Tuesday, October 7, 2025 - An American biotech tycoon has been found guilty of orchestrating a murd£r-for-hire plot to k!ll the father of six and a former business partner after their oil deal collapsed.
Serhat Gumrukcu, 42, of Los Angeles, faces a mandatory life
sentence for the 2018 abduction and k!lling of Gregory Davis, who was taken
from his Vermont home and found shot de@d at the base of a snowbank, according
to the US Attorney’s Office.
Gumrukcu, the founder of Enochian Biosciences, was found
guilty of hatching the de@dly plot after Davis, a father of six whose wife was
pregnant with their seventh child, threatened to sue him over a soured oil
deal.
Prosecutors said the biotech tycoon recruited his friend,
Berk Eratay, 38, who then used a second intermediary, Aron Ethridge, 45, to
hire hitman Jerry Banks, 37.
On Jan. 6, 2018, Banks, 37, arrived at Davis’ home in a
vehicle fitted with flashing red and blue lights, posing as a Deputy US Marshal
and telling the unsuspecting father of six he needed to come in for
questioning.
Banks then abducted Davis from his Danville home and
murdered him, prosecutors said.
Davis’s body was discovered in a snowbank a short distance
from his home in Barnet, Vermont, on Jan. 7, 2018.
Following his murder, “investigators quickly discovered
emails and messaging indicating the tension between Gumrukcu and Davis over the
failed oil deal, resulting in Gumrukcu being interviewed twice by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation,” prosecutors said.
Investigators later discovered Gumrukcu had lied in each
interview, but cellphone data, purchase records, bank documents, emails, and
messages ultimately exposed him and his co-conspirators’ roles in Davis’
kidnapping and murder, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
Around 2017, Gumrukcu was brokering a multimillion-dollar
biotech merger with Enochian Biosciences built around his purported HIV cure —
a high-stakes deal that prosecutors said made silencing Davis all the more
urgent.
Prosecutors said Davis’s threat to take legal
action over their failed oil transaction could have jeopardized Gumrukcu’s bid
to gain control of Enochian Biosciences.
Gumrukcu’s downfall came in May 2022, when he was arrested
and taken into custody. He was convicted in April of murder-for-hire,
conspiracy, and wire fraud.
“Serhat Gumrukcu tried to hide his role in the murder of
Greg Davis by paying one man to pay another man to pay the hitman, who shot and
killed Greg Davis on a January night in Vermont,” stated Acting United States
Attorney Michael P. Drescher.
“Uncovering Gumrukcu’s responsibility for this murder
involved years of determined investigation by the men and women of Vermont’s
United States Attorney’s Office, working closely with the FBI and the Vermont
State Police.”
Banks and Ethridge were arrested in April 2022. Eratay was
arrested in May.
Banks was sentenced to 200 months in prison, followed by
five years of supervised release, and Eratay received a sentence of 110 months
in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
Ethridge was sentenced to 140 months in prison followed by
five years of supervised release.
Last month, Davis’s widow, Melissa, slammed Gumrukcu in
court for shattering the lives of her and her seven children by killing her
husband, Vtdigger reported.
“I stand here today not only as a widow, but as the mother
of seven children whose lives were shattered the night Gregg was taken from
us,” she told Gumrukcu during a Sept. 25 court appearance.
“You thought you could silence my husband, but your lies d!e
here in this courtroom.”
During that same court appearance, Gumrukcu had his
sentencing pushed to November.
0 Comments