Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  “When did you meet Elva Statler?” Pruette asked.

  “Last spring,” Brad said. “We became engaged in December.”

  “You have been married previously, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, to Jessica Aylward.”

  “You are divorced and have some children?”

  “Yes. The children are living with their mother in Berryville, Virginia.”

  “How old are the children?”

  Davidson had to pause and do a little mental arithmetic before replying, “Ten, twelve and eighteen.”

  “What business are you in?” Pruette asked.

  “None.”

  “None?”

  “I had a job with the Sherwood Oil Company in Baltimore. It provided me with a modest income to contribute to the support of my children. But I gave that up just before Christmas because Elva wanted me to come down here to Pinehurst and live.”

  “At the time you married Elva Statler,” Pruette asked, “your finances were depleted, were they not?”

  “No,”Davidson replied.“I had previously had a very good job in Washington.” (He was referring to his position as manager of the struggling Annapolis Roads Club, which in fact he had given up when it stopped paying him any money.)

  “Isn’t it true, Mr. Davidson,” Pruette demanded to know, “that when you were asked just before your marriage to Elva Statler how you were going to support her, you said you intended to live on her income?”

  Davidson was described as “bristling” at the question. “Positively not,” he snapped. “That’s wrong. I did not say that.”

  “Did you know she made a will shortly before she died?” Pruette asked.

  “I happened to be very much in love with her,” Davidson almost shouted, glaring back. “I didn’t pay any attention to monetary matters.”

  Pruette, practically in Davidson’s face now, raised his voice in disbelief. “You mean you didn’t know that her will left you an annuity of $1,000 a month and $300,000 in either cash or securities?” he asked.

  Davidson stood his ground, his lips again tightening. “Not until I read it in the newspapers,” he said.

  Leaving the jurors and spectators to draw their own conclusions on that one, Pruette paused. Again his voice softened for a moment. “Was Mrs. Davidson expecting the birth of a child?” he asked.

  “No,” Davidson replied in a resentful tone. “At one point, she thought she might have been pregnant. And, without consulting her about it, I went to Dr. Marr. I told him I did not think Mrs. Davidson was in physical condition to bear a child. Dr. Marr agreed that she was highly nervous.” Both he and Elva had wanted children, he said, “but we didn’t think it was the proper time to have them.”

  Then Pruette was suddenly on the offensive again: “Mr. Davidson, didn’t you and your wife sometimes quarrel?”

  “No,” Davidson replied. “We did not.”

  “I ask you,” said Pruette, “if it isn’t a fact that you have a domineering personality?”

  “No, I think not.”

  “Weren’t you sometimes abusive to your wife?”

  “Of course, I say no. I was never abusive toward her. I would say that the contrary was the case.”

  “I believe Mrs. Davidson’s body was bruised,” Pruette said.

  “She showed some bruises to us Saturday before she died,” Davidson said, “just after we had been playing tennis. They were on her right hip, I believe.”

  “Didn’t she have a bruise on her left arm?”

  “If she did, I didn’t know it.”

  Asked if he knew of any other existing injuries that his wife had suffered, Davidson mentioned two—one very old and the other more recent. In her early youth, he quoted her as saying, she was riding a bicycle down a hill and ran into an automobile, suffering a head injury that necessitated the insertion of a small silver plate in her skull. And on their honeymoon trip through Georgia in early January, he said, Elva suffered a bruised back and torn shoulder ligaments in an automobile accident. She refused treatment, he said.

  This photo, from the Pinehurst Outlook, shows the Davidsons in January 1935, just days after their wedding and days before her death. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  Pruette had one more question: was it true that Davidson, just back from taking his wife’s body to New York for burial, had gone to the Pinehurst Country Club on Sunday and played ten or eleven holes of golf ?

  “Yes, I did,” Davidson replied. “But I didn’t go near the clubhouse.” Reacting to murmurs from the spectators, Davidson felt the need to add an explanation: “I felt I had to have some recreation.”

  Before leaving the stand, “his face emotionless,” Davidson answered some softball questions from Carthage attorney M.G. Boyette, the moonlighting prosecutor whom he had hired to represent him. Seeking to beat somebody else to a sensitive question and put the best spin on it, Boyette asked: “Mr. Davidson, is it true that you were not in favor of an autopsy?”

  “Yes,” Davidson replied. “But only because I didn’t like the idea of having my wife’s body handled.”

  “You later agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you offered your assistance to the officers or investigating authorities in clearing up facts concerning Mrs. Davidson’s death?”

  “I have been available at all times. I have not contacted the attorneys here other than to invite them to the funeral services.”

  Finally, Boyette asked if Elva had frequently suffered from insomnia. Davidson replied that she had and that she had kept two “sleeping potions” on hand to calm her nerves. He identified them as aluminol and allonal. She also went for frequent long drives by herself on nights when she couldn’t sleep, he said. “She told me that she wanted to be alone on those occasions and that she had gone off in her car that way all her life,” he said, adding that Elva usually wore sport clothes on those early morning rides.

  “I can’t say how she was dressed the morning she was found in the garage,” he said. “I didn’t notice because I was only thinking of her. So far as I know, she was not especially unhappy that night at the club and at the spaghetti camp.”

  Boyette chose not to pursue that last comment—“not especially unhappy that night.” But those in the room who were familiar with the statements of other witnesses about extended fits of inconsolable weeping on Elva’s part had to wonder whether Brad Davidson, who had been sitting two or three chairs away, was (1) a blind man or (2) simply lying through his teeth.

  CHAPTER 7

  Waiting for the Hole Card

  Having coaxed and badgered all the testimony he could out of Henry Bradley Davidson on that first Tuesday morning, Solicitor Pruette still had time for a couple of other witnesses before lunch. The first one he called was Emanuel Birch.

  After establishing that Birch’s employment with Elva Statler had predated the Davidsons’ wedding, Pruette got down to business, asking the painfully uncomfortable black butler how much drinking had gone on in the Davidson household. Birch replied that he had served one cocktail to both husband and wife before dinner.

  “What happened after dinner?”

  “They left about eleven o’clock for the charity ball, and I went to bed.”

  “Did you hear them come home?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you hear the car start up any time that night?”

  “No sir.”

  “Did you hear anybody out in the garage during the night?”

  “I didn’t hear anybody, and I didn’t hear the garage doors pushed up. And they make considerable noise if they aren’t pushed up just right, too.”

  The solicitor then directed him to tell what had happened early the next morning.

  “I got up about seven-thirty o’clock,” he said. “Pearl Watson came in at eight o’clock.”

  “She’s the maid?”

  “Yes, sir. I stayed in the houses and did some chores. Neither Mr. and Mrs. Campaigne nor Mr. and Mrs. Davidson had asked
for breakfast. Sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Davidson left their car out front, sometimes in the garage. That morning it was cold and the car wasn’t in front. I looked for it, but it wasn’t there.”

  At nine o’clock, he said, he finally decided that he would stop waiting for either couple to wake up and would go on out to the garage to clean up the Packard. “The door was down,” he said. “When I pushed the door up and stepped in, I smelled gas, like it had burned. I had closed the door after me, but there was gas so strong that I couldn’t stand it. I pushed the door back up.”

  “Was the ignition switch on or off ?” Pruette asked.

  “It was on,” Birch said. “But the motor wasn’t running.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I went to the left of the car to get the hose to wash it. And that’s when I found Mrs. Davidson.”

  “What did you notice about her?”

  “The strange way she was slumped over the running board.”

  “What did you do?” Pruette asked.

  “I ran back to the house. The cook met me when I went in. I said, ‘Say, Mrs. Davidson is sick or else she is dead out there in the garage.’ I told her to wake Mr. and Mrs. Campaigne and I ran upstairs, calling Mr. Davidson.”

  “What did you say to him?” Pruette asked.

  “I believe I said, ‘My God, Mr. Davidson, Mrs. Davidson is dead!’” he replied, his voice still reflecting traces of the anguish he had felt that morning a week earlier.

  “And what happened then?”

  “I helped Mr. Davidson get his shoes, and then he went to the garage.”

  Birch couldn’t be of much help about what had happened after that, since he had gone out in front of the house to wait for Dr. Marr. But in reply to a question by Pruette, Birch did say that he had not seen Davidson take his wife onto his lap as Davidson had testified.

  “No, sir,” he said, “I didn’t see that.”

  Pruette questioned him for a time about the operation of Mrs. Davidson’s twelve-cylinder automobile.

  “The car had an automatic choke that releases itself, and it doesn’t choke easy,” Birch said, relieved to slip into a subject of which he was more in command.

  “Was the gas lever on or off ?”

  “I didn’t notice, sir. But the car will idle for fifteen to thirty minutes without feeding it.”

  “How much gasoline was there in the tank?”

  “I didn’t notice, sir.”

  Pearl Watson, who gave her age as thirty-five, wrung her hands and rocked back and forth nervously as she answered questions from J.M. Broughton, the Raleigh attorney representing Statler interests. Pruette had asked him to take over for a time.

  “Miss Watson,” Broughton began, “when did you go to work for Mrs. Davidson?”

  “Last January.”

  “Did you know her before that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What was the nature of your work?”

  “Just general duties. I cooked and cleaned. I made up the beds, among other things.”

  “What time did you usually come to work?”

  “About eight o’clock.”

  Asked if there had been any times when she had come to work and found that Mrs. Davidson was out for a drive in the car, Pearl said that there had been no such times. Directed to recount what she had done on the morning of February 27 after Birch ran into the kitchen to tell her that he had found Mrs. Davidson unconscious in the garage, she said she had gone to the first-floor guest room to awaken the Campaignes.

  “Were they asleep when you went in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did you tell them?

  “I said that Mrs. Davidson was out in the garage, either ill or dead.”

  After she testified about being told to call the doctor and doing so, Broughton jumped ahead in time to ask about another detail. “Miss Watson,” he said, “did you go upstairs after Mr. Davidson and Mr. Campaigne had left to take Mrs. Davidson to the hospital?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did you see there?”

  “The sheets on Mrs. Davidson’s bed were rumpled, and both beds in her room looked like they’d been slept in.”

  “Slept in?” Broughton asked. “Couldn’t they have just been sat on?”

  “I suppose so, yes, sir,” Pearl replied.

  “And was there clothing in the room?”

  “Yes, sir. Her evening dress was hanging in the bathroom,” Pearl said, adding with a note of disapproval: “Inside out.”

  “I believe you have said that you found her underclothes scattered about the bathroom and bedroom,” Broughton said.

  “Yes, sir,” Pearl said, “but she usually left her clothes all over the place.”

  Attorney Boyette, representing Davidson, took over and pursued that line of questioning a bit further. “Miss Watson,” he asked, “did you see a nightgown in the room?”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied. “It was on the back of a chair.”

  “How would you describe its condition?”

  “It looked like it had been slept in.”

  Boyette looked at Broughton, who had one more question before lunch. “Now, Miss Watson,” he said, rising and trying to maintain a mock casual tone, “after Mrs. Davidson’s body had been found, isn’t it true that Mr. Davidson told you not to say anything about it?”

  The surprising question, raising an implication that had not surfaced before, hung in the air.

  “Why, no,” Pearl replied, squirming and trembling in her chair. “No, sir, he didn’t say that.”

  Content with having entered his damaging question, Broughton dropped the subject as quickly as he had brought it up.

  Curtis and Edna Campaigne, both well into their forties, were several years older than Brad Davidson and a generation older than his twenty-two-yearold wife. Yet it was Elva whom the Campaignes had met in Pinehurst in early 1934. They hit it off, and the Campaignes returned from their home in Montclair, New Jersey, for Elva’s wedding to Brad Davidson at the beginning of 1935. They stayed around for a few weeks, which is why they happened to be houseguests of Elva and Brad on the night of February 26.

  Solicitor Pruette called Curtis Campaigne as the first witness after lunch, to be followed shortly by his wife.

  “Mr. Campaigne,” Pruette began, still seated, “will you please tell the jury what happened the afternoon before Mrs. Davidson’s body was found?”

  “Late in the afternoon,” Curtis replied, “Davidson called and asked us, ‘How about a game of bridge?’ We played until about six o’clock, had tea while playing and drank highballs afterward before dinner.”

  “Did Mrs. Campaigne have a highball?”

  “No. She doesn’t drink. And, though Mrs. Davidson poured one, I don’t think she finished it.”

  “And what happened after dinner?”

  “We went to the country club. To the charity ball.”

  “Did Mr. Davidson dance with his wife?”

  “He danced with her once.”

  “Did she dance with anyone else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.”

  Pruette let that sink in for a second. Then—

  “Was Mrs. Davidson under the influence of liquor?”

  “No,” Campaigne replied. “Not at any time.”

  “How would you describe her mood?”

  “Mrs. Davidson was gay and happy when the pictures were auctioned off. She bought two, which she said she would hang in the hall.”

  “And later, at the spaghetti house, did you sit near Mrs. Davidson?”

  “I sat on her immediate left.”

  “Did she drink there?”

  “There was some red wine passed around, and I saw Mrs. Davidson pour some, but I can’t swear she drank it.”

  Pruette stood and resumed his pacing.

  “After you left Montesanti’s,” he asked, “what time did you get back to the Davidsons’ cottage?”
>
  “About four thirty in the morning,” Campaigne replied.

  “And what happened when you arrived there?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Davidson had a friendly argument.”

  Pruette raised an eyebrow.

  “Friendly?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Davidson suggested that she take the car around to the garage. Mr. Davidson said, ‘Let me do it,’ and he got out and opened the door and ushered Mrs. Campaigne and me into the hall. When I got to the door, I said, ‘I’m going to turn in, Brad. I’m tired.’”

  “And you and Mrs. Campaigne went to your room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what happened next?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see the Davidsons enter?”

  “No, we didn’t. But we heard footsteps going up the stairs.”

  “Did you hear the car drive around during the night?”

  “No.”

  At this point, Pruette slipped in another surprise question seemingly designed to challenge the integrity of this witness as well. “Mr. Campaigne,” he said, “didn’t you previously state that the three of you—you and your wife and Mr. Davidson—had waited for Mrs. Davidson to put the car up and then parted company and said goodnight?”

  Campaigne appeared to search his mind and draw a blank. “No, sir,” he said, “I don’t believe I made such a statement.”

  Having gotten in his little zinger, Pruette let that matter drop as well. “All right,” he said, sitting back down. “Tell the jury what happened the next morning.

  “The maid came to the door and told us, ‘Something has happened to Mrs. Davidson in the garage.’”

  “Did she seem agitated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Mr. Davidson up by that point?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you heard the butler calling him?”