William George Davis was a registered nurse on the night shift of the cardiovascular intensive care unit at the Louis and Peaches Owen Heart Hospital in Tyler, Texas, part of Christus Mother Frances Hospital. Between June 2017 and January 2018, a series of patients who had come through heart or vascular surgery without trouble suddenly collapsed in the early hours of the morning. Their brain scans showed something doctors said they had rarely or never seen: air in the arteries of the brain. Davis was not assigned to any of them. He was, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later found, the only night-shift nurse in the unit whose shifts matched every one of the collapses.
In October 2021 a Smith County jury convicted him of capital murder for the deaths of four men: John Lafferty, Ronald Clark, Christopher Greenaway and Joseph Kalina. The same jury sentenced him to death. On March 12, 2026, the Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously affirmed the conviction and sentence. His lawyers are preparing a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Davis was born on February 3, 1984, and is a native of Gregg County in East Texas, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. At the time of his arrest and trial he lived in Hallsville. He played football at West Rusk High School. A classmate testified at his sentencing that he had been a standout football player and the salutatorian of their class. His high school football coach, Billy Davis (no relation), told the jury that he "wasn't the fastest or the strongest, but he had the heart." His brother David, a physical therapist, testified that the two had grown up playing sports together. Their parents did not testify, for health and emotional reasons, his brother said.
Police said in 2018 that Davis graduated from nursing school at Texas Woman's University in Denton in 2014 and had worked at another hospital, which they did not name, for two years before joining the Christus Trinity Mother Frances Health System. The health system said he began working for it in 2013. TDCJ lists his highest education as a master's degree. He had no criminal record. He was married, with children; by the time of trial he and his wife had divorced.
One episode from his youth came out only at the punishment phase of his trial. A woman testified that when she was about 13 and he was 18, around 2002 and 2003, he pursued a sexual relationship with her. Her stepfather described setting strict rules to keep the two apart, and a protective order was filed in 2003. Her name has not been published. The appeals opinion lists this conduct among the evidence the jury heard at the punishment phase.
The cardiovascular ICU cared for patients in the first hours and days after open-heart and vascular operations. Each patient had an arterial line, a small catheter placed in the radial artery at the wrist to monitor blood pressure and other signs. Nurses check these lines carefully for air, the unit's charge nurse, Wendy Stone, told the jury. Ben Rasberry, a night-shift nurse who worked alongside Davis, testified that air does not enter an arterial line by accident. "You have to physically, I mean manually inject that air," he said.
Night nurses covered for one another during breaks. Rasberry said Davis was a good ICU nurse whom he trusted. That trust is how Davis came to be alone with at least one of the men he was convicted of killing.
John Lafferty had recently moved to Wood County, where he planned to farm, his son Steve Lafferty told the jury. He had a heart attack and needed surgery, which took place on June 16, 2017. Early the next morning the family received a call saying there were complications. He died on June 25, 2017, his son said. The anesthesiologist on his case testified that the surgery had gone well, with no dangerous swings in blood pressure and no sign of brain injury in the operating room. A defense witness who reviewed the case was later forced to admit he had not checked whether Lafferty was awake and talking to his nurse after surgery.
According to the Court of Criminal Appeals, Davis temporarily took over Lafferty's care when the assigned nurse briefly stepped out of the room. At the punishment phase Steve Lafferty described the helplessness of leaving his father in the hospital, and said his father's death had made it hard for him to retire from the family farm, which the family has kept running since.
Ronald Clark was 68. His daughter, Tiffany Farmacka, told the jury he enjoyed gardening and riding his motorcycle, and that he hoped the operation would let him get back to "his gardening, riding his motorcycle, you know, enjoying his life." He came to Tyler on July 25, 2017, for an abdominal bypass to restore blood flow to his legs, which had been causing him pain in his hip and legs. The vascular surgeon, Dr. Todd Bengtson, called it "a very routine surgery that went very well" and said he expected a full recovery.
Farmacka spoke to her father by phone after the operation, and all seemed well. Just after midnight on July 26, a nurse found his heart rate in the 40s. By the time his daughter reached the hospital he was brain dead, and he died less than 48 hours after his surgery. "My dad was brain dead and none of us understood what happened, how it could happen," she said. Davis was not assigned to Clark; according to the appeals court, he was caring for the patients in the rooms next door.
After the sentence, Farmacka told KLTV that her father had been married to her mother for 50 years, that he was down-to-earth and animated and drew people into his stories, and that he was "fearless." "He was an awesome father, he was an awesome friend," she said. At the punishment phase she testified that her mother was "just a shell of what she was" and that she felt Davis had taken her whole family from her.
Christopher William Greenaway was 47 and lived in Tyler. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, he served in the U.S. Army, where his awards included the Army Aviator Badge, and later flew as a medical transport pilot, CBS19 reported from his obituary. He held a Coast Guard captain's license, was a certified scuba diver and an Eagle Scout. After his death, his organs saved four lives.
Greenaway had heart surgery on August 3, 2017. The surgeon, Dr. William Turner, called it a success, and Greenaway talked with his family afterward. At 3 a.m. on August 4 he was stable and asking for water. Rasberry, his nurse, then left for a meal break of about 20 minutes and asked Davis to watch him. While Rasberry was away, Greenaway's heart rate and blood pressure spiked at about 3:35 a.m. and he showed signs of a stroke. When Rasberry came back he heard a code being called in Greenaway's room. A CT scan showed air in his brain. Davis told Rasberry he did not know why the blood pressure had spiked.
The radiologist who read the scans, Dr. Jose Enriquez, said he was shocked by the amount of air he saw where none should have been. An anesthesiologist on the case said that in 37 years of practice he had never seen so much air in the arteries of the brain. Turner told the jury he was "furious," and said: "I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it [air] was introduced through a radial art line." Greenaway died on August 6, 2017. An autopsy found an ischemic stroke caused by an air embolism, D Magazine reported.
"I can't believe this happened," Rasberry said on the stand. He told the jury he had trusted Davis and felt he had let down his patient and his colleagues. Greenaway's brother Jeff testified at the punishment phase about having to tell their father that Chris had died. "While there are many memories, what I felt was taken are future memories because he's not there," he said.
The deaths of Lafferty, Clark and Greenaway did not lead at once to any suspicion of a nurse. The Court of Criminal Appeals described a pattern of patients who were progressing well after surgery and then suffered severe and seemingly inexplicable strokes overnight. Other patients in the same unit collapsed and survived with lasting injuries. The jury heard at the guilt phase about two of them. J.S., who had a triple bypass, was left "severely, profoundly injured," Turner said. His daughter testified that he woke from the event with no memory of his family and now needs help with everyday tasks. "He is nothing what he used to be," she said. His nurse, Natalie Kelley, testified that while she was at the medication machine she heard Davis calling the patient's name from inside the room, and when she came back she found a syringe on his arterial line. Davis told her to remove it and cap it.
P.H. was hurt in November 2017. Her nurse was charting outside the room when a monitor showed a spike in her blood pressure; when he went in, Davis was already at the bedside. P.H. survived with brain damage. "I remember waking up and I could not raise my head," she told the jury. "It just felt like it weighed a ton."
Neither J.S. nor P.H. was part of the capital murder count. The trial judge admitted their cases under what Texas courts call the doctrine of chances, the idea that a repeated pattern of unusual events makes coincidence unlikely, and the appeals court upheld that ruling.
The unit's clinical director, Teresa Meeks, described the atmosphere. "We were very frightened. We came in in the morning and were really anxious. We were hoping that nothing bad had happened," she said. "It was terrible. It was a terrible time." A doctor testified at sentencing about a growing distrust between operating room staff and ICU nurses as unexplained events kept following routine surgeries.
Joseph Kalina, of San Antonio, had driven trucks for 25 years and was proud of his commercial driver's license, his wife, Jeanette, told the jury. They had been married 37 years, and she described him as a traditional provider for his family and a good man. He was on the road for work and passing through Mount Pleasant, Texas, when he developed heart attack symptoms. He was taken to Tyler, where he had bypass surgery in January 2018.
After the surgery he was stable, on a BiPAP breathing machine, and his vital signs were normal about 20 minutes before he collapsed, Rasberry testified. At the start of 2018 the hospital had upgraded the security cameras in the unit and added new ones, which recorded when they detected motion. The footage from the early morning of January 25, 2018, was laid out for the jury. Rasberry went into and out of Kalina's room at about 1 a.m. At 1:16 a.m. Davis entered and left in under a minute. He then stood at the hallway monitors that display patients' vital signs. At 1:21 a.m. a nurse in training noticed a problem and called Rasberry. At 1:23 a.m. Stone called for more help. At 1:25 a.m. Davis returned to the doorway and watched while the nurses worked on Kalina; Stone said he did not help, and he never told anyone he had been in the room.
The Court of Criminal Appeals summarized it this way: the footage "showed Appellant entering Kalina's room with an empty syringe moments before Kalina began to crash," and afterward he watched from down the hall as staff tried to save him. Meeks testified that what she saw in his hand looked like a normal syringe, with one clear side and one solid white side, not the fully clear packaging of a pre-filled saline syringe.
Kalina survived the night but not the injury. He spent 19 days in the ICU. In April 2018 his family's lawyer said he had severe brain damage and quadriplegia and could not walk, talk or feed himself. His wife said that when she saw him in the hospital, she felt the man she knew was already gone. He died about seven months before April 2021, KLTV reported. The Bexar County medical examiner who performed the autopsy gave the cause of death as acute bronchopneumonia complicating multiple strokes. She listed the manner of death as undetermined, because the autopsy itself could not show what had caused the strokes. "My companion is gone, he was my other half," Jeanette Kalina told the jury at sentencing.
Kalina's collapse was the turning point. The health system said it identified an "unusual and unexplained patient outcome" in the unit on January 25, 2018, and began a review. Deb Chelette, an associate vice president of the heart hospital, testified that she watched the security video of Davis entering Kalina's room carrying something, leaving, and then staying at the end of the hall without responding as the emergency unfolded. Her "gut" told her something was wrong, she said. She contacted the chief executive, Jason Proctor, and the regional director, Chris Glenney. Davis was removed from the floor and suspended with pay.
When administrators asked him to explain, his account kept changing. He first said he had gone in only to silence a beeping IV pump; later he said he had helped manage the airway. He gave different versions of whether he had spoken to Kalina and whether he had touched the arterial line. Chelette said the flushing process he described could not have let air into the line. At trial, his own lawyer conceded in closing argument that Davis "wasn't honest" with administrators about Kalina's crash.
The health system fired him on February 15, 2018. It gave the reasons as "falsification of care events" and failing to disclose interventions. It reported its concerns to the Texas Board of Nursing and the Tyler Police Department. On March 16, 2018, the Board of Nursing summarily suspended his license. Its order said he had entered the rooms of three patients who were not his and performed interventions it described as unnecessary or inappropriate; one of the patients died two days later of an embolism and other complications, and the other two were left in vegetative states. Davis set up an online fundraiser to fight the suspension, blaming it on "misunderstandings."
Once Davis was off the schedule, the unexplained crashes stopped. A Christus neurologist, called by the defense, agreed that no similar events had happened since he was let go. Rasberry said the same.
Tyler police, led by Chief Jimmy Toler, took up the case. Detective Jeff Roberts recorded a phone conversation of about three hours between Davis and investigators, which the jury later heard. Roberts said Davis seemed eager to talk and gave information quickly. Much of the call concerned P.H.; Davis said another nurse had asked him to check her fluids. Roberts also testified about a call Davis made after his firing but before his arrest that covered four of the patients. At the time of the arrest, police described Davis as uncooperative.
On April 10, 2018, Davis was arrested in the lobby of the Tyler Police Department and charged with murder in the death of Christopher Greenaway. Bond was set at $2 million. Police said they were looking at seven cases dating back to June 2017, involving patients aged 47 to 63 who had been recovering from cardiovascular surgery when they "suddenly experienced a profound incident." Investigators said security video showed Davis entering patients' rooms late at night or early in the morning, shortly before stroke-like symptoms set in. The health system said it believed the problems were isolated to Davis and that he "acted independently and of his own accord," and it set up a hotline for worried patients.
On June 21, 2018, a Smith County grand jury indicted Davis for murder in Greenaway's death and for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the cases of P.H. (November 30, 2017) and Joseph Kalina (January 25, 2018). The district attorney then was Matt Bingham. On August 28, 2018, further indictments added a capital murder count with an offense date of June 16, 2017, and three more aggravated assault counts. Capital murder of more than one person in the same scheme or course of conduct can carry the death penalty in Texas, and the state said it would seek it.
The trial was first set for December 2018 before Judge Christi Kennedy and was pushed back at the defense's request, which cited the volume of evidence. It was then set for August 2020 and postponed again by the COVID-19 pandemic. On April 22, 2021, a new indictment charged a single capital murder covering four deaths: Lafferty on June 16, 2017, Clark on July 26, 2017, Greenaway on August 4, 2017, and Kalina on January 25, 2018. Kalina had died by then, and the earlier assault charge in his case became part of the capital count.
The trial opened on September 28, 2021, before Judge Austin Reeve Jackson of the 114th District Court. Davis pleaded not guilty. By then the district attorney was Jacob Putman, who led the prosecution with Chris Gatewood and Lance Long. Phillip Hayes led the defense.
In his opening statement Putman said each patient was stable after surgery until all four developed stroke-like symptoms, that CT scans showed air where it should not be, and that Davis was the nurse present each time. He told the jury a hospital was the perfect place for someone who kills repeatedly to hide. Hayes said his client had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, that strokes are not unusual in an intensive care unit, and that "sometimes people die in a hospital."
Over 11 days of testimony the state called surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, nurses, hospital managers and family members. The surgeons and anesthesiologists described operations that went well and patients who were awake and talking afterward, which, Turner said of Greenaway, ruled out air reaching the brain in the operating room. Dr. William Yarbrough, a Dallas-area pulmonologist and professor of internal medicine, testified that injecting air into the brain's arterial system causes brain injury and death. He said he saw air in the victims' brain arteries on the scans, something he had never seen in decades in medicine. He ruled out blood pressure problems and other causes, and concluded that the air was introduced after surgery, because the collapses came during recovery. Other testimony, as the appeals court summarized it, established that the injury pattern was so rare it could have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and that patients who are improving neurologically after heart surgery rarely crash without warning.
The defense called four witnesses over two days. Dr. Vipul Kapoor, a Dallas physician, said he reviewed scans of six patients without being told what was suspected, and found a pattern matching a "watershed stroke," which can occur when blood pressure falls around the time of cardiac surgery. He suggested the strokes could be complications of surgery. Dr. John Schnell, an emergency physician, testified that the strokes were not caused by clots. On cross-examination he acknowledged that he had little experience with post-surgical cardiac patients and had not spoken with the nurses or doctors who treated them. In rebuttal the state recalled Yarbrough and Dr. Kenneth Layton, who rejected serotonin syndrome and alcohol withdrawal as explanations.
In closing, Hayes argued that the hospital had problems and that Davis was a scapegoat, charged only because he was present. Gatewood told the jury Davis "liked to kill people." Putman noted that the hospital had not changed its procedures and that no similar incidents had happened after Davis left. Davis did not testify.
On October 19, 2021, after deliberating for about an hour, the jury convicted him of capital murder.
Under Texas law the only sentences for capital murder are death and life without parole. The punishment phase began the next day. In a brief opening statement Putman told jurors they would hear about six more patients, three who died and three who survived, beyond those presented at trial. The defense made no opening statement.
Krystal Frank testified that her husband of 32 years, Perry Frank, of Grapeland, a former U.S. Navy Band musician who became a schoolteacher, had heart surgery in June 2017 and appeared to be recovering. She got a call at about 3 a.m. and arrived after he had died, on June 22, 2017. His nurse, Greye Fowler, testified that he had stepped out to get Frank a cup of water and saw his condition crash on a monitor; Davis arrived shortly afterward with a crash cart, which Fowler found odd. Amy Landrum described her grandfather, James Sanders, as one of the most caring people she knew. Kay Blanks, married to James Blanks for 48 years, called him her best friend. "He had my back, and I had his," she said.
Three survivors testified. G.P., who had run a decorative concrete business for 25 years, spent 45 days in a Louisiana hospital and about two and a half years in rehabilitation. J.W. was in a coma for more than a month and now uses a wheelchair, with brain damage and partial paralysis. "I just woke up in a different world," he said. R.G., a welder from Henderson, now walks with a walker and can no longer weld. In each case a nurse testified that the patient was doing well before stepping away. Dr. Charles Crum, a radiologist, told the jury the brain scans were nearly identical and consistent with arterial air embolism. None of these cases has been tried; they remain allegations proved only to the extent the jury accepted them at sentencing.
Jurors were shown searches from Davis's seized devices, including a news story headed "Mother Frances Hospital investigates possible serial killer" and lists of killers ranked by number of victims. They heard that he had tried 23 times in 2021 to call the woman he had pursued as a girl, sometimes using other inmates' identification numbers, until she blocked him.
The most important new evidence was a set of jail calls Davis made just after the verdict. In a call to his former wife, who was crying and asked him to tell her the truth, he first asked whether she would still let him see their children. He then admitted causing the deaths but called them accidents. He said he had found ways to keep patients in the ICU longer so he could keep working extra shifts and earn more money. "It was. I'm not even gonna lie to you. I know it was," he said, according to the appeals court. He said he was not a malicious person, and that it had been an impulsive decision. Asked why his thoughts had turned to hurting patients, he said he did not know. His former wife called what he had done "evil."
The Court of Criminal Appeals recorded a further exchange in which Davis strongly suggested that, about a year before he began harming patients in the heart unit, he had caused the death of an elderly woman in a neurological ICU. When she asked, "Was she your first," he answered, "Yes." In a call to his brother Ken, he said he would rather get life without parole and die "on God's timing." The prosecution called his apparent remorse "fake repentance." Detective Roberts testified that what made Davis emotional was his own situation, not the victims.
The defense called the classmate, the coach, his brother, jail staff who said he had caused no problems in custody, and a forensic psychologist, Dr. Christy Compton, who testified that capital defendants are no more likely than other prisoners to be violent in prison. She had not assessed Davis. Davis chose not to testify.
In closing, Long told the jury that someone would be sentenced to death that day, "William Davis or his next victim in prison." Putman said Davis had taken only a month off from harming patients after his daughter was born. Defense lawyer Douglas Parks asked for mercy, telling the jury, "Mercy is not something a person earns. It's a gift."
On October 27, 2021, after just under two hours of deliberation, the jury answered the two special issues in the state's favor: that there was a probability Davis would commit criminal acts of violence constituting a continuing threat to society, and that the mitigating circumstances were not enough to warrant life without parole. Judge Jackson sentenced him to death. He was received on death row on October 29, 2021, as TDCJ inmate No. 999623.
Kay Blanks, speaking to Davis at the hearing, said: "I want you to know I forgive you." Tiffany Farmacka said she wanted him to know the people he took and the families he took them from. "I say I'm glad it's over, but it will never really be over because my dad will never be here," she said.
Two weeks later it emerged that Phillip Hayes, the lead defense lawyer, had been arrested on November 5, 2021, on a warrant alleging that during the trial he had arranged to pay an undercover sheriff's deputy posing as a prostitute. The texts were dated October 5, in the middle of the state's case. There is no report that the arrest became an issue in the appeal, and the opinion of the Court of Criminal Appeals does not mention it.
A death sentence in Texas is appealed automatically to the Court of Criminal Appeals. Davis's appeal, No. AP-77,106, raised 13 points of error. On March 12, 2026, Judge Richardson, writing for a unanimous court, overruled all of them and affirmed the conviction and sentence.
The central question was jury unanimity. The capital charge named Greenaway as the predicate victim, with Lafferty, Clark and Kalina as the other deaths that made the crime capital. Davis argued that the jurors had to agree on which of those other deaths he caused. The court held that the other killings were alternative ways of proving the same aggravating element, so the jury needed to agree only that he caused at least one of them along with Greenaway's.
The court also rejected his challenges to the admission of the evidence about J.S. and P.H., to rulings in jury selection, to the recorded jail calls and to the instructions on lesser offenses. A prosecutor had described the defense case in closing as "misdirection and deception"; the court assumed the remark was improper but called it mild and harmless, given that "the State's evidence was voluminous and compelling." On future dangerousness, the defense had argued that Davis would never again have access to medical equipment and had used no physical force. The court disagreed, finding that the jury could rationally have concluded he had killed as many as eight people and grievously injured five more over more than a year, and that he "abused the trust placed in him."
Davis moved for rehearing on April 13, 2026. The court denied it on June 25, 2026. His lawyers, Raoul D. Schonemann of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law and Thea Posel, then asked the U.S. Supreme Court for more time to file a petition for certiorari, saying they intend to argue that the state court's unanimity ruling conflicts with the Sixth Amendment. Justice Samuel Alito granted extensions on September 8 and October 6, 2026. The petition is now due by November 22, 2026.
Families also went to the civil courts. In April 2018 the Crosley Law Firm of San Antonio and Hossley and Embry of Tyler announced a medical malpractice claim against the hospital on behalf of Joseph Kalina. "We want to know what the hospital knew and when they knew it," the lawyers said. By November 2018 another lawyer, Raymond Hatcher, had resolved two cases against the hospital on confidential terms, and Randy Roberts, who represented other families, said the hospital had approached lawyers to settle without lawsuits. How the remaining claims ended has not been reported. In 2023 a Christus Health spokesperson said the hospital had acted quickly, involved law enforcement and helped bring justice to the families.
As of October 19, 2026, Davis is on death row in Texas, listed by TDCJ as No. 999623. No execution date has been set. His petition to the U.S. Supreme Court is due by November 22, 2026. In April 2023 Putman said his office was already working on the post-trial appeals and writs.
Proved and affirmed on direct appeal: that Davis intentionally or knowingly caused the deaths of Christopher Greenaway and at least one of John Lafferty, Ronald Clark and Joseph Kalina in the same course of conduct. The jury convicted him on a charge naming all four, and the appeals court described the four as murders.
Proved only as extraneous acts: the injuries to J.S. and P.H.
Alleged but never tried: the deaths of Perry Frank, James Sanders and James Blanks and the injuries to G.P., J.W. and R.G.. Prosecutors also said at one point that Davis was responsible for seven murders and five attempted murders. The appeals court said the jury could rationally have found as many as eight killings, which appears to include the woman in the neurological ICU.
His own accounts: in the jail calls he called the deaths accidents and gave a money motive. In 2023 he gave his first television interview, for the ABC News Studios series The Lesson Is Murder on Hulu. Putman said that in it Davis admitted to the killings and said he did them because he enjoyed it; Cardiovascular Business reported that he described the sense of control as "an addiction." These are statements made outside court and were never tested at trial. The neurological ICU death has not been charged, and the woman has not been named.
Details that vary: the dates of Lafferty's and Clark's deaths (the indictment dates are June 16 and July 26, 2017; his son put Lafferty's death on June 25, and a doctor said Clark was pronounced dead after midnight on July 27); the date J.S. was hurt (August 2017 in the appeals opinion; Turner's testimony, as KLTV reported it, placed his surgery in October 2017); the spelling of Greenaway (the Associated Press used Greenway); the names of Clark's daughter (Farmacka or Farmacki) and Kalina's wife (Jeanette or Janet); and whether the nursing board suspended or revoked Davis's license in March 2018 (the board's own action was a summary suspension).
February 3, 1984: William George Davis is born; he is a native of Gregg County, Texas.
About 2002 to 2003: pursues a 13-year-old girl; a protective order is filed in 2003.
2013: begins working for the Christus Trinity Mother Frances Health System.
2014: graduates from nursing school at Texas Woman's University, according to police.
June 16, 2017: John Lafferty collapses after heart surgery; he dies on June 25.
July 26, 2017: Ronald Clark, 68, collapses after vascular surgery and dies.
August 4, 2017: Christopher Greenaway, 47, collapses while his nurse is on a break; he dies on August 6.
August and November 2017: J.S. and P.H. suffer severe strokes and survive.
Around the start of 2018: new security cameras are installed in the unit.
January 25, 2018: Joseph Kalina, 58, collapses minutes after Davis is filmed leaving his room; the hospital opens an inquiry and removes Davis from patient care.
February 15, 2018: Davis is fired.
March 16, 2018: the Texas Board of Nursing suspends his license.
April 10, 2018: arrested and charged with murder in Greenaway's death.
June 21, 2018: indicted for murder and two aggravated assaults.
August 28, 2018: indicted for capital murder and three more aggravated assaults.
2020: trial postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
April 22, 2021: new capital murder indictment names all four men.
September 28, 2021: trial opens in the 114th District Court, Tyler.
October 19, 2021: convicted of capital murder after about an hour of deliberation.
October 20 to 27, 2021: punishment phase; jail calls played.
October 27, 2021: sentenced to death.
October 29, 2021: received on Texas death row.
November 5, 2021: lead defense lawyer arrested on a solicitation warrant.
March 2023: The Lesson Is Murder, with Davis's first television interview, is released on Hulu.
March 12, 2026: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the conviction and death sentence.
June 25, 2026: rehearing denied.
September 8 and October 6, 2026: Justice Alito extends the time to seek Supreme Court review, now to November 22, 2026.
October 19, 2026: on death row; no execution date.