Do you know who murdered William? In the spring of 1982, 25-year-old male William Hellings had been in Tulsa for only about a year, having left New Jersey to build a new life far from home. On the night of April 24, 1982, he was at an apartment at 6701 South Lewis Avenue, a unit leased to 24-year-old Priscilla Henshall. Sometime before dawn, in that ordinary south Tulsa complex, the two young adults were shot multiple times and left inside the apartment, their lives cut short in a place that should have offered safety.
The horror of what had happened was first betrayed not by sound, but by water. A neighbor in the unit below noticed liquid leaking from the ceiling, the trickle taking on a red tint as it pooled and spread. Alarmed, they called authorities. When officers arrived and forced their way into the upstairs apartment leased to Henshall, they followed the trail to the bathroom. There, with the shower still running and the room filling with steam and spray, police found the bodies of Henshall and Hellings together, each shot multiple times, the running water mingling with blood on the floor.
What confronted detectives was a contained but brutal crime scene: two victims in a confined space, no immediate witnesses, and little clarity about who had come to the apartment and why. Both victims had died of multiple gunshot wounds, suggesting a determined attacker rather than a single impulsive shot. Some later accounts of the case note that the still-running shower may have been intended to muffle the noise of gunfire or to wash away physical evidence, a small but chilling indication of planning and control on the part of the killer. The fact that Hellings was relatively new to Tulsa, with most of his earlier life and connections in New Jersey, added another layer of complexity, forcing investigators to look beyond the immediate neighborhood for possible leads or motives.
Despite the initial investigation, the case soon slipped into the category of unsolved homicides. Over the decades that followed, Tulsa authorities continued to classify the killings of William Hellings and Priscilla Henshall as a cold case, repeatedly appealing to the public for information and listing the double murder among the city’s long-unresolved crimes. Public summaries of the case, from police and city unsolved-crimes databases to true-crime and cold-case archives, all tell the same stark story: two young people found shot to death in a bathroom with the shower running, a neighbor’s discovery of red-tinged water leading police to the scene, and, crucially, no one ever arrested or charged. To this day, the murders remain officially unsolved, and no suspect has been publicly identified, leaving the final moments of William Hellings’s life—and the identity of whoever stood over him in that small Tulsa bathroom—an open question that still hangs over the case.
