She was 89. 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 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. 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. 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. Now, as a wealthy man, he could dally with the even younger Mrs. Tryforos. 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. “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. 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. 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.
– 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."