Jean Harris Trial: 1980-81

Aurnou decided to put Harris on the stand. The strain of Tarnower's rejection and the pressures of her career burst forth in emotional exchanges between lawyer and client. Aurnou's probing of Harris' precarious emotional state intended to show that she had been pushed to the point of suicide, not murder. Harris described in detail how she and Tarnower struggled over the gun with which she tried to kill herself.

The defense view of Harris as a stolid, sympathetic figure in control of her behavior despite intense suffering began to blur under prosecutor Bolen's cross-examination. Harris' responses to his questions were haughty and abrasive. She accused other witnesses of perjury. Yet Aurnou's failure to subdue his client's temper was overshadowed by an even graver miscalculation.

Harris testified that she had mailed Tarnower a registered letter on the morning of March 10. She telephoned him later, interrupting his consultation with a patient. Harris told the doctor to throw the letter away when it arrived. After Tarnower's death, the defense team had quickly retrieved the thick envelope from the post office. When the prosecution asked to examine it during the trial, Aurnou theatrically removed it from his pocket and handed it to Bolen, certain that its pleading depiction of Tarnower as a faithless philanderer would win the defense's case.

Instead, the image of a cultivated, quietly suffering headmistress vanished when Bolen read the 11-page "Scarsdale letter" aloud. Pain and bitterness, which the defense had denied was compatible with her character, raged from its page. Harris wrote of her rival for Tarnower's affections, calling her "your whore" and "your adulterous slut." The rambling letter also spoke of Tarnower removing Harris from his will.

Because Harris had voluntarily testified about her March 10 telephone call, Bolen was free to produce the doctor's patient as a rebuttal witness. Juanita Edwards testified that she was with Tarnower when his phone rang that day. The doctor took the call in his office but left the examination room phone off the hook.

"Goddammit it, Jean, I want you to stop bothering me!"

Edwards could hear Tarnower shout angrily at a woman over the open line.

"You've lied and you've cheated!"

Edwards also heard Tarnower say,

"Well, you're going to inherit $240,000!"

Aurnou objected fiercely but to no effect. After more analytical haggling over the tissue found in Tarnower's chest wound, the defense rested. Judge Russell Leggett instructed the jurors that if they found Harris had intended to kill Tarnower at the moment she pulled the trigger, they could find her guilty of second-degree murder. If they decided that she had not intended to kill him, she could be found guilty of either second-degree manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.