by Steve Bouser
The bitter weeping continued for a long time, Nostragiacomio told investigators. He would notice it each time he brought another plate of steaming pasta, basket of crisp garlic toast or bowl of salad to the table.
The waiter also made a point of saying that he had not noticed Mrs. Davidson’s husband making any attempt at all to comfort or console her. Rather, he seemed cold and remote, largely ignoring his conspicuously distraught bride as he talked, laughed and danced with others. Though not everyone who had been at Montesanti’s could swear that they had seen Elva crying, and no one saw her quarreling with her husband at that stage, several friends recalled that she had “feigned gaiety but seemed depressed,” both at the charity ball and later at the spaghetti house.
Interior of Montesanti’s. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.
When the accordionist stopped near Elva, she requested a song. But when he played it, his fingers racing like spiders across the black and white keys, it only made Elva sob louder. The song that so affected her was described only as “a melancholy Gypsy tune.”
The winter’s dawn was less than three hours away when the members of the party, suspended somewhere between intoxication and hangover, finally paid their bills and tips, toddled out into Montesanti’s sandy parking lot, bid each other adieu, slipped into their cold car seats and departed in their separate ways with their minds on a good day’s sleep. At that point, several in the party agreed, tears were still welling in Elva’s eyes.
Sheriff McDonald and Coroner Kelly had heard more than enough. Here they had a wealthy young woman who displayed signs that something was deeply troubling her at a couple of parties. Her husband of seven weeks turned his back on her. Back home, there was an oddly extended, wee-hours quarrel between the two of them about who would park the car. Hours later, she was found dead amid highly peculiar circumstances. The doctor who examined her body told of bruises and baffling attire or lack thereof. A husband/beneficiary who stood to become instantly wealthy as a result of his new wife’s death seemed to have some explaining to do on several points.
McDonald and Kelly lost no time deciding what to do: they would order an autopsy. And they would call a closed-door inquest immediately, barring the press and everybody else except witnesses. They would order all those involved to show up, take an oath and come clean on what they knew—beginning that very afternoon, while their memories were fresh. The six humble, homegrown, hardworking members of the hurriedly assembled coroner’s jury might not look much like “peers” of the idle, fun-seeking, upper-crust northern transplants who would be required to testify before them, but the two men resolved that they would damned well get to the bottom of this puzzling and increasingly sensational story.
And they would resist those forces that could be expected to try to cover the whole thing up—forces whose attitude was summed up in the phrase that had already become a standing local joke: “Nobody dies in Pinehurst.”
CHAPTER 3
Not Conceivably an Accident
Up at 10:50 to face another awful day,” Hemmie Tufts wrote in her diary on Thursday, the last day of February 1935. “Took a walk…Had to listen to this gossip. Got mad. Convinced Elva was not a suicide! Tragic!”
It was an eventful day. By the time Hemmie had arisen, Dr. M.W. Marr of Pinehurst and Dr. C.C. Carpenter of the Medical School of Wake Forest College near Raleigh had already completed an autopsy on Elva Statler Davidson at the college, splitting her fit young body open down the middle the way one would dress a deer. They took out the heart, liver, lungs and other vital organs for more thorough testing and examination at nearby Duke University; took blood and tissue samples and corked them into test tubes; and sawed the skull open to cut loose and remove the brain.
What was left of the cadaver was returned to Powell Funeral Home in Southern Pines. Once it had been released, plans were to transfer it to New York State, where the family would hold a private burial service. “Everything right now depends on the report of what was in her stomach,” Acting Coroner Kelly said that night, though he did not elaborate on what authorities expected to find there besides some half-digested spaghetti and perhaps a little port wine.
The two doctors issued a joint statement saying that they had found a dozen minor bruises (or a half dozen, depending on which paper you read) on the young bride’s right hip and thighs. The Buffalo Times would call them “abrasions,” though that was apparently an error. The statement said that none of the bruises was more than forty-eight hours old. Dr. Carpenter, a pathologist, described them as “superficial,” and Kelly said they “apparently had nothing to do with the death.” No bruises were found on the head or upper part of the body.
The doctors said carbon monoxide poisoning was the “only condition found capable of producing death,” which wasn’t the same as coming out and identifying it as the cause. Carpenter left for Wake Forest that night, saying he would file a written report as soon as possible on the further chemical analysis of the brain and organs.
Henry Bradley Davidson had at first resisted having an autopsy performed. But that was before Alice Statler, the widow of Elva’s adoptive father, Ellsworth, and the woman known by many as the wicked stepmother, made her formidable presence felt from afar. Because Brad, oddly, had taken no pains to make sure she was informed of her stepdaughter’s death, Alice learned about it only through chancing upon the early AP story in The New York Times. It was she who called Pinehurst Inc. president Leonard Tufts to demand the postmortem. Alice also put several executives of the Statler Hotels corporation on a train to Pinehurst, accompanied by two company attorneys, William Marcy and Edwin Jaeckel—all under orders to look after family interests and accompany the body back to New York.
Attorneys Marcy and Jaeckel would join J.M. Broughton, a lawyer from Raleigh, who had been representing the family at the inquest. The growing entourage of legal eagles had an odd twist. M.G. Boyette of Carthage, described as “the prosecuting attorney of the Moore County recorder’s court,” also attended the jury sessions. But contrary to what one might expect, he was not there to look out for the people’s interests. He was “representing Mrs. Davidson’s husband, H. Bradley Davidson and his family,” apparently picking up a little money on the side.
Meanwhile, the six male members of the coroner’s jury, sequestered in the little, one-story, white-columned Community House in Pinehurst, sat through a second day of the inquest, listening as witness after witness testified in private about the events leading up to the death and the circumstances surrounding it.
Friday, the first day of March, was even more eventful. Reporters, attracted by the smell of a good story, were arriving in the little village from all over. And the proceedings, which threatened to become a three-ring circus, had a new ringmaster.
The redoubtable Alice Statler, still calling the shots from her office at Statler Hotels headquarters in Buffalo, disapproved of the way Sheriff McDonald and Coroner Kelly were handling the case. So she put in a call to none other than the governor of North Carolina, John Christoph Blucher Ehringhaus, who agreed to bring in a bigger gun and put him in charge of the investigation: Solicitor Rowland S. Pruette.
“Solicitor” was merely the old English term then applied to the public official who would now be called a chief prosecutor or district attorney. Pruette lived an hour to the southwest in the Anson County seat of Wadesboro, headquarters of the six-county Thirteenth Judicial District, which then included Moore.
Careless reporters would frequently misspell both of Rowland Pruette’s names in various ways during the coming days, but personal vanity was the least of his concerns—though he does appear to have relished the limelight once he got going. He knew how to pose and defend a good argument. As a student at Wake Forest College, he had served on the debate team that beat its Davidson College counterpart to win the 1911 Silver Loving Cup sponsored by the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce. The issue was: “Resolved, that the United States should fortify the Panama Canal,” and the Wake Fore
st team successfully argued the affirmative.
Pruette hadn’t been a prosecutor long. A hard worker whose full head of hair turned gray and then white at an unusually early age, he was forty-five at the time of the Davidson case. He weighed well over two hundred pounds, quite a bit for a man who stood no taller than five feet, seven inches.
After spending a few hours getting his feet on the ground that Friday, Rowland Pruette called the growing number of reporters together and informed them of a decision he had made. Though the jury had been ready to throw up its hands and return a verdict of “death by unknown means,” he and Coroner Kelly were suspending the inquest until the following Tuesday, when it would be possible to probe more deeply into a case that was becoming ever more troubling. The resumed inquest would be open to the press and public. And, where the jurors had been vacillating between accident and suicide, Pruette didn’t hesitate to announce that he was adding another option to the range of possibilities: homicide.
“I am not satisfied with the facts,” he said, lifting the slouch hat he liked to wear and scratching his head.
To be perfectly frank, I am puzzled. I do not know whether it was a case of suicide, accident or murder. I have heard enough since I have been here to make me feel that a full investigation is necessary to meet the ends of justice, because of circumstances surrounding the case. It is a peculiar situation for a woman to go for an early-morning ride with only mules, a skirt and sweater on. Other facts include one that the butler got up at 7:30, looked in front of the home for the car and discovered that it was in the garage. He made no investigation immediately but went to the garage to wash the car and found the body. The body was still warm at 9:05.
In postponing the inquest’s adjourned session, The Washington Post reported,
Acting Coroner Hugh Kelly said the delay was out of deference for the family, which had a brief private funeral service this afternoon, and to give the sheriff and solicitor time to prepare for questioning witnesses. Mrs. Davidson’s body was put on a train for New York tonight [Friday] and burial will be at Mount Kisco, N.Y., tomorrow. Accompanying the body were her husband, his brother, Richard Porter Davidson, of Washington, and Mrs. Davidson, and Mr. and Mrs. Nat S. Hurd, of Pittsburgh.
Hurd had been the best man at Brad and Elva’s wedding a few weeks earlier.
Another reason for delaying the resumption of the inquest, Kelly told reporters, was to make possible completion of the autopsy report, about which some questions were still left hanging. “A preliminary report said no cause of death other than carbon monoxide poisoning had been found,” The Post wrote, “but that discovery of apparently superficial bruises on the woman’s thighs necessitated a more complete examination of the whole body. Dr. C.C. Carpenter, conducting the autopsy, said he was studying other facts which might throw some light on the manner of death.”
In a paragraph that managed to misspell two key names, the writer for The Post added: “Pruett [sic] said he had subpoenaed, among others: Davidson himself, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Champaign [sic], of New York, who were house guests of the Davidsons, and all Davidson household servants. They will be questioned at the inquest, which now is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.”
In short, Pruette, unhappy with the way things had been handled so far, had huddled with the other men and decided to hold a second, more thorough inquest the next week, prompted by new evidence suggesting that this was more than the open-and-shut case they had earlier thought. Many of the same witnesses would be called back for more probing questioning, and others would be added to the list.
On Saturday, Pruette stated emphatically that his first twenty-four hours on the case had made him more certain than ever that the Davidson death had to be either suicide or murder. “I’m not prepared to say which,” he said. “But it was not conceivably an accident.”
Pruette sought to clear up lingering confusion about the time of death. He was certain, he said, that Elva Davidson was already deceased when butler Emmanuel Birch found her at 9:05 a.m. on Wednesday. “First reports said she was still alive, beneath the steering wheel, and that she died at a hospital when resuscitation efforts failed,” the Associated Press reported. “Later it was brought out, however, that she was found dead, in a kneeling position on the running board, her face on her arms, which were spread across the car’s floorboards.”
The solicitor cast doubt on the original diagnosis of death from carbon monoxide poisoning and said “a careful check of that angle” was underway, though he didn’t speculate, at least not out loud, on possible other causes. Dr. Carpenter did not seek to dispel those doubts. He said that when he first examined the body, he found “a condition that probably could have resulted from carbon monoxide poisoning” but that “there may be other contributing causes, and we are making efforts through chemical analysis to determine what they are.”
In any case, Pruette told a Boston Globe reporter that he and Dr. Carpenter “would undertake immediately a study of the amount of gas necessary to cause death under such circumstances, and the possible effect of the amount possible to collect in the garage.”
The Davidson case made front pages across the country. Courtesy of Michael McLellan.
One of the reasons Pruette gave that weekend for his doubts about carbon monoxide as the cause of death turned out to be groundless. He said he understood that there was “considerable ventilation clearance under the doors and the side of the three-car garage,” which might have allowed some of the gas to escape and prevent the buildup of a fatal concentration. One wonders why he didn’t just go out and look. A later examination showed that the doors fit snugly enough in their openings to make a tight seal and form an efficient—if oversized—gas chamber.
Pruette gave a mini-exclusive to a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter by confiding that he wasn’t the least bit sure that Elva Davidson had slept in her bed at all after coming home from the party. “Although the covers were disarranged,” he said, “it is not at all clear whether Mrs. Davidson slept there”—leaving open the question of where she might have spent the intervening four hours or so, especially considering that, as Pruette confirmed, her body was still warm when found.
The solicitor voiced an especially provocative theory to The Washington Herald’s Pat Frank. Frank wrote:
Mr. Pruett believes that if Mrs. Davidson was murdered, she was either drugged or poisoned and then later her body carried to the garage. His theory is that whoever carried the body either could not lift her into the seat, or just dumped her on the side of the running board. Then the engine was started and the doors of the garage closed in an effort to make the case appear either a suicide or an accident.
CHAPTER 4
Touched by the Breath of Scandal
Sunday, March 3, was a remarkably beautiful, calm, spring-like day in Pinehurst—as in the eye of a storm. Temperatures had risen dramatically. Much had happened during the previous few days, and much would happen in the week ahead. For now, everyone craved a day of resting and catching up.
Solicitor Rowland Pruette had gone home to Wadesboro to be with his family and attend church. Pinehurstians lazed in the balmy weather, went through the motions of having fun, braced for the coming circus and tried to act for a moment as if everything were normal.
Each arriving train disgorged more newspaper and wire service reporters and photographers. They fanned out across southern Moore County, interviewing friends and neighbors of the Davidsons, badgering the sheriff and coroner, hanging around the rustically palatial Carolina Hotel and the modest Community House with its humble dirt yard and speculating about possibly sexy aspects of the story.
The local reporters learned that twenty-two mourners had gathered on Saturday under a canopy on a snowy hill in Kensico Cemetery at Valhalla, New York. The Reverend John Walter Houck, of Pilgrim Presbyterian Church in New York City, had conducted a three-minute service, after which Elva was laid to rest near her hotel magnate father in the Statler family plot. Brad Davidson’s brother, Richard P
orter Davidson, had been there, along with Richard’s wife, Betty, and Elva’s stepmother, Alice Statler.
“My wife’s unfortunate death was purely accidental,” Brad Davidson told journalists besieging him at the chapel. “I have nothing to say except that I am satisfied that when the investigation is completed, the authorities will announce that finding.”
After returning that Sunday from burying his wife, Brad did two things that the prosecutors would make much of: he played a round of golf, and he invited his close circle of friends over for cocktails, including several who would be called as witnesses in the public inquest starting Tuesday. He seemed to see nothing improper in either activity.
“Baked in sun all day,” Hemmie Tufts wrote in her diary. “Glorious hot day…Brad for drinks. Looks awful.”
The assembled reporters, with a little time on their hands, took advantage of Sunday’s lull to bone up on Pinehurst, gathering background and local color for their coming stories. Several wrote sidebars about this peculiar little rural paradise in which they found themselves cooling their heels.
Pinehurst itself, located low on North Carolina’s long underbelly and halfway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, was lush with exotic vegetation. But the newsmen knew from looking out their train windows on the way in that the village amounted to a green oasis in a depressing, poverty-stricken sea of grit and spindly second-growth trees. This was the bedraggled Carolina Sandhills, the plight of whose inhabitants had been made all the worse by the ravages of the Great Depression.