by Steve Bouser
“Not that I know of.”
Pruette turned on his heel.
“No further questions,” he said, suddenly all business. “I now call Mr. Pat Frank to the stand.”
Birch remained seated for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Pruette turned back.
“That’s all, Mr. Birch,” he said. “Thank you.”
The witness stood stiffly, looking wrung out after nearly a half hour on the stand, and walked toward the door, again thinking his ordeal was over.
What happened next was the kind of thing that makes any newsman uncomfortable: reporter Frank, who worked for the now long-defunct Washington Herald, had to become part of the story. And this at a time when reporter confidentiality was not the issue it has become today.
Under oath, Frank felt compelled to testify to what Birch had told him the previous Sunday: that the Davidsons usually slept in separate rooms, that they “followed this procedure because of misunderstandings” and that “sometimes they quarreled.”
The next witness was the waiter John Nostragiacomio. As he walked to the rocking chair, the spectators could clearly see that he was, indeed, quite bushy-haired. After struggling with the witness’s surname, Pruette asked him if he was acquainted with both Mr. and Mrs. Davidson. He said he knew them both well.
“How many were in their party on Tuesday night of last week? Or perhaps I should say Wednesday morning.”
“There were eighteen of them.”
“What did they do once they had arrived?”
“They came in and sat around the fireplace in the dining room while the meal was being prepared.”
After Nostragiacomio told of later showing the party to their table, formed by pulling smaller tables together, a juror named Russell Sullivan piped up, wanting to know how the seating arrangement was decided on. He seemed to place some importance on that.
“They picked their own seats,” the waiter said.
Sullivan nodded and sat thoughtfully back in his chair.
Pruette took over again, asking if Nostragiacomio had noticed “anything about Mrs. Davidson’s behavior that night.”
“Yes, I did,” the witness said. “When I started serving the spaghetti, she was crying. She took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes.”
“Would you describe her tears as profuse?”
“Yes, I would. So much so that Mrs. Herbert Vail went over to her.”
“Mrs. Herbert Vail?”
“Yes.”
“Did Mrs. Davidson cry for a long time?”
“Some time. I don’t know how long.”
Pruette asked if there had been any other guests there, besides the party from the country club.
“No,” he said. “Just them.”
“Did you serve anything to drink?”
“Some wine. Three bottles of claret. And someone had some whisky in a pint bottle.”
“I see. Doesn’t Montesanti’s have a bar?”
“Not a regular bar.”
Pruette smiled and glanced at the spectators.
“I understand,” he said. “It couldn’t be. This is North Carolina, isn’t it?”
Laughter rippled through the audience.
Pruette made quick work of the next four minor witnesses. Their names were Freeman, Turner, Reinicke and Hyde, but they might as well have been Eenie, Meenie, Minie and Moe. All were local men who had been at one or both of the parties, but they either differed on whether Elva had seemed upset or said they hadn’t noticed her at all, and they generally had nothing of interest to offer—although Hyde would provide a tidbit when Pruette recalled him at the end of the morning.
After Eenie et al. came a cluster of three witnesses who, though they also testified only briefly, caused the all-male jurors to perk up considerably. All were attractive young ladies—no more than girls, really. All were socialite acquaintances of Elva’s. And all were of an exotic avian species that those stolid locals could only wonder at and sometimes resent: flighty, brightly plumaged snowbirds that always came winging into Pinehurst from New York or New England in the fall and fluttered away again in the spring, enjoying the luxury of being spared both the North’s bitter winters and the South’s sweltering summers.
The first of these pampered pigeons was Miss Jane McMullen, described as “a debutante of Pinehurst and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts,” which meant she spent the summer social season hobnobbing with the likes of Joe Kennedy’s multitudinous offspring.
Pruette began by asking her his favorite question: whether she had had anything to drink on the night of February 26. She “blushed when he asked the question and admitted that she had a ‘small one.’” Asked whether Elva had been in tears at the spaghetti camp, Jane said: “Mrs. Davidson was crying at the table. Her expression made me feel she was fairly morbid and depressed. She would stop crying and then start all over again.”
But Jane’s sister, Isabel, swore that she hadn’t seen Elva weeping or displaying any other signs that she was the least bit unhappy. Isabel, dressed in a tight-fitting, bright yellow knitted blouse and a dark green skirt, did not hesitate to admit that she had had two drinks at the country club that night.
“Was there any liquor at Montesanti’s?” Pruette asked. As he questioned her, one reporter noted, “he puffed on a cigarette and tilted back in a straight chair to an unstable angle,” trying to look cool but almost falling over backward.
“There wasn’t any more liquor,” she said. “They had had a couple of drinks before—that is, those we went to the party with.”
The third snowbird was Miss Polly Lovering of Boston, who kept her long winter coat pulled protectively around her and never smiled during her brief time in the rocking chair. While she had known the Statler heiress for some time, she said, “she was never in a pensive or sad mood when I saw her.” And that was all she could or would say.
Pruette was ready for the midday break. But lawyer Broughton, representing Statler family interests, wanted to briefly recall witness Bernard Freeman, Pinehurst publicity man. He had been the Eenie of Eeenie, Meenie, Minie and Moe.
Freeman confirmed Nostragiacomio’s testimony that there had been no hard liquor available at Montesanti’s “since there was no place to purchase it and you had to bring your own.”
Then, asked about Elva Davidson’s mood at the earlier party, Freeman could remember only one detail. But it was a compelling one: “I heard Mrs. Davidson say, ‘I’m going to get tight.’”
“Are you sure of those words?”
“Yes. ‘I’m going to get tight.’”
The phrase echoed in the minds of spectators as they gathered outside the Community House or headed for lunch. If a happy young lady speaks those words, it sounds like she’s out to tie one on and have a good time. But if a conspicuously unhappy young lady says, “I’m going to get tight,” it sounds like something altogether different. It has overtones of a wronged woman seeking some kind of bitter satisfaction.
Reporter Folliard was so taken by the phrase that he characterized it as a “threat,” though none of the witnesses would testify in public that she had carried it out.
CHAPTER 9
Looking On with a Pained Expression
Brad Davidson was again wearing his “somber garb” and seemed weary when Solicitor Rowland Pruette called him back to the now all-toofamiliar rocking chair after lunch on Wednesday.
“How old are you?” Pruette asked.
“Forty-two,” Davidson replied
“And how old was Mrs. Davidson?”
“Twenty-two.”
“I believe you were divorced from your first wife last May.”
“That is correct.”
“And what were the grounds?”
Davidson took a deep breath, casting his glance around the silent room.
“Desertion,” he finally said, almost under his breath.
“What did you say?”
“Desertion.”
“And your wife—the first Mrs. Davidson—brought the ac
tion?”
“Yes.”
“In speaking of partially supporting the children of that marriage,” Pruette said, “you stated yesterday that you had a private income. What was the source of that income?”
“Several small securities.”
“What was the income from them?”
“Negligible—seventy-five to a hundred dollars a month.”
Davidson said he had resigned his last job around Christmastime.
“How long had you been employed?” Pruette asked him.
“Less than a month.”
In response to further questions, Davidson again insisted that he knew nothing before marrying Elva Statler about the million-dollar trust fund that her father had established for her—the fund that produced an income of $2,500 a month.
“But after the marriage,” Pruette asked, “didn’t she set aside $1,000 a month to your credit?”
“Yes.”
Having succeeded in reminding the jury of all the material benefits that were intended to flow to Davidson upon his wife’s death, Pruette returned to the subject of those suspicious bruises found on Elva’s right thigh and hip. He reminded Davidson of his testimony from the day before: that Elva had been bruised by a tennis ball the previous Saturday and by a fall on the ice in Boston in mid-February.
“Do you stand by that?” Pruette asked.
“Yes,” Davidson said.
That was all Pruette needed to hear.
Having thus set the stage, and with Davidson again sequestered out of earshot, Pruette called Elva’s grave, aging family physician, Dr. Myron Marr.
“Dr. Marr,” he said, “I believe you knew Elva Statler for several years.”
“That is correct,” Marr replied.
“Was she of a cheerful disposition?”
“Yes,” the physician answered, “unusually so.”
“And how would you describe her physical condition?”
“She was athletic,” Dr. Marr said. “Exceptionally athletic.”
“Strong?”
“Yes.”
“Had you treated her recently?”
“When she returned from her honeymoon, I treated her for a bruised and swollen shoulder.”
Pruette turned to the morning of Elva’s death. Marr told of hurrying to Edgewood Cottage after receiving a frantic call from maid Pearl Watson, imploring him to “come quick, even if you’re not dressed.” Inside the garage, he said, he found Davidson bending over his wife.
“Was her body still warm when you arrived at the garage?” he asked.
“Surprisingly so,” Marr said. “I noticed it when I lifted her arm to check for a pulse.”
“Did you feel one?”
“No.”
“How long do you think she had been dead?” he was asked.
“I think now that she could have been dead as little as a half hour.”
A murmur arose among the spectators. “At this point,” one newspaper reported, “the society women, dressed in bright spring sports costumes, and the millionaires attired for golf and the eager townspeople crammed at the doors and with their faces pressed in the windows, crowded closer.”
Marr told how, despite his belief that Elva was dead, he had ordered her rushed to the county hospital so that all possible efforts could be made to revive her. He said that the flushed condition of her skin caused him to conclude immediately that she had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and he added that he had not changed his opinion since.
Pruette then moved on to his real subject: the bruises. “Where were they?” he asked.
“On her right hip and thigh,” Marr answered.
“And how old do you think those bruises were?”
“I now believe that they must have been received from a half hour to forty-eight hours before her death.”
The murmur grew louder. “A half hour to forty-eight hours?” Pruette asked, pressing home his point. “How do you know that?”
“By their color,” Marr said. “Up to a certain point, the age of bruises can be determined by the coloration.”
“It changes as time passes?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Marr, Mr. Davidson has said that his wife was bruised by a tennis ball four days earlier and by a fall on the ice about three weeks earlier.”
“That may be. But those can’t be the bruises we found on her body.”
Reporters scribbled furiously in their notebooks. The doctor’s statement was described as having “startled the crowd of spectators and aroused keen interest among the six men who are asked to determine how Mrs. Davidson came to her death.”
Feeling better than he had expected to be feeling at the end of this second day of testimony despite his big setback, Solicitor Pruette adjourned the inquest until the next morning. “We hope to finish by noon tomorrow,” he said. “We have several more witnesses to examine.”
But first, with a little time left on his hands, he announced that the jury was going to take its first and only field trip.
Pruette wanted the jurors to see the death vehicle with their own eyes. The original intent, according to what lawyer Broughton confided to some reporters, was to require Brad Davidson to drive his wife’s twelve-cylinder touring car to the Community House that morning. Then Birch would be recalled to the stand and asked to show exactly the position in which he had found Elva’s body.
Next, the authorities planned to ask a young woman to sit in the driver’s seat and, feigning unconsciousness, attempt to fall forward to the floor. They knew that either she would be obstructed by the broad steering wheel or else she would fall out of the car altogether. This would demonstrate that she could not have passed out while sitting in the car and ended up in Elva’s final position on the running board.
The show didn’t come off that way. Perhaps the prosecutors decided the logistics of making Brad drive the car to the Community House and setting up their demonstration there were too complicated. Maybe Brad simply refused to cooperate. Most likely, they thought it more effective to have the Packard viewed in its natural habitat. Whatever the reason, they decided to move the mountain to Mohamet. If they couldn’t bring the car to the jury, they would take the jury to the car.
Donning their coats and hats, the six members of the panel worked their way through the crowd, filed outside the Community House and climbed into a couple of automobiles waiting at the edge of Community Road. Other officials and witnesses got into other cars. Then, “trailed by a curious crowd,” the little convoy headed west. Their destination, less than half a mile away as the crow flies but closer to a mile via Pinehurst’s winding streets, was Edgewood Cottage.
Once they had arrived there and parked along the shoulder of Linden Road and McKenzie Road, the curiosity-seekers were prevented from drawing near the big two-story garage that sat at the back of the lot next to the cottage, behind an imposing brick house called the Pines. From a distance, they could dimly make out activity inside the garage as the members of the jury and others walked around and rubbernecked at the building’s interior under the supervision of Solicitor Pruette, who wore his trademark slouch hat.
The jurors could be seen testing the three garage doors, evidently finding them so easy to slide up and down as to rule out the possibility that anyone could have gotten trapped inside and died accidentally.
Then an unusual sight presented itself. Acting on instructions from Pruette, Birch started getting into the shiny, black automobile parked inside. But he didn’t sit down in the usual manner.
“While the jurors watched,” Folliard wrote, “he climbed halfway into the 12-cylinder convertible touring car. His head and shoulders were lying across the gear-shift lever and his legs dangled to the running board.”
After that, the jurors themselves could be seen swarming over the car. Three of them followed Birch’s lead, trying to duplicate the position of Elva’s body. Some sat on the seat and let themselves fall forward onto the steering wheel. Others got down on their hands and knees an
d tried to crawl up onto the running board and into the car.
Through it all, it was reported, Brad Davidson looked on “with a pained expression.”
CHAPTER 10
Electrifying the Courtroom
As the Community House began filling up for the climactic day of the inquest on Thursday, March 7, 1935, Solicitor Rowland S. Pruette was still smarting from the loss of his own hole card. He couldn’t have known that the other side was about to raise the stakes of the game at the last minute by playing one of its own.
Coroner’s inquests—a legal proceeding since abolished in North Carolina, along with the office of coroner itself—weren’t supposed to have “sides” at all. They were supposed to be dispassionate medical and scientific inquiries. But the nature of the Elva Statler Davidson case, juiced up by sensational allegations and the presence of national media, had turned this particular proceeding into the next thing to a full-fledged murder trial. Under those circumstances, it would have been unrealistic to expect the high-powered lawyers involved to pull any punches.
Brad Davidson’s family, friends and attorneys had hoped to see Elva’s death swept under the rug as an unfortunate accident rather than a suicide. That was obviously the least embarrassing and damaging of the three options. But when the needle threatened to swing all the way over to the other end of the scale, into the red “murder” range, they decided it was time to do whatever necessary to pull it forcefully back into the middle: suicide.
And Herbert Vail was their man.
But first, before Vail could fire off his torpedo, even before they could bring on Vail’s wife, Minnie, to set the stage for him, those in the Davidson camp would have to sit through the lengthy testimony of Dr. C.C. Carpenter. Pruette had put him off as long as he could and had abandoned his pet poison theory. But the state could still be counted on to milk “the chubby, smiling little Dr. Carpenter” for all he was worth.
Statler family attorney J.M. Broughton—who would go on to become governor of North Carolina four years later—handled the questions for Pruette.