Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  “No.”

  “What did you do then?” Pruette asked.

  “Mr. Davidson and I ran out to the garage,” Campaigne said.

  “You saw Mrs. Davidson’s body?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you and Mr. Davidson do then?”

  “He started to pick her up, and I told him not to.”

  “You told him not to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had read or recalled being told that it was better not to pick up a body if there was a chance of murder.”

  Pruette’s eyebrow shot up again. “Of murder?”

  “Yes.”

  Pruette was back on his feet. “How did he react?”

  “He said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ And he put his hands on her head.”

  In proceedings of this sort, jury members enjoyed the prerogative of asking questions themselves. One of them chimed in at this point. “Did Davidson hold her on his lap?” he asked. “On the running board?”

  “He sort of held her head,” Campaigne replied, re-creating the position as best he could, “and supported her with his arm when the doctor arrived.”

  Pruette took over again. “Did you detect any gas or smoke in the garage?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “None?”

  “None at all.”

  “Did you think Mrs. Davidson was dead at that point?”

  “I didn’t think she was dead.”

  The solicitor’s debating skills kicked in. “Yet you told Davidson not to pick her up?” he asked, “because ‘it might be murder’? How could it be murder if the person was not dead?”

  Campaigne shifted his weight in the chair and backpedaled a bit. “I didn’t know whether she was or not,” he lamely replied.

  Edna Foote Campaigne, a tall, lanky and gracious brunette known to friends and family as “Ted,” was next. Dressed in a fashionable suit with a wide-collared white silk blouse and a small boutonniere in her lapel, she testified only briefly, corroborating much of her husband’s testimony about the bridge game, the highballs, the after-dinner conversion and the trip to the charity ball.

  Pruette once again wanted to know whether everyone at the party was drunk, and she replied: “None of the guests at the country club were under the influence of whiskey that I recall—that is, at our table.”

  Pruette began to ask another question, but Edna Campaigne startled him and the audience by interrupting and launching into a little announcement.

  “I’d like at this time to say something which no one heard but myself,” she said. “Mrs. Davidson was sitting next to me at the party at Montesanti’s. The man who played the accordion played three pieces in succession—one, two, three. When he finished, Elva said, ‘Play that second tune again.’ He wanted to play something a little livelier, but she insisted. And when the piece was over, she was sitting there almost in tears. She said, ‘That was my father’s favorite tune.’”

  In her short time in the rocking chair, Edna Campaigne offered one other compelling detail: her useful description of the ever-puzzling position in which Elva’s body was found. “If you were stepping out of a car backward and suddenly fainted,” she said, straining to convey a mental image, “that would be the position her body was in.”

  The last two witnesses of the day, Herb and Minnie Vail, of Glen Cove, Long Island and Pinehurst, testified even more briefly than Edna Campaigne. In their mid-thirties, Herbert and Minnie fell at the midpoint between Brad and Elva in age.

  Herb Vail ran through the events of the party night without adding anything particularly new.

  “Was Mrs. Davidson despondent at the spaghetti camp?” Pruette asked him.

  “I wouldn’t say she was exactly crying,” Vail said, “but she was sad and melancholy.”

  “You knew her quite well before her marriage. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I ask you if her demeanor did not change. Didn’t she appear more depressed after her marriage?”

  Vail was not about to go along with that. “No,” he replied firmly. “I saw no change.”

  In response to another question from Pruette, Vail acknowledged that he had played golf with Davidson on Sunday in Pinehurst, the day after Elva’s burial in New York. He did not sound apologetic about it.

  Minnie Vail, described as “an attractive blonde young matron,” wore a sport suit over a red sweater. She brought up the rear by reinforcing her husband’s testimony. “I saw the Davidsons at the country club, and I saw them dancing together more than once,” she said. “Later, at the spaghetti camp, she was sad and leaned over and said, ‘Nobody loves me.’”

  “Was she crying?” Pruette asked.

  “She wept,” Minnie replied. “But I had often seen her as despondent as she was then.”

  Minnie Vail said that she, like Pearl Watson, had gone up to Elva’s room on the day of the death. Her description of what she saw there largely squared with the maid’s: the beds were messed up, and there was clothing dropped here and there.

  But she injected one small and intriguing difference into her spin on what she had seen. Pearl Watson, it will be recalled, had testified in the morning that she had found Elva’s wrinkled nightgown over the back of a chair and that “it looked like it had been slept in.” But Minnie Vail, for whatever reason, saw the wrinkled condition of the nightgown as indicating that “she might have tried to sleep and been unsuccessful.”

  Leaving some to wonder: how much can you read into a wrinkled nightgown?

  It had been a long session, and the reporters hurried out to write and file their stories. But a note of letdown and dissatisfaction ran through them. The mystery had only deepened. What was going on? Was this all there was? Had poker player Rowland Pruette overplayed his hand? Was he bluffing?

  “Pruette, who has expressed strong suspicion that murder was committed, said he had ‘a hole card that I am going to play at the inquest,’” wrote The Post’s Eddie Folliard. “He did not play it today. No testimony was obtained from any witness that pointed to murder, and most of the evidence seemed to support the theories of accidental death or suicide.”

  Those stretching their legs and leaving the Community House and lighting up smokes outside were left wondering: If, as had been broadly hinted, H. Bradley Davidson had committed “a strange and scientific murder” by administering a “subtle poison” to his wife and trying to pass its effects off as those of carbon monoxide, then why would he have gone out of his way to testify that he noticed no trace of gas or smoke inside the garage? Or if it was in Davidson’s interest to have it thought that his wife’s death had been a suicide and not a homicide, why in the world would he have made a point of contradicting others by saying that “she was not especially unhappy that night”?

  The inquest was to resume the next morning, Wednesday, and it was expected to run another couple of days. And one of the early witnesses, supposedly, was Dr. C.C. Carpenter, pathologist from the Wake Forest Medical School, who had performed the autopsy and been hard at work since on chemical analyses of the vital organs. Maybe he would have some startling findings.

  Meanwhile, Solicitor Pruette remained unflappable. “I’ll show the hole card,” he said, “after I’ve shown the other four.”

  Some were beginning to wonder if he even had one.

  CHAPTER 8

  No Other Foreign Matter

  Solicitor Rowland Pruette got the bad news on the evening after the first day’s testimony: Tuesday, March 5, 1935. Or the next morning at the latest.

  Dr. C.C. Carpenter had left the pathology lab at Duke University and driven to Pinehurst, though failing to get there in time to head off Pruette’s overconfident repetition of his “hole card” boast as he debriefed reporters. The news the doctor brought was the last thing Pruette wanted to hear. He would have to rethink Wednesday’s game plan, and in a hurry. He would have to take another look at his other four cards and salvage some strategy fo
r possibly snatching victory from defeat—or at least managing a stalemate. It wouldn’t be easy. It might be impossible. The fates were about to call the poker player’s bluff.

  Dr. Carpenter had offered Pruette tantalizing semi-assurances that traces of some sinister substance had been found or would be found in the blood and tissue samples taken from Elva Statler Davidson’s autopsy-desecrated body. But in the end, despite all their sophisticated tests, he and his colleagues from Duke had come up empty-handed.

  That fact wouldn’t become known to the spectators in the courtroom until the inquest’s last Thursday morning session. But an anonymous Associated Press reporter would find out about it on Wednesday night—suddenly making it clear to him why that second day’s testimony had seemed so anticlimactic, unfocused, repetitive and lacking in anything resembling a blockbuster revelation. Pruette, as the reporter suddenly understood, had simply been stalling for time on that all-important second day. His star witness had pulled the rug out from under him.

  “Pruette produced a string of witnesses,” the AP reporter wrote, “but failed to uncover the ‘hole card’ he’d promised to support his theory [of murder]. An authoritative source revealed tonight that Duke University and Wake Forest College experts had reported finding evidence of sufficient carbon monoxide in the body to cause death, and some alcohol, but not enough to produce intoxication. This source said the tests of the experts failed to show evidence of any other foreign matter.”

  That “authoritative source”—the wire service writer’s Deep Throat—had to be none other than Dr. Carpenter himself. Hanging around Pinehurst while waiting to testify, he had had a snort or two and blabbed to the casually inquisitive reporter—but only on the condition that his name be kept out of it.

  “No other foreign matter.” Now that his hole card was off the table, Pruette had to shift gears hurriedly and take another approach. Having thought it over and consulted with the others on the prosecution team, he came up with about the best possible strategy under the circumstances: he would fall back on a simple process of elimination.

  “Few persons here think that Mrs. Davidson was murdered,” The Washington Post’s Folliard wrote on that day. “At the same time, they find it difficult to believe that she would have committed suicide or that her death could have been an accident.” Barring supernatural intervention, though, Pruette was certain that Elva’s death had to have resulted from one of those three possible causes: (1) accident, (2) suicide or (3) murder. (There was no talk of natural causes.) At the risk of replowing some old ground and losing momentum, the solicitor would do all he could to demolish 1 and 2, leaving the jury no choice but to settle on 3 as the most likely. In pursuing that goal, he would have to lean even more heavily on motive and opportunity, since his best bet in the means department had been taken from him.

  It would be a difficult strategy, relying too heavily for comfort on circumstantial evidence and conjecture. But at least the solicitor had one big legal reality on his side: this was not a murder trial, requiring him to convince the jury beyond a shadow of a doubt. It was a coroner’s inquest, in which the members had only to be guided by what seemed to be a preponderance of evidence. If they thought the case looked more like murder than anything else, they could so decide. If they did, there would still have to be the filing of charges and a whole new trial with different rules of evidence.

  Folliard, though unaware of the AP’s coming scoop about the pathology findings, would instinctively begin to understand Pruette’s strategy as he saw it unfolding on Wednesday. He wrote: “Solicitor Roland [sic] Pruette, who indicated at the outset his belief that Mrs. Davidson was murdered, set to work at the outset this afternoon to explode the suicide and accident theories.”

  Pruette would attempt to make an accident seem unlikely by dwelling on Elva’s youth and superb physical fitness and on the ease with which the doors of the garage opened, making it all but impossible for her to have become trapped inside. He would pour cold water on the suicide scenario by casting sufficient doubt on stories that she had been despondent enough to do herself in—though impressions on that were a mixed bag at best. And he would steer the jurors toward a homicide finding by reminding them of all that Brad Davidson had to gain financially from Elva’s death, by hinting at ways other than poison that the death could have been intentionally produced—and by painting a picture of a newlywed relationship so stormy and quarrelsome that it resulted in bruising to the bride.

  Pruette could hardly strike Dr. Carpenter’s name from the witness list, but he would save him for Thursday morning’s third and last session. He had already called an array of second- and third-tier witnesses for Wednesday, and he would have to go through with hearing briefly from them, even though their testimony was sure to add up to an inconclusive muddle.

  But as the main order of business on that middle day, he would bring Brad Davidson and Mannie Birch back to the stand and hammer away at both of them on some key points in hopes of tripping them up and bolstering the case for murder. Without his own smoking gun, it was the best he could do.

  Though maintaining an even keel and keeping his emotions to himself had been an important part of his job description, Emanuel Birch was clearly perturbed at having been called back to the wooden rocking chair for yet another bout of testimony at 10:00 a.m. The AP described him as “nervous.” And his mood didn’t improve as his turn on the stand wore on and things began to get unexpectedly confrontational.

  As was his habit, Pruette—said to have been dissatisfied with Birch’s “insufficient testimony” in his first appearance—began by asking a line of relatively innocuous questions.

  “Now, Mr. Birch,” he said, “I believe you told us that you drove uptown to the post office to pick up the mail on the morning of February 27, before you found Mrs. Davidson’s body. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Whose car did you use?”

  “My own car.”

  “Where did you keep it?”

  “In the backyard.”

  “That was near the garage?”

  “No, sir. Not so close.”

  “So you didn’t go near the garage at that point?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Was the garage door locked that morning?” Pruette asked.

  “Oh, no, sir,” Birch replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was able to open it later from the outside.”

  “How does one lock that door?”

  “It has a handle on the inside that locks when you turn it. You have to have a key to open it from the outside.”

  “And who has that key?”

  “I carry it with me.”

  “I see. Were you in the garage on that Tuesday, the day before?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you lock the door then?”

  “No, sir. I left it unlocked.”

  “So anyone could have opened it from the inside.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Without turning the handle.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For that matter, they could have opened it from the outside.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is it easy to open?”

  “Oh, very easy. It has springs. All three of them do.”

  Having stopped at the table, Pruette began leafing through a legal pad, finally pausing at the page he was looking for. He turned back toward the witness.

  “Now, Mr. Birch,” he said, referring to the notes, “Sheriff McDonald has told us that those doors—and I quote—that those doors ‘would drop to the floor if not raised more than twenty-four inches, would remain stationary between twenty-four and thirty-six inches, and would shoot up to the top if raised more than thirty-six inches.’ Is that correct?”

  “Yes sir, I’d say that sounds about right.”

  “So wouldn’t that make it impossible for someone to become trapped inside? Against their will?”

  “I don’t see how they
could. All they would have to do is slide the door up.”

  “And that was easy to do.”

  “Yes, sir. Very easy.”

  Pruette tossed the pad back on the table and sat down.

  “Thank you, Mr. Birch. Now. Do you recall the position in which you found Mrs. Davidson lying last Wednesday morning?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “And haven’t you made the statement that you didn’t believe she could have fallen into that position?”

  “I have.”

  “And how do you think she might have gotten into that position?”

  “It looked to me like she might have crawled into it.”

  It wasn’t exactly what Pruette wanted to hear, but he had to leave the subject at that for now. He stood up again and prowled restlessly for a few seconds, marshalling his thoughts. Then—

  “Mr. Birch, did Mrs. Davidson ever take automobile drives at night?”

  “Yes, she did on occasion.”

  “Can you give us an example?”

  “I remember that she did it just before Christmas one night.”

  “I see,” Pruette said. “And are you aware of any occasions when Mrs. Davidson went for a drive at night since she and Mr. Davidson were married?”

  Birch searched his mind before answering. “No, sir,” he said.

  “None?”

  “No, sir.”

  Pruette then bore in on his main question.

  “Have you ever heard the Davidsons quarrel?” he asked

  “Not to my knowledge,” Birch said. “I never heard them have cross words.”

  “Really? Isn’t it true that you heard them quarrel frequently after their marriage on the third of January? Haven’t you said that?”

  “I don’t believe I have, no, sir.”

  “You haven’t? Didn’t you, in fact, tell a reporter for The Washington Herald that they had often quarreled? Didn’t you say the same thing to some of the other butlers from neighboring houses?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Isn’t it true, in fact, that Mr. and Mrs. Davidson had a quarrel before leaving for the club on that very Tuesday night?”