Edgars Flashback: Blood Will Tell · Hollandsworth · Heist on I-5

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be doing a look back at the 1980 Edgar Award nominees for Best Fact Crime. These titles, published in 1979, include a cold war espionage classic, an account of one of the 1970s’ most high profile criminal trials, a Texas murder saga, an investigative look at inmates on death row, and the story of one of the decades’ lesser-known serial murder cases. Are any of these titles worth a read 43 years on?

Our next title: Blood Will Tell: The Murder Trials of T. Cullen Davis by Gary Cartwright. And yes, that’s plural. T. Cullen Davis, one of three sons of an eccentric and irascible Texas millionaire made rich by snatching up companies tied to the state’s oil boom, stood trial in the 1970s for the murder of his stepdaughter, and later for plotting the murder of his estranged wife Priscilla and the judge who would oversee their contentious divorce. Davis was acquitted both times. Blood Will Tell paints a stark portrait of not just the justice available to the moneyed, but the biases inherent our assumptions about who commits violent crimes.

I first learned about this case from an episode of American Justice years ago and a lot of the details have stuck with me — Cullen and Priscilla’s ostentatious Fort Worth mansion that later became the scene of the murders, their tumultuous relationship and contentious divorce proceedings, Priscilla’s style (Cartwright deliciously describes her as “a sexy, twice-married platinum blonde who came from so far on the other side of the tracks, it wasn’t even the same railroad”), and the cast of characters that rotated in and out of the mansion after Cullen and Priscilla’s split. Several of these factors would play outsized roles in both trials.