by Steve Bouser
“But with chips,” his son hastened to add. “Not money.”
The elder Pruette’s story came to a melancholy end. Seven years after the Davidson inquest—in 1942, the darkest year of World War II—he was driving his “pregnant Buick” home from prosecuting another case in another small North Carolina town, Rockingham, when he ran off the highway and down a steep ravine. He was fifty-two.
“A big truck ran him off the road, as near as we could tell,” his son recalled. “He didn’t die immediately. He lived four or five days. In the hospital, he kept saying, ‘Oh, that truck. That truck. That truck.’”
Henry Bradley Davidson IV, a personable dentist who lives with his loving family at the end of an unpaved rural road near Lake Cayuga in upstate New York, managed to live most of his life with no inkling that his grandfather had once achieved national notoriety as a suspected wife murderer. But once Brad IV had learned about the long-cold case, he was surprisingly and cordially willing to talk about this late ancestor with the unknown dark side. His wife, Holly, cheerfully joined in.
Everybody in the family, it seems, called Brad Jr. “Bompa,” presumably an affectionate variation on “Grampa.” Acquaintances outside the family in Cooperstown, New York, where he spent his later years with his third wife, the late Elizabeth Bishop of Philadelphia, usually called him by the more respectful “Colonel Davidson.” That was in deference to the rank of lieutenant colonel that he achieved during his apparently honorable army service in World War II.
“I married into the family after Bompa died,” Holly said. “I could never keep the family straight—there were too many wives! The only picture of Bompa I have, he’s dressed in his army uniform. The Davidson men all had the same nose. Kind of long and sloping. They all hated the name Henry, so we called Bompa’s son—my Brad’s father—‘Dave.’” There were no more Henry Bradley Davidsons coming along, she said—“Brad is the end of the line. Our son is named Gregory.”
In a case like this, a fascinating triangulation can result from examining a man’s life from two entirely different angles and seeing how that stereoscopic view rounds things out.
“Looking at what a calm, placid man my husband is,” Holly said, still trying to get over what they had learned about Bompa’s grim secret, “I can’t imagine him being descended from somebody who could do something like that—if he did.” Brad IV was even more dumbfounded. “What amazes me is that I’ve never heard a word about any of this,” he said. “I remember hearing about a second wife who was supposed to have committed suicide, but we always just thought she had jumped out a window or something.”
Though both Davidsons were floored to learn about the very large skeleton rattling around in their family closet, they listened and responded with acceptance and curiosity—and openly shared a wealth of information in return.
“My father, Brad III, whom we called Dave, never breathed a word about anything like this,” Brad said. “But then, he was a very quiet guy who never shared much about anything. He was in the army in World War II, but he never talked about what happened in the war. He hid a lot of things. Now, my mother was just the opposite. Our family never had much, so Mom was always wanting to move up, and she was intrigued by her father-inlaw, Bompa, and the wealthy life he had led. This thing really would have intrigued her.”
Brad conceded that his father’s silence on the nature of Elva’s death might have been less a matter of not wanting to talk about it than simply not knowing much about it. During the inquest, Dave’s divorced mother, Jessica, had protectively kept all three of her children sequestered in the Retreat, that brooding old mansion on the shores of the Shenandoah River, screening their phone calls and hiding the newspapers.
Attitudes toward lovable old Bompa within the extended Davidson clan were clearly ambivalent at best. The more Brad IV opened up, the more he kept returning to the theme of a relatively poor family and its resentment toward a grandfather who enjoyed wealth that he didn’t deserve and was dismayingly reluctant to share.
In short, Brad Jr. seems to have been an old skinflint. But his grandson emphasized that he was also “an elegant southern gentleman” and that he never sensed any arrogance or rudeness in him. Moore Countians would have to smile at the idea that Brad Jr., who seemed like some kind of predatory Yankee to the folks down in rural North Carolina in the 1930s, looked like a thoroughgoing “southern gentleman” from the direction of New York.
Brad said:
I knew Bompa pretty well when I was a kid. We went up to Cooperstown to his house several times. It was a formal relationship, which seemed to me kind of like a southern relationship—polite and respectful. Oh, he was family, no question about it, but there was not the kind of warmth we have in our family. He just didn’t take care of his kids very well. We didn’t have much in the way of money, and he had obviously had a lot—though it was pointed out to me that, while my father had to get money the old-fashioned way, by working, Bompa had gotten his by marrying wealthy women. So why did he get the catbird seat when he didn’t deserve to be that well off ?
All these years later, a particular childhood memory still rankled Brad IV. It seems that word went out one day that Bompa had decided to be uncharacteristically generous with his two surviving offspring, Dave and his sister “Jack” (another Jessica), by giving each a sizable cash gift. It was enough money that Brad IV’s parents were able to put a down payment on a new house. The grandchildren were all required to pay a visit to the court of Bompa and show him the appropriate obeisance, humbly thanking him for his munificence. Only later did they learn that Bompa hadn’t given that money away just out of the goodness of his heart. He had been advised to do so for tax purposes.
“Even at my young age,” Brad said, “I kind of felt it was phony that he should have such stature—that all he had done was marry money. It’s not my nature to resent, and I don’t think I felt it at that time, though I think my mother did. But I do remember thinking, ‘What’s wrong with this picture? We have to suck up to this old guy to get a little help for my tuition or whatever. And he’s holding the purse strings, when he never filled the purse himself.’”
Although the stars in this play are all long dead, one supporting actress was still alive as this book was begun. Elva’s most intimate friend, Isabelle Stone Baer, later Isabelle Baer Famiglietti, lived in Providence, Rhode Island. She died in the spring of 2009 at age ninety-seven.
Isabelle’s son, Richard Famiglietti, understandably solicitous of his mother’s frail health and vulnerable state of mind, declined for a long time to arrange an interview with her. He offered instead to serve as a telephone go-between, relaying questions and answers. He also provided an update on her post-Elva life. It seems that the artistic young Isabelle, no doubt stressed out from all she had been through, dropped out of Radcliffe College in her sophomore year and went back home to graduate from the University of Minnesota. Then, much later, in 1969, as Isabelle Famiglietti, she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Richard said his mother had spoken often over the years about Elva—whom friends called by the nickname “Stat,” short for Statler—and what happened to her. The two of them had been “very close,” he said, and his mother had told how they had had “tons of fun with each other, chasing guys and being chased by guys and getting into her Packard and driving wildly down Fifth Avenue in New York.” Richard said his mother had always been upset by what happened, even after all these years, and had buried it in the back of her mind. She clearly hated Brad and said she had encouraged Elva to get her will changed. She didn’t attend the inquest in Pinehurst, staying instead with Katherine Statler in Arizona. But she did attend the caveat hearing a year later in Carthage. And once again, she thought, Elva had been terribly wronged.
According to her son, Isabelle could hardly stand to talk about the story even after seven long decades. She thought the inquest had been “a sham” and the case had been poorly handled from beginning to end, and Richard thought sh
e might have repressed parts of the experience that were too painful. She still shuddered, he said, at the memory of the tension and hostility hanging in the chilly courtroom air during the caveat hearing in 1936—which, she said, only grew worse as the proceedings neared their end. She characterized the combative atmosphere as “the Civil War thing” all over again. And she still couldn’t get over the disgusting spittoons in the jury box.
Far from answering any lingering questions about the Elva story, Isabelle—through Richard—added a new one of her own: “something about a dog.”
Isabelle apparently kept saying that Elva’s butler, Emanuel Birch, had phoned her right after Elva’s death, placing a then-unusual long-distance call to Arizona, and that he had seemed terribly agitated and afraid, Richard said. “She has spoken of it often,” he said, “just agonizing over her inability to remember what it was that he called her about. It had something to do with Elva’s dog. But she just can’t recall what.”
It is known that Elva had two dogs, one of which was a male Great Dane, but no mention of them ever came up at the time of the inquest. At this point, it’s possible only to speculate on what got the butler so upset that he went to the trouble of finding Isabelle’s number and placing an anguished long-distance call to her. Could one of the dogs have behaved aggressively toward Brad, not allowing him or anyone else near? Had it dug up something in the yard or found something that upset Birch in the house or garage? Or could the matter of the dog or dogs have had something to do with where they slept that evening? Had they become disturbed by something happening during the night? Had they been found in a place they didn’t belong? Or maybe Birch just didn’t know what to do with the dogs now that their mistress was gone.
Whatever happened, it’s one secret the conscientious Emanuel Birch took with him to the grave.
CHAPTER 19
Let Him Beware
If the sensational coroner’s inquiry in March 1935 could be compared to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, then the so-called caveat case, bitterly fought out by phalanxes of lawyers in February 1936 at the Moore County Courthouse in Carthage, might be likened to the subsequent civil suit filed by the families of Simpson’s two victims.
The inconclusive, anticlimactic verdict that the coroner’s jury reached—“death by carbon monoxide poisoning under circumstances unknown to this jury”—had left a lingering bad taste in many mouths. More than a few people still thought H. Bradley Davidson had to have been involved somehow in the wretched death of his young wife, Elva, and they still wanted to see justice done.
For others, it was more a matter of morbid curiosity of the same kind that the Simpson case would arouse all those decades later. Despite the reams of testimony heard at the inquest, the essential questions about what happened in Pinehurst early on February 27, 1935, still stubbornly defied answers:
• Why had Elva seemed so distraught at Montesanti’s on the night before her death? The easy answer might be that she suffered from clinical depression, or perhaps even what we today would call bipolar disorder, strongly suggesting suicide. But the impression persisted that there was more to it—that something had happened to turn Elva from the happy bride going on a buying spree in New York and planning for a new house to the grievously unhappy woman who wept inconsolably while others were enjoying themselves at dinner. What was it?
• After the newlywed Davidsons and their houseguests had arrived back at Edgewood Cottage in the wee hours, why did they argue so long and hard, if indeed they did, over the insignificant question of who would park the car in the garage? That had never made any sense.
• Why was Elva’s body in that strange, much-puzzled-over position when butler Birch found her the next morning, slumped across the running board, half in the car and half out? Dr. Marr said it looked as if she had been placed there. Edna Campaigne said it looked as if she had been trying to back out of the car door and passed out. But to many, the description of the body’s position sounded more like somebody crawling in. Or could the body have been placed there after it was already dead or incapacitated? And if so, why would someone go to the trouble of arranging the scene and then just plop her down in such a suspiciously unnatural posture?
• If Elva had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to begin setting in, and if the temperature had fallen well below freezing during the night, why was her body still noticeably warm to the touch when she was found?
• What about the way she was dressed? Why no underwear? Why was the skirt later found to be several sizes too big?
• Were the bruises on Elva’s body a byproduct of her rigorously athletic lifestyle, or could they have resulted from a violent confrontation?
In any case, this was not to be a murder trial, as the judge would make clear. It was supposed to be a relatively staid matter involving the disposition of a last will and testament. Still, as will be seen, the hearing would turn out to be anything but boring.
For an oddly disparate group of three individuals who lived quietly far from the center of the storm—a mentally retarded boy in England, a curly haired toddler in Arizona and an attractive young woman in Minnesota—the outcome of the caveat hearing would be a matter not just of justice but also of money: several million dollars at today’s rates. Though two of them might not even have been aware of it, all three stood to benefit richly from Elva’s original will—the one she tore up just ten days before she died, giving everything instead to her new husband. Now they were out in the cold.
Then there was another group, for most of whom the hearing was a simple matter of money. These were the high-powered, out-of-town attorneys representing all of the above, as well as those on the other side looking after Brad Davidson’s interests. They came swooping into the case from all directions, like buzzards squawking and elbowing one another around a rotting carcass.
Ten days after the inquest, no sooner had Elva’s new will been filed at the Moore County Courthouse in Carthage than J. Melville Broughton, the Raleigh lawyer and future North Carolina governor who was representing all the Statler family interests locally, entered a legal instrument known as a “caveat.” From the Latin for “let him beware,” a caveat is a formal notice that an interested party files with a court, requesting the postponement of a proceeding until the filer has a chance to be heard. The effect of the caveat lodged in the Davidson case was to freeze all proceedings under the will until the court could hear a challenge to its validity.
“The Statler family started its fight today on the purported will of Mrs. Elva Statler Davidson, which leaves virtually all of the $560,000 personal estate to her husband, H. Bradley Davidson Jr.,” the Associated Press reported on March 18. “Acting in behalf of Ellsworth Statler of England and Joan Marie Statler, three years old, of Tucson, Ariz., J.M. Broughton, Raleigh attorney, filed a caveat to the will in the County Superior Court.”
Ellsworth was Elva’s only surviving adoptive sibling. Baby Joan Marie, who already had $1 million to her name in her own right, was Elva’s niece—the daughter of her brother Milton, who had been killed in an auto accident. Joining their lawyers only late in the game was the attorney for lovely young Isabelle Stone Baer of Minneapolis, Elva’s roommate at Radcliffe and intimate friend.
“Their suit alleges,” the AP report said, “that the will filed Saturday by Herbert Seawell, Carthage attorney, is not the valid last will and testament of the 22-year-old heiress who was found dead of carbon monoxide gas in her garage at Pinehurst Feb. 27.”
Under North Carolina law at the time, objectors could attack the will on three grounds: that there was some defect in the instrument itself; that “undue influence” had been exerted on the testatrix (Elva); or that the testatrix had been of unsound mind when she signed it. The caveators, as they were called, would focus on the second of those three possible grounds, the “undue influence” angle. They would attempt to show that Brad and his lawyer, W. Barton Leach, had “virtually driven” a suggestible Elva into unwisely changing the will.
They would get nowhere pursuing the first possibility by trying to show that the will was defective or invalid, since its signing had been well witnessed. And they faced an interesting dilemma where the third ground, “unsound mind,” was concerned. On the one hand, they would need to portray Elva as confused and vulnerable enough to bolster their contention that Brad and Leach were able to exert their sinister “undue influence.” But they wouldn’t want to make her appear too troubled or unstable, lest they strengthen the suspicion that she might simply have done herself in—with no goading by her husband.
They would spend several days walking that tightrope.
Superior Court Judge Don Phillips gaveled the hearing on the caveat case into order on Monday, February 10, 1936—eleven months after the coroner’s inquest had ended. Meanwhile, Brad Davidson had been obliged to keep spending most of his time in Pinehurst, enduring gossip whenever he appeared in public, to maintain his legal residence.
The Moore County News attempted to put the Davidson case in a national perspective. “Intricate legal problems, some of which may have to go before the United States Supreme Court before they are settled, are involved in the Statler-Davidson will case,” the paper reported. “Some of them concern the residence of the Davidsons, whether in Massachusetts or North Carolina; the validity of the prior will, if the purported last will is set aside, and the share of the estate H. Bradley Davidson, the husband, would receive if both wills should be invalidated. But win, lose or draw, one attorney not interested in the case gives the opinion that Mr. Davidson will come into quite a bit of money.”
