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 attention 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 brethren—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.
So what was a Southern Pines fireman doing in possession of a wool skirt that would soon be marked Exhibit A? “It turned out,” The News reported, “that the fireman had thoughtfully removed the skirt from the clothesline and carried it to the firehouse when he saw a couple of little Negro boys sidling up to the garment with the evident intention of stealing it.” Kelly, we are told, “heaved a sigh of relief when, a few minutes later, he deposited the clothing into the safekeeping of the sheriff.”
By mid-March 1935, once all the excitement was over and the big-city journalists had departed, most Moore Countians seemed more than willing to “shelve discussion of the case for the time being,” as The News wrote. There were several reasons for this willingness to put the thing out of mind. Many of the locals were tired of being the topic of sensation and eager to get back to their fun and games. Others were weary of trying to solve the seemingly insoluble Davidson mystery and ready to think about something else. Still others in the upper echelons of Pinehurst had more selfish concerns: the resort community had had more than enough damaging publicity and didn’t need any more.
The late Mary Evelyn de Nissoff said that Pinehurst, protecting its image as a carefree getaway place, did all it could to keep the lid on from day one. At the time Brad Davidson’s new bride died under such unsavory circumstances, she pointed out, the place had already been reeling in crisis mode for years. As the Depression dragged on, Pinehurst was hanging on for dear life, trying to put on a happy face, barely bringing in enough guests to keep the lights on. The last thing it needed was a world-class scandal on its hands. “The resort had scheduled a big tennis tournament in March or April of 1935 and didn’t want anything casting a pall over it,” Mary Evelyn said a month before her death in 2005. “I think Bill Tilden and Don Budge, the big tennis players, were going to come. Pinehurst and the Tuftses didn’t want Elva’s death to be the talk of the town and keep people from coming here for the tournament. So I think they pretty much tried to hush it up.”
If Pinehurst did try to soft-pedal Elva’s death, there was more than just Pollyanna squeamishness involved. It was also a matter of hard-nosed public relations and careful image cultivation. “First of all, you’ve got a resort here,” Mary Evelyn said. “And it’s dependent on people coming here. And they’d had a really good reputation for single women being able to come here and be safe and chaperoned and all that sort of thing. Also, they were very careful about gold diggers.” Bad press was bad news in Pinehurst, she explained, and the Pinehurst PR people routinely swept it under the rug. And she knew what she was talking about, since she did some of the sweeping herself. “You were never supposed to write anything bad about Pinehurst,” she said. “You were supposed to bury things. Always. I used to work for the resort. I knew about burying things.” She remembered that when obituaries were sent out to area papers for someone who had inconveniently passed away in Pinehurst, they routinely bore a Southern Pines dateline. “They never said Pinehurst,” she said. “If you saw an obit for a Pinehurst person in the Charlotte or Raleigh paper, it always said Southern Pines. It was all part of that ‘Nobody dies in Pinehurst’ thing.”
How far would the sunny little village go to perpetuate the myth that the Grim Reaper never visited its curvy streets? Old-timers swear that Carolina Hotel personnel, instead of using stretchers, sometimes put dead bodies in wheelchairs and rolled them out so they’d look like they were just dozing or kept them under wraps until the wee hours of the morning and spirited them down the freight elevator while everyone else slept.
Gay Bowman, a resident of the village since moving there at age fourteen in 1939, says Pinehurst had three golden rules in the old days: “No Negroes, no Jews and no funeral homes.” Bowman likes to quote a story told by the late Mildred McIntosh, the original Tufts archivist. It seems a man was sent out from Pinehurst in the middle of a spooky night to deliver a dead body to Southern Pines in a mule-drawn covered wagon, only to discover upon his arrival at the funeral parlor that the wagon was empty. The body had fallen out. He raced back the way he’d come in a panic, the mules almost trampling the corpse before he spotted it lying on its back there in the road, its sightless eyes gazing at a sky full of stars.
Not every Pinehurstian wanted the Elva case to go away, of course. Many remained tantalized by the story and unwilling to settle for the frustratingly anticlimactic verdict that had ended the coroner’s inquest on such an inconclusive note—“death of carbon monoxide poisoning under circumstances unknown to this jury.”
The story was by no means over. There would be an entirely new trial of sorts, and a dramatic one, in which two teams of legal titans would contest the hastily drawn will in which Elva had left everything to her husband. But the wheels of justice ground slowly, then as now, and it would be nearly another year before the court in Carthage would hear days of explosively heated arguments in that case.
The lull gave all the lawyers a chance to return to their various home bases and prepare their cases. It also gave local curiosity-seekers at the time—as it does us today—a chance to step back, fill in some blanks and seek answers to some basic human questions that had gone neglected: Just who was Elva Statler, this bad-luck orphan for whom nothing seemed to go right? Who was Henry Bradley Davidson Jr., the opportunistic mystery man who swept her off her feet? And what do we know about their brief, doomed marriage?