by Steve Bouser
The newsmen scrambled to report it. Eddie Folliard scribbled out a bulletin and sent it winging by telegraph to Washington, where rewrite men waiting at The Post hastened to turn it into typed copy, which they then sent by pneumatic tube down to the smoky bowels of the composing room:
Pinehurst, N.C. March 7.—The death of Elva Statler Davidson, 22-year-old heiress and bride of two months, remained an official mystery tonight after a baffled coroner’s jury had rendered what is known in North Carolina as an open verdict. It found that the young woman, wife of H. Bradley Davidson, Jr., of Washington, had come to her death by “carbon monoxide poisoning under circumstances unknown to this jury.”
CHAPTER 11
His Thin Face Smilelessly Imperturbable
Circumstances unknown.
The inquest jurors, “confronted by a set of bewildering circumstances and conflicting stories,” had simply agreed in the end that they couldn’t agree on what had happened to Elva Statler Davidson. They were back to the verdict that they had been prepared to deliver a week earlier, before Solicitor Pruette had suspended the inquest and jacked it up to the level of a trial and put everybody through so much.
Though it seems clear that the jurors didn’t know what to make of Herb Vail’s last-minute story of suicidal urges on the victim’s part, he might have succeeded in sowing enough doubt to forestall a conclusion of murder.
Where was H. Bradley Davidson when the jury brought its verdict? Oddly, newspaper reports differ on that fundamental question.
One paper writes that Davidson, “his tanned, thin face smilelessly imperturbable, sat in a rear row when the jury returned to the tense, packed Community House,” and that “without comment, he walked from the emergency court room when the verdict was announced.” Eddie Folliard paints an entirely different picture: “Davidson was not in the makeshift courtroom when the jury filed back…He was seated outside in his automobile, and the news was carried to him by his brother, Richard Davidson, who was in attendance with his wife, the former Betty Hanna.”
Wherever Brad was, it is clear that he betrayed no emotion upon hearing the news. And when reporters later crowded around him, he would say only: “I have no comment to make.”
Things wrapped up with blinding speed once the jury had spoken.
Sheriff McDonald made it clear that he still considered the case open. “I’m going right ahead to continue the investigation,” he told reporters. “If we find further evidence which warrants the arrest of anyone, that person will be arrested, and the case immediately sent to the grand jury.”
The sheriff made clear that he would be “assisted” in that investigation by private gumshoes employed by the Statler estate.
“He will cooperate with L.P. Whitfield, of Atlanta, district manager of the Burns Detective Agency, who has been here at the behest of Buffalo attorneys representing the Statler family,” Folliard wrote. “Whitfield said tonight that he would remain in Pinehurst until the conflicting circumstances and the aura of mystery had been cleared. Whitfield was joined today by ‘Buck’ Healy, Burns representative from Buffalo, famous character of northern New York.” Disappointingly, there would be no more word of this “famous character,” Mr. Healy.
As for Solicitor Rowland S. Pruette, he was out of there. All of a sudden he couldn’t wait to get back to his wife and four kids—back to his real town and away from this unreal town with its unreal people and their insoluble mystery.
“So far as I am concerned, any further action is up to the grand jury,” Pruette told reporters as he hurriedly packed up his briefcase. “The grand jury has a regular term in May, but they can meet in special session any time they want to. I am leaving for my home in Wadesboro immediately.”
The grand jury never reopened the case.
“Davidson case ends,” a weary Hemmie Tufts wrote in her diary on March 7, 1935. “Verdict death by CO2 [she meant CO], cause unknown. Thanks be that’s over. Let there be light.”
A great many people in Pinehurst, especially Hemmie’s father-in-law, Leonard Tufts, shared her thankfulness at seeing the inquest over and its damaging publicity ended—even on such ambiguous and inconclusive terms, which would lead to years of lingering gossip and conspiracy theories.
At the time of the Davidson story, The Pilot of Southern Pines was a weekly coming out on Fridays. So it was able to publish a fairly complete account of Thursday’s climax on March 8, though it had nothing that the bigger papers didn’t. The competing Moore County News, based in Carthage, had the misfortune to publish on Thursdays. So it had to wait a whole week until March 14 before coming out with its story, which by then was old news.
The News did offer its readers its own exclusive interview of sorts, with an anonymous woman who claimed to be an “intimate friend” of the Davidsons. They were visiting her at her home in New York not long after their January 3 wedding, she confided, when Elva announced that she had to go to Boston alone on business. That was when Elva made out her will, leaving more than a half million dollars to her husband, the source said—and she did it without his knowledge.
“Mrs. Davidson, I know, was devoted to her husband,” the source told the editor, “and it was perfectly natural for her to make a will in his favor.”
Though the mystery woman remained unidentified, she must have been none other than Minnie Vail—still working with her husband to help Brad Davidson put the best face on the messy affair, still trying to remove that “shadow of ugly suspicion.” The New York connection fits, since the Vails had a second home on Long Island. And Minnie had already demonstrated a propensity for approaching journalists with her own particular pro-Brad spin.
The groundwork was already being laid for the next ugly court confrontation in the Davidson case: an all-out challenge by Statler family interests aimed at keeping Elva’s will from being executed as written. But that wouldn’t reach its climax for another year.
As of March 14, 1935, all the big-city boys had long since packed up and departed to pursue other sensational stories in distant places. And things in Pinehurst were already getting back into their former carefree swing.
The News reported:
While several mysterious circumstances in connection with the death of Mrs. Davidson remain to be cleared up, it is believed locally that the verdict of the coroner’s jury, which found that she came to her death from monoxide poisoning from causes unknown, has written “finis” to the case…In the meantime, millionaires and their servants, who listened attentively for developments and attended the inquest last week, shelved discussion of the case for the time being. Golf and bridge and the recreations making up the normal routine of the resort town are again the order of the day…
In its 40-year history, Pinehurst never has had a major mystery to compare with the Davidson case, which brought attorneys, private detectives, Moore County officers, newspaper men and news photographers to investigate and report. The jurors who returned the verdict were a livery stable operator, a waiter, a butcher, a chauffeur, a golf professional and a butler, and they had also resumed their normal activities and showed a reluctance to discuss the case.
As the paper was being put to bed, an adjacent column by the editor noted that it was “raining dogs and cats.”
In much of New York State, by contrast, that week brought a late-winter snowfall. The first random flakes that came to rest on a swollen rectangle of fresh black earth on a sloping hillside in Kensico Cemetery seemed to accentuate the contrast between it and the surrounding grass.
But the more briskly the flakes fell, the faster Elva Statler Davidson’s grave—Plot 6, Circle 1320.25, Section 3A-2, Area 56—waned from view. Soon, its secrets locked away, it became indistinguishable from the rest of the silent snowscape that faded on all sides to the palest white.
CHAPTER 12
Nobody Dies in Pinehurst
It is hardly an exaggeration to call the Davidson case the Scott Peterson or O.J. Simpson trial of its day. It may not have held the nation’s at
tention for as long, but for a week or two the Davidson saga bumped the ultra-sensational Charles Lindbergh case off the nation’s front pages. Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s trial in the abduction and murder of the superstar aviator’s baby had ended with a guilty verdict and a death sentence on February 13, only two weeks before Elva’s death.
Yet after flaring up so brightly but briefly with the coroner’s inquest in 1935, and again even more briefly in 1936, when her family challenged her will, the Elva case was destined to sink to the pitch-black bottom of the ocean without a ripple, forgotten by all but a few old-timers and local history buffs. It would languish there in silence like the wreck of the Titanic, accumulating undisturbed layers of silt for two-thirds of a century.
It is perhaps easier for us to put the Davidson case in historical perspective than it was for all those savvy, sharply dressed out-of town journalists jostling and joshing one another while getting Moore County sand on their well-shined wingtips in March 1935. Larry (Nuts) Byrd and A.E. Scott and the others who posed for that now-faded photograph knew they were down here to cover a good story before moving on to cover another one somewhere else. What they couldn’t have known was that a far bigger story was breaking all around them—one that they were part of, though it was too close for most of them to see: America was transforming itself. An old era was dying. And another age was in the painful throes of being born.
In 1935, the unemployment rate hit 25 percent and the country bottomed out in the Great Depression. It was the year that stood exactly halfway between the stock market crash and Pearl Harbor. Exactly halfway between the Wright brothers and Apollo. For that matter, exactly halfway between the beginning of the Civil War and today.
For Pinehurst itself, that little elite northern outpost struggling to stay alive in the middle of the South, 1935 marked another kind of midpoint. It came forty years after idealistic Yankee millionaire James Walker Tufts selected a spot on a sandy, logged-over rise and drove a wooden stake to mark the center of the ambitious village that at that point existed only in his fertile brain—and nearly forty years before the Tufts family would make the mistake of selling the place lock, stock and barrel to a company called Diamondhead, which would proceed to despoil and exploit it and all but run it into the ground before it could be repurchased, rescued and restored.
The year 1935 was when Adolf Hitler built up his navy and made other great and ominous strides toward bringing his dark vision to fruition. It was the year when Louisiana’s demagogic Governor Huey Long was assassinated; when Congress passed the Social Security Act; when Richard Byrd returned from his two-year expedition to Antarctica; when the Dionne quintuplets went on tour; when George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess premiered on Broadway; when Mutiny on the Bounty won the best-picture Oscar; when Parker Brothers introduced the game of Monopoly.
More important to this story, the year 1935 came at a time when fast-evolving changes in the public’s demand for news happened to intersect with technological leaps that made it easier for the media of the day to meet that demand. Not only had the radio networks entered a golden age of Walter Winchell and Jack Benny and Fibber McGee, but newspapers were also leaping forward in better-quality reproduction and high-speed printing. It had been only two years since the Associated Press stopped sending stories out to papers on its “A Wire” by Morse code over old-fashioned telegraph keys and started transmitting them instead to newfangled Teletype machines that clunked along at the then-blinding rate of sixty words a minute.
And only at the beginning of that very year, 1935, had AP introduced the revolutionary Wirephoto machine, which, with its rotating helix rubbing rhythmically against a roll of damp paper, made it possible to get black-and-white pictures into far-flung editors’ hands in minutes over telephone lines instead of taking days to send them by mail. They would make good use of this brand-new, cutting-edge advance in disseminating some of the photos being shot in Pinehurst.
As 1935 dawned, a Depression-weary and anxiety-ridden American public hungered for the thrill and sense of momentary escape to be found in stories of ritzy affluence, crime among the upper crust, celebrity sin, unexplained deaths and dramatic court proceedings. They wanted them in real time. If it happened yesterday, they wanted it this morning. Or in the case of the still-thriving p.m. dailies, if it happened this morning, they wanted it this afternoon. And the media stood newly empowered to travel to even remote places and satisfy that appetite with previously unimagined dispatch.
One can almost picture editors casting about for a good, out-of-the-way proving ground in which to test out and show off their new technology—in rather the same way that Germany would test out advanced new weapons systems by allying itself with the fascist rebels in the Spanish Civil War, which was to start the following year. What the media needed was a good, juicy scandal story somewhere in the boonies—one they could bring directly to their readers as it unfolded day by day. One with love, sex and betrayal and money, death and mystery.
If the Elva Statler Davidson case hadn’t come along, someone would have had to invent it.
Normally laidback and fun-loving Moore County had never seen anything remotely like the Davidson inquiry, not to mention the media circus surrounding it. “Direct wires were run into the old Pinehurst Community House, over which the testimony was sent to press headquarters as rapidly as it was given,” wrote The Pilot, a publication more accustomed to covering hospital balls and county commissioner meetings. “Specially chartered airplanes carried photographs from the witness stand to distributing points in Atlanta and New York each day.”
Shortly before his death in 2006, Joe Montesanti Jr. still vividly remembered the frenzy of excitement surrounding the inquest seventy years earlier. He told of playing hooky and hanging around the back of the Community House on his bicycle, available to rush various dispatches to the telegraph offices as needed. “They wouldn’t allow us in,” recalled the eighty-six-year-old Montesanti, a descendant of the family who ran the spaghetti restaurant in which Elva ate her last supper. “When they had something on the case that they wanted to telegraph—the reporters and the lawyers and the others—why, they’d hand it out the back window. And I’d get on my bike and take it up either to the Western Union or the Postal Telegraph, I can’t remember which. And I can’t remember how much they paid me. A dime, maybe.”
The Moore County News, chief competitor of The Pilot in the 1930s, wrote:
Acting Coroner Hugh Kelly, as well as others connected with the investigation into the strange death of Mrs. Davidson, has been besieged with long-distance calls and requests for interviews by big-city papers the length and breadth of the land. The prominence and wealth of the young woman, to say nothing of her athletic record, made her unfortunate death “big news,” especially for the papers located in cities where Statler hotels are operated. The case also had the elements of mystery calculated to catch the popular fancy, the people clamoring for details and the press struggling to supply them.
Despite their local contacts and the many insights they must have had into the lives of key players in the drama, neither local paper seems to have nailed down any significant exclusives on the substance of the story. They spent most of their time ogling all the comings and goings of the big-city guys and second-guessing them on minor details—if not engaging in downright plagiarizing of the metro dailies’ stories.
At one point, an anonymous writer for The News, presumably female, saw fit to chide the male investigators and reporters in print for their ignorance in the matter of feminine footwear. “The feet of Elva Statler Davidson…were not clad in ‘mules,’ Solicitor Rowland Shaw Pruette and The Associated Press to the contrary,” she lectured. “‘Mules,’ in case you do not know, are simply bedroom or boudoir slippers, but, admitting that it sounds less intriguing, Mrs. Davidson wore a pair of plain suede slippers.” The metro guys presumably stood duly corrected.
The reporter for The News did score one macabre little scoop on her fast-lane brethr
en—and it also had to do with women’s attire. Acting Coroner Kelly, she wrote, had received “quite a jolt” on the Sunday after the death when a big-city journalist asked about the whereabouts of the garments the dead girl had been wearing. Safeguarding of evidence not being what it is now, Kelly drew a blank. He knew at once that he was in trouble.
“He leaped into a car,” wrote the reporter, who knew a good sidebar story when she saw it, “and hurried to the Southern Pines undertaking establishment where the body had been prepared for burial, and where the clothing had last been seen by him. An attendant, in response to his frantic request, rustled up the shoes and sweater for him, and then went to get the skirt, which had been hung on a clothesline outside. To the consternation of all concerned, the skirt was not to be found.”
By this time, Kelly was beside himself. The item of clothing would surely be called for during the inquest that was then about to resume, especially since certain troubling questions had been raised about the apparel. And what would he say? One can almost hear him standing there outside the funeral parlor and yelling at the hapless young attendant: “What do you mean you don’t know where the damned thing is?”
Then luck intervened—in the person of a fireman who happened to be working outside the nearby Southern Pines firehouse and heard the commotion.
“What are you looking for?” he shouted.
“A woman’s skirt,” Kelly replied.
“I have it,” the fireman yelled back.
The acting coroner and the young mortician-in-training looked at each other with grins of disbelief. Asking them not to go anywhere (he needn’t have worried), the fireman then went inside, retrieved the carefully folded piece of clothing and soon had it back in Kelly’s eternally grateful hands.
