“These young people were stricken by a disease - as deadly as typhoid fever or pneumonia. Lucille, a Warner Theater beauty contest winner and, according to one account, “a titian-haired allure,” made a living selling cigarettes in the Sky Room of Downtown’s Hotel DeVoy (later the King Cotton). Among the many young women who caught Brit’s eye was 19-year-old Lucille Underwood, who lived with her deaf-mute parents in a little cottage across the street from Humes High School. They met, dated, and married in 1927, and soon had a son, George.īut the marriage, almost from the beginning, was a rocky one, and Brenton continued “to trot into fresh pastures,” as The Commercial Appeal so quaintly phrased it, even as he and Daisy raised their son and built a nice home at the corner of Kimball and Echles, which was outside the city limits in the 1930s.
Rawleigh, wholesale food and drug distributors, and Daisy got a job Downtown as a clerk at Goldsmith’s. Different paths eventually brought them to Memphis, where Brenton became a contract manager for W.T. Newspapers called the killing of Brenton Snow Root, the only son of the former archdeacon of the Episcopal Church of West Tennessee, “one of Memphis’ most sensational murders.” For days, page-one headlines spotlighted the exciting and ultimately tragic lives of Brenton, Daisy, and Lucille Underwood, the “red-haired cigarette girl” who had started it all.īrenton, better known by his friends as Brit, was born in Connecticut, Daisy in Alabama. Brenton, just 32 years old, died on the way to the hospital. She sighed, “Is that really necessary?” but got in anyway. They quickly put the dying young man into the back of the ambulance, and asked Daisy to ride with them to Methodist Hospital. When the ambulance crew arrived they found Daisy sitting calmly in the living room. Then she walked into the kitchen, picked up the telephone, and told the operator, “I’ve shot my husband.” Daisy raised the pistol, aimed it at his chest, and fired three shots, cocking the gun each time. “Look at me.”īrenton opened his eyes and started to sit up in bed. She stepped inside the front door, walked to the front bedroom, and switched on the light, where she found her slumbering husband, Brenton. It was just a few hours after midnight, on the cold morning of November 3, 1935, when Daisy Root parked her sedan on the side street and quickly walked across the yard to her house on Kimball Road, carrying a flashlight and a. Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in our March 2002 issue.
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