Almanac: The Scarsdale Diet Doctor murder trial
And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: March 20th, 1981, 35 years ago today ... the finale to a tabloid sensation of a trial.
For that was the day Jean Harris was sentenced to 15 years to life for the killing of Dr. Herman Tarnower, the creator of the popular "Scarsdale Diet."
Jean Harris was a divorcee and a girls school headmistress involved in a years-long romance with Dr. Tarnower.
After discovering that the diet doctor was two-timing her with a younger woman he employed in his office, Jean Harris took herself, and her handgun, to his suburban New York home on the night of March 10, 1980 -- NOT to kill him, she testified at trial, but to confront him before committing suicide.
Instead, she said, the doctor struggled with her over the gun and it accidentally went off, killing him.
The tangled tale was told in not one, but TWO, made-for-TV movies, including an HBO offering in 2005, with Annette Bening in the title role.
Harris' story of romantic betrayal failed to sway the jury, which convicted her of second degree murder.
However, she DID win the support of some feminists and writers, including Diana Trilling, who compared her to such wronged heroines of literature as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.
Unlike them, Jean Harris survived.
A model prisoner, she counseled and tutored her fellow inmates, while her son, Jim, stood on New York City sidewalks drumming up signatures for a clemency petition.
At the end of 1992, New York Governor Mario Cuomo commuted her sentence, and in a public appearance in 1994, she reflected on her experience:
"The most compelling lesson that I learned when I was in prison is how connected we all are to one another," she said. "The problem of one of us is the problem of us all."
Jean Harris died on December 23, 2012. She was 89 years old.