Kentucky bros. wouldn’t stand for sister’s slay

AN ILL-FATED love between Henry Denhardt and Verna Garr Taylor sprouted amid the springtime Kentucky bluegrass bloom of 1936. At age 61, Denhardt was a bald, 6-foot-2 brute raised by German immigrant parents in Bowling Green, Ky. His formidable resume included a long U.S. Army career that peaked at the rank of brigadier general. He served as Kentucky’s lieutenant governor in the 1920s and later commanded the commonwealth’s National Guard.

Taylor, 40, was a bluegrass blueblood, born into a prominent farm family with roots deeply embedded in La Grange, east of Louisville.

She was regarded as the prettiest woman there in Oldham County but was also admired as a steel magnolia. After the death of her husband in 1929, she had raised two daughters while managing a busy laundry business — with the support of three devoted brothers.

The divorced general and the widowed belle met when Denhardt bought a retirement estate near La Grange. He phoned her one spring evening.

“She asked how I was, and I said all right except that I was lonely,“Denhardt later recounted. “She laughed and said she was pretty lonely, too. So I said we lonesome people ought to get together.”

They were engaged within weeks, but the sun set early on the May-September romance.

Denhardt quickly became possessive and bossy, smothering his fiancee with scrutiny. His behavior fit a pattern established in the military, where he was nicknamed “the iron general.” A peer called Denhardt “power drunk.”

In the fall of 1936, Taylor told her daughters, Frances and Mary, ages 17 and 21, that Denhardt had threatened her when she tried to break up.

“If you don’t marry me,” he growled, “you won’t marry anyone.”

On Nov. 6, the foundering couple took a drive in the country to relieve Taylor’s aching head, according to Denhardt. His car broke down on a rural highway, and the pair sought help at a farmhouse. Mechanics pushed the car to a nearby gas station.

By Denhardt’s account, Taylor walked back to the site of the breakdown to retrieve a glove she had dropped.

Suddenly, the still evening was punctured by a gunshot.

The mechanics hurried toward the bang and found Denhardt gazing at Taylor’s body, which lay in a roadside ditch — shot through the heart.

The general’s military-issue .45 pistol lay nearby.

“Suicide,” he muttered. “She shot herself.”

A week later, as Denhardt sat mute in court, refusing to answer questions at a coroner’s inquiry, the local sheriff served him with an arrest warrant for murder, sworn out by E.S. (Doc) Garr, Taylor’s veterinarian brother.

This prompted gasps in the brimming courtroom — and front-page ink from Tinseltown to Timbuktu: A renowned politician-soldier accused of murdering his fiancée.

Denhardt’s lockjaw had loosened up by the date of his criminal trial in May 1937. His life was at stake as prosecutors sought the death penalty.

He painted a word portrait of an idyllic relationship. He insisted Taylor was pressing him to elope, not break up.

“I told her that it would look foolish for people as old as we were to get married without telling our friends,” Denhardt testified. “She said, ‘Henry, you don’t want to marry me.’ ”

He said the conversation turned grim.

“Mrs. Taylor suggested that we both die together,” the general said. “I told her there was no reason for us to die, that we were going to be happy. She threw her arms around my neck and said I was the finest man that ever lived.”

Minutes later, he said, she shot herself.

“I could not have killed her,” Denhardt declared. “I loved her too much.”

The woman’s brothers — Roy, Jack and Doc Garr — sat in court glowering at him.

A forensics expert, Louisville police Sgt. John Messmer, offered damning evidence. He said Taylor had been shot from well beyond arm’s reach and that paraffin tests found gunshot residue on Denhardt’s hands but not hers.

Taylor’s daughters added that Denhardt was furious because she was being courted by a younger man.

But Rodes Myers, the general’s golden-tongued attorney (and later a Kentucky lieutenant governor himself), made Sgt. Messmer the trial’s straw man, declaring him “willing to send an innocent man to the chair to make a name for himself.”

The jury deadlocked 7-5 in favor of acquittal - a mistrial.

“It’s a great vindication,” Denhardt crowed. But the plot had one more twist. On the eve of his retrial, Sept. 20, 1937, Denhardt and Myers were walking to the Armstrong Hotel in Shelbyville, Ky., when they were confronted by the Garr brothers. Roy and Doc brandished pistols and dropped Denhardt with seven shots.

The press called it “a Kentucky code of honor killing.”

Although the taboo subject was sidestepped at trial, the brothers believed Denhardt had shot Taylor as a cover-up because he had raped her that night.

Doc and Jack Garr escaped charges, but Roy was tried for murder. His attorney, Ballard Clark, argued Garr had “a right to draw” to avenge his sister’s death.

“He shot a mad dog,” Clark told the jury. “I say he had a right to … It isn’t a shame that Kentuckians are quick on the draw. It’s an honor sometimes.”

Roy Garr was acquitted after just minutes of deliberation.

Outside the courthouse, a juror told scribes, “The verdict was for the entire Garr family, including Verna.”