Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  Elva and many of the other principal characters in the Davidson cast appear in articles published from 1928 through 1935 in The Outlook, Pinehurst’s social register and propaganda organ.

  Miss Isabelle Baer paid a visit to Miss Elva Statler prior to Miss Statler’s marriage to Mr. H. Bradley Davidson. Mesdames H. Bradley Davidson and Herbert Vail served as patronesses of the Black and White Ball. Mr. H. Bradley Davidson dressed as a sailor at a Valentine’s Day masquerade (when Mrs. H. Bradley Davidson was out of town). Dr. M.W. Marr, Pinehurst’s resident physician, dressed up as a doctor treating five ladies dressed in baby clothes as the Dionne quintuplets, who were all the rage at the time.

  “Special Parties Accommodated,” Montesanti’s Spaghetti Camp advertised. Mrs. Betty Hanna Davidson (continually overspending her allowance from her wealthy Ohio family after marrying Richard) had gone into business, setting up an Elizabeth Arden salon. That same Mrs. Davidson sponsored a dance during the Mid-South Golf Tournament, giving the affluent snowbirds an opportunity to benefit the undernourished indigenous children of Moore County.

  This formal portrait is of Elva’s best friend, Isabelle Stone Baer.

  Miss Elva Statler of New York, wearing an elegant gown, and dashing young Mr. Jack Rudel of Montreal, resplendent in a tux, won a New Year’s Eve scavenger hunt. Among the items they had assembled in less than an hour were a crusty old bachelor, a finicky old maid, the U.S. Constitution, a last year’s bird nest, a Massachusetts license plate, a hand of tobacco, a useless Christmas present, something incongruous and a deck of cards minus the ace of spades.

  Then there is that splashy layout that appeared on January 5, 1935, under the headline “A Pinehurst Wedding of Great Interest,” detailing “the marriage of Miss Elva Idesta Statler and Mr. H. Bradley Davidson Jr. on Thursday noon at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Richard P. Davidson in Knollwood.”

  The story takes up more than a page. Accompanying it is a photo of the newlyweds grinning as they examine a piece of paper, perhaps a scorecard, on some kind of sporting field. He towers a head and a half over her. Both of them are dressed in stylish layers against the cold, and both are looking about as good as they could look. They seem happy, and they seem like a couple.

  “The bride was escorted to the altar by Mr. Richard P. Davidson and was given in marriage by her sister-in-law, Mrs. Milton Howland Statler of Tucson, Ariz., who was matron of honor,” the paper reported. “Mr. Nat S. Hurd of Pinehurst was best man. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Dr. Murray S. Howland, of Binghamton, N.Y.”

  The Davidsons married in January 1935 at the Pinehurst home of Richard Porter, Brad’s younger brother. From left: Richard Porter; Mrs. Nat Hurd, Elva’s next-door neighbor; Brad; Elva; Nat Hurd; and Betty Hanna Davidson, Richard’s wife. Courtesy of Andrew Edmond.

  Elva beams on her wedding day. Courtesy of Andrew Edmond.

  The improvised altar, the article says, was decorated with madonna lilies and lilies of the valley, and the house was decorated with white lilies, lilies of the valley and white snapdragons. Elva had even brought in a string quartet from the North Carolina State Symphony, founded only a couple of years before, to play the Lohengrin wedding march.

  “The bride wore a white satin wedding dress with an Elizabethan collar,” the article says. “Her cap was of white net with a collar of orange blossoms. She carried white orchids. The matron of honor wore a blue taffeta dress made in Empire style, with pleated ruffles, and a blue hat to match. She carried yellow roses. Miss Statler’s going-away costume was a gray tailored suit with hat to match, and a topcoat of gray caracul.”

  The new Mrs. Davidson was “graduated [not exactly] from Radcliffe College in 1934,” the paper said. “She has been to Pinehurst many times with her family and this winter for the first time joined the cottage colony, leasing the ‘Edgewood’ cottage on Linden Road. She is known at Pinehurst as an expert horsewoman and has won many prizes here.”

  The rest of the article devotes itself to a detailed account of the many parties held during that “active and gay” week and who attended them, providing a veritable who’s who of Brad and Elva’s friends. Brother Richard and his wife had a dinner for the couple. A Miss Helen Louis Heim gave a tea for the bride. Mr. and Mrs. Richard Tufts of the Pinehurst ruling family gave a buffet supper for the groom’s mother. The night before the wedding, while Elva entertained the womenfolk in her house, Brad threw his stag dinner at—where else?—Montesanti’s Spaghetti Camp.

  Mary Evelyn de Nissoff had a more blunt and jaded version of what Pinehurst life was really like in the 1930s. It provided a helpful counterpoint to all that high-society gloss in The Outlook. “The fact is that this gang put Elva together with Brad because he needed a rich woman and they wanted to get her married off,” she said. “There used to be men like that, who came from good families that had lost their money, and they used to do the resort scene here and in Europe. Because this is where the rich women went—usually older women—who were willing to support these gigolos.”

  What struck Khris Januzik, the former Tufts Archives lady, was the ironic contrast between the extravagant, scorched-earth coverage The Outlook devoted to Elva’s wedding and the terse, one-paragraph squib it gave to her death a few short weeks later—at a time when papers from coast to coast were printing front-page stories with all the juicy details their reporters could beg, borrow or steal. Clearly this was not a newspaper; it was a spin sheet.

  “All The Outlook has about her death is just this tiny little thing regretting her passing,” Khris said. “Just shortly before, there’s the big write-up of her wedding, and you look at the guest list and everything and realize that she was right up there with the Tuftses and everybody on the upper echelon of the social circles here at the time. And then there’s this little, ‘Gee. We’re sorry she’s gone.’ Now, wait a minute, okay? Queen Victoria got more ink than that when she died, and they didn’t even know her!”

  One of the last known photographs of Elva Statler shows her in a fashion show at Pinehurst in 1935.Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  CHAPTER 16

  To Parts and Places Unknown

  Remarkably, it is now possible for posterity to know not only the color of panties that Elva Idesta Statler wore on the day she became Elva Statler Davidson (peach, as noted earlier) but also the colors of the pajamas she wore on her honeymoon: gold and brown.

  Those garments were among numerous trousseau items listed on a bill that sat undisturbed inside a dusty file drawer in the spooky, dungeon-like basement of the Moore County Courthouse in Carthage for three-quarters of a century. The statement, dated March 15, 1935, came from the ritzy Milgrim store in New York City. Other items on it included a white satin bridal gown, a white bridal headpiece, a peach satin gown, a blue gown, a white gown, a tea rose slip and a brassiere (size not specified).

  The invoice had been sent to “Estate of Mrs. H. Bradley Davidson Jr.” and was among a number of other documents submitted by creditors seeking payment when Elva’s will was submitted to probate shortly after her death. Elva had gone on a spending (or charging) spree in New York in December 1934, days before Christmas and only a couple of weeks before her wedding. The bills, revealing many of the items that the excited bride-to-be had purchased, add up to a living account of what Elva did in her last few months alive.

  The girl had expensive tastes. Among her other stops were Cartier and Saks Fifth Avenue. At Cartier, she ordered two hundred fancy engraved wedding invitations and two hundred visiting cards. She arranged to have some of her own “brilliants” (diamonds), along with others supplied by the store, mounted in a platinum brooch. She also lavished some money on gifts for Brad: a pair of gold, enamel and onyx cufflinks ($75) and an engraved, gold and silver cigarette case ($135, or nearly $2,000 of today’s dollars—and this when there was a depression on). At Saks, she bought a doll cradle and miniature tea set to be shipped to her niece, Joan Marie, in Arizona. Elva returned to New York after her wedding to charge m
ore things like linens and kitchenware. At the Steuben Glass store on Fifth Avenue, she picked out twelve crystal wine glasses and two crystal decanters, a black glass pan and eighteen crystal cordials—which were shipped express on the day she died.

  The merchandise bills aren’t all the courthouse dungeon has yielded. Other statements and letters tell an all-too-familiar story about H. Bradley Davidson Jr.’s characteristic failure to honor his obligations—and not only his own but also those his late wife had encountered.

  The bills range from a handwritten slip showing that the Davidsons owed a few dollars for groceries they had bought during that final week in February to a letter six months later from a lawyer in Boston, seeking payment of $2,000 owed to the Hotel Continental in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The letter indicates that Elva had signed a twelve-month lease on a penthouse on September 1, 1934—providing a clue that that’s where Elva had arranged for Brad and her to live when they weren’t in Pinehurst. Noting that no rent payment had been received since January 1935, the lawyer courteously but pointedly asked Brad to pay up or at least acknowledge responsibility for the claim—“in order that we may be saved the trouble of instituting suit.”

  A letter from a Packard dealer in Boston demanded that Brad resume the payments that his wife had faithfully made on her car, lest the company feel compelled to send a repo man around. Another was from an attorney representing Lillian Page, the music teacher who befriended the student Elva and let her move in with her from time to time. Elva apparently owed her $260, which Brad had repeatedly neglected to pay—all the while sweetly telling dear Ms. Page how much she had meant to poor Elva. “I was very glad indeed to have your letter enclosing a statement of monies advanced by you to Elva,” he oozed in a letter, “and of course you realize that inasmuch as the Statlers are protesting Elva’s will, that it will be impossible for me to do anything until the case has been settled.” He strung her along at least until 1937, by which time one source has him working as a yacht salesman in Manhattan.

  A petition filed on June 2, 1936, more than a year after Elva’s death, indicates that a Washington plaintiff named Nesbit had previously sued Brad in D.C. over some debts. The court had ruled in his favor then, but Brad hadn’t coughed up any money. Nesbit, learning that Brad had inherited a great deal of money from his late wife, was down in North Carolina trying to collect some of it. Article 7 of the yellowed document stood out: “Petitioner accuses Davidson of having removed practically all, if not all, of the property belonging to his late wife from the State of N.C. and taking [it] to parts and places unknown. Also wasting and squandering the same, making away with and disposing of it with intent to hinder and delay, cheat and defraud petitioner and other creditors in collecting their debts.”

  Elva Statler Davidson’s death certificate, dated February 27, lists “carbon monoxide gas poisoning” as the principal cause of death, with contributory causes “not known.” Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  The files contain one more melancholy document: an inventory sent to “Estate of Mrs. Elva Statler Davidson” from J.N. Powell Inc., Undertakers, Southern Pines, North Carolina. It had been prepared on February 27, 1935, “terms cash,” but had not been paid until four months later. Items include: casket, $500.00; shipping case, $50.00; embalming body, $25.00; hearse to hospital, $10.00; hearse for funeral, $10.00; plate and engraving, $5.00; transportation papers and permits to New York, $2.50; personal service, $15.00; telegram to New York, $1.44; and 3 percent sales tax, $10.00—for a grand total of $628.94.

  The bill had been notarized for submission to the probate court on June 28, 1935. A written notation and signature at the bottom, in a firm hand whose backward slant might suggest reluctance on the part of the signer, reads: “Approved for Payment. H. Bradley Davidson, Executor. 7/1/35.”

  More than a dozen other courthouse records tell of civil cases involving Brad’s brother, Richard Porter Davidson, and Richard’s wife, Elizabeth Hanna (Betty) Davidson—who, though she was part of the wealthy and politically powerful Hanna family of Ohio, seemed to play fast and loose with other people’s money. Some complaints tell of house payments missed and grocery bills unpaid by Richard and Betty. In one case, Nolan Motor Company, the local Ford dealer in the 1930s, had sold Richard a top-of-the-line Crown Victoria. Richard had made a couple of payments and then stopped, while continuing to drive the snazzy car around to golf dates and such for month after month. Nolan Motors was about to have a summons served on Richard. The exasperated petitioners alleged that Richard had mortgaged his property to his mother and was about to defraud his many creditors. Upon investigation, they said, they had found that Richard had a number of accounts and judgments against him, but that his bank account back in D.C. had only thirteen dollars in it.

  Of great interest as circumstantial evidence in any Davidson investigation would be the existence of a large insurance policy Brad may have taken out on Elva shortly before her death. No such document has ever presented itself, though there is a fleeting and unenlightening reference in the courthouse records to insurance—a Globe Indemnity policy from which her lawyer had paid some of Elva’s legal fees.

  Another damning piece of evidence might be a transcript of Brad’s divorce from his first wife indicating a possible pattern of abuse. But no such record exists in the Moore County Courthouse, since the divorce took place in Bethesda, Maryland, a Washington suburb. And the forty-page document that turned up there contains nothing particularly incriminating. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  In the complaint, it is alleged that “although the conduct of the Oratrix [Jessica] towards her husband has always been kind, affectionate and above reproach, the said H. Bradley Davidson Jr. did on the first day of February, 1931, without just cause or reason, abandon and desert her; and said abandonment has continued uninterrupted more than three years and is deliberate and final and the separation of Oratrix and the said defendant is beyond any reasonable expectation of reconciliation.”

  The stack of complaints, answers and depositions makes compelling reading as soap opera, but it contains no gun, smoking or otherwise. No hint of spousal abuse is alleged. Indeed, the divorce seems to have been puzzlingly amicable, with liberal visitation rights granted. Which raises the question: was Jessica downright saintly in her forgivingness of the man who walked out on her and their three children? Or could it be that she brought some unspoken, mitigating fault of her own to the table?

  The startling apparent answer to that question, arriving from an unexpected quarter, doesn’t make itself known until a bit later.

  Central to any case such as this would normally be the details from the autopsy report. But no such document on Elva Statler Davidson has ever turned up in any of the most likely places—the Moore County Courthouse, the Moore County Sheriff’s Department, the Tufts Archives, two funeral homes, Moore Regional Hospital or Duke University Medical Center.

  Oddly, the most complete accounting of the autopsy’s content found to date has come to light in, of all places, the microfilm files of The Cleveland [Ohio] News. That newspaper presumably had taken a special interest in the case because Brad Davidson’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth (Betty) Hanna Davidson, was from Cleveland. In fact, Betty’s father was the paper’s publisher.

  As reported by other media at the time, the pathology lab at Duke University had failed to find the “hole card” that Prosecutor Rowland Pruette had hinted at. There was “sufficient carbon monoxide in the body to cause death.” There was “some alcohol, but not enough to produce intoxication.” Beyond that, there was no “evidence of any other foreign matter.”

  Of most interest, in the end, was the number of bruises on the body and their location, giving rise to much speculation. There were thirteen or fourteen of them. The upper surface of Elva’s left arm displayed a blue area. A slight discoloration, not quite a bruise, was found on the right side of her back. In the upper third of her right thigh, there was an abrasion or scratch. Just below the right hipbone and just
back of the middle thigh was a blue area or hemorrhage beneath the skin. Just in front of this was a similar bruise. In front of the upper third of the right thigh were several areas of similar appearance. Then on the outside of her left arm, halfway up, was something intriguingly described as “a perforation surrounded by a reddish mark.”

  Bruises can have any number of causes, especially in the case of an athletic girl who rides horses. The description of Elva’s bruises doesn’t seem consistent with a beating, though there has been speculation that they could have resulted from an attempt to hold her down and have sex with her.

  In any case, that “perforation surrounded by a reddish mark” has always seemed harder to explain away. It strongly suggests a hypodermic syringe. Though the autopsy did indicate that Elva had breathed in enough carbon monoxide to kill her, suspicions were raised from the beginning that she could have been injected with some kind of drug—the “subtle poison” hinted at by Solicitor Pruette—that immobilized her long enough for the gas to take effect. Such theorizing seemed farfetched, but it was encouraged by Solicitor Pruette’s hints at a “subtle poison” and by the United Press reporter’s reference to “a strange and scientific murder.” Even if there wasn’t a smoking gun, couldn’t there have been a dripping syringe?