Do you know who murdered Priscilla? On April 24, 1982, Priscilla Gail Henshall, a 24-year-old woman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was at home in her apartment at 6701 South Lewis Avenue with 25-year-old William T. Hellings Jr., a young man who had moved from New Jersey to Tulsa about a year earlier in search of a new start. The apartment was leased in Priscilla’s name, a modest unit in a south Tulsa complex that should have symbolized independence and the ordinary rhythms of early adulthood.
At some point that day, the quiet of the building was shattered behind closed doors when both Priscilla and William were shot multiple times inside the unit, a sudden burst of violence that left no immediate witnesses and no chance for either of them to survive.
The first sign that something was terribly wrong did not come from shouting or the sound of gunfire, but from water. Tenants in the apartment below began noticing water leaking from the ceiling, a steady drip that soon carried a disturbing reddish tint. Alarmed by the strange “red” water seeping into their home, they contacted authorities, prompting a welfare check on the upstairs unit leased to Priscilla. When officers entered the apartment, they followed the source of the leak to the bathroom. There, with the shower still running, they found the bodies of Priscilla and William together in the bathroom area, both of them dead from multiple gunshot wounds. The running water had carried their blood through the drain and into the plumbing, announcing the crime to the outside world in a way the killer never had. That detail—the shower left on, the water turned red as it traveled downward—has lingered in every later retelling of the case, a haunting image of a crime scene frozen in time.
In the days that followed, a short death notice for Priscilla Gail Henshall appeared in the pages of the Tulsa World, a quiet public acknowledgment of a life cut short, while police officially recorded the deaths as a double homicide. Investigators documented that both victims had sustained multiple gunshot wounds and confirmed that the apartment at 6701 South Lewis was the primary crime scene; there was no indication they died anywhere else. William’s background—having recently come from New Jersey and living in Tulsa for only about a year—was also noted in later cold case summaries, suggesting that detectives explored whether his move or his connections might have played a role in the motive, but no clear narrative ever emerged from the evidence available to the public. Over time, the case passed from active investigation into the files of the Tulsa Police Department’s Cold Case Unit and onto public lists of unsolved homicides, where it remains described simply and starkly: two young adults, found shot to death in her apartment, their killer or killers unknown.
Decades later, the details available to the public are still largely confined to these same stark facts: the address, the date, the leaking red water, the bathroom with the running shower, and the repeated note that both victims were shot multiple times. No online record from police, local government, or dedicated cold case archives describes any arrest in connection with the murders, nor do they name a specific suspect; every official and semi-official source instead ends with an appeal for information and a phone number for the Tulsa Police Department’s Cold Case Unit. The apartment building at 6701 South Lewis Avenue now appears in databases of “dark history” properties and cold case compilations, where Priscilla’s and William’s names are preserved as entries in a list of unsolved crimes. With no publicly reported breakthroughs, no named perpetrator, and no indication that charges were ever filed, the story of Priscilla Henshall’s death remains that of an unexplained act of deadly violence in an ordinary Tulsa apartment, a mystery that has outlived the era in which it occurred and continues to wait for someone to finally come forward with the truth.
