Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  To try to keep that from happening, what The Buffalo Times called “a galaxy of Buffalo attorneys, reinforced by others from Pinehurst and Minneapolis,” converged in Moore County for a strategy session on the weekend before the court date. They would retreat to Pinehurst every night, traveling every morning back to Carthage.

  That threadbare little county seat town, home to a few hundred souls, presented the contingent of outsiders with a grim and dispiriting scene of hardship upon hardship. Not only was Carthage still struggling in the depths of the Depression, but the area had also been locked for two months in the iron grip of a cold spell of Arctic bitterness. The lawyers would find both their hotel rooms in Pinehurst and the courtroom in Carthage uncomfortably chilly for their entire stay, and they would have to bundle up against the biting wind for the trips back and forth between them.

  Seventy-eight-year-old N.A. Stone, who had lived in those parts all his life, allowed that this was the harshest cold snap he had witnessed since he was sixteen. A farmer just outside town lamented that his prized, full-blooded calf had frozen to death. A revenuer in Charlotte reported that area moonshiners were shivering through a hardship of their own: they couldn’t operate their woodland stills because the mash pots kept turning into blocks of brown ice.

  More ominously, The Moore County News told of a near-epidemic of pneumonia among the county’s suffering rural population, largely attributable to a dangerous combination of unrelenting cold, poor nutrition and widespread inability to pay for critically needed medical care.

  “Just as the inquest last year ended in mystery,” read a Sunday feature article that appeared in The Buffalo Times on the eve of the February 10 opening of the caveat hearing, “so will the court action start, it was indicated as attorneys emerged tight-lipped from last-minute conferences. So the mystery which enveloped Elva Idesta Statler almost from birth, which deepened at her death, still continues to cloak her affairs.”

  The Times had gotten a local stringer to write the pregame scene-setter because of continuing interest in the case in Buffalo, where E.M. Statler’s hotel empire had its headquarters. For play-by-play accounts, the paper would rely thereafter on the Associated Press. None of the other big-city papers that had clamored for scoops during last year’s inquest bothered to show up for the caveat hearing. No Ed Folliard. No Al. No Larry (Nuts) Byrd.

  Besides Broughton, the lawyers, who had been “in almost constant conference for the past two days,” included Edwin F. Jaeckle, Edward J. Garono, William L. (Buffalo Bill) Marcy Jr. and S. Fay Carr of Buffalo; Richard Barrett of Minneapolis; and U.S. Spence of Pinehurst. Jaeckle and Garono represented the institutionalized Ellsworth Statler. Marcy and Carr represented Katherine Statler of Tucson, Arizona, widow of Milton Statler and mother of little Joan Marie. Barrett had been retained by Elva’s chum Isabelle, and Broughton and Spence were thrown in for good measure, “looking after the interests of all the claimants.”

  Of course, that didn’t even count the Davidson lawyers huddling in another hotel. Besides Bostonian Bart Leach, they included M.G. Boyette of Carthage and Jones Fuller and R.P. Reade, both of Durham.

  The stone courthouse in which Act Two of the Davidson legal drama would be played out had been built in the more optimistic year of 1922. It was described at the time as “crowning the dominating ridge visible against the blue haze of the pines, glistening white in the brilliant Carolina sunshine, a significant exponent in the new age of peace, progress, prosperity and plenty.” As of 1936, prosperity and plenty had gone down the drain, peace was about to join them, and no one spoke much about progress anymore.

  Despite the sensational nature of the Davidson case, only a handful of hardy spectators had made the twelve-mile trip up from the winter colony at Pinehurst for the first day of the hearing. The number of onlookers increased some as the first day wore on, but most were curious walk-ins from Carthage.

  Brad Davidson, wearing his usual dark suit and imperious poker face, sat with his attorneys at a table on one side of the drafty courtroom. His eyes seldom met those of stylish young Isabelle Baer, who sat on the other side, surrounded by the gaggle of lawyers for the caveators.

  The laborious process of selecting a jury and putting Elva’s purported will into the record took up most of the first day. The twelve-man jury—which would be called upon to sit through days of arcane arguments by nationally prominent legal eagles and then make a Solomonic decision about the disposition of a fortune—ended up consisting almost entirely of farmers from the surrounding countryside. The others were a filling station attendant and a worker at a handkerchief mill.

  Given the magnitude of the case (and perhaps the precarious state of the local population’s health), Judge Phillips took the locally unprecedented step of selecting a thirteenth juror, a carpenter named Gus Fry. He would have to sit through all the testimony like a spare tire, to be brought out of the trunk only if the jury had a flat. It turned out to be a wise precaution.

  These are the jurymen who heard the 1936 “caveat” case in Carthage, North Carolina, in which lawyers for Elva’s family and friends attempted to prevent Brad Davidson from inheriting her fortune. The judge added a thirteenth juror just in case, which proved a wise decision. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  The contrast between the sophisticated northern witnesses and lawyers on one hand and the rustic, rural southern jurors on the other was so marked as to constitute a gaping void. The culture shock obviously made an impression on the youthful Isabelle. She viewed with distaste the demeanor of the “dumb” jurors, who punctuated the testimony by expectorating noisily and messily into strategically placed spittoons.

  The sun already hung low in the bleak February sky outside the courthouse’s broad windows by the time the jury had been empaneled on that first day. But Leach, opening the case for Davidson, had time to call the only two witnesses he planned to put on the stand: Livingston Hall, an assistant professor of law at Harvard University; and Victoria L. Mercer, Leach’s own secretary in his capacity as a professor at the Harvard Law School.

  Their sole function, for which they had been prevailed upon to travel all the way from Massachusetts to this humble North Carolina hamlet in the dead of winter, was to confirm that Elva had signed the will in question and that the version entered as evidence was the right one. They testified that Leach had dictated the will to Miss Mercer, who typed it up and then joined with Hall and Leach in witnessing Elva’s signature. Once that had been established, the two witnesses were free to turn around and go back home to Cambridge.

  That perfunctory matter out of the way, Leach began straightening his papers, ready to head back to Pinehurst for the night.

  “We rest our case,” he told Judge Phillips. But not so fast.

  “Your Honor,” said attorney Broughton, rising to his feet, “We ask the court’s permission to call one more witness today.”

  “Who?” Phillips asked, caught off guard.

  “W. Barton Leach.”

  Leach did a double take. A buzz went through the courtroom. Our story was about to get a new villain.

  CHAPTER 20

  A Chance to Blow Out the Candles

  The judge at first dismissed the unorthodox request to call Bart Leach to the stand. Broughton argued that Leach, who had signed the will along with the other two, was every bit as important as a witness himself. Leach, offended at this assault on his dignity, argued that the request was highly improper, that he was there not to be a witness on this day but to serve as an officer of the court.

  When Phillips eventually relented, agreeing to require Leach to testify as “a witness of the court,” Broughton directed a self-satisfied little smile back in the direction of his co-counsels. Once he got his opponent on the stand, he would be able to have a little fun with him. He would attempt to show that Mr. Leach was well named—that he had opportunistically sucked his fill of blood first from Elva Statler Davidson and then from her widower, playing both ends against the middle.


  “Mr. Leach,” Broughton said after some routine questions, “whose idea was it for Mrs. Davidson to change her will in the first place, naming her husband as principal beneficiary of the estate?”

  “Why, it was hers,” Leach replied warily.

  “Really?” Broughton asked. “Didn’t you yourself suggest to Miss Statler the night before her marriage that she should make a new will?”

  “No,” Leach said—then, after a pause: “Not directly.”

  “Indirectly, then? What did you tell her?”

  “I told her that the marriage would invalidate her previous will.”

  “Isn’t it true, Mr. Leach, that you sent Mrs. Davidson a letter on January 7, just four days after her marriage, telling her you would draw a new will for her if she would send you notes?”

  Leach acknowledged that he had done so but said Elva had not responded with any notes.

  At this point, Broughton started to bring up some other unspecified matter that had come out during the inquest a year earlier. But the judge smacked him down, telling him to stick to the matter at hand: the will. “There is no evidence before you about any inquest,” he cautioned the jury.

  The chastened Broughton turned back to the witness and took a different tack. “Mr. Leach,” he said, “would you say Mrs. Davidson appeared normal at the time she signed the will that you have entered here today?”

  “Entirely normal,” Leach replied.

  “But hadn’t she consulted a psychiatrist not long before her marriage on January 3, 1935?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see. But in any case, it is your testimony here today that she never appeared to you to be moody or abnormally temperamental?”

  “It is.”

  Broughton, having saved the most glee for last, turned to money questions. “Now,” he asked, “you represented Mrs. Davidson on some financial matters during 1934, did you not?”

  “I did,” Leach said.

  “And how much did she pay you for your services?”

  Leach scowled at the question and looked up to the judge, who nodded for him to answer. He grudgingly replied: “$22,500.”

  From the jury box, whose occupants were receiving the princely sum of two dollars a day apiece for their pains, one can imagine the sound of a plug of chaw hitting a spittoon.

  Leach was squirming now, more than ready to step down. But Broughton had one more question—prompted by the realization that if this had been a year or more earlier and Elva Statler Davidson had been involved in some other kind of legal case, the leech would have been doing his blood-sucking from the other table. The jury already knew that Leach had deftly switched from one partner in the Davidson marriage to the other without missing a beat or a fee, but Broughton wanted to make sure they knew about the timing of his decision to jump ship.

  “Mr. Leach,” he said, “just when did Mr. Davidson retain you as his counsel?”

  “Last year,” Leach replied in a flat, almost surly tone, knowing where the questioning was leading.

  “Early March, would you say?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And where did this take place? Where were the two of you located when you and Mr. Davidson consummated this agreement that you would begin representing his interests?”

  “We were on a train.”

  “A moving train? En route from where to where?”

  “From Pinehurst to New York.”

  “New York? I see. And what was the occasion that took you to New York?’

  “A burial.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mrs. Davidson’s.”

  At that point, there had to have been the sound of another plug of tobacco hitting another spittoon.

  The aristocratic, thirty-something W. Barton Leach, slumming it down in the North Carolina boonies for a frigid week, might have gone into the caveat hearing thinking it was going to be about Elva and Brad. But with the tough questioning the lawyers for the other side sprang on him at the end of the first day, they had “let him beware”: to a great extent, it was going to be about him.

  During three days of often-dramatic testimony and one day of bitterly combative final arguments, Broughton and his colleagues set out to make Leach look like an unchivalrous Yankee creep defending another unchivalrous Yankee creep, H. Bradley Davidson. Those overtones, Broughton knew, could hardly have been lost on the jurors, many of whose fathers and grandfathers had proudly worn Confederate gray.

  In addition to portraying Leach as an unethical, opportunistic shyster, the Statler lawyers would try to paint him as what people today would call a male chauvinist pig. The picture that emerged was of a domineering man who would tell a young girl who came to him for help, “Now, don’t you worry about a thing, honey. I’ll take care of you”—while all the time charging her unreasonable fees and maybe even sinisterly manipulating things to her husband’s advantage.

  While they were at it, Davidson’s opponents would also be pulling out all the stops to portray him as undeserving of his late wife’s money.

  Over Leach’s bitter objection, Judge Phillips did allow Broughton to kick off the second day’s proceedings with at least a brief refresher course of testimony about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Elva’s body.

  Butler Emanuel Birch was prevailed upon once again to take the stand (this time a proper witness dock instead of a creaky rocking chair) and tell his harrowing story of entering the garage and finding his dead mistress sprawled across the running board of her 1934 Packard, dressed in skirt and sweater. Drs. M.W. Marr of Pinehurst and C.C. Carpenter of Wake Forest essentially repeated the testimony that they had given at the inquest, including their opinion that carbon monoxide was the cause of death.

  Elva’s devoted butler, Emanuel Birch (left), who had found her body a year earlier, was called to testify at the caveat hearing at Carthage, North Carolina, in January/February. The man at the right is unidentified. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  None of the three witnesses offered anything startlingly new, though one of the doctors added “shins” to the list of places where bruises had been found. And Birch’s mention that the body “was not moved” until the doctor arrived might be taken as contradicting what he had said a year earlier about Brad sitting on the running board and taking the lifeless Elva’s head on his lap.

  The stage-frightened Birch also provided a rare bit of comic relief, however mild. Broughton showed him a carefully prepared chart and asked him if it was a fair representation of the layout of Edgewood Cottage. Birch puzzled over it this way and that, then looked up and replied, “It don’t look to me like it is.”

  Even if the judge had allowed the Statler lawyers to rehash the question of whether H. Bradley Davidson Jr. might have murdered his wife, they weren’t inclined to waste much time doing so. That issue had been gone over ad nauseam at the inquest in Pinehurst a year earlier. Despite the best and most relentless efforts of Solicitor Rowland Pruette to make his case for homicide, the jury hadn’t bought it. Nor had anything come of Pruette’s follow-up efforts to turn all his evidence over to the grand jury and have it prosecute Davidson criminally. Legally, at least, that horse was pretty much dead, and there was no point flogging it.

  Once they had gotten their initial scene-setting testimony out of the way, the Statler lawyers put their arch enemy, Leach, back on the stand late Tuesday morning with plans to give him a thorough grilling.

  Leach’s goal was to seem like anything but the evil Svengali the other side portrayed him as. Far from encouraging Elva to marry Brad, he said, he had tried to dissuade her from doing so. He also insisted again that she had made out the second will, executed twelve days before her death, without “undue influence” from him or anyone else.

  “When did you first meet Elva Statler?” Broughton began by asking.

  “Sometime in 1934,” Leach replied. “She employed me well before her marriage to handle some legal matters for her.”

  “An
d when did you first learn she was planning to marry H. Bradley Davidson Jr.?”

  “In the fall of that year.”

  “And did you encourage her in that?”

  “No. I discouraged her. I warned her against marrying Mr. Davidson.”

  “Really? On what grounds?”

  “I based my objections on the difference in their ages—twenty years—and on the disparity of their financial positions.”

  “But you didn’t maintain your objections for long, did you?” Broughton asked, pacing the floor in front of the witness stand like a lion circling its prey.

  “I maintained them as long as I could,” Leach said. “Almost up until her marriage early the following January.”

  “I see. And why did you withdraw your objections?”

  “She told me that Mr. Davidson was the man she had been looking for. That she loved him and had made up her mind to marry him.”

  Broughton, for some reason, chose that moment to ask Leach if he knew who Elva’s birth parents were. Leach replied that he did not, and the subject turned to the contested will.

  “Whose idea was it to change her will after she married Mr. Davidson?” Broughton pointedly asked.

  “Hers,” Leach replied in a firm voice.

  “Did Mr. Davidson ever communicate with you about a will for Mrs. Davidson?”

  “Certainly not!” Leach snapped.

  “Did you try to talk her out of changing it?”

  “There would have been no point. She was extremely strong-willed. And she made it clear that she loved her husband.”

  “I see. And do you know why the new will did not mention her foster brother, Ellsworth, or her niece, Joan Marie?”

  “She told me that there was no use leaving any of her property to Ellsworth and Joan, since they were well taken care of already. Instead, she expressed a desire to leave everything she could to Brad.”