Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  This part of the South was an environmental disaster area as well as an economic one. Moore County, as some of the reporters took the time to learn, had once stood on the edge of a stately forest of longleaf pines that marched in unchallenged dominance across ninety million acres of land stretching from southeastern Virginia to southeastern Texas. By the 1930s, as a result of relentless depredations by man, mere shreds of the original old-growth stands remained in a few overlooked or inconvenient spots here and there.

  The trees that were merely chopped or sawed down, dismembered and sent north in endless long, groaning trains to provide the lumber to build massive Victorian houses for a burgeoning American population were, in a sense, the lucky ones. At least they met a quick, if brutal, end. Millions of others were consigned to a death of slow torture, their bark stripped off in great gashes so that their lemon-fragrant sap could bleed away. First that rich, golden life’s blood was used for pitch and tar required to keep wooden fleets afloat. (The sticky-footed workers involved in this messy process of exsanguination became known as Tar Heels.) Then later, on a much more vast and destructive scale, swarms of busy human ants would boil the sap down into turpentine and rosin, which found many uses in the Industrial Revolution then transforming human civilization. When the loggers and turpentiners moved on, they left behind a stripped and silent moonscape that was so poor, folks said, that a crow flying across it had to pack his lunch.

  Still, when a nattily dressed and courteous northerner named James Walker Tufts, who appeared to the locals to have more money than brains, rode in on the Aberdeen and West End Railroad in June 1895 and expressed an interest in purchasing a sizable acreage for a new town, local land baron Henry A. Page saw no reason not to ask top dollar for it. No harm trying. When Tufts asked him how much he would take for several adjacent tracts of particularly barren, blasted, cutover land north of Aberdeen, Page tried to keep a straight face as he replied, “Oh, I reckon any land ought to be worth a dollar an acre.” To his amazement, the gullible Yankee met his price, and they shook on it. The first transfer was made immediately: 658 acres for $700. The rest, a total of more than 6,000, came soon after.

  Tufts, approaching sixty, was a Boston idealist who had already made his fortune in soda-fountain equipment and was looking for a new challenge—something of a more humanitarian nature. Like many in his era, he was attracted to the idea of a utopian community. He had been drawn to Moore County by a piece of marketing propaganda distributed all over the North by a local entrepreneur named John Tyrant Patrick, a bearded prophet who had founded the nearby town of Southern Pines a few years earlier. Patrick promoted otherwise useless southern Moore County, derided by some as the “Sahara of North Carolina,” as the ideal spot to which the breathing-challenged could come from afar to heal. Pine-scented air was said to cure consumption.

  It didn’t. But by the time Tufts found that out, he had already committed himself to building a health resort on his newly purchased land. He proceeded with blinding speed. By the end of 1895, he had paid famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out a curvy-streeted, New England–style village, and workmen had thrown together dozens of cottages, a modest hotel, a couple of boardinghouses and even an electric power plant.

  Tufts, pleased with his progress, needed to decide what to call his creation, which had already morphed from a TB sanitarium into a budget-priced winter retreat for weary, working-class northerners. After toying with clunkers like “Tuftstown,” “Tuftown,” “Pinalia” and “Sunalia,” he gave his little utopia a name that mystified the locals. After all, who knew what a “hurst” was? (It’s a sandy hillock or wooded eminence.)

  Looking around at the Pinehurst of 1935, the out-of-town reporters didn’t see many working-class people, unless you included the maids, bellhops and cooks looking after all the wealthy playboys and their women. That’s because the place had morphed another time or two in the few decades since its founding. Tufts, who had run his personal fiefdom like a benevolent despot, could look back with pride on how remarkably much he had accomplished in a few short years, building from absolutely nothing. But at his death in February 1902, he had already set in motion the forces that would render his noble founding vision unrecognizable. Soon, under James’s son Leonard, it would go corporate. Even as the old man breathed his last, his beloved Pinehurst was responding to economic realities by rapidly transforming from a place where regular people went to restore their health to a place where rich people went to play golf or retire or both.

  The opening of the Carolina Hotel, then the grandest in the South, was a turning point in the history of Pinehurst. Though it brought in a lot of much-needed revenue, it substituted social stratification for Tufts’s original egalitarian ideal. It drove a wedge between “hotel people” and “cottage people,” or “cottagers.”

  But Pinehurst remained a magical place as well. Visitors couldn’t seem to describe the remote little wonderworld without waxing extravagantly poetic. A good example is author Edward Everett Hale, best known for his novel The Man Without a Country. A longtime friend of Tufts, he had encouraged him in the Pinehurst project and become one of its most eloquent promoters.

  “Ever since I returned home,” Hale wrote after a stay in 1901, while Tufts was still alive, “I have been saying to tired people and worried people who have notes to meet: ‘Why don’t you go to Pinehurst?’ At Pinehurst, I have said, ‘there is no care. At Pinehurst you do as you choose. At Pinehurst you simply breathe sweet air and drink pure water and walk under the blue sky and meet pleasant people, and you do not know that there is any worry in the world.’”

  The early day village is said to have been especially lovely by night, when its imperfections and still-raw surroundings faded to black and the windows of all the newly painted buildings glowed like something out of a Caravaggio painting with light made possible by energy from Tufts’s newfangled generator plant. Entranced couples strolled the empty, sandy streets, holding hands and stealing kisses in the shadows.

  By the mid-1930s, though, Pinehurst must have seemed to an outsider as if it had taken on a bit of a dark and decadent side, as idle scions of the prominent and powerful pursued their fun and games in this isolated, artificial little enclave while most of the rest of the country languished in poverty, despair and looming war.

  “Pinehurst, the sun-drenched garden spot of North Carolina, has a sensational death,” Washington Herald reporter Pat Frank wrote in a mood piece on that sunny Sunday in March 1935 as he and his colleagues/competitors waited for the public inquest to begin two days later. “And Pinehurst doesn’t know what to do about it.”

  Leonard Tufts remained sequestered in his office and refused all interviews. Already having enough problems keeping Pinehurst afloat, he may have wished the whole Statler-Davidson thing would go away. But it clearly wasn’t going to. Reporter Frank told of retired bankers on the championship golf course exchanging theories about how Elva had died. He told of their wives sitting on the lawns in front of sprawling resort hotels, whispering over the knitting needles, “Tsk, tsk, imagine Elva Statler being murdered; why, I can hardly believe it. I knew her when she was so high.” He told of Elva’s peers in the younger set staying to themselves and trembling in their shock at what was coming to be seen as the biggest event in the resort village’s history.

  “Pinehurst, in sports clothes, looks with amazed eyes on the corps of reporters which has suddenly descended on the resort, clad in business suits,” Frank wrote. “The reporters, a score or more, picket the lobby of the exclusive Carolina Hotel, where even Coca-Colas cost eleven cents. The reporters pounce on some principal in the case, and the socialites gather around furtively, to listen to what is said. In ten minutes everyone in Pinehurst knows about it.”

  Though Pinehurst was an ostensibly dry town, Frank noted that the wealthy were willing to pay a dollar apiece for alcoholic drinks, while their servants could purchase a whole pint of Carolina moonshine at the same price. Meanwhile, the law lo
oked the other way.

  Frank wrote:

  There are slot machines in every drugstore and barber shop. Playing the slot machines is the principal sport of the debutantes when they’re not dancing, golfing or riding. There is also a luxurious club and gambling house—Chalfontes, which specializes in roulette…This is Pinehurst, which for fifty years [forty, actually] was touched only by the pine-scented breezes, and for the first time is touched by the breath of scandal.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Shadow of Ugly Suspicion

  After the weekend break, which gave out-of-town reporters a chance to get their feet on the ground and dig up background for their stories, things picked up again on Monday, March 4, 1935, the suspenseful eve of the second and climactic phase of the inquest into the death of Elva Statler Davidson.

  “I have a hole card,” Solicitor Rowland Pruette rather cockily boasted, resorting to the language of the poker table at an impromptu news conference. “I can’t tell you what it is. But it’s going to be a big surprise for someone. This investigation wouldn’t have progressed this far if it didn’t have a pretty good hole card.”

  Pruette wouldn’t elaborate. What hole card was he holding in reserve? The reporters assembled at Pinehurst could only venture guesses that Monday night over drinks and dinner—and occasionally a poker game or two of their own. The consensus seemed to be that it had something to do with what Dr. C.C. Carpenter of the Medical School of Wake Forest College, Pruette’s alma mater, had found as he performed exhaustive tests on the victim’s brain, vital organs and blood and tissue samples.

  Carpenter had first examined Elva’s body at Wake. Then, apparently finding something suspicious, he had ordered “the entire viscera” removed and sent off to Duke University’s laboratories at Durham for further chemical analysis. All of her internal organs, in other words, had been cut loose, scooped out and hauled away like so much slaughterhouse offal. The chubby Carpenter, having performed the tests with state-of-the-art equipment at Duke, arrived back in Pinehurst with a portfolio containing a preliminary report on the autopsy under his arm and an enigmatic smile on his face. He would say nothing to reporters except: “I guess you boys will be around here for a couple of weeks.”

  In the absence of hard revelations, speculation raged within the press corps. Most of it had to do with the “m” word: murder. And most of the rumors pointed an increasingly accusatory finger at the twenty-two-year-old dead woman’s forty-two-year-old husband, Henry Bradley Davidson.

  Meanwhile, Solicitor Pruette, with his own flair for the dramatic, was doing nothing to allay the rampant suspicions. Indeed, he only fanned the flames. “I wouldn’t be here if I thought it was a suicide,” he said pointedly, noting that he had already ruled out accidental death. “The State of North Carolina isn’t interested in suicides…As a matter of fact, no coroner’s inquest is usually held unless there is a suspicion of foul play.”

  And if foul play there had been, Pruette left no doubt about who he thought the perpetrator was. He said he wanted to know more about Brad Davidson’s activities and whereabouts on the morning of the death. He added that he was looking into the financial arrangements between the heiress and her husband. In response to questions, Pruette confirmed reports that he had sent investigators to Annapolis, Maryland, where Davidson had lived and worked before his second marriage. He said he was investigating reports that Davidson had been hanging around Annapolis in the middle of February of that year, about the time his new bride was in Boston willing him a king’s ransom.

  Pruette told the reporters that the Davidson cottage on Linden Road, having been neglected in the first couple of days, was now under tight guard day and night, with no one permitted in the vicinity. He added that he planned to subpoena as many as twenty-five witnesses, including “seventeen Pinehurst socialites,” to testify at the inquest. But he had heard that some of them had already left the state, he said—in which case “I can do nothing to get them back to testify.”

  By way of review, Pruette ticked off what he considered the main outstanding questions to which he would formally seek answers beginning the next day:

  • Why was Mrs. Davidson so despondent at one or both of the two parties on the night before her mysterious death, if indeed she was?

  • What happened from the time that the Davidsons left the spaghetti restaurant about 4:15 a.m. until the still-warm body of the heiress was found at 9:05 a.m.?

  • Why was the body in such a peculiarly cramped, kneeling position on the running board of her automobile?

  • How did she get those bruises?

  • Why did butler Birch swear that the garage was heavy with smoke and fumes when he entered it, while Davidson said there were no fumes noticeable except in the car itself when he went in minutes later?

  • Why had the motor of the car stopped running with the ignition switch still on, at a time when the tank still held two or three gallons of gasoline?

  • Why was Mrs. Davidson dressed as she was if, as claimed, she was just going for a drive?

  Pruette just couldn’t let go of that last question, the salaciousness of which clearly intrigued him. It’s not every day that a prosecutor finds himself dwelling in public on the topic of women’s underwear. “I can’t conceive of any woman, unless she was dead drunk, dressing in a costume like that for the purpose of committing suicide,” he said, noting once again that Elva had been found wearing neither stockings nor undergarments. He said experts had told him that women “never take their lives without first putting on their best clothes.”

  Noting that Davidson had testified the previous Wednesday in the first phase of the inquest that his wife suffered from insomnia and was in the habit of going for rides, Pruette indicated that he didn’t buy that explanation either. He pointed out that the temperature got down to almost twenty degrees that night and expressed a firm opinion that if a woman were planning on either taking a drive or killing herself, “the attire would have been more adequate.” Pruette also noted in passing that Elva had paid thirty-five dollars for a painting at the hospital’s charity ball on the night before her death, adding: “Women with suicide on their minds don’t go around bidding on pictures.”

  So those, Pruette said, were just some of the matters he wanted H. Bradley Davidson to clear up for him. And then the solicitor added this barbed zinger: “Of course, Davidson [not Mr. Davidson] can refuse to testify if he sees fit to do so…We have no way of knowing whether he regards himself as an accused person or not. If he should take that attitude, he may refuse to amplify the voluntary statement he made at the first hearing or to submit to questioning.”

  Pressed by a reporter, Pruette hastily added in all seeming innocence that he saw no reason why Davidson should refuse to testify. But he had already accomplished what must have been his ulterior purpose. Barring an earthquake or a fatal heart attack, Brad Davidson would be on the stand the next day.

  The State of North Carolina and the Statler family weren’t the only ones sending in their big guns as the revved-up second inquest loomed. Though they had missed the boat in the early days, the editors at The Washington Post now decided that the Elva story was getting big enough to justify dispatching a superstar to cover it. And the reporter they chose to send packing to North Carolina was none other than Edward T. Folliard, thirty-six, who had been The Post’s White House correspondent since 1923.

  It wasn’t as if there were nothing going on for Folliard to cover in early March 1935 within the Roosevelt administration—which at that very moment was celebrating the second anniversary of its inauguration. As a result of the Great Depression, relief rolls had reached an all-time high of 22,375,000. The president’s proposed $4.8 billion works relief bill was getting a going-over in the Senate, his plan for a revamping of the merchant marine was caught up in a legislative logjam and the House was debating a controversial bonus for World War I veterans.

  Father Charles E. Coughlin and Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long (who had a date with an assa
ssin) were peppering their demagogic speeches with bitter attacks on FDR, and the president was preparing to attend the funeral of former Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. England and Hitler’s Germany had just ratcheted up their naval and air arms race. A monster dust storm had descended on Washington, bringing in tons of topsoil stripped from Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma.

  Still, The Post considered the Davidson story urgent enough to tear the competent, levelheaded Mr. Folliard away from all that and dispatch him to Podunk, North Carolina, for a few days. Or maybe he volunteered, eager for a little excitement and a change of scenery. He arrived Monday, March 4, intent on quickly getting up to speed on the situation, filing his own first story that evening for Tuesday morning’s paper and thereafter running circles around the lesser journalistic entities assembled there.

  In that regard, Folliard had a “big surprise” of his own in store that week.

  Few of the other journalists assembled in Pinehurst were snoozing. Most were digging for exclusives.

  A reporter for The Buffalo Times had a story outlining what was at stake financially in the continuing investigation and what seemed sure to be a looming legal contest over Elva’s fortune. E.M. Statler, he wrote, had established trust funds of $1 million each for his four adopted children in 1920, and there had already been litigation over the trust funds for two years.

  The reporter recounted:

  On Jan. 2, the day before Miss Statler, 22, married Mr. Davidson, a Supreme Court decision in Erie County, N.Y., ruled that she was entitled to $550,000 accrued interest from her trust with the provision that she establish two trust funds, one giving her full liberties to will and the other to follow the provisions of the other Statler trusts. Each fund was to be $275,000. On Feb. 14, securities for the total amount were forwarded from the Marine Trust Co. in Buffalo to a bank in Boston, where Ms. Davidson receipted for them.