Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  Leach also quoted Elva as saying she didn’t want to leave anything to Katherine Statler, widow of Milton and mother of Joan.

  “And what about her best friend, Isabelle Baer?” Broughton asked, making a point of not looking at Isabelle, who sat at his table. “Why didn’t Mrs. Davidson leave anything to her?”

  This time it was Leach who was able to make himself look like the gentleman. Glancing at Isabelle, he asked the judge if he and Broughton might approach the bench. The judge agreed to this request—an unusual one in that it came from someone on the witness stand. The three of them went into a whispered huddle, during which Leach apparently objected to the awkwardness of making him discuss the matter in front of Isabelle. Broughton ended up withdrawing his question, for reasons that remain obscure. Had something gone wrong with the relationship between the two girls—something that all parties were willing to let slide?

  The Associated Press account, as published in faraway Buffalo, leapfrogs from Tuesday’s court proceedings to Thursday’s, which started off with a bang as the Davidson side rested its case and asked that Judge Phillips order a directed verdict upholding the contested will. He refused. Brad then took the stand, and all ears in the courtroom perked up.

  Jones Fuller, one of Brad’s lawyers, began by leading him through some back story about his first marriage to Jessica Aylward in 1915, their brief time together on her estate in Virginia, his service in the Great War, his various jobs, his three children and his first encounter with Elva Statler in late 1933.

  “Did you court and marry her?” Fuller then asked.

  “Yes,” Brad replied.

  “Did you ever talk to her about her will?”

  “No. Never.”

  Then, Fuller decided to beat Broughton to the punch with a question he was sure to pose in the cross-examination.

  “Mr. Davidson,” he said, “did you do anything which in any way produced or contributed to the death of Mrs. Davidson?”

  “Absolutely not,” Brad declared.

  In addition to professing his love for Elva, Brad then took advantage of the opportunity to introduce several telegrams and one handwritten letter that she had sent him during their brief marriage.

  Brad shields his face from photographers as he and his sister-in-law, Betty Hannah Davidson, leave the Moore County Courthouse during the caveat hearing. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  His purpose was to show that his late wife reciprocated his affection. But for courtroom listeners and readers outside, these communications—which were undoubtedly genuine—performed another important function: they provided some of the rare examples of Elva speaking in her own voice. And that voice sounded strikingly alive and passionate.

  “Darling, I wanted to be in your arms so badly, but you probably would have gone to sleep,” she wrote teasingly from New York in the middle of February 1935, after going to Boston to see attorney Leach and change her will. Her note closed, “I love you,” and was signed, “Elva.”

  On her arrival in New York on February 13, she wired: “Good morning, darling; arrived safely though very late; spent horrible night at St. Regis; today will call you around 6:30; be good and don’t forget I love you more than anything else in the world.”

  Besides sending him the warmly devoted love notes, Brad said, Elva had telephoned him every day while she was away. He had arranged to meet her in New York on her return from Boston, he said. He read a telegram sent from Boston on February 16, the day before he was to meet her: “Not too long before tomorrow. Can hardly wait. Try to know time of arrival in New York when I talk with you at 1. Much love.”

  Those in attendance seemed to hang on every phrase, as if they could hear the dead girl’s musical words echoing faintly in that cold, somber, cavernous courtroom. Reluctant to break the spell, Fuller paused for a beat or two before asking gently: “Mr. Davidson, when did you first learn that your wife had made out a new will, bequeathing most of her estate to you?”

  Brad sighed deeply as he refolded the letters and replied: “She told me about it when we met in New York. After her trip to Boston. She showed me a copy of it.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told her, ‘That was a foolish thing to do. There’s no chance of your dying until long after I die.’”

  When it was Broughton’s turn, he got right to the point.

  “Mr. Davidson,” he said, “you have said that your divorce from your first wife, Jessica Aylward Davidson, was by mutual consent. But isn’t it true that she divorced you on the ground of desertion?”

  Giving a pained, we’ve-been-through-this-before expression, Davidson acknowledged that she had.

  “And after your marriage to Miss Statler, didn’t you live on her money?”

  “No.”

  “No? Well, did you have any employment at the time of your marriage?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t. But I had saved some money from my previous job in Washington, in which I made $250 a month. I gave up that job at the insistence of my wife, who said I could find employment in Pinehurst.”

  Broughton asked if Brad had not played golf the day after his return from his wife’s funeral and if he did not continue at that time to serve highballs in his home. Brad acknowledged that he had played golf. As to the serving of cocktails, he said it was “merely a continuance of a custom started by Mrs. Davidson.” He didn’t invite anybody, he said, but he did serve drinks to those who dropped in.

  Brad’s stay on the witness stand closed with a particularly hostile exchange.

  “Mr. Davidson,” Broughton demanded to know, “Mrs. Katherine Statler has quoted you as saying that you could—and I quote—‘live on Elva’s money’ after your marriage. How do you respond to that?”

  Brad looked at Broughton for a moment and then cast a steely stare in the direction of Katherine, who sat across the courtroom from him.

  “With all due respect to Mrs. Statler,” he said in a level voice, “she knows that is not a fact.”

  Pressing their effort to portray the newlyweds as having been madly in love, Brad’s lawyers closed out the Thursday session by calling what the newspaper called “a number of witnesses from the Pinehurst society colony” to “testify to the evidence of affection he and his wife had for each other.”

  Allie Tufts said Elva was so crazy about Brad before their marriage that—“well, she’d sort of rave about him.” On her wedding day, she said, Elva was “very nervous but very, very happy.” And Brad? “Oh, he was the same way.” Edna Campaigne backed up Allie’s story. Brad and his wife, she said, “seemed much in love with each other.” The husbands of the two witnesses gave similar glowing accounts of marital bliss. Curtis Campaigne testified that Elva had come to his office in New Jersey in December to tell him of her engagement, excitedly saying, “I have found the man!”

  Allie Tufts injected a bittersweet note by describing Elva as “unusually bright, emotional—and pathetic.” Asked to elaborate, she said: “Pathetic because she seemed to crave attention so.” Eyes teared up in the courtroom as Allie recounted something she said Elva had told her shortly before her death. There were two things that the poor little rich girl had always wanted very much and now maybe could have at last, she said: “a chance to blow out the candles on her birthday cake and to hang up her stockings at Christmas.”

  When Broughton’s turn came, he wasn’t content to let that poignant note linger for long. He brought Allie back down to earth with a thud.

  “Mrs. Tufts,” he asked, pausing to confront her face to face, “were you one of those who went to Davidson’s house and drank highballs while his wife’s death was being investigated?”

  “Why, yes,” she replied, squirming a bit.

  “And wasn’t it you,” he said, referring to notes, “who sent a telegram to another bride in early 1935, saying, ‘I hope you are happier than Elva,’ and in another place, ‘Elva can’t take it’?”

  Allie attempted a shrug before answering, “I might have
been.”

  CHAPTER 21

  So Cunningly and Craftily

  The nearer the caveat hearing grew to its end, the more heavily the tension and hostility hung in the chilly courtroom air. Some in the mostly local audience seemed to view the proceedings suspiciously through a regional prism—as if the northerners were down there looting the South again, trying to steal money that didn’t rightly belong to them.

  That wasn’t it exactly. The lawyers for the Statler family and Isabelle Baer weren’t trying to keep Elva’s fortune in North Carolina, as it might have appeared. That wasn’t going to happen in any case. If the will held up, the money would end up in Washington or Baltimore or Virginia or who knows where in no more time than it would take Brad Davidson to shake the sand of Pinehurst from his shoes. If the Statler interests won and Elva’s earlier will was reinstated, the money would go to places like Buffalo and London and Minnesota and Arizona. In neither case would much or any of it stay around locally.

  Nor was this a case of invading Yankee lawyers skirmishing with a contingent of Carolina boys defending their homeland, though that would make a better story. It was more complicated than that. The ranks of both teams included a mix of members from both regions.

  Still, from that first afternoon’s surprisingly brittle and personal exchange amid suggestions of extravagant lawyer fees and unseemly client-switching and unethical solicitation of legal business from an impressionable girl, there was one sense in which the courtroom drama did take on a North-versus-South flavor. What could have been a dry courtroom exercise carried out in relative decorum quickly turned into an ugly, intimately personal battle between two main protagonists, southern gentleman Broughton and arrogant Bostonian Leach. It made for crackling drama.

  The lawyers’ closing arguments, which took up most of Friday, were surely among the most eloquently biting, the most slashingly articulate, that the Carthage courtroom had ever witnessed.

  Boyette, the first of six attorneys to address the jury (three on each side, with the two sides alternating), began on a civil note, sticking to the facts and trying not to get personal. There was “not one scintilla of evidence,” he said, that anyone had induced Elva Statler Davidson to make out a new will in favor of her husband.

  Boyette praised Davidson’s war record, referring to him as “this stalwart man, this heroic man who gave up home and loved ones and offered his life to his country.” Referring to the previously introduced letter and telegrams as proof that Elva had loved her husband, Boyette asked: “Isn’t it only natural that she would want to leave her money to him, rather than to her foster relatives who were already wealthy?”

  Describing the relationship between Leach and Elva as “right and proper between an attorney and client,” Boyette said Leach’s standing in the legal community “is attested by his present position at Harvard Law School and the fact that he was once private secretary to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

  Broughton snorted at that comment, remarking: “Justice Holmes never taught Bart Leach to solicit law business.” As for the law school job, Broughton said, leaping to the attack, Leach deserved to be fired from it. He charged that Leach, by his own admission, had solicited employment as Davidson’s attorney, a legal no-no. This act of ambulance-chasing, he said, along with “suppressing evidence” and “becoming a lawyer in a contest over a will he himself had drawn,” should cause Leach to “lose his place at Harvard.”

  Describing Elva’s death as one “in anguish, after brooding,” Broughton said, “the truth may never be known, but she was found sprawled out there with nothing on but a sweater and skirt, without even underclothes, with the thermometer down to seventeen degrees above zero.”

  Clearly implying that Elva had killed herself, Broughton went a step further by all but accusing Leach of driving her to it with his machinations. Leach had “entered into a conspiracy with Davidson in regard to her money when he withdrew his objection to her marriage,” he said, and “her melancholia was caused by a realization that what Davidson wanted was money and by the insistence of Leach that she make the will.”

  Broughton had been prowling in front of the jury box as he made his sensational charges, his voice raised dramatically. Then, pausing by the rail, his passion spent and his voice subdued, he looked from juror to juror.

  “If you sustain this will,” he said, “you approve actions of this man who so cunningly, craftily, persistently and indecently brought about the situation.”

  In his rejoinder, lawyer Fuller tried to turn the tables on Broughton by charging that it was he and “Buffalo Bill” Marcy who were the attack dogs. They had mercilessly “hounded and persecuted Mr. Davidson during the investigation of his wife’s death,” Fuller said, and continued to hound and persecute him in the caveat suit.

  “And why was he subjected to it?” he asked, also pausing before the jury to answer his own rhetorical question. “Because of the love of money,” he said, rubbing the thumb and fingertips of one hand together, “the root of all evil.” The attorneys for the objectors, Fuller said, were merely trying to confuse the jury with irrelevant arguments and accusations.

  “The case my learned friend Broughton presented to you is not the case presented in the evidence,” he said. “Remember that you are not trying Mr. Davidson on charges in connection with the death of his wife. There never has been a charge of any kind against him.”

  When his turn came, attorney U.S. Spence of Pinehurst lost no time in turning the withering fire back on Leach. “He took possession of poor Elva Statler in 1933 and never let her go until her death,” he charged, saying that it was “an unnatural thing” for Leach to have broached the morbid subject of a will to Elva when he had come to Pinehurst for what was supposed to be a joyous occasion, her wedding.

  “Oh, Leach is smart, all right,” he said. “He’s as smart as greased lightning. He was smart enough to look out for himself and his friend Brad.”

  Spence said the marriage itself was “unnatural” because of the difference in the ages of the bride and groom and because of Davidson’s status as a divorced man with three children. “That’s what Elva got—a divorced man with three children so poor he couldn’t pay the alimony,” Spence told the jurors. “That’s what she got. And that accounts for her distress.”

  By the time Thursday’s closing arguments had ended, the winter sky was growing dark outside the courthouse windows, and most of the people present were feeling weary, restless and hungry. Judge Phillips briefly charged the jurors, reminding them that there were only two issues for them to consider: (1) whether the document produced in court was in fact Elva Statler Davidson’s last will and testament and (2) whether her husband and/or attorney Leach had unduly influenced her in preparing it.

  Lawyers and jurors return to the caveat hearing in Carthage. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  The jurors, “somewhat bewildered and confused by the reams of evidence placed before them and the long hours of testimony,” as The Moore County News reported, received the case at 6:10 p.m. but were taken out to supper before being brought back to begin their deliberations. When they reported back after ninety minutes that they had failed to reach a verdict, the judge sent them to bed at 8:30 p.m.

  They resumed their discussions with fresher heads at 9:30 a.m. Friday, and at 11:43 a.m. they reported that they had arrived at a unanimous decision, and a bailiff brought them back into the courtroom. In contrast with the crowd that had gathered for some of the week’s juicy earlier testimony, only a dozen or so spectators were on hand to witness the climax.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” Phillips asked.

  “We have, your honor,” the foreman replied.

  “How find ye?”

  “We hold for the defendant, Henry Bradley Davidson Jr.”

  And so it was over, just like that. The will was upheld. Brad and Leach had won. Ellsworth Statler, Joan Marie Statler and Isabelle Baer had lost. Still, it
all seemed anticlimactic somehow. The show had gone on too long, and now it had ended, and everybody was eager to get out of there and hit the road. The Statler lawyers said they would file an appeal with the state Supreme Court, but nothing ever came of it.

  The few spectators began bundling up against the cold that awaited them outside. The judge thanked the jurors for their service and sent them on their way. The Moore County News later reported that the jury had initially been split six to six and then voted nine to three for upholding the will upon retiring Thursday night. Votes the next morning had gone ten–two, then eleven–one, and then a rereading of the judge’s charge won over the lone holdout.

  Phillips, as it turned out, had shown admirable foresight in seating a thirteenth juror as a spare. One member of the panel, seventy-year-old W.R. Lewis, fell ill during the deliberations and had to be excused. But carpenter Gus Fry, the alternate, had sat through the entire case and was able to step in and fill the void.

  Brad Davidson was the only principal in the case who was present to hear the verdict, sitting quietly in one of the rear benches with his brother, Richard. Katherine Statler, who had attended the trial, stayed away for the final day. Her lawyer said she would have no comment.

  “It is gratifying to know that others think the way I know,” Brad said, declining to answer any more questions from reporters. He said he planned to leave immediately for New York, where he had formed “a business connection.”

  He didn’t say what kind.

  Attorney W. Barton Leach, representing Brad Davidson, was the big winner of the 1936 caveat hearing in Carthage. But his was something of a Pyrrhic victory, and he went home to Massachusetts to lick the personal wounds inflicted on him during the bruising battle.