined him. By the summer of 1976, the courts had sided repeatedly with Priscilla, ordering increased support payments and forcing Cullen to pay her legal fees.

The man who believed he owned the system watched it turn against him. The stage was set for the massacre. The trial that followed became the most expensive murder defense in American history up to that point. Cullen assembled a team led by Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, a flamboyant Houston attorney famous for winning unwinnable cases.

The strategy was simple and brutal: attack the victims. The defense portrayed Priscilla as a drug-addicted, promiscuous deviant who lived in a cesspool of vice. They put the corpse of the twelve-year-old aside and put the mother on trial instead. They cross-examined Priscilla for days, questioning her sobriety, her eyesight, her morality, forcing her to relive her daughter’s execution while implying she was too high to know who pulled the trigger.

They offered alternate theories—a drug deal gone wrong, a professional hitman, a jealous lover—anybody but Cullen. They argued that a man of his wealth would never risk the electric chair by doing his own dirty work. On November 17, 1977, after a four-month trial, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Priscilla screamed.

Prosecutors slumped in their chairs. Cullen grinned and flashed a thumbs-up to the cameras. That night he celebrated at a steakhouse. The acquittal did not satisfy him.

In 1978, still battling the divorce and still seething at the judge who had evicted him from his mansion, Cullen allegedly offered an acquaintance named David McCrory $25,000 to kill Judge Joe Eidson and eventually Priscilla. McCrory went to the FBI. Agents staged a bizarre sting: they took the judge to a secluded location, had him climb into a car trunk, tore his shirt, covered him in tomato juice to simulate blood, and photographed him playing dead. In a parking lot outside a Fort Worth restaurant, McCrory showed Cullen the photo.

According to the tapes, Cullen looked at the image of his nemesis and said, “Good. Good job. ” He handed over $25,000 in cash. FBI agents swarmed the car.

The evidence seemed airtight. But in the first trial, the defense argued that Cullen had been playing a double agent, pretending to go along with the plot to expose a blackmail ring orchestrated by Priscilla. The jury hung. In the second trial, the defense refined the conspiracy theory.

The jury returned not guilty again. A man caught on tape paying for a judge’s murder walked free because his lawyers told a better story than the FBI. Cullen could not beat the economy the way he beat the courts. In the mid-1980s, oil prices collapsed.

Kendavis Industries was overleveraged and mismanaged. In 1985, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then the largest in Fort Worth history. Cullen lost the company, the jets, the power. Stonegate was foreclosed upon and sold for pennies on the dollar.

It became a tourist attraction, then a steakhouse, then a church, then a Mexican restaurant. Each business failed. Eventually the mansion was bulldozed and replaced with a housing development. Cullen claimed he found Jesus.

He became a born-again Christian, preached forgiveness on televangelism programs, and smashed his collection of Asian idols with a sledgehammer. He never admitted guilt and never apologized. His girlfriend, who provided his alibi, married him. They lived a modest existence, and Cullen took a job selling skin care products for his brother.

Priscilla never received justice. The divorce settlement evaporated in legal fees. She died of breast cancer in 2001, insisting to the end that Cullen was the man behind the mask. Cullen Davis died without ever spending a day in prison for the carnage at Stonegate.

He kept his freedom but lost everything else. He became a cautionary tale in Fort Worth: a man who tried to buy the world and ended up owning nothing but a graveyard.