Jean Harris, the patrician girls' school headmistress who spent 12 years in prison for the 1980 killing of her longtime lover, "Scarsdale Diet" doctor Herman Tarnower, in a case that rallied feminists and inspired television movies, has died. She was 89. 
 
 FILE - In this Feb. 9, 1981 file photo, Jean Harris, left, arrives at court in White Plains, New York Monday, Feb. 9, 1981. Harris, the patrician girls' school headmistress who spent 12 years in prison... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this March 20, 1981 file photo, Jean Harris, handcuffed and carrying a book, leaves the Westchester County Jail enroute to the Westchester County Courthouse in Valhalla, N.Y. Harris, the patrician... (Associated Press) 
 
 Harris died Sunday at an assisted-living facility in New Haven, her son, James Harris, said Friday. 
 
 She had claimed the shooting of Tarnower, 69, was an accident. Convicted of murder in 1981, Harris suffered two heart attacks while serving her sentence in the Bedford Hills women's prison north of New York City. She was granted clemency by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo when she underwent heart bypass surgery in December 1992 and was released on parole three weeks later. 
 
 She later founded Children of Bedford Inc., a nonprofit organization to provide scholarships and tutoring for children of female prison inmates. 
 
 Her trial for shooting Tarnower, the millionaire cardiologist famous for devising the Scarsdale Diet _ a weight-loss book and sensation of the 1970s named for the New York suburb where he practiced _ brought feminists rallying to her defense. 
 
 They pictured her as a woman victimized by a male-dominated society, adrift because she was getting older and her lover of 14 years was brushing her off in favor of his younger office assistant. In addition, they said, she was in the thrall of antidepressant drugs Tarnower had prescribed for her. 
 
 The case inspired two made-for-television movies, "The People vs. Jean Harris," which aired not long after her 1981 conviction, and "Mrs. Harris," which ran on HBO in 2006. 
 
 Harris always maintained that she went armed to Tarnower's Westchester County estate in Purchase on March 10, 1980, to confront him over his womanizing and kill herself, but unintentionally shot him four times in a struggle over the gun. She later acknowledged at a parole hearing that she was "certainly guilty of something. I caused the man's death." 
 
 A jury convicted her of murder, and she was sentenced to 15 years to life. 
 
 Her lawyer had unsuccessfully gambled on an all-or-nothing strategy that eschewed an "extreme emotional disturbance" defense and did not allow the jury to consider a lesser charge such as manslaughter. 
 
 Jurors said afterward it was Harris's own testimony that led them to convict her. They said they tried to re-enact her account of the struggle for the gun and did not find it credible. 
 
 The defense maintained that jealousy was not a factor. But during cross-examination, the prosecutor introduced a letter written just prior to the shooting in which Harris referred to her rival as an "ignorant slut" and "a vicious, adulterous psychotic." 
 
 "The fact was, Jean Harris was too much of a lady to admit that she was jealous of the office girl," the late author Shana Alexander wrote in her book about the case, "Very Much a Lady." "She would rather go to prison than acknowledge it. And she did." 
 
 As an inmate, Harris criticized authority, chafing under what she saw as arbitrary, counterproductive rules. In books and articles she wrote and in interviews, she advocated reform, both for her own benefit and that of other imprisoned women. 
 
 Housed in the prison's honor wing, she taught mothering skills to expectant inmates and worked in the Bedford Hills children's center. 
 
 Born Jean Streuven on April 27, 1923, she grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, attended private schools, graduated magna cum laude from Smith College and married industrialist James Harris. 
 
 The couple lived in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and had two sons. Harris also got her first job there, teaching first grade. 
 
 She and James Harris divorced in 1966. A few months later, the slender, blond, blue-eyed divorcee of 43 met Tarnower, 12 years her senior, at a party on Park Avenue in New York. They talked about marriage early in the relationship, but that never panned out, and Harris remained his lover. 
 
 In 1977, she left a sales administration job in New York to become headmistress of the Madeira School for girls in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va., a position that also got her listed in the capital's social register. 
 
 Weekends and vacations were spent with Tarnower, traveling or on his arm at social gatherings. She also earned a mention in the acknowledgments in his best-selling diet book, "The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet," for helping with research. 
 
 But Tarnower's dalliances with other, younger women drove Harris to desperation, and, according to her account, she decided to drive from Virginia to his home and kill herself in his presence. 
 
 She testified at her trial: "In Westchester, I always felt I was a woman in a pretty dress that went to dinner parties with Dr. Tarnower. In Washington, I was a woman in a pretty dress and a headmistress. I wasn't sure who I was, and it didn't seem to matter." 
 
 The expensively dressed Harris came across as snobbish, arrogant and jealous of the younger woman who had replaced her as the principal object of Tarnower's attention. 
 
 During the trial, it was assumed that Harris insisted on testifying about the fateful last meeting in Tarnower's bedroom. She later said she would not have taken the stand had her lawyer told her to "keep quiet." ||||| Jean S. Harris, the private-school headmistress whose 1981 trial for the murder of a prominent Scarsdale, N.Y., physician galvanized a nation with its story of vengeance by a woman scorned, died on Sunday at an assisted-living center in New Haven. She was 89. 
 
 Her death was confirmed by her son James. 
 
 For more than a year — from her arrest on March 10, 1980, to her sentencing for second-degree murder on March 20, 1981 — Mrs. Harris’s case was front-page news. 
 
 The trial provided the fascination of a love triangle involving the cultivated headmistress of an exclusive girls’ school, a wealthy cardiologist whose book, “The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet,” had been a best seller, and an attractive younger rival for his affection. If Mrs. Harris was to be believed, it was the story of an attempted suicide by a jilted woman that turned into the unintentional shooting of the man who had rejected her. 
 
 But there was an underlying social debate that drew commentary from writers, sociologists and feminists and antifeminists alike. Mrs. Harris’s passionate defenders saw her plight as epitomizing the fragile position of an aging but fiercely independent woman who, because of limited options, was dependent on a man who mistreated her. Her detractors, who were just as ardent, suggested that such reasoning made it seem that it was the physician, Dr. Herman Tarnower, who was on trial. 
 
 Mrs. Harris was sentenced to 15 years to life, and spent 12 of those years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y. But she managed to salvage that seemingly wasted period through a remarkable prison life. She counseled fellow female prisoners on how to take care of their children, and she set up a center where infants born to inmates can spend a year near their mothers. Then, after her release in 1993 following a grant of clemency by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, she set up a foundation that raised millions of dollars for scholarships for children of women in prison in New York State. 
 
 She also lectured about her often incongruous experiences with inmates. 
 
 “They looked at me as a rich white woman, even though some of the call girls earned six times what I did as a headmistress,” she told an interviewer. 
 
 At the center of the murder case was Jean Struven Harris, a slight, blue-eyed blonde, then 56, who was a product of comfortable suburban homes and a Smith College education. Headstrong, articulate and ambitious, she was the headmistress of the Madeira School, a boarding school for affluent girls on a sprawling wooded campus in Virginia. 
 
 At 10:56 on the night of March 10, 1980, the White Plains police received a telephone call from Dr. Tarnower’s secluded glass-and-brick house on a 6.8-acre estate in Purchase, N.Y. Lying in an upstairs bedroom dying of four bullet wounds was Dr. Tarnower, the 69-year-old founder of the Scarsdale Medical Group, whose diet book had sold three million copies. 
 
 When the police arrived at the driveway, they came across Mrs. Harris, wearing tan slacks and a mink jacket, driving away. She contended that she was going to look for a phone booth to call the police. But officers found a .32-caliber gun in the glove compartment, and a detective later testified that she told him: “I did it. ... I’ve been through so much hell with him. He slept with every woman he could.” 
 
 Dr. Tarnower and Mrs. Harris, the divorced mother of two grown sons and 13 years his junior, had been lovers for 14 years. But in the years before the shooting, the doctor had begun appearing at dinner parties and taking vacations with his office assistant, Lynne Tryforos, a divorced woman who was then 37. For years Dr. Tarnower, a lifelong bachelor, had refused to marry Mrs. Harris. Now, as a wealthy man, he could dally with the even younger Mrs. Tryforos. 
 
 In her eight days on the witness stand, Mrs. Harris was able to describe her betrayal with an arch wit that charmed the courtroom. She recalled how she once discovered a birthday greeting from Mrs. Tryforos to Dr. Tarnower in a small advertisement on the front page of The New York Times, and how she responded: “Herman, why don’t you use the Goodyear blimp next time? I think it’s available.”
– The woman whose killing of a famous diet doctor in 1980 became the stuff of made-for-TV movies—two, in fact—has died at 89, reports the New York Times and AP. Jean S. Harris spent a dozen years in prison for shooting her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnowner, creator of the wildly popular Scarsdale Diet of the 1970s. Harris, headmistress of a prestigious girls' school at the time, swore it was an accident and said she intended to kill herself, but was convicted of murder. She was granted clemency in 1993 and devoted herself to a foundation she created to help the children of female inmates. The Times and AP have similar takes on why Harris' case became the sensation it did: Times: Harris' "passionate defenders saw her plight as epitomizing the fragile position of an aging but fiercely independent woman who, because of limited options, was dependent on a man who mistreated her." AP: "They pictured her as a woman victimized by a male-dominated society, adrift because she was getting older and her lover of 14 years was brushing her off in favor of his younger office assistant. In addition, they said, she was in the thrall of antidepressant drugs Tarnower had prescribed for her."