Prosecutors Doubt Inmate Confession True

FORT WORTH, Texas - Prosecutors who handled a murder case arising from the 1976 shootings at oil tycoon Cullen Davis' mansion say they don't believe a condemned inmate who confessed to the crime seconds before his execution for another killing.

Before Billy Frank Vickers received a lethal injection Wednesday night for a 1993 murder, he said he was involved in about a dozen other crimes, including the shootings that placed a cloud of suspicion over Davis for three decades.

"One I would like to clear up is Cullen Davis - where he was charged with shooting his wife. He didn't do that," said Vickers, 58.

Davis' 12-year-old stepdaughter, Andrea Wilborn, was killed in a shooting rampage at Davis' Fort Worth mansion. His estranged wife and the girl's mother, Priscilla Davis, was wounded. Her boyfriend, Stan Farr, was killed. A family friend, Bubba Gavrel, was wounded and paralyzed.

Davis, who was worth an estimated $400 million, was tried only in his stepdaughter's murder, and was acquitted.

Davis could not be reached for comment Thursday but has maintained his innocence.

Vickers, an east Texas career criminal, was not in prison in 1976, and it is unclear where he was living at the time. But there is no evidence that anyone other than Davis shot the people at the Fort Worth mansion, prosecutor Joe Shannon said.

Vickers' name never surfaced in the investigation, and the Tarrant County district attorney does not plan to reopen the Davis case, Shannon said.

"Anyone who suddenly confesses to 14 murders - I would question ... his believability," Shannon said Thursday.

Jack Strickland, a former prosecutor in the Davis case, said he had never heard of Vickers and that his claims were a last-ditch attempt to get attention and "monkey around" with the system.

"I would add him to the volumes of people who have claimed to be involved in this case through the years," Strickland said. "We had groupies of every stripe and persuasion who claim to know something."

Vickers was executed for gunning down a grocery store owner in 1993 outside Arthur City, about 100 miles northeast of Dallas.

When Davis was tried, Texas law did not allow defendants to be tried for more than one slaying in a single trial. After his acquittal, prosecutors decided against trying him in Farr's death out of concern it would violate constitutional rules against trying a defendant twice for the same crime.

Davis later was accused of hiring someone to kill the judge handling his divorce, but was acquitted.

Davis, who had a well-publicized religious conversion in the early 1980s, still lives in north Texas.