Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  “I was scared,” Birch would later recall. “But I walked over and looked. It was Mrs. Davidson.”

  She was clad in a light wool sweater and skirt that didn’t seem warm enough for this bitter weather. And what was she doing in that odd, contorted position, sprawled half in and half out of the car, one knee on the running board, face downward, arms extended across the seat and floorboard? Still coughing and covering his mouth, Birch stepped around the driver’s door—glancing at the dashboard to notice that the ignition switch was still on though the engine had stopped running—and tentatively approached his mistress. He knelt and placed his hand on her shoulder, which still felt warm.

  “Mrs. Davidson, get up!” he cried, shaking her. But she didn’t move.

  Curtis Campaigne and his wife, Edna, visitors from New Jersey, were still sound asleep in the downstairs guest room of Edgewood Cottage at 9:00 a.m., so they never heard Birch’s anguished cry at the door of Brad Davidson’s room upstairs: “My God, Mr. Davidson, Mrs. Davidson is dead!” But they knew at once that they had a bad situation on their hands when the maid, Pearl, came banging on their door seconds thereafter and jolted them awake with an urgent notification: “Something has happened to Mrs. Davidson in the garage!”

  The Campaignes followed the agitated Pearl through the house to the back door. There, Edna paused while Curtis proceeded across the frosty backyard, half-walking and half-running as he approached the three-car garage in the adjoining lot. Inside, he could dimly see the tall figure of Brad Davidson, who had thrown on a pair of trousers and a sweater over his pajamas. He was standing with the shorter Birch on the far side of the 1934 Packard, which sat parked with its chrome-emblazoned front end facing the open sliding door, its shiny black finish emitting a sinister glint.

  As he walked around the open driver’s side door, Campaigne saw it: the youthful, athletic body of Elva Statler Davidson, motionless as a wax museum figure and wearing a brown sweater, wool skirt and slippers, lying oddly crouched in the car’s doorway, half in and half out. She looked still and small and alone, dwarfed by the massive car, her short-cropped, dark blonde head bowed in final defeat.

  Brad Davidson knelt at his wife’s side, feeling for a pulse and finding none. There were no funeral homes in Pinehurst, no ambulance services anywhere near. Brad had Pearl telephone the house physician for the Carolina Hotel, Dr. M.W. Marr, who lived across Linden Road and down a few houses. As Birch waited for him out by the street, Brad took hold of Elva’s body as if intending to pick her up or make her more comfortable. But at that moment, Curtis Campaigne blurted something out.

  “Don’t touch her!” he cried.

  Davidson looked up at him questioningly. Campaigne explained that he had “read someplace that a body shouldn’t be touched under such circumstances, if there was a chance of murder.”

  Murder? Who said anything about murder? Ignoring Campaigne’s advice, Brad sat on the running board and cradled his wife’s head in his lap. As they waited there, Campaigne asked the seemingly distraught Brad what he thought had happened. He said he had no idea. The last time he had seen his wife, he said, was when they parted sometime before 5:00 a.m., more than four hours previously. The last words she spoke, he said, were, “Goodnight, darling.”

  When Dr. Marr finally arrived at Edgewood Cottage, carrying his black bag and not even having bothered to dress fully, he was quickly escorted back to the garage. There was no time for even subdued handshakes. He got right to his grim work.

  As the others looked on anxiously, Marr knelt there amid the tools and garden implements, applied his stethoscope and lifted a half-closed eyelid to check on Elva’s reflex responses. He took only a minute to ascertain that, alas, it was too late for him or any other person on earth to do any good. No heartbeat, no breath. Elva Davidson was quite dead. Though he thought the fit young body had begun displaying the first signs of rigor mortis, he was surprised at how warm it still felt. The coloration of the face, which Dr. Marr described as markedly “flushed,” provided him with a broad hint as to the cause of death. Still, whether acting on the off chance that the girl could be revived or going through the motions in an effort to make her distraught husband and friends feel that something was being done, Dr. Marr stood up.

  “Let’s get her to the hospital,” he ordered.

  Brad Davidson, with assistance from Curtis Campaigne and Birch, wrapped Elva in a blanket, picked her up and laid her as gently as possible in the cramped back seat of the low-slung Packard. Her body, weighing about 130 pounds, was all dead weight, still awkwardly limp even if it was just beginning to stiffen. Then Brad, with Campaigne sitting next to him in the shotgun seat, pulled out onto McKenzie Road, drove up to Linden Road, turned right and stepped on the gas. Dr. Marr followed in his own car.

  The new Moore County Hospital, a source of great community pride, stood three miles away on the other side of town. It fronted on Page Road, named for the family of the man who had sold the logged-over land that would become Pinehurst to James Walker Tufts in 1895. The route taken by the little two-vehicle emergency convoy, skirting the village on the south, took less than five minutes. The men got help conveying Elva to an examining room inside the hospital, where Dr. Marr and two attendants, using a respirator, began trying to revive her. They gamely continued to press their futile effort for nearly two hours before the doctor finally gave up and officially declared his patient deceased at 11:20 a.m.

  Scarcely twelve hours earlier, Elva Statler Davidson, bride of a few weeks, superb athlete, hotel heiress and society darling, had been hobnobbing with other socialites at a fancy charity dinner to benefit this very hospital. Now she lay cold and lifeless in one of its rooms.

  As mysterious as the circumstances leading to her death that morning were several curious details that Dr. Marr and his assistants discovered: her body bore a number of bruises, some of them evidently fresh. Despite the raw February morning, she had been dressed inappropriately for a cold snap, wearing a sweater and a mismatched skirt that seemed way too big for her—so much so, it was later said, that if she had stood up, it might have fallen off. Rolled up in the hem of the sweater were a tube of lipstick, several golf tees and about thirteen dollars in cash. And, perhaps strangest of all, she wore no undergarments.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Melancholy Gypsy Tune

  The news raced along the village grapevine like fire along a fuse. By noon, almost everyone in the close-knit winter colony knew what had happened at Edgewood Cottage out on the corner of Linden Road and McKenzie. At that early point, many of the gossipers were attaching the “s” word to it: suicide. Locking oneself in a garage and turning on the engine had, after all, become a standard way of ending it all in the three decades since the advent of the automobile.

  “A horrible day,” Hemmie Tufts, granddaughter-in-law of Pinehurst founder James Walker Tufts and the friend who had introduced Brad and Elva just a year earlier, wrote in her diary. “Got word Elva had attempted suicide. Then Allie [Hemmie’s sister-in-law, Allie Vail] came in with the news that Elva was dead. Carbon monoxide. It all seemed so horrible after being together just last nite…We went to movies for escape. ‘All the King’s Horses.’ Took a walk alone. Couldn’t talk about it…All is so horrible and unreal…Deadly sorry for Brad.”

  But some thoughtful residents had doubted from the beginning that a troubled Elva Statler Davidson had simply gassed herself and that was the end of the story. For one thing, there was the question of motive. “What people in Pinehurst’s winter playground of the rich cannot understand,” a United Press correspondent later wrote, “is why Mrs. Davidson should want to take her life. Outwardly, she had everything to live for: beauty, youth, wealth, social position and a husband who is a member of a prominent Washington family.”

  And then there were the nagging questions raised by the bits and pieces of evidence that had so far surfaced. No matter how you looked at them, they didn’t seem to add up to a story that made a lot of sense. Whether or not there
was going to be a trial, as such, this was clearly not going to be a cursory examination that would go away quickly—especially given the prominent cast of characters.

  Of all the mysteries hovering around the case of Elva Statler Davidson, none was so puzzling as the inexplicable, illogical position in which her body was found. At this early stage of discussion, every plausible explanation—suicide, murder or accident—seemed to leave a big question or two unanswered.

  Suicide: If a despondent young woman were determined to kill herself with carbon monoxide inside a closed garage, surely she would sit down comfortably behind the wheel, start the engine and lean back to let the gas do its work. As a poor second alternative, she might go sit or lie near the tailpipe in hopes of getting a quicker, more potent dose.

  Murder: On the other hand, if someone else were intent on murdering a young lady and making it look like suicide, wouldn’t he take care to place her body (presumably already dead or incapacitated through other means) behind the wheel? Surely the last thing he would do is to dump her in a pile sure to arouse suspicion and then go away.

  Accident: First of all, it was hard to imagine, under the circumstances that prevailed in this case, and considering how long it takes a lethal dose of monoxide to build up, how a fit young woman could possibly end up dying by accident in that garage, which had plenty of windows that could be broken out. And even if she had, was it likely she would end up being huddled how and where she was found?

  As described by that small group of heartsick and helpless witnesses who had seen her, the position almost sounded like that of one who had collapsed while climbing uphill on hands and knees. Or backing downhill. “If you were stepping out of a car backward and suddenly fainted,” a shaken Edna Campaigne told others in attempting to imagine a scenario that would somehow fit the awful thing she had seen that morning, “that would be the position her body was in.”

  An anonymous correspondent who filed an Associated Press story on that first day seemed to lean toward the theory that Elva, known to suffer from insomnia, had taken an early morning drive and then somehow died accidentally while preparing for a trip to the golf course. But why would a young woman choose to take a drive or play a round of golf while wearing house slippers, somebody else’s ill-fitting skirt and no hat, panties, girdle, brassiere, camisole or stockings?

  One of those harboring early misgivings about the case was Moore County sheriff Charles McDonald.

  Described as “a squared-away guy,” he had one of North Carolina’s most expansive counties (at more than seven hundred square miles, half the size of Rhode Island) to look after. And Pinehurst, an unincorporated village—really more of a company town—with no police department and no crime to speak of, was part of the sheriff’s beat. The village had a lone constable, a man named Deese, but he seems to have bowed out early and left the investigation up to the high sheriff.

  McDonald himself took his own sweet time picking up on the gravity of what had happened. It was 10:00 a.m. on that first day—while Dr. Marr was still working in vain to bring some life back to the body—when somebody called the sheriff’s office in Carthage with the news of “a lady dead at the hospital.” McDonald didn’t arrive in Pinehurst (twelve miles away) until 11:30 a.m. The hospital called again at noon, only to find that the sheriff had gone off to his weekly Kiwanis Club lunch.

  McDonald still had a toothpick in the corner of his mouth when he finally walked into the hospital a little after 1:00 p.m., but he quickly got down to business. He might have been a country boy, but he knew right away that he had a big case on his beat, and it didn’t take him much longer to recognize that certain pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit together quite right. He made sure that another man became involved in the investigation from the start: Acting Coroner Hugh Kelly. (Coroner Carl Fry was out of town.) McDonald and Kelly paid their first visit to Edgewood Cottage between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. Neither had ever handled a case quite like this before, and they improvised as they went along.

  First of all, they wanted to find out more about what had happened the previous night, most of which the Davidsons and their friends had partied away.

  The first party that the group had gone to after putting on their tuxes and evening gowns was the premier local social event of the year: the annual Hospital Ball at Pinehurst Country Club.

  “Everything that can be done to make a party a roaring success has been done by the finance committee of the hospital auxiliary, which is sponsoring the Charity Ball on February 26,” The Pilot had reported a few days before the event. “Fred Kibler’s Casa Nova orchestra will play, and we all know what excellent dance music that is.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Herb Vail, close friends of the Davidsons, weren’t just attending the dance. They were part of the entertainment. “At intervals during the evening,” the paper reported, “the Casa Novas will be relieved by the local amateur orchestra known delicately as the ‘B.O.’s,’ consisting of Mrs. Herbert Vail, Herbert Vail, Bob Page, John Leland and Liv Biddle…The dancing will take place in the regular ballroom. Specialty acts and stunts have been arranged to entertain between dances.”

  Herb Vail had become part of the Tufts family when his sister, Allie Vail, a good-looking, dark-haired horsewoman and tournament-class tennis player, married Richard S. Tufts, grandson of patriarch James Walker Tufts and son of Leonard Tufts, president of Pinehurst Inc. Herb and Minnie could always be counted on to be the life of any party.

  Lots was going on that night. “Mrs. Myron Marr [wife of Dr. Marr, who would have his hands full in a few hours] and Mrs. Percy Thomson will be in charge of a ‘take a chance’ booth, where the customers may win a small fortune or lose their shirts,” the paper advised. “Donald Sherrerd will act as official barker to lure suckers in!…Tickets for this gay three-ring circus are $5.00 for a couple and $3.00 for a single person.”

  So a good time would be had by all at the charity ball. Or almost all. There was one notable exception: Mrs. Henry Bradley Davidson. She was not having any fun at all. And she continued to be a party pooper all night, try though the others might to cheer her up and make her get with the program. Nothing seemed to go right in that regard. Local artists had contributed “posters of various kinds, amusing, decorative and even sketches of local celebrities,” which could be bought at auction. They were described as “just what you’ve been looking for to liven up some particular corner of a room that has never looked just right.” So Elva bought one of them, but Brad had been overheard harshly disapproving of her purchase in mock playful fashion, rebuking her in front of others and plunging her even deeper into her apparent despair.

  Not even the strolling accordionist who had been engaged to wander among the seated guests, “playing any tune anybody asks for,” did anything to improve Elva’s spirits. In fact, he later made things even worse.

  Montesanti’s Spaghetti Camp was a roadhouse located near a creek bottom off the old Morganton Road, which wound a kind of back route between Pinehurst and Southern Pines. The “camp” was really just an Italian restaurant housed in a rambling, wooden structure that looked as if it might have evolved section by section as a one-story wing was added on to an early two-story farmhouse. It had once served as a hunting lodge. There was an ancient stone chimney and weathered wooden siding that appeared never to have felt the touch of a paintbrush.

  The building housing Montesanti’s Spaghetti Camp, where the Davidsons and friends dined in the wee hours of the morning of her death, stood on land that is now part of the Lawn and Tennis Club. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  Angelo Montesanti had brought his tribe to Moore County in 1912. Besides running the camp on the side, Angelo was the chef at the Highland Pines Inn during “the season.” In the summer, when Pinehurst mostly shut down, the family traveled to Charleroix, Michigan, to work at a sister inn. The casually inviting spaghetti camp was a popular spot with the fast Pinehurst crowd, which admittedly didn’t have a wide array of choices for evening entertainment. The
central village had always been known for rolling the sidewalks up and storing them away at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m.

  Angelo was sound asleep when someone came pounding on his locked door and demanding service sometime between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, February 27. He looked out into the yard to see a party of eighteen people, some yawning and a little unsteady on their feet, climbing out of a convoy of snazzy automobiles. The women wore rumpled evening gowns, the men tuxedos with their ties loosened. They had just come from the charity ball at the Pinehurst Country Club, they informed the proprietor, and they were starving.

  Whether welcoming an opportunity to live up to his own advertising slogan, “Where Hospitality Rules,” or (more likely) responding to the promise or expectation that this bunch of rich playboys and party girls would make this wee-hours imposition more than worth his while, Angelo complied and invited the gang of impromptu guests in. Soon he was turning up the lights, firing up the stoves and waking up the help.

  As he interviewed spaghetti camp employees in the harsh light of that same day, Sheriff McDonald quickly zeroed in on one witness: a waiter named John Nostragiacomio, whom newspapers later would invariably describe as “bushy-haired.”

  The thing that struck him, the waiter said, was that while seventeen of the guests who had barged in were having a good time around the pulled-together tables, one of them most clearly was not: Elva Statler Davidson. “Everybody in the party except Mrs. Davidson was laughing and having fun,” he said. “She sat at the head of the table, and her husband sat several chairs away from her. They had brought a harmonica player with them from the dance at the Country Club, and there was some music.”

  Nostragiacomio was wrong about the “harmonica” player. The musician was the aforementioned strolling accordion player, one Carlo Restivo, who had been brought along from the ball. But the waiter was certain of one thing: he didn’t see Elva Davidson smile once during her stay at his establishment. “Her eyes were wet,” he said, “and she finally began to cry. She cried very hard.”