by Steve Bouser
The most prominent example of changed testimony, of course, is that of Vail, who first said on the stand that Elva seemed okay but then, in that climactic final day, told his story of suicidal thoughts poured out at the piano. Only one other instance comes to mind, and it is relatively obscure. At one point during the inquest, after Curtis Campaigne told of the argument about the car and how it was ultimately left outside, Solicitor Pruette asked him if he hadn’t said earlier that Elva had put the car in the garage and then returned to the house that night. He said he couldn’t recall saying that, and the matter was dropped.
In murder trials, lawyers always try to convince jurors of the presence of three elements: means, motive and opportunity. Brad certainly had a motive: money. And the timing of Elva’s death, just days after she had signed most of her wealth over to him, is impossible to ignore. He had plenty of opportunity. But what means could he have employed?
In that regard, much has been made of the “raised red area with a puncture in the middle” that the autopsy report said was found on Elva’s left arm. That cryptic reference has given rise to much fevered speculation about a “strange and scientific murder” involving immobilizing the victim with some kind of hypodermic injection and then carrying her out and placing her in the car.
But let’s take a closer look.
Asked during the 1935 inquest whether the puncture could have been made after death, Dr. C.C. Carpenter, in charge of the autopsy at Wake Forest, barked, “Absolutely not!” Carpenter also said at the inquest that “a needle puncture was made in her chest to inject adrenaline.”
But when the aforementioned missing third day of caveat testimony finally turned up recently, it told a different story. Dr. Myron W. Marr, the Pinehurst house physician who had first received the call about the discovery of Elva’s body, was called back to the stand. And here the good doctor tossed off a critical bit of testimony almost as an afterthought. “Describing the position of the body as kneeling on the running board,” wrote the AP reporter, “Dr. Marr again asserted that he did not believe Mrs. Davidson’s body could have fallen into the position in which she was found dead of carbon monoxide poison in her garage.”
And then: “Questioned about a bruise on Mrs. Davidson’s arm, he said it was caused by a hypodermic given her in an effort to revive her.”
Could it really be that simple, that the doctors just gave Elva a shot in the arm on that first morning in the hospital in a failed attempt to bring her back to life? Nothing sinister at all? Then why didn’t Marr mention that important fact at the inquest, assuming he didn’t—especially when Dr. Carpenter had said in his inquest testimony that the injection was given in the chest?
One might be tempted to theorize that Marr committed perjury the second time—that Brad or Leach or somebody got to him and he lied. Why else would he go along with one version while the case was still fresh on his mind—that the shot had been given in the chest—and then conveniently change his story a year later? But a careful reexamination of the inquest clips appears to straighten the story out. Dr. Marr, after all, didn’t say anything about a shot in the chest. Or if he did, it was never reported. That tidbit had come instead from Wake Forest’s Dr. Carpenter. “I understand that a needle puncture was made in her chest to inject adrenaline,” Carpenter had said, “but none was made in the arm.” He understood that. But he wasn’t there at the hospital.
So why hadn’t Marr, who supposedly administered the shot in the arm with his own hands at the hospital, set the jury straight on that critical error in Carpenter’s hearsay testimony? It seems likely that he never knew Carpenter had said that. Solicitor Pruette, after all, had taken pains to sequester witnesses from one another so they wouldn’t try to get their stories straight. Marr would have been outside the Community House when Carpenter made his comment about the supposed injection in the heart, and he wouldn’t have read about it in the papers until later, if ever.
In one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery because of “the dog that didn’t bark”—something that didn’t happen. This story includes a similar important negative: though the very thorough autopsy report takes pains to describe a puncture wound in Elva’s arm in detail, it is silent about any such needle wound in that pigeon-breasted chest of hers. She was given only one shot, and it was in her arm, and its purpose was to revive her.
In the end, only two people ever knew for certain whether what happened on that morning in March 1935 was a heinous felony or a mere tragedy. And neither is in a position to shed light on any of the lingering questions.
The first of those two people lived on for thirty-seven more years and now lies in Upperville cemetery in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, under a bulky stone whose inscription reads:
H. BRADLEY DAVIDSON, JR.
Sept. 10, 1892–Aug. 8, 1972
Bethesda, Maryland
World War I—World War II
Lt. Colonel
The stone stands in the extreme corner, in the very last row on the far eastern edge of the cemetery. Right next to an open meadow, it is in a position to be among the first to receive the rays of a rising sun. On the reverse side is the carved notation “Elizabeth Bishop Davidson, 1909–1998.” That was Brad’s third wife, Betty, with whom he apparently enjoyed a long and happy (and financially secure) marriage.
To visit there is to wonder why Brad chose that spot, scarcely twenty miles from the former Retreat estate where he and his first wife, Jessica, briefly lived, for his final resting place. Here you have a rootless man who lived in Washington; Baltimore and Annapolis Roads, Maryland; rural Virginia; Waukegan, Illinois; Milwaukee; Ormond Beach, Florida; Massachusetts; and at least two towns in upstate New York—not to mention Pinehurst. This wasn’t even his original home. He had been born in the Washington area. This was Jessica’s country. It was she who had inherited Retreat. Considering all the ugliness surrounding their long-ago divorce, surely this would have seemed the last place in the world where he would have wanted to be caught dead. After all those years, did he still cherish memories of that young and innocent time, before America got sucked into World War I and everything in his life began to fall apart?
A visitor familiar with the Pinehurst mystery also can’t help wondering whether Brad took a dark, hideous secret with him to his grave. Or will he just keep sleeping on peacefully there through eternity with his conscience blissfully clear and, as a newspaper account once said, “his thin face smilelessly imperturbable”?
The second person who knew what happened in the predawn chill in that garage out behind the house next to Edgewood Cottage has lain for seventy-five years under a modest, flat stone marked simply:
Elva Statler Davidson
1912–1935
Her grave is located on a slope in Kensico Cemetery, affording a peaceful vista eastward toward the town of Valhalla, New York, partially visible below along the wooded shore of Rye Lake. Elva’s marker is one of seven ranked from left to right in front of a massive upright stone with the single word “STATLER” carved on it in a stark serif typeface.
Elva’s gravestone is in the Statler family plot in Kensico Cemetery near Valhalla, New York. Courtesy of Diane McLellan.
On the far left is Marian Francis Statler, 1907–1927. She was Elva’s foster sister, who died a slow and terrible death from pneumonia. Then comes Milton Howland Statler, 1906–1933, her older foster brother, killed in that grinding car wreck in Arizona. Next: Alice Seidler Statler, 1882–1969. The wicked stepmother. Ellsworth M. Statler, 1863–1928, occupies the center space. The patriarch and hospitality king arranged to check into a berth between those reserved for his two wives. The first of them, Mary I. Statler, 1864–1925, Elva’s adoptive mother, comes next in line. Elva is sixth, and last is a newer stone, less stained and chipped than the others: Ellsworth Morgan Statler, 1912–1987. Elva’s mentally handicapped foster brother (and probably her birth twin as well), Ellsworth, survived her by more than half a century, living out his l
ast years with a couple in Palm Springs, California, who had taken him into their home after the lawyers had run through all his money.
A comforting sense of calm lies over the manicured landscape all around. In the late 1880s, those who began building Kensico from the ground down—seized with the same utopian sense of optimism and idealism that motivated James Walker Tufts to found distant Pinehurst a half-dozen years later—wisely placed it in a rural area more than thirty miles northeast of New York City. There, they pledged, this “Great City of the Dead” would be forever safe from encroaching urban sprawl, and the rights of the deceased would be permanently protected.
Kensico’s promotional people worded that assurance in terms of a sublime promise that one can only hope will someday come true for the poor little rich girl buried under that sixth stone from the left:
Those who are interred there will sleep in peace, awaiting the dawn of the glorious day when death itself shall pass away, and there shall be reunion on the shore of that eternal sea where those who meet shall part no more.
About the Author
Steve Bouser grew up in Missouri, served as a Russian linguist in the U.S. Army, graduated from Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State) and worked at papers in Wisconsin and Florida before moving to North Carolina in 1973. He is now editor of The Pilot, a prizewinning community newspaper serving Southern Pines/Pinehurst. From 1993 to 1997, he worked with media assistance programs in Russia and other former Soviet countries. He and his wife, Brenda, have a daughter, Kate, and Steve has two sons, Jacob and Benjamin, from a previous marriage. His one-man play, Senator Sam, has been produced numerous times, and his play Ben, about Benjamin Franklin, is now being prepared for production. He is working on a memoir of his Russian experiences. He has aired a number of commentaries on NPR and teaches journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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