BLOOD WILL TELL: A True Story of Money and Murder

What happens when the richest man ever to be tried for murder in Texas--a quiet all-business type who runs a billion-dollar company with his two brothers--well, when he allegedly, ahem, shoots his wife pointblank in her surgically super-enlarged chest; shoots her twelve-year-old daughter dead; blows away the wife's six-foot-nine lover with four shots; and then shoots a witness, crippling him for life? And he does all this in his own little 20-room mansion which is decorated with $3 million worth of art. Well, if he has access to $300 million and to the finest legal help in Texas, he can walk out of court scot free, despite ""pointblank"" eyewitness testimony from his wife and the girlfriend of the witness he crippled, who also saw him and identified him in court. The man in question is Cullen Davis of Fort Worth, and he clearly has the clout to turn the law inside out. Not only was he acquitted, he became a state hero after the trial for the murder of his stepdaughter. How did he beat the rap? By a great deal of testimony that impugned his wife's character (and, by association, the other witness's character), and thus diverted the jury from thinking about the dead little girl. Meanwhile Davis' divorce from his injured wife Priscilla is dragging on much too long. And so we find Davis rearrested--two years later to the exact hour and day of his first arrest--for trying to murder the divorce trial judge. What's more, the FBI had videotapes and wiretaps of Davis paying off the murderer and of his looking at photographs of the dead judge's body stuffed bleeding into a car trunk. You might think that this at last is rock-solid evidence against Cullen Davis and that he hasn't a chance in hell of buying his way out. But he is free again and walking the streets of Fort Worth. . . . This rivals Thomas Thompson's Blood and Money for luscious infamy among the high and the mighty--and far outclasses David Phillips' Great Texas Murder Trials (below).