Murder with Intent to Love

By WALTER ISAACSON

Jurors re-enact the crime and find Jean Harris guilty

The story was a classic one: a jealous woman, a man who done her wrong, a gun, a struggle, and a question of where to put the blame in a blizzard of passion. It happens every day on television, in films, even in real life. But the trial of Jean Harris, 57, accused of murdering Scarsdale Diet Doctor Herman Tarnower, 69, assumed the proportions of a national melodrama. During the three-month trial, as her precious privacy and guarded respectability were stripped away, the pitiably proud former headmistress of Virginia's Madeira School for girls became the centerpiece of a passionate drama--the old battle of the sexes, fraught with newer, feminist tonalities. In the end, the outcome seemed almost predetermined: the jury found Harris guilty of second-degree murder, of shooting Dr. Tarnower with the intent to cause his death.*

During the trial, Harris had admitted driving five hours from her home in Virginia to Tarnower's Westchester County, N.Y., estate on March 10 with a gun in her purse. Nor did she dispute that, late in the night, she pulled the trigger five times (though she could not account for all of the shots), wounding the doctor, whose lover she had been for 14 years, four times. But in her eight days of testimony she insisted that she only wanted to kill herself, and Tarnower died trying to save her.

The summation by Defense Attorney Joel Aurnou, 47, was emotional and dramatic. "Don't let Dr. Tarnower's life itself be tarnished!" he shouted. "Don't say he died as a result of a homicidal rage, of some sordid affair. Restore the dignity of Dr. Tarnower, who himself died trying to save Jean Harris." He ended his impassioned plea by quoting a poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "I miss him in the weeping of the rain . . ."

Prosecutor George Bolen, 34, was cold and indignant in his summation, insisting that jealousy over Tarnower's affair with his lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos, 38, was the motivating factor for murder. Argued Bolen: "There was dual intent, to take her own life, but also an intent to do something else . . . to punish Herman Tarnower . . . to kill him and keep him from Lynne Tryforos." Bolen ridiculed the notion that Harris fired her .32-cal. revolver by accident. He urged the jury to examine the gun while deliberating. Said he: "Try pulling the trigger. It has 14 pounds of pull. Just see how difficult it would be to pull, double action, four times by accident." Bolen, who was thought by his superiors to be too gentle when he cross-examined Harris earlier in the trial, showed little mercy as he painted a vivid picture of what he claims happened that night. He dramatically raised his hand in the defensive stance he says Tarnower used when Harris pointed the gun at him. When the judge sustained an objection by Aurnou that Bolen's version went beyond the evidence presented, the taut Harris applauded until her body shook.

The eight-woman, four-man jury--the class-conscious Harris would probably never admit they were her peers--began their deliberations by requesting all 400 pieces of evidence. As Lisa Zumar, mother of two, told the New York Daily News: "We wanted it all--the bloodstained pajamas, the .32-cal. gun, the bloodied bed sheets, the schematics showing the trajectory of the bullets, and the letters--including of course the crucial Scarsdale Letter." That frenzied, ten-page epistle, the emotional centerpiece of the trial, had been sent by Harris to Tarnower the morning of his death. "I have to do something besides shriek with pain," she wrote. She called rival Tryforos "a vicious, adulterous psychotic" and "a thieving slut." Harris described her pain, saying she felt "like discarded trash . . . You keep me in control by threatening me with banishment, an easy threat which you know I couldn't live with." To Bolen, the letter was proof of Harris' pathological jealousy. To Aurnou it was an emotional suicide note within a love letter.

On the second day of deliberation, the jury took its first vote: it was split. The crucial factor in the jurors' minds was Harris' detailed yet contradictory description of the shootings. They asked to have five hours of her testimony reread. Foreman Russell Von Glahn, a bus mechanic from Yonkers, had a clerk repeat aloud again and again the parts where Harris tried to recall how the shots were fired. Marion Stephens, a teacher from Rye, asked to have Harris' account of how she attempted suicide reread twice.

Then the jurors retired to a deliberation room dominated by wooden tables, where they joined in macabre re-enactments of the crime. "We used two tables to simulate the bed," recalls Marian West, an administrative assistant for a community service program. Von Glahn, donning the bloodstained pajama top, played the doctor, as other jurors came at him with the actual gun. "We did it many, many times," said one. "It was Jean Harris' testimony that convicted her," said Marie Jackson, a clerical worker. "We tried it like it was told. We couldn't see how he could have come in back of her and gotten shot in the hand. If there was a struggle over the gun, someone else would have been wounded." Added Geneva Tyler, a keypunch operator: "It was a lot of shots. If you're going to commit suicide, you only need one, in the right place."

For eight days the discussions and re-enactments continued, never acrimonious but always intense. The jurors applied no pressure on each other. On the ground floor, a hundred or so journalists and half as many dedicated trial followers waited. The celebrity of the victim and the social standing of the accused, their intriguing affair, and the misogynist overtones that many women found in Tarnower's treatment of Harris, all combined to make the trial a press spectacular, a debate over man's inhumanity to woman. Said one courtroom regular, a sharp-eyed lady of about 60: "I pray for Jean Harris every night. I know all about men. I know what they did to me. They went out with my girlfriends." And so there were television crews catching catnaps in the corner, and authors calling their agents from the makeshift phones in the lobby-cum-pressroom. After more than 47 hours of deliberation, a final secret ballot was taken. A unanimous verdict was reached. A note was passed to Judge Russell Leggett, and he reconvened the court.

Then came the final scene: Jean Harris, primly clad in a suede jacket and brown skirt, her hair held back by a tortoise shell band, was led in, staring straight ahead. Each day of the ordeal seemed to have shriveled her a bit more. The jurors, stone faced and grim, did not look at her, seated at the defense table, as they filed in. "I understand the jurors have arrived at a verdict," said Judge Leggett. Von Glahn rose and nodded yes. The clerk asked: "How do you find the defendant, Jean Harris, on the first count of second-degree murder?" Replied Von Glahn: "Guilty!" He was asked about two lesser charges, second-and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon. "Guilty!" he said. "Guilty!"

Two of the defense lawyers started to cry. Aurnou, who has announced plans to appeal but has not yet said on what grounds, explained later that he did not present any psychological testimony, which some jurors said would have been useful to the defense, because he did not believe Harris acted out of insanity. The judge set her sentencing for March 20; the woman once known as "Integrity Jean" faces a minimum of 15 years in prison before she is eligible for parole.

A sheriffs deputy moved behind Harris as the judge remanded her into custody. To her attorney she whispered: "Joel, I can't sit in jail." With the verdict, gone was the $220,000 Tarnower had left her in his will; under state law convicted murderers forfeit any bequests from their victims. Gone also are the comfortable weekends at the house in Westchester County she considered home, gone is the man she loved. The deputy touched Harris' shoulder. She rose slowly, shook off the hand. Softly she said, "I must go now," and left to spend her first night in jail as a convicted killer.

--By Walter Isaacson. Reported by James Wilde/White Plains

* Under New York State law, first-degree murder is reserved primarily for those who kill a law enforcement officer.

With reporting by James Wilde

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