Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  That possibility, too, must remain a tantalizing mystery almost to the end.

  CHAPTER 17

  Shrouded in Verdure and Mystery

  Anyone setting out to reconstruct the Elva Statler Davidson story and recapture its ambience encounters some baffling obstacles. But there is also one big advantage: most of the physical structures involved—the sets on which the sensational drama was played out so long ago—are still there, if sometimes put to different modern uses.

  Elva’s rental house, the garage in which her lifeless body was found, the hospital to which it was rushed, the cramped building in which the inquest took place, the stone courthouse where the caveat trial was held the next year—all remain in existence, though finding and gaining access to some of them can take a while for the uninitiated.

  Back in the thirties, the house that Elva Statler leased on Linden Road, like other Pinehurst dwellings, had a name instead of a street number. One reason for that is that there was no home mail delivery—as there isn’t to this day in the heart of the village. Press clippings about the Davidson case identify it only as Edgewood Cottage, leaving the location of it and other quaintly named dwellings a mystery unless one knows to go to the Tufts Archives and consult the Cottage File, a special cabinet containing alphabetical index cards on all of Pinehurst’s old homes. (In Pinehurst, a “cottage” can be quite impressive in size and cost.)

  Elva rented this house, located on Linden Road in Pinehurst and known as Edgewood Cottage. Her body was found in a garage behind the neighboring house, known as the Pines. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  Located in a quiet residential neighborhood a few blocks west of the village center, the Edgewood property of today—whose current owner was unaware of its dark history and had to be filled in—is so heavily wooded that a passing motorist can’t make out much of the building sitting at an angle inside the southeast corner of Linden and McKenzie. It’s a two-story Dutch Colonial house whose wood-shingle siding has been painted a creamy white, and the shutters are dark gray. Inside, the original floor plan appears to be largely intact. The kitchen has been modernized, and what was once butler Birch’s modest quarters now appears to have been converted into a little back porch. Out front, a swimming pool and cabana have been built in place of the old horseshoe drive, displacing the street entrance from McKenzie around to Linden.

  Edgewood Cottage, as the Cottage File divulges, was built in 1917 by one Nils Hersloff, of Orange, New Jersey. He also owned the property adjoining Edgewood to the south, and on it in 1928 he put another “cottage” (this one really a two-story Georgian red-brick mansion) called the Pines, the last brick home completed in Pinehurst before the Depression hit. Behind it he built a three-car garage with a carriage house. Though a modest garage now stands behind Edgewood Cottage, it wasn’t there at the time Elva leased the place in early 1935. Rather, the Davidsons had standing permission to park Elva’s Packard in the garage behind their neighbor’s house.

  The garage, as viewed casually from the street, remains largely shrouded in verdure and mystery. A contemporary driver passing by the Pines on McKenzie, peering through the jungle of trees and bushes that has grown up over the decades, can catch only a few tantalizing glimpses of the two-story brick outbuilding in the left rear corner of the lot, with its three square white doors and original slate roof.

  In the 1930s, both the Pines and Edgewood were new and their yards were open, and one could hardly tell where the boundary between the two lots ran. Though Edgewood residents still had to drive out onto McKenzie Road, turn left and then pull into the driveway of the Pines and drive to the back to access the garage, it was possible at that time to walk freely between cottage and garage. No more. Someone has long since put up a wire fence on the property line, and a thicket of bamboo and other foliage has grown up along the garage side. This has created a virtually impregnable DMZ between the two properties.

  Upon gaining permission to enter the garage from its current owners—who also had to be brought up to date on its history—one feels a little of the kind of anticipation that archaeologist Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon must have experienced on November 4, 1922, when they first lifted their carbide lamps and beheld the long-secret tomb chamber of King Tut. While various owners have made significant alterations over the decades (someone in the modern era has partitioned off the leftmost bay with cheap paneling), this is unmistakably the garage discussed at such length in the inquest testimony. Those segmented, white wooden doors are the originals—though now, instead of lifting them thirty-six inches by hand and letting springs take over, you push the button on a handheld electric opener and watch one of them go haltingly chugging up.

  There, in the dark far-left corner, is the very faucet that Birch headed for on that seemingly routine morning, intent on giving the Packard a light washing, only to stop in his tracks when he encountered choking exhaust fumes and saw a small, slippered foot sticking out from under the driver’s door. A few feet to the right, nearer the middle of the back wall, is a wooden door leading to what had been a half-bath.

  A visit to the garage can quickly clear up what had long been two nagging mysteries.

  The first involves what was once another interior wooden door in the right rear corner. That door, which formerly led to a little entryway with an exterior door of its own and a narrow staircase winding upstairs, has since been bricked over. Something about a bricked-over door always fires one’s imagination, bringing to mind images out of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” Who had sealed off that passage? When? Why? At one point, overactive imaginations speculated that perhaps Brad had done it to prevent Elva from making her escape from this “death chamber” once he had set a murder plot in motion. The truth, which easily becomes evident upon a little exploration, is considerably less dramatic. At some point, previous owners fixed up the upstairs servants’ quarters and rented the second floor out as an apartment. The door was permanently closed off simply to keep apartment occupants from having access to the garage and its contents as they came and went through the exterior door in back.

  The second mystery concerns the location in which the Packard was sitting when Birch found Elva’s grotesquely cherry-tinged corpse. An Associated Press photograph shows jurors swarming over the car inside the garage a week after the death. One of those eager-beaver shutterbugs covering the inquest snapped the picture in the chilly late afternoon of Wednesday, March 6, 1935. “H. Bradley Davidson (extreme right) was a spectator when the coroner’s jury probing his wife’s death inspected the garage at their home in Pinehurst, N.C., in which her body was found,” reads the caption. “The auto in which she was found is shown.” At least part of it is. The photographer, standing to the right front of the Packard, aimed his Speed Graphic at an angle across the car’s long hood, with the low, flat windshield at the left of the frame. All six curious jurors are at least partially visible as they cluster around the door. Slender, physically fit Brad Davidson, with his dark, receding hair immaculately slicked back and a white handkerchief intricately folded in the left breast pocket of his suit coat, stands apart and looks on with his “pained expression.”

  The men in the flash picture are all crammed so closely into the narrow space on the driver’s side of the car that you can see their shadows on the blank white wall directly behind them. But which wall? One might logically assume that the car had been driven front-wise into the garage and parked against the left (north) wall, the one nearest Edgewood Cottage. But there was always the possibility that the Packard had been backed into the rightmost bay and parked against the south wall. In either case, there would be a wall to the car’s left. Though a window and bare overhead light bulb are visible in the picture, there are (or were) windows and light fixtures on both sides.

  A visitor to the current garage can solve that minor puzzle by standing at various angles and comparing the newspaper photo to the layout of the garage. The position of the overhead track proves that the long, sleek roads
ter was backed in and parked against the right wall, the one farthest from the Edgewood. Of course, it is known that the Packard had been moved at least once since Elva’s death—to take her body to the hospital. So there is always a chance that it had been returned to a different position for the jury’s visit a week later, but that seems unlikely.

  The location of the Community House, in which the Davidson inquest took place, became a matter of unnecessary confusion for a time at the beginning of the current revival of interest in the Elva case. One theory had it that the low, nondescript, almost rustic building in the picture, with its shed roof held up in front by four widely spaced white posts, had been torn down years ago. Another placed it in Carthage, the Moore County seat. Yet another held that the building had been remodeled into a thrift shop that still stands just east of the old firehouse on Community Road in Pinehurst. But that two-story, gabled structure looks so different that it just didn’t compute.

  For the answer, as it turned out, one had only to look at the squat building on the other side of the firehouse, the west side. Quite small and nondescript and partially obscured by a wooden fence, it is easily overlooked. Yet a glance shows it to be unquestionably the one in the picture: white posts, low shed roof, long porch.

  The building still looks remarkably the same, though conventional asphalt shingles have replaced the tin roof and buff-colored vinyl has gone up over the old white wooden siding. The original bare hardwood floor is still there—the very boards upon which the drama that those out-of-state journalists were covering in 1935 played itself out. The Community House looked brand-new when the picture was taken, having been remodeled in 1934 under a New Deal project. It originally housed all local governmental functions. One reason nobody knew it was there was that nobody had called it the Community House for years, referring to it instead as “the Little Club.” It now stands vacant most of the time, except for weekly Boy Scout meetings.

  As for the building that once constituted the entirety of Moore County Hospital, to which Elva was rushed in her Packard roadster, it is now a modest two-story gabled affair totally swallowed up on all sides by the larger, more modern structures that make up the sprawling campus of Moore Regional Hospital, home base of a multi-county health conglomerate known as FirstHealth of the Carolinas.

  Of the key venues in the story, only Montesanti’s Spaghetti Camp has long since vanished. The property is now part of the Lawn and Tennis Club of North Carolina, a posh gated community, and there’s a swimming pool where once stood the rustic wooden lodge in which key players partied to accordion tunes in the wee hours of that ill-fated morning.

  The ultimate fate of the Packard itself is unknown. But there are hints, intriguing though sketchy, of what happened to it in the years after Elva’s death. Among the documents in the Moore County courthouse basement is a bill from a New York garage, dunning Brad Davidson for work done on his late wife’s 1934 Packard. The bill specified repairs carried out on a damaged headlight, fender, door, mirror and mud flap—all on the left side—and for a Simoniz wax job. The bill was dated July 25, 1935, six months after Elva died.

  So how did the car get banged up? The answer, surprisingly, can be found in an obscure vanity press book called I’m Fifty—So What? It was written by none other than the late Edna Foote Campaigne, who had been a houseguest in Edgewood Cottage on that February morning when Pearl the maid came pounding on their door with the news that “something has happened to Mrs. Davidson in the garage.” The lanky and gracious Edna, known to friends as “Ted” or “Teddi,” spent her last years on Long Island with her husband, Curtis, known as “Camp.” They had lived in New Jersey in 1935. Her book marking her first half-century amounts to a long and disjointed birthday letter to family members. But buried deep under all this dross is a bit of gold.

  Elva Statler Davidson’s body was found slumped half in and half out of this 1934 Packard roadster on the morning of February 27, 1935.

  “There is one incident that should be recorded here,” Edna wrote. “Camp and I returned from a hideous two weeks in Pinehurst after Elva’s death and had to go to New York on a business party. It was late when we started home, and we were very tired. As we were going down Seventh Avenue, Camp was driving over the white line. ‘For goodness sakes,’ I said, ‘don’t get arrested at this time in the morning. I’ve had all the publicity I want!’”

  Teddi wrote that it had been “one of the hottest days of the year” and she was afraid that her husband was falling asleep at the wheel. He told her to close her eyes and stop worrying. She complied, only to wake up in a meadow beside the road. Camp, it seems, had strayed across the centerline again and sideswiped a bus, causing extensive damage to the left side of the car. He also had apparently fled the scene of the accident. “You told me not to get arrested,” he reminded her.

  Teddi’s book later mentioned that Camp had presented her with the bill for the repairs to the car—including, as she noted, a charge for Simonizing. The conclusion is inescapable: that was Elva’s Packard the Campaignes were driving. Brad must have prevailed upon them to drive it back home right after the inquest. They damaged it, and Elva’s estate paid the bill. Brad later sold the car to a New York dealer.

  There is one more episode before the story of the Packard fades to black.

  Googling of the Packard Club turned up a member named James Pearsall—who, as it turned out, had also become intrigued by Elva’s case in past years and had done a little sleuthing of his own. “Her Packard was a 12-cylinder,” he said. “The VIN number began with the digits 1-3. Unlucky 13.” Pearsall, in turn, pointed the way to an elderly man who had once briefly owned the roadster himself. The man agreed to talk, but only anonymously. Call him Jack.

  When Jack was a young boy in late 1935, he was sitting on the curb in a rural West Virginia town when “the prettiest car in the world” sped by. He fell in love with it. And when he gave voice to his infatuation, the owner offered to pay him to keep it washed and waxed. That was the year Elva died, and the man had just purchased the Packard from the dealer who bought it from Brad.

  The relationship between boy and man continued until Jack had grown up, at which point he became the owner’s chauffeur. But when the old man died, things got complicated for Jack. First he had to endure several years of watching the Packard sit out in the weather, neglected and decaying. Then one day the dead man’s widow came to see Jack. She was terminally ill herself, she said. Would he like to have the car, since he had always loved it so much?

  Jack’s dream seemed to have come true. He got the old roadster cranked up, drove it home and began lovingly restoring it. Alas, though, the dying woman had forgotten to transfer the car’s title to Jack. Soon her children, squabbling over the will, took it back and auctioned it off. All these years later, one could still hear the hurt in old Jack’s voice.

  “Nothing good has ever come from that car,” he said. “It’s cursed.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Why Did He Get the Catbird Seat?

  One indication of the obscurity into which the Elva Statler Davidson case fell is that the direct descendants of some of the main players in the drama were entirely clueless about it until recently. Consider, for instance, a friendly retired minister quietly living out his eighties in an assisted-living center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There would appear to be nothing about his life and career that would make him of interest to anyone looking into the story—except his name: Rowland S. Pruette Jr.

  The name Elva Statler Davidson meant nothing to him when he was first contacted. But this aged man’s confirmation that his father had worked as a solicitor in the North Carolina court system made it certain that he was the one who had been called in by the governor to preside over the coroner’s inquest in 1935. Although Pruette Jr. remembered nothing about the Davidson case (“I would have been a teenager then”), he was more than willing to talk about his father, whom he and his three siblings admired greatly.

  The no-longer-so-junior P
ruette said of his dad:

  He was a little bit rotund. He was an amiable, loving father in the family. He was very conscientious about his job. He was on the road a lot—going to court in different counties around his district. I remember he was always going to Carthage, to Albemarle, to Laurinburg—places like that. And sometimes my mother liked to go with him. She especially liked to go to Carthage. She said they had good food at the hotel there.

  I only remember one thing about a case he had—a private case, I think, just before he became solicitor. He made the biggest fee he’d ever made, and the family bought a new Buick car. It was the kind of car that they called a “pregnant Buick” because it was puffed out on both sides. And mother bought a fur coat. That would have been not long before the time we’re talking about.

  The elder Pruette had a confident, assertive manner, according to his son—whether in the courtroom or at the dinner table. “I can still hear him talking,” he said. “He had a pretty strong voice. He could be pretty emphatic in what he had to say.”

  One question had to be asked, given all those references Solicitor Pruette had made to hole cards and such: did his father happen to like playing poker?

  “Oh, did he ever!” his son said with a little chuckle.

  It seems that Rowland S. Pruette Sr. liked to play poker so much that when he and three other students at Wake Forest College had been caught red-handed with cards and money on the table in front of them early in the century, all four had been suspended for a semester. Their class at Wake Forest, a Southern Baptist institution, was scandalized. Rather than go home and face the wrath of his father, a Baptist minister, young Rowland went to Raleigh and spent the rest of the semester in a rented room, keeping the suspension a secret and finally graduating a year late in 1913. He took a certain pride in the episode as an adult and even taught his three children to play poker.