Criminal Trials
In August 1976, Davis was charged with the murder of his estranged wife's boyfriend, Stan Farr, and her daughter, Andrea Wilborn. Davis' wife, Priscilla Davis, had filed for divorce in 1974, but in 1976 the divorce proceedings were still ongoing and the divorce had not been made official. Farr and Wilborn had been shot dead, and Davis' wife Priscilla wounded, by a gunman who entered their home in Fort Worth on August 2, 1976. In November 1977, after what has been called "one of the most expensive murder investigations and trials in Texas history," a jury found Davis not guilty. The children of Stan Farr later sued Davis for wrongful death and were awarded $250,000 in a settlement.
In 2004, Billy "Sonny" Vickers, a man sentenced to death in an unrelated case, confessed that he had been the person who murdered Farr and Wilborn. His claim, and the fact that he had been convicted multiple times of burglary with force and was on death row for a murder committed during a burglary that generally matched the Davis case, seemed to settle the issue of Cullen Davis' innocence in the case. Vickers was executed a week after confessing.
In 1978, Davis was arrested again, this time for allegedly hiring a hitman to murder his wife Priscilla, as well as the judge overseeing their ongoing divorce litigation. The case hinged around a tape-recorded conversation between Davis and an undercover employee posing as a hitman, during which Davis was alleged to have asked the undercover employee to murder his wife; this trial, Texas v. Davis, has been called one of the first uses of forensic discourse analysis of tape-recorded evidence in a legal setting. A discourse analyst testified that Davis' words in the tape did not constitute solicitation of murder; and Davis was ultimately acquitted.
Read more about this topic: T. Cullen Davis
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