For Love of HY

FOR LOVE OF HY

The Jean Harris Case

In 1984 I heard surprising news. The bedroom of the house in which Dr. Herman Tarnower was killed in 1980 had been preserved by its new owners exactly as it was at the time of the tragedy, with furniture riddled by a bullet hole, a window broken by Jean Harris in a jealous rage, a chipped bathtub where she had banged the gun trying to remove its jammed shells, and a bullet gouge from a wild shot in the floor of the balcony outside the bedroom.

Jeffrey and Valerie Westheimer, who purchased the home shortly after Tarnower’s death, had not allowed any journalists or investigators to inspect the room, despite repeated requests over the years. But the Westheimers had preserved the room intact because they believed passionately in Jean Harris’s innocence and hoped that someday, if she is allowed another trial, the evidence still contained in the room may help free her.

For me, the existence of that room presented a rare opportunity—and a fantastic challenge. In 1984, through the kind intermediation of an acquaintance, the noted New York attorney Michael Russakow, who is a personal friend of the Westheimers, I was exclusively permitted to inspect Dr. Tarnower’s bedroom and examine the forensic evidence it contained.

On the day of my visit, with Valerie Westheimer as my guide, I climbed a small spiral staircase that rose vertically from the garage through the living room to Dr. Tarnower’s bedroom. Emerging from the staircase, the only means of ingress, I found myself in a corner of a room with a low, peaked roof. To my right were glass doors leading to a balcony overlooking the grounds of the estate. Facing me were twin beds backed by a headboard containing books. A bedside table and a lamp stood between the beds, in front of a shelf in the headboard which held a telephone and notepads. In the aisle between those two beds, many of the bloody events occurred the night that Tarnower met his death.

I found the bedroom to be oddly designed. The beds and other furniture, such as armchairs and a television set, were all situated in just one half of the space, the area facing the glass doors and the balcony. Behind the high headboard was nothing but empty floor space for about ten feet, reaching to the outer wall, which contained a window (with a pane broken by Jean Harris that fateful night), and three-foot-high cabinets along the floor, used for storage.

On both the left and the right of this room, situated slightly behind the headboard, were “his” and “hers” bathrooms. Tarnower’s bed was on the left as I faced it from the staircase, and his bathroom was on that side. The other bathroom was for his female guests. This, then, was the room in which the tragedy had taken place, and Mrs. Westheimer told me that Jean Harris, during her visit at the time of her trial for the murder of her lover, had said that she still “loved” this house. “All of my best memories are here,” she said. Then she went to the balcony door to gaze out at the large pond on the estate and murmured, “I want my ashes spread on that pond when I die.”

I was familiar enough with the Jean Harris case to know what to look for in that bedroom, but both Mrs. Westheimer and I were in for a surprise. We were standing near the floor cabinets lining the outer wall on the far side of the room behind the beds, and Mrs. Westheimer told me that the cabinets were empty because Tarnower’s sister had removed all of his personal effects years ago. She idly slid open a few doors just to show me that the cabinets were vacant, then said, “What’s this?”

For the first time since she had moved into the house, she spotted, deep in the dark recess of a cabinet, two pieces of cardboard about three feet square. She reached in and brought them out—and we both stared at collages made by Jean Harris for her lover, the first one dated New Year’s Day of 1979, and the second New Year’s Day of 1980, only two months and ten days before Tarnower was killed. The collages had never been mentioned by Jean Harris at the trial and, hidden away in the cabinets, were probably unknown to anyone else connected to the case.

A chill went down my spine as I read the words on those happy, almost exuberant collages, especially the headline on the one prepared just a few months before Dr. Tarnower fell dead with bullets in his body fired by Jean Harris:

HOW YOU CAN USE LOVE TO LIVE LONGER.

Dr. Herman Tarnower’s house, a modern, rambling structure set in a verdant lawn that sloped down to a picturesque pond, was completely dark at 10:30 P.M. on March 10, 1980, when a car pulled up and parked in the circular driveway in front. A minute later Jean Harris, headmistress of the fashionable Madeira School, emerged, dressed in a smartly tailored suit, and looked up at the darkened windows of Tarnower’s bedroom. “Hy” had not waited up for her even though she had telephoned to say she was coming.

A few minutes later she climbed up the spiral staircase from the garage in the dark, passing the level that opened on the living room, then paused. She had forgotten the flowers she had brought along on the trip from Washington. Hy would be angry that she was waking him, but perhaps the flowers would help soften his irritation.

She went back down to her car and opened the door. The flowers had been tossed into her automobile by a student at Madeira School as a friendly gesture when Jean Harris was driving away from the campus, at the beginning of her trip. Now they lay on the passenger side of the front seat, in a colorful little bouquet. Beside them was her handbag, which she had also forgotten on her first trip upstairs. The handbag contained a Harrington and Richardson .32-caliber revolver with five live rounds in its chambers. Jean Harris had brought the weapon to Purchase, New York, to kill herself beside the beautiful pond she loved so much.

Earlier that day she had signed her will and left suicide notes in her home addressed to close friends at Madeira. At fifty-six, she believed that both her professional and personal lives were over. A controversy about her expulsion of three students for smoking marijuana had led to flaring problems with the school’s board of supervisors, and a feeling that she had failed as a headmistress. Worse, her lover and confidant for fourteen years, Dr. Tarnower, a prominent physician and author of the best-selling book The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, had let her know that he was abandoning her for a younger rival, Lynn Tryforos.

Determined to kill herself, Jean Harris felt she could not die without talking one last time, to the man who had been at the core of her life for so long. She picked up the flowers in one hand and her handbag in the other, and started back up the staircase.

According to Jean Harris’s later testimony, this is what happened next:

Tarnower, when awakened, refused to talk to her, even though she implored him, “It’s not really that late and I’m not going to stay very long.” She went into “her” bathroom, the one on the right, and discovered “a greenish-blue satin negligee” belonging to Lynn Tryforos. “I took it off the hook and threw it on the floor. By this time I felt hurt and frustrated…. I picked up a box of curlers and threw them … they … broke a window.”

At that point, Hy Tarnower, not only awake but angry, got out of bed and slapped Harris. The slap, she said, calmed her down, and now “I simply wanted to get dying over with.” She stood at the foot of the bed, “picked up my pocketbook and I felt the gun and I unzipped my bag and I took out the gun…. I raised it to my head and pulled the trigger at the instant that Hy came at me and grabbed the gun and pushed my hand away from my head and pushed it down and I heard the gun explode. Hy jumped back and…. held up his hand and it was bleeding and I could see the bullet hole in it and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, look what you did.’”

Tarnower went to his bathroom on the left side of the room. Harris, more determined then ever to kill herself, dropped to her knees to retrieve the gun, which had fallen on the floor under a bed. But Tarnower, returning from the bathroom, took the gun away from her, then went to the phone at the head of the bed and pressed the buzzer to his housekeeper’s quarters. At this point he was sitting on the side of his bed, Harris said. “I pulled myself up on his knees…. and I was just about straight, and the gun was there…. on his lap…. I grabbed the gun and Hy dropped the phone and…. grabbed my wrist and I pulled back and he let go and I went back on the other bed…. Hy lunged forward, as though he were going to tackle me, and his hands came around my waist and there was an instant when I felt the muzzle of the gun—and I had the gun in my hand and I pulled the trigger and it exploded…. and my first thought was, ‘My God, that didn’t hurt at all.’”

Still clutching the gun, Harris pulled herself away from Tarnower and ran completely around the bed to get away from him. There she placed the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger.

Click!

The gun had malfunctioned. She held it away from her and pulled the trigger again. To her amazement, this time it fired, the bullet plowing into a cabinet in the headboard of the bed next to her. She placed the gun to her temple again and pulled the trigger. Click! Click! Click!

Sobbing, semihysterical, she ran to her bathroom to reload the gun with the extra bullets in her purse so that she could kill herself. But she couldn’t pry loose the cartridge shells in the cylinder. Angrily she banged the gun against the tub, gouging chips in its side, and broke the weapon.

She returned to the bedroom, and saw Tarnower lying on the floor, bleeding. She picked up the phone to call for help, but heard nothing. She didn’t know that the housekeeper had left the extension off the hook. “I said, ‘Hy, it’s broken….’ I helped him onto the bed. He looked exhausted, but he didn’t look dying.”

Thinking the telephone was out of order, she left to go to a phone booth at the nearby Community Center to summon help, but by then the housekeeper, Suzanne van der Vreken, and her husband, Henri, had already reached the police. A police car approached and Harris led it to the house, and stepped out into the night to be greeted by Henri shouting to the police, “She’s the one! She did it!”

Jean Harris was arrested for the murder of Herman Tarnower and on November 21, 1980, went on trial. The charge was murder in the second degree.

It was a case in which both sides apparently were certain of victory. The defense believed that Harris’s story of an attempted suicide would be confirmed by the evidence. The prosecution scented victory because it felt that no jury would believe that Harris, while trying to commit suicide, would fire no fewer than three bullets into Tarnower’s body.

According to the press, most courtroom observers—and most Americans—agreed with the prosecution, and simply didn’t believe Harris’s story.

During the trial seven forensic experts, including my friends Dr. Cyril Wecht, the former Chief Medical Examiner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a world-famed pathologist, and Professor Herbert MacDonell, one of the country’s leading authorities on ballistic and bloodstain evidence, testified for the defense. Their forensic findings caused great difficulties for the prosecution. In fact, in what may be an unprecedented action in a homicide case, Deputy Medical Examiner Louis Roh, who performed the autopsy of Herman Tarnower, changed his interpretation of his original autopsy report in court.

The credibility of Harris versus the prosecution began with the question of whether or not there had been a struggle. Harris said that the shots that killed Tarnower were fired while they were battling over the gun as she attempted to shoot herself with it. The prosecution could not accept the concept of a struggle, because it would indicate that the shots might have been accidental, or even that Tarnower’s own hands had misdirected the gun toward himself. Therefore the prosecution’s scenario included no hint of a struggle for the weapon. In its story, the shooting was deliberate, and from a distance. In the vivid words of the prosecuting attorney: “She confronts the doctor. She gets the gun. She is in control now. She has power…. The doctor [is] seated on the bed…. The defendant [points her gun] and shoots it…. The bullet goes through Herman Tarnower’s outstretched [right] hand and enters his chest….”

According to the prosecution’s scenario, Harris then deliberately shot Tarnower a second time, in the shoulder, as he lunged toward her. Falling back, he brushed the gun, causing her to fire a third bullet into a cabinet built into the headboard behind the bed. He recovered, went to the bathroom and when he returned pushed Harris onto the bed, causing her to fire another wild bullet through the balcony doors. Finally, as he tried to telephone the housekeeper, Harris deliberately shot him once again, this time the bullet striking his arm, and he collapsed.

In sum, in the prosecution’s presentation of the case, the three fatal wounds occurred this way: Harris stood at the foot of the bed as Tarnower sat up and held out his hand, and she cold-bloodedly fired at him, the bullet going through his hand into his chest. Then he lunged at her, and she aimed and fired again, the bullet going down through his shoulder and into his lung. Finally, when he was on the phone, desperately seeking help, she deliberately shot him again, this time in the arm. The two “wild” shots occurred not in a struggle but when he brushed her gun accidentally, and again when he pushed her onto the bed.

One of the immediate problems with this recreation of events was that Tarnower’s blood was found on the cylinder of the gun, and indeed had seeped deep inside it. The forensic experts for the defense argued that this could not have occurred during casual “brushings”—the only times which the prosecution admitted that Tarnower even touched the gun. However, this was just one instance, the defense said, which showed that Harris’s version of events was true, and the prosecution’s was not. And there were many more controversial clues—beginning with the first shot through the hand.

In his original autopsy report, Deputy Medical Examiner Louis Roh had stated that the hand injury was a “through-and-through” wound, in which the bullet “had not been recovered,” and that four shots struck Tarnower’s body. But only five shots had been fired, and two of them were wild. So Roh later said only three bullets struck the body. The bullet through the hand, which he had previously thought was not recovered, had actually entered Tarnower’s chest, causing both wounds.

This new testimony was important because if Harris had fired through an outstretched hand into Tarnower’s chest, she was a deliberate murderer. If instead the gun was fired during a struggle at the foot of the bed, and the bullet had lodged not in Tarnower’s body but somewhere else in the room, it supported her story that she was trying to commit suicide.

The issue was Jean Harris’s credibility—and so a war raged in court over that first shot.

The defense sent ballistics expert Herbert MacDonell to the scene of the crime with Jean Harris to reenact the shooting. There MacDonell discovered a hole in the glass balcony door, and a bullet gouge in the balcony floor outside. When he drew a string from the gouge through the bullet hole in the glass door, its trajectory led directly to the spot at the foot of the bed where Harris said she had fired the first shot in an attempt to kill herself.

When MacDonell testified about his on-the-scene inspection, the prosecution team battled back on two fronts: one, they claimed that the gouge on the balcony floor was not a bullet gouge at all, and, two, they had “proof” that the shot through the hand had not gone wild through the balcony door, but, instead, entered Tarnower’s chest after traversing his hand.

Back to the stand came Dr. Roh with an addition to his autopsy report. He now stated he had discovered, after the autopsy, that there was “palm tissue” inside the chest wound, proving that the shot had gone through Tarnower’s hand into his chest. Also, he said, the chest wound was cylindrical, not round, indicating that the bullet was “tumbling” when it struck the chest, so it must have struck an intervening object. And finally, no “soot,” or particles, from the bullet had been found around the chest wound, which proved that the bullet had struck another object, “cleaning it off,” before it struck the chest.

Forensic scientists can tell the distance of a weapon from the wound in this manner. Soot around a wound indicates a shot up to three or four inches away. Beyond that distance, up to about three feet away, no soot is found, but unburned metallic particles will be seen around the skin surface of a wound, which forensic scientists call the “tattooing effect.” Longer-distance shots leave no evidence of powder or particles on the skin surface.

To the witness stand came seven distinguished forensic scientists who rebutted Dr. Roh, sometimes angrily. The so-called palm tissue in the chest, Dr. Wecht and others said, was not such tissue at all but collagen, a microscopic cartilage element found everywhere in the body. The bullet hole in the chest was cylindrical, not round, not because the missile had first gone through a hand, but simply because Tarnower was bending foward at the time he was hit. The lack of powder or “tattooing” around the chest wound meant only that the gun was fired more than three feet away.

Thus the angry courtroom battle over the first shot raged on and, I believe, fundamentally altered the outcome of the trial, for a reason neither side planned. That shot was significant in indicating who—Harris or the prosecution—was telling the truth. Apparently the jury believed the prosecution, but there was much more forensic evidence that might have altered that belief, and this evidence was mentioned barely or not at all at the trial because of the time expended quibbling about the hand injury. Almost ninety percent of the forensic experts’ testimony revolved around that one shot.

In the ebb and flow of courtroom battles, confrontation tactics often dictate the course of the trial and, in doing so, may obscure the most important forensic evidence. I believe that is what happened in the Harris case.

Courtroom presentation of forensic evidence is a problem which we in the profession know we must somehow improve, and progress is being made. In the universities today, courses in such presentations are being taught, but we have still not solved the basic problem of presenting clear, narrative analyses that juries can understand, because the American judicial system is based on confrontation, not presentation.

The fact that important forensic evidence in Jean Harris’s trial was either lost in the uproar over the first shot or not presented in a way that the jury could understand was particularly damaging in this case because, more than in most cases, its outcome then had to turn not on the evidence, but on the jury’s perception of the defendant herself, as to whether or not she was telling the truth. Unfortunately for Harris, by all reports she was a disastrous witness for herself, appearing arrogant and snobbish on the stand. Worse, during her time in the witness chair the prosecution gained the right to read a long, bitter letter she had sent to Tarnower on the very day he died. The letter was full of rage against Lynn Tryforos, and seemed to provide a motive for the killing.

On February 25, 1981, Jean Harris was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years to life in prison. She is now in the Bedford Hills, New York, Correctional Facility.

Because of its forensic aspects, I was intrigued by the Jean Harris case and decided to investigate it for myself. I began by reading transcripts of the forensic testimony at the trial, plus the news reports in The New York Times, various magazine articles and two fine books by journalists about the trial: Mrs. Harris, by Diana Trilling, and Very Much a Lady, by Shana Alexander.

Later on, as my investigation progressed, I obtained copies of the original autopsy report, the hospital reports made by physicians attending Dr. Tarnower’s body when it arrived, and all the laboratory records of the various forensic tests in the case made at the request of the police by the Department of Laboratories and Research, Forensic Science Laboratory, Valhalla, New York.

From these sources, I was surprised to discover major flaws in the prosecution’s scenario of murder. Like most people who had followed the case from afar, I had believed Harris to be guilty. But now, studying the evidence as a forensic scientist, I made one discovery after another which bothered me. First and foremost, it seemed to me obvious from this evidence that a struggle for the gun had taken place—and yet the jury had accepted the prosecution’s contention that no struggle had occurred and that Harris had shot Tarnower deliberately, and from a distance.

To begin with, I noted that all the bullet tracks in Tarnower’s body were clustered in one area, as happens when two people are wrestling for control of a gun. Further, the bullet tracks in his body were all at different angles, also typical of a weapon involved in a struggle. Other evidence of a struggle was the bullet wound in Tarnower’s arm. The prosecution said that this wound was inflicted when Tarnower was sitting on the bed, telephoning the housekeeper, and Harris fired down at him. But the autopsy report stated that the track of the bullet in the arm was upward. This upward angle could not have occurred if she was standing above him. Obversely, it would have occurred if Tarnower’s body was above hers during a struggle.

Also, Jean Harris was left-handed. When she was physically examined after her arrest, bruises were found on the inside of her upper left arm, and such bruises on the gun arm almost always indicate to coroners that there was a battle for the weapon. In sum, a struggle definitely had occurred—just as Jean Harris had testified.

As for the famous first shot, the prosecution’s contention that Harris had shot Tarnower through his outstretched hand was disproved, I believed, by the location of the hand wound. The bullet passed through the fleshy area of the skin between the thumb and the index finger. In a struggle this is one of the most common locations for a hand wound. The victim grasps the muzzle to push the gun away, it fires, and the bullet goes through that fleshy area of the semi-closed fist.

I believed that the prosecution’s version of the outstretched hand (and therefore deliberate murder) was wrong for yet another reason. The bullet had passed through Tarnower’s right hand, and from my experience I’ve learned that right-handed people (as Tarnower was) do not throw up their right arm to ward off danger. Instinctively they put up their left arm, reserving their stronger arm for further use.

But perhaps the most glaring flaw of all in the prosecution’s case, in my opinion, concerned Tarnower’s trip to the bathroom. According to Harris, Tarnower went to the bathroom after the first struggle for the gun, which began when she placed the gun at her temple and climaxed with the hand wound. The prosecution contended that Tarnower walked to the bathroom after being shot through the hand into the chest, and again down through the shoulder. The bullet in the chest cut a major vein to the heart and pierced the lung. The shot through the shoulder was even more devastating, traversing the body downward for seventeen inches, fracturing three ribs, rupturing the lung and the diaphragm, and tearing into the right kidney.

According to Deputy Medical Examiner Roh, those wounds meant that Tarnower went into “irretractible shock” within five to ten minutes, when death occurred. And yet, after sustaining these catastrophic wounds, with only five to ten minutes to live, Tarnower supposedly walked to the bathroom, examined his injuries, then returned to the bedroom, shoved Harris aside, and sat down to telephone the housekeeper.

I don’t believe that the victim of such wounds could have crawled to the bathroom and back, let alone walked, while so near death.

In further corroboration of Harris’s story was the presence of soot around two of Tarnower’s wounds, which indicated that those shots had been fired at close range, not, as the prosecution claimed, from a distance. In sum, I concluded that Jean Harris’s version of events that night, not the prosecution’s, was probably the truth. But how to prove it?

From my preliminary examination of the forensic evidence, I had determined there were two major facts I must research that could prove to me, once and for all, whether or not Harris had told the truth:

1. The blood trail that Tarnower made en route to the bathroom. If Harris was telling the truth, and Tarnower had suffered only a hand wound after that first shot, the trail should be a thin line of blood drops from the hand. If, instead, as the prosecution alleged, he had been wounded in three places, massive blood should have been found on the carpet.

2. The gouge in the wooden floor of the balcony. If that was really a ricochet mark of a bullet, as MacDonell testified, and its trajectory though the hole in the glass door could be traced to the spot at the foot of the bed where Harris said she was standing during the first struggle for the gun, then again Harris was telling the truth.

The prosecution said that the tragic events of that night began with Harris deliberately firing into the chest of Tarnower. Harris said they began with Tarnower pushing the gun away from her temple as she tried to kill herself. Murder or attempted suicide? I was determined to find out.

Herbert MacDonell, a tall bearded man, is colorful in every sense of the word and an expert in two fields: ballistics and bloodstain evidence. He is the author of dozens of books and articles on analysis and testing, and he teaches courses in the subjects at Elmira College as well as at his own “Bloodstain Institute.”

In the summer of 1984 I flew to Binghamton, New York, where MacDonell lives, to interview him about the Jean Harris case at which he had testified for the defense. He met me at the airport and drove me to his home on a lovely wooded street. Inside, his house appeared to be a conventional suburban home, until he took me down to the basement and I suddenly found myself in a very sophisticated forensic laboratory, equipped with modern devices of all kinds for MacDonell’s use in his profession. After a tour of his laboratory, we sat at a little table in his kitchen, the sun pouring in through a window, and I asked him to tell me what he knew of the dark night of Tarnower’s death.

He began by showing a Christmas card Jean Harris had sent him from prison: “Merry Christmas to all your students. If the case had gone to jury right after you testified I’d have walked out a free woman.—Jean Harris.”

“The actual physical contributions I made to the defense were never written up,” MacDonell said. “In fact, “20/20” [the ABC television show] did a whole program on the Jean Harris case and never mentioned any of the seven forensic scientists who testified she was telling the truth.”

On the kitchen table, MacDonell had assembled several large files filled with photos and documents relating to the trial. “Was Jean Harris telling the truth?” he said. “I checked every step of her story, and in every instance I discovered that the scientific evidence supported her story—and disproved the prosecution’s.”

MacDonell found a picture in one of his files and held it up to me. The picture showed a string, tracing the trajectory of a bullet from the gouge on the balcony through the hole in the glass door to a person holding the string waist-high at the foot of the bed. “For example, the first shot,” he continued. “When Jean and I were at the house together, she was out of the room when I ran the string from the bullet gouge to the position at the foot of the bed, so I thought I’d test her when she got back. I said, ‘Jean, exactly where were you when that first shot was fired?’ She went to the precise spot at the foot of the bed where my line had reached, when I did the test earlier.

“But then I had a bigger surprise when I finally got hold of the official police photos of the crime scene. The police had dozens of photos the defense hadn’t yet seen. I got them—and realized why they couldn’t have been eager for the defense to see them. Look at this.”

MacDonell selected a second picture which was almost identical to the first, only this time a police investigator was holding the string at the foot of the bed. “They did the same test before I even came along!” he said. “The police had to know that the angle of the bullet shot was just as Jean said. So what did they do? They started saying the ricochet mark on the balcony floor was not a bullet ricochet, even though one of their own investigators admitted it was a ‘fresh gouge.’” He shook his head. “The prosecution hated that bullet gouge.”

MacDonell then showed me a close-up picture of the gouge. “Look at that. Unless someone took a knife and deliberately carved a large chunk out of the wood, that has to be a ricochet mark, especially as there’s a bullet hole in the glass door behind it. So we know that Jean is telling the truth about the first shot.”

MacDonell continued his argument. “And what does Jean say next? She says Tarnower went to the bathroom to check his hand wound, then returned with a towel around it, grabbed the gun from her, and sat on the bed while he telephoned the housekeeper.”

“Yes,” I said. “Was there a blood trail on the carpet? That would show us whether he was wounded only in the hand—or had two other massive wounds as the prosecution said.”

MacDonell looked through his pictures and came up with a police photo of the carpet at the time of the crime that I had not seen published. I sighed. The picture showed a single trail of blood droplets, as I had thought should be present if Harris was telling the truth. “But the blood trail isn’t the only evidence,” MacDonell said. “There was hydrolized blood on the mattress where Tarnower sat, after he returned from the bathroom.”

Hydrolized blood is blood mixed with water. It indicated that Tarnower had washed his hand in the bathroom. “Furthermore, I examined the mattress for bloodstains,” MacDonell continued. “The other side of the bed, nearer the bathroom, had a cloth-on-cloth bloodstain from the towel he tossed there. You see, it all fits with her story of the hand wound.

“And there’s also a psychological factor which makes the prosecution scenario ridiculous,” he said. “If Jean had stood in front of Tarnower, deliberately firing away to kill him, wouldn’t he have run out of the room yelling, ‘She’s trying to murder me,’ rather than walking to the bathroom and back?”

He shook his head. “Now we come to the climax, the struggle that Jean says took place on the bed, and the shots she fired. She says she remembers the sound of only one shot—and the jury, and everyone else, says, ‘Oh yes? If there really was a struggle, you pulled the trigger three times!’”

MacDonell leaned over and said, almost confidentially, “But I conducted a ballistics test of my own in police headquarters—and it proved Jean was right when she said she didn’t remember more than one shot.”

He told me he had fired the gun on the police pistol range. “The police thought I was testing discharge distance. But what I was doing was firing each shell twice to see if Harris had told the truth.

“You see, her story was that after the struggle on the bed when Tarnower was shot, she ran around the bed, placed the gun to her temple to kill herself, pulled the trigger, and it clicked. The reason it clicked is that Jean had loaded only five bullets into the six chambers. One of the chambers was empty. If it hadn’t been, she would have been dead when she pulled the trigger.” He paused. “She then held the gun out to test it, and the fifth bullet fired into the headboard behind the bed. What did she do next? According to her, she kept pressing the trigger, each time hearing a click. Do you see now why I fired each shell twice on the police range?”

“Yes,” I said. “To prove she had kept pulling the trigger and thereby prove she really didn’t know she had fired all those shots before, just as she later told the jury.”

“Right,” MacDonell said. “You can tell when a shell has been struck twice. When a bullet is fired, the gases from the explosion cause the back of the shell to rise. But the second fall of the hammer flattens out the back of the shell in a distinctive manner. That’s how I could tell Jean Harris kept squeezing the trigger, and therefore didn’t know she had fired all those shots on the bed. It’s scientific proof that she remembered only one shot. She thought there were still bullets in the gun!

“So from first to last her story checked out, scientifically, ballistically, psychologically, and every other way including logically,” MacDonell said. “And there are other clues. Here’s something no one brought out at the trial. It’s only a small clue, but again it builds up her credibility.” He showed me a picture of the back of Tarnower’s pajama top. “Where’s the bullet hole in the shoulder?” he asked. I looked at the picture and saw that the collar flap of the pajama top that covered the bullet hole in the shoulder revealed no hole of its own. “You won’t find it because the flap was up when the bullet struck,” MacDonell said. “And why was his collar flap up? Because he was involved in a struggle, as Jean said.”

That evening MacDonell gave a slide presentation of the Jean Harris case for me and some of his friends, in which he explained many of the points he had made to me earlier. The next morning, as I was leaving, he made one final and very intriguing statement. “I know of a test Jean took,” he said. “She passed it with flying colors. But it wasn’t admissible in court.”

Then he added, mysteriously, “There’s a tape recording of that test in existence.”

Was he talking about a lie detector test that Jean Harris had taken—and passed? MacDonell wouldn’t tell me, but if that is what he meant, why the test is still secret mystified me.

A few months after my visit with MacDonell, I discovered that the Tarnower bedroom had been preserved, and I would be allowed to see it. There I knew I would be able to check in person the two items of forensic evidence which I had decided earlier would be litmus tests of Harris’s honesty.

1. The trail of blood to the bathroom. Was it a thin trail from a hand wound? If it was, Harris’s story would be confirmed. The police photo in MacDonell’s possession showed that it was, but from long experience as a coroner I knew that pictures often lie, because of the camera angle or the lighting.

2. The gouge in the wooden floor of the balcony. I was concerned about it because in my opinion a bullet should not have ricocheted at all from such a floor but would have bored straight through the wood. If the gouge was not that of a bullet, then the prosecution, not Harris, was right.

When at last I found myself in the bedroom of Tarnower’s former house, I went directly to the foot of the twin beds where Harris said she had stood when that famous first shot was fired. I turned to look through the glass doors that opened onto the balcony, and admired the splendid view. The pond, larger than I had imagined, and the willow trees were graceful ornaments to the estate. At my shoulder, Valerie Westheimer murmured, “That tree over there.” She pointed to a tall willow. “Jean Harris said when she visited, ‘That was Hy’s favorite tree. I’m so glad you saved it.’ She was so in love with that man.”

But I was concentrating not on love but on a gouge in the balcony floor outside. I began to open the glass door to the balcony, but Mrs. Westheimer stopped me. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you not to go out on the balcony.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous. We’re going to have to rebuild the balcony, because the wood is rotten.”

Rotting wood! I crouched behind the glass door and looked at the gouge. That explained the mystery to me. I knew from experience that if a bullet strikes rotting wood it will not bore through cleanly, as it normally does. Instead the wood will break off in chunks—and cause just such a gouge as I was seeing. That meant MacDonell’s test was right, and the prosecution was wrong about that first shot. It had been fired, as Harris claimed, when Tarnower stopped her from trying to commit suicide at the foot of the bed.

I next went toward Tarnower’s bathroom to look for the trail of blood on the carpet. There was no carpet. It was gone: one important piece of evidence in the case that had not been preserved, I thought sadly. When I asked Mrs. Westheimer about it, she said she had removed the carpet because of the blood on it. “How much blood was on the carpet?” I said. “A pool?”

“Oh no,” she said, “not much blood at all. Just a few drops.”

Once again the evidence confirmed Harris’s story.

I was also curious about the last shot and went to the far side of the bed, where Harris said she had fired it. According to her, she had stood at the bedside near the headboard after Tarnower was shot, placed the gun to her head to kill herself, and heard a click. Then she held the gun out to test it, pulled the trigger, and the gun fired, sending a bullet into the cabinet built into the headboard.

At the trial the prosecution said that the wild shot into the cabinet had not occurred that way; instead it happened earlier when Tarnower “brushed” the gun as he passed Harris who was standing at the foot of the bed. But as I examined the cabinet, I saw something strange. There were two gouges, not one. One was in the front corner of the headboard, the other was in the back of the cabinet inside it, five inches to the side. The angle between the two marks showed precisely—and with no other explanation—that Harris had stood at the very spot she said she was standing when she fired the gun. The prosecution, according to the Westheimers, had not inspected the room, relying instead on the earlier police photos of the scene. So perhaps they were unaware of the two gouges in the headboard when they claimed the shot originated from the other side of the bed, and at its foot. But here was further evidence that Harris’s story was true.

Examining the storage cabinets behind the headboard, Mrs. Westheimer and I then found the collages Jean Harris had made for her lover. And, my investigation complete, I left this house where one night, four years before, a fifty-six-year-old woman in love, and despair, had come bearing flowers, and a gun.

Dr. Robert E. Litman is co-director and chief psychiatrist of the famous Suicide Prevention Center in Los Angeles. I first worked with him on the Marilyn Monroe case in 1962, and I don’t believe anyone in the world knows more about the psychology and circumstances of potential suicides than he. I was troubled by the fact that Jean Harris had not remembered firing three shots, so I asked Dr. Litman about the case. I told him that Harris remembered firing only one shot in the struggle on the bed. And that one shot, she believed, was fired when the muzzle was pointed at her own stomach. Was it possible that she couldn’t remember the two other shots?

Dr. Litman said it was indeed possible. “Often in police cases involving gunfire,” he told me, “the trained officer cannot remember the number of shots he fired in the incident. That’s because of shock, and here there was a second factor. When Jean Harris pulled the trigger the first time, she expected the shot to be fatal to her. She was psychologically prepared for death, and when it didn’t happen her mind ceased to function, and all she remembers is that first shot which should have brought her death.”

Thus all of the pieces of the case seemed to fit together. Forensic evidence from the bullet wounds to the lone blood trail to the bullet gouges in the balcony and the headboard revealed that Jean Harris told the truth about the events of that night from beginning to end. MacDonell’s test in the ballistics laboratory showed she really hadn’t remembered firing all of those shots, and Dr. Litman’s psychological experience agreed with him.

A struggle for the gun obviously did occur, and if it did, the killing of Dr. Herman Tarnower could have been accidental, as I believe it was. My research into the actual forensic facts has given me faith in Jean Harris’s credibility. I believe she was at all times trying to commit suicide and Tarnower misdirected the gun in the struggle. Therefore, in my opinion, a grievous miscarriage of justice was done in that courtroom, and Jean Harris should not be serving fifteen years in prison for second-degree murder.

And she would not be if she and Tarnower had heeded the unconscious warning for both of them that Jean Harris had written on her last New Year’s collage to “Hy.” Not only “HOW YOU CAN USE LOVE TO LIVE LONGER,” but elsewhere on the collage:

LOVE—THE SECRET OF HEALTH, HAPPINESS AND LONG LIFE.