by Steve Bouser
“Were the emotional ups and downs of Miss Statler the emotional ups and downs of the average person or were they greater?” one of his interviewers had asked, as a stenographer took notes.
“I would say they were greater,” he readily responded.
Reinforcing that finding was Robert D. Field, an art instructor who had befriended Elva, who is quoted as making this riveting comment: “She told me she guessed she was just no good.”
The sessions with Dr. Stetson had apparently helped Elva, but only temporarily. Then things had taken a more ominous turn.
That while this condition of moodiness and periodic mental depression was, following such treatment, greatly improved, it was subject to recurrence; that as caveators are informed and believe, such condition did recur following the marriage of Elva Statler with the said H. Bradley Davidson Jr…
That said Elva Statler Davidson at a dinner in Pinehurst on February 8, 1935, just seven days before the execution of said purported will, was observed to be in a condition of deep and desperate mental depression, giving way to tears and other manifestations of unhappiness, and that when talked to at such times by intimate friends, she expressed great unhappiness and avowed the intention of taking her life.
Clearly, the piano-bench conversation with Herb Vail wasn’t the only one in which Elva had spoken of “taking her life.” These descriptions summon up an image of a young woman who feels terribly isolated, living alone there at Edgewood Cottage, still reeling from the end of a love affair, with no family or best friend nearby to lean on or cry out to, trying to deal with this bout of depression all by herself.
That on the day on which the said Elva Statler Davidson executed the said purported will in the office of said W. Barton Leach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was admittedly ill and was observed by friends to have “a distant and faraway look”;
That by reason of these circumstances and previous observation, these friends and acquaintances, including even the wife of said W. Barton Leach, on hearing twelve days later of the reported suicide of said Elva Statler Davidson, observed that it was just such an event as they were expecting to happen.
Among those deposed were a Harvard couple who had befriended the student Elva. They both began by trying to portray her as normal, though in the end they can’t be said to have succeeded.
Robert D. Field, an instructor in fine arts, said Elva had “problems growing out of her status as an adopted child” and was “subject to moody spells as we all are.” But he insisted that she “gave no evidence of undue emotionalism, taking into consideration her background and makeup.” Under cross-examination, though, Field conceded that “she was considerably depressed.”
Field’s wife, Helen Stickney Field, wanted to go on record as saying that Elva had telephoned from Pinehurst after her honeymoon to report that “she was very happy” and that “Brad is grand.” But there was this peculiar addendum: “The deposition showed Mrs. Field declined a positive answer to the question whether Mrs. Davidson told her, ‘I don’t see how I can go through with it.’”
Go through with what? The marriage? The will? Her life? And what did “declined a positive answer” mean? It might have meant that the witness had clammed up or equivocated when asked that question. But if Elva had never told her, “I don’t see how I can go through with it,” wouldn’t a simple “no” have sufficed?
Two witnesses for the caveators testified in person, according to a partial transcript of the once-missing third day of testimony. The first was Dr. T.A. Cheatham, a Pinehurst minister, who told the jury that Elva was “melancholy and perturbed” at the charity ball on the night before her death. The report on the second witness was a bit more compelling, though it raises more questions than it answers: “L.M. Tate, manager of a riding stable at Pinehurst, said that on February 25—two days before her death—Mrs. Davidson came to the stables to arrange for a horse and during a conversation with him said, ‘I have been having quite a bit of trouble.’”
A youthful Elva jumps her horse at Pinehurst on an undetermined date. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.
In a story loaded with twists and tangles, here is yet another odd footnote: L.M. Tate, the stable manager who testified in the caveat hearing that Elva had confided in him about her problems, was none other than the L.M. Tate who had served a year earlier as the jury foreman in the coroner’s inquest!
This gives rise to questions of its own: Did Tate make this conflict known? Did he share the stable conversation with his fellow inquest jurors? Did that revelation affect their verdict? Even if he kept it to himself, didn’t it color at least his own vote? For that matter, did Tate know even more than he told?
Though L.M. Tate apparently never shared those secrets publicly, his son, Lloyd Tate, was still alive in Pinehurst at this writing—and was privy to some details that his father had told him many years ago about his role in the Davidson case. But he was suffering from a stroke that had severely affected his speech, making it all but impossible for him to communicate. That became clear in a telephone call to his house. His wife answered. After being filled in on the case and the information being sought, she put the phone down and asked if he wanted to talk about it. He could be heard in the background groaning, “No, no!” Mrs. Tate returned to report that her husband definitely wanted no part of an interview. But she agreed to ask him just one more question: whether his father had thought Elva’s death was a matter of murder or suicide.
More labored conversation was audible. Then Mrs. Tate came back to the phone, apologizing that she couldn’t get much more than a word out of her husband. “Please,” she said. “He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. It gets him too upset. But he says—suicide.”
CHAPTER 25
The Shore of that Eternal Sea
To balance the Lloyd Tate quote that ends the previous chapter, perhaps it is only fair to begin this final one with an indirect quote from another individual who also had personal knowledge of the Davidson affair: Hemmie Tufts, an in-law of the founding Pinehurst clan. Hemmie, who died in 2005, no doubt had many stories to tell, since she had been instrumental in bringing Elva and Brad together and knew the couple as well as anyone. It is her son, Fred, who made available her hard-to-decipher diaries, passages of which are quoted elsewhere in this book.
“From time to time when I was a kid,” Fred recently said, “I’d badger my mother to tell me about Elva’s death. I’ve always found it so fascinating.”
So what did she think happened?
“To be perfectly honest,” Fred said, “it depended on how many martinis she’d had. With every drink, it would go further away from suicide to—well, let’s just say not suicide.”
It is worth noting, however, that Hemmie Tufts never came forth to testify to that effect—something it would have been her duty to do if she had anything concrete to back up her suspicions. There may also be a broader significance to be found in her son’s observation that she apparently tended to believe Elva’s death was a suicide when she was sober and only swung over toward the murder side when she was—well, let’s just say not sober.
So it is with all of us. Human nature being what it is, we want to believe that Elva Statler Davidson’s death was murder most foul and that Brad Davidson did it. If nothing else, it makes a better story that way.
A typical reaction is that of Khris Januzik, former director of the Tufts Archives in Pinehurst. In all her years in her job, she once said, two or three stories had stuck with her, and Elva’s was one of them. She had always wanted to investigate the case further but had never found the time. “Elva always just kind of yelled at me from the photographs,” she said. “Here you have this lovely young woman, and she comes down here hoping for something good to happen to her, and then—boom—she’s dead. And it’s like, why is there so very little known about her? And why is it all sort of packed away somewhere? Why was it all hushed up? And then I start looking at her husband, and he dropped out of those circles and was
completely gone. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been watching too much television—City Confidential and Forensic Files and stuff like that. But I keep thinking, ‘Hmmm. I wonder…’”
We all wonder. But, though our hearts may tell us one thing, our heads keep insisting on another. In our sober moments, we have to acknowledge that there was never a shred of hard evidence (as opposed to the circumstantial kind) that Brad could have been guilty of uxoricide, or the killing of one’s wife. On the other hand, everything that has been learned so far—and surely there can’t be a lot more to be learned—tends to compel us toward one melancholy, reluctant conclusion: though she clearly had so much coaxing that some may consider it a kind of murder, the facts strongly suggest that poor, confused, tormented Elva Statler Davidson simply killed herself.
Or not so simply.
To anyone who has read this far, vexing questions must remain about the baffling set of circumstances surrounding Elva’s death. They include many of the same questions that led officials back in late February 1935 to throw up their hands and reopen what might otherwise have been an open-andshut case, thus turning a local tragedy into a nationwide sensation. But to those inclined toward the suicide theory, each of those questions, considered in the light of all that has since come out, now seems susceptible to a logical answer—though not always a likely one.
First of all, there is no reason at all to wonder why Elva was so distraught on the night before her death. She was already unstable and traumatized enough, for plenty of good reasons. It would be a wonder if she hadn’t spiraled into an inconsolable state after losing at least one man and then learning that the man she had just married—and willed her fortune to—was a jerk who was already cheating on her and in cahoots with her lawyer. That would help explain, by the way, why the two of them were already sleeping in separate rooms.
Nor need there be any lingering mystery about the front-porch, after-party argument over what to do with the Packard. If Elva had recently confided in Herb Vail and others that she thought maybe “the best solution would be for me to go out into the garage and turn on the motor,” it must have gotten back to Brad. So when she began talking about taking the car back to the garage at that ungodly hour, especially in her volatile and perhaps intoxicated state, surely it would only be natural for him to try to keep that from happening. Though the little spat would have seemed pointless to their houseguests, that is only because they lacked some necessary background.
As we switch to the next morning, we confront three central questions: (1) Why was Elva’s body still noticeably warm to the touch when she was found? (2) How did she end up in such a strange position? And (3) Why was she dressed so oddly? The latter two require us to venture a little further into the area of speculation. But with all three, there are scenarios capable of making perfect sense.
As for the first question, an anecdote from Jamie Boles, a local funeral home operator and state legislator, sheds an unexpected light into one little corner of our story. During an interview about the traditionally high suicide rate in the supposedly blissful resort paradise, Boles recalled one call he got about a lonely recent widower who had done himself in by closing up his garage and turning on the engine of his luxury sedan, which idled for hours. “He and his wife had had all these cases of soft drinks stacked up out there,” he said. “And it had gotten so hot in the garage—from all that exhaust—that every one of those hundreds of cans of soda had burst. That concrete floor was just flooded with Coca-Cola and Seven-Up and Dr. Pepper.”
For our purposes, Boles’s story causes a red light to click on. From now on, whenever we wonder how Elva’s body could still have been warm when Dr. Myron Marr examined it, even though the temperature had fallen well below freezing during the night and she had apparently been dead inside that unheated garage long enough for rigor mortis to begin setting in, all we have to do is remember all those exploding Coke cans.
Next, the position of the body. To understand one possible explanation, picture Elva deciding, at some point after the others in the house have gone to sleep, to slip down and go for a predawn ride in the Packard to think things over (something she had often done in the past). Perhaps she even sets out to keep that early morning golf date, if there was one—which would explain the tees and other items rolled up in her sweater. But somewhere along the way, she gives in to her overwhelming suicidal impulses and heads back. Or, more likely, she makes that fateful decision in her room and just goes directly downstairs and to the garage, perhaps after moving the car there.
Either way, she ends up pulling the big jointed door closed, starting the engine and sitting down behind the wheel—or elsewhere in the chamber—to wait for the roiling carbon monoxide fumes to take their deadly effect. But as the minutes tick by, she panics or gets cold feet and decides to get out of there. By that time, though, she is almost too weak, dizzy or disoriented to walk straight. Then, while trying to find the exit, she remembers to go back and turn off the ignition. She makes it to the driver’s-side door, makes one final, feeble effort to reach across for the key and collapses—in that oft-described posture of one trying to crawl into the car.
We now arrive at the state in which Elva’s body was found. First, the bruises: nobody has ever made much sense out of the pattern in which they were found. She was a spirited horsewoman who enjoyed tennis and other active sports. Maybe there really was some kind of sexual confrontation that night, with Brad trying to pin Elva down and claim his rights as a husband. Or maybe she thrashed around in her death throes, inflicting some of the contusions on herself. In any case, there seems little reason to concern ourselves with the bruises. They have never added up to anything.
Similarly, the lack of underwear, however titillating, may also be of little significance in the end. Back in her room, Elva had already undressed for bed, at least according to Brad’s testimony. If so, she would therefore have been nude under her nightgown. If she later decided to go down and take her own life, she would have tossed the gown on the chair—where the maid said she later found it—and started pulling on whatever clothes were handy. In her agitated and highly distracted state, would underwear have ranked high on her priority list? The reason for wearing slippers instead of shoes should be obvious: she didn’t want anybody to hear her going down the stairs and out the door.
Which brings us to that eternal puzzle of the wool skirt, which was found to be two or three sizes too big for Elva. Why in the world was she wearing it? Fact is, she may never have worn it at all. There are a couple of possible explanations, both a bit far out but worth consideration. And neither involves foul play.
First possibility: Elva was, indeed, wearing a skirt that morning. But in the excitement after her body was found, it got mixed up with another one, which then found its way into the evidence locker. That could have happened at the hospital amid the lengthy scramble to try to revive her. More likely, it could have happened when Assistant Coroner Hugh Kelly drove to the Southern Pines funeral home to retrieve Elva’s clothing. According to that story, it will be remembered, the attendant produced the slippers and sweater but became frantic when he went outside to get the skirt, only to find it missing from a clothesline, “to the consternation of all concerned.” A nearby fireman later supposedly produced the skirt, saying he had taken custody of it when he saw some boys attempting to steal it. But is that unlikely story what really happened? Or did Elva’s real skirt go missing at some point, perhaps stolen by the boys, only to be replaced with another one of a different size by someone trying to cover his tail? That would help explain why the skirt and sweater were described as “mismatched.”
The second possibility is rather more intriguing: what if Elva was nude when the butler found her? Stranger things have been discovered at suicide scenes. Elva, after all, had just learned that Brad was involved in a relationship with someone else, and hell has no fury like a woman scorned. In her hysterical reaction, perhaps she undressed and presented Brad with a furious, twisted message: “Yo
u wanted a naked woman’s body? You’re looking at a naked woman’s body.” According to this script, Brad and the others huddled around her the next morning do not want her to be seen in such an embarrassingly indecent state. They decide to get some clothes on her quick, before the doctor gets there. So they send Edna running inside the house, but she doesn’t know where Elva keeps her clothes, so she just grabs one of her own skirts and sweaters and comes running back out with them. Then they proceed with the grim and hushed business of dressing the body there on the cold garage floor, discreetly agreeing among themselves never to breathe a word about it.
Or not.
Those who cling to the murder explanation would challenge much of the above. For one thing, they would ask whether any of the primary witnesses could be believed at all, since several appear to have been paid off. During his merciless grilling of Brad during the 1936 caveat hearing, attorney J. Melvin Broughton pointed out what he considered a remarkable fact. Virtually everyone around the Davidson home the night of Elva’s death, he said, had since been employed by Brad’s friends and relatives. Brad, on the witness stand, attempted to shrug that off. “Well, they were out of work,” he said, “and these jobs opened up.”
Houseguest Curtis Campaign was a regional executive with the British toiletries company Yardley. After the inquest, it seems, he bestowed a nice position with Yardley upon Herbert Vail, the Davidson friend who offered that climactic testimony about Elva’s supposed suicidal musings. That employment arrangement would remain the subject of gossip in some Pinehurst circles for years. But Vail wasn’t the only one to land a job. Under prodding from Broughton, Brad confirmed that the Campaignes had since employed Emanuel Birch, the butler, and that Vail and Brad’s brother Richard had hired “other servants.” The clear suggestion of bought testimony or purchased silence hung in the air, and we can’t brush it aside—although in an actual murder trial, any defense lawyer would surely attempt to have such evidence thrown out as strictly circumstantial.