After the corpse of his 40-year-old fiancee, Mrs. Verna Carr Taylor, "most beautiful woman in two counties," had been found with a bullet through the heart and his .45 calibre revolver lying nearby (TIME, Nov. 23), 60-year-old Henry H. Denhardt, onetime Lieutenant Governor and Adjutant General of Kentucky, declared he had not fired a gun for six months. He suggested suicide. Paraffin tests for traces of nitrates, as from gunpowder, were made of both their hands. Last week Coroner D. L. Ricketts of La Grange announced that the tests indicated Mrs. Taylor had not lately fired a gun, and that General Denhardt had. Coroner Ricketts further announced that stains found on the road 410 ft. from Mrs. Taylor's body had been made by human blood, and that stains found on the coat worn by General Denhardt the night of her death had also been made by human blood.
"Damn what the coroner says!" barked General Denhardt in the Louisville hotel room where, freed on $25,000 bail after arrest for Mrs. Taylor's murder, he had secluded himself under a nurse's care.
"The prosecution has said from the beginning," declared a Denhardt lawyer, "that General Denhardt shot Mrs. Taylor when she told him she could not go through with their marriage as planned. The truth of the matter is that Mrs. Taylor was begging the General to marry her. He will tell the truth about this when the day of his trial comes."
"Mrs. Taylor's daughters," countered Coroner Ricketts, "are prepared to testify that their mother told them the General had threatened her several times when she tried to break off their affair. The Taylor daughters will say that the General told their mother, 'If you don't marry me, you won't marry anyone!' "
"Because of the intense feeling against the General," announced 6 ft. 5 in. Sheriff Evan Harrod of Henry County, "and the murmuring that some of Mrs. Taylor's kinfolk are preparing for any emergency, we are going to be ready to repel any attempt against the General's life."
New Castle's packed courtroom was surrounded by State police and deputy sheriffs when General Denhardt, bluff, 6 ft. 2 in., 220-lb. veteran of three wars, appeared for an examining trial. George Baker, the farmer who had pushed the General's stalled car into his driveway and later heard two shots, took the stand. The first shot, he said, had sounded "awful loud, awful near." He had gone out in the yard, had glimpsed the General standing by his car, then heard a second shot, "like a popgun or a .22 rifle." General Denhardt had explained that Mrs. Taylor had gone up the road to look for her glove. Few minutes later two messengers from town had driven up with a new battery for the General's car. "Mr. Denhardt said," continued Farmer Baker, " 'My, my, ain't that awful? She was the finest woman I ever knew.' While they were fixing the automobile, he said that several times."
The prosecutor pounced. "What did Denhardt know?" roared he. "Why did he speak of her in the past tense if all he knew was that she had gone up the road to find a lost glove?"