On December 29, 2021, Priscilla Ann Cox, a 73-year-old female resident of Tumacacori, Arizona, was found dead inside a home in the Old Bailey Crossing area after Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a 911 call just after 5:00 p.m.; public reports about the case do not specify her race or ethnicity. Deputies arrived to discover two deceased adults and a dog in what investigators immediately described as a probable murder-suicide.
Early reports from the sheriff’s office stated that Cox had suffered a gunshot wound to the back right side of her head, apparently inflicted with a revolver; a handgun with a single spent cartridge was located at the scene near her body.
The other person found dead in the home was a 76-year-old man believed to be her spouse, who showed no visible signs of traumatic injury. According to the sheriff’s office, preliminary examination suggested that his death was likely due to a drug overdose rather than a gunshot wound, while the couple’s dog had been killed by one or more gunshots from a semi-automatic pistol, indicating the presence of at least two different firearms in the house. At the time of the initial news coverage, authorities withheld the names of the deceased pending notification of next of kin, but later gun-violence records and case summaries identified Cox as the woman killed in the Tumacacori incident that day.
Subsequent aggregation of public information about the case characterizes the incident as a domestic murder-suicide inside Cox’s residence, noting that she “lost her life to gun violence” in an event involving a firearm and that she is listed as one of the victims rather than a suspected perpetrator. Case-tracking databases describe the investigation as “solved” with the “primary suspect deceased,” signaling that law enforcement ultimately concluded that the other adult in the home was responsible for the fatal shooting of Cox before his own death, rather than there being an unknown outside assailant.
Because the individual investigators believe to have carried out the killing also died at the scene, there is no public indication that any arrests were ever made in connection with Cox’s death, nor that additional suspects were sought. The official description of the case as a murder-suicide, combined with later references to the “primary suspect” being deceased, points to a closed investigation focused on a single, now-dead suspect, with no ongoing search for other perpetrators reported in the available records.
