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.” ||||| 6 members of Spring family shot to death in likely domestic dispute Suspect in apparent domestic dispute surrenders after car chase, standoff 
 
 Harris County sheriff's officers escort the suspect in the Spring-area shooting deaths late Wednesday. Harris County sheriff's officers escort the suspect in the Spring-area shooting deaths late Wednesday. Photo: Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle Photo: Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 40 Caption Close 6 members of Spring family shot to death in likely domestic dispute 1 / 40 Back to Gallery 
 
 Six members of a Spring family, including four children and two adults, were shot to death Wednesday after an apparent domestic dispute at their Spring home and a relative was arrested hours later after a police chase and a tense standoff in the cul-de-sac of a nearby neighborhood. 
 
 Authorities held a news conference about 5:30 a.m. Thursday to announce that Ron Lee Haskell, 33, had been captured and charged after a slow-speed chase and lengthy standoff. 
 
 A 15-year-old girl was wounded in the shooting at the home in the 700 block of Leaflet Lane and was airlifted to Memorial Hermann Hospital where she remained in critical condition late Wednesday. 
 
 Harris County Sheriff's Office identified the victims as two males, ages 4 and 13, two females, ages 6 and 9, and two adults, a 39-year-old male and a 34-year-old female. 
 
 Mark Herman, assistant chief deputy for the Precinct 4 Harris County constable, said authorities responded to a report of a shooting about 6 p.m. at the home on Leaflet Lane. There they found five people dead and two others with gunshot wounds to the head. Both were taken by Life Flight helicopter to the hospital, where one of them died. 
 
 Before being flown to the hospital, one of the wounded was able to tell police that the shooting arose from a domestic dispute involving "someone who had left the family." 
 
 Herman said the victim, a female, gave them a description of the person, the type of car he was in, and said he was on his way to kill other family members at another address. 
 
 Authorities were dispatched to the home of the relatives a short distance away, near Ponderosa and Anvil, and arrived just before Haskell. 
 
 "As soon as they got over there, he came driving up, and that's when the chase started," Herman said, crediting the victim's information with saving the relatives' lives. 
 
 A 25-minute pursuit ended in a standoff at a cul-de-sac in a nearby subdivision on Country Meadow Drive after police, using spike strips, disabled Haskell's car. Authorities evacuated residents near the scene in the Country Lake Estates subdivision, while SWAT negotiators attempted to defuse the situation. 
 
 The standoff with Haskell lasted late into the night. SWAT teams sandwiched his Honda sedan between two hulking armored vehicles at the end of a quiet neighborhood street and bathed it in floodlights. 
 
 The suspect eventually surrendered after several tense hours and was taken into custody. 
 
 At one point during the standoff, Haskell pointed a gun at his head, police said. 
 
 Girl, 15, sole survivor 
 
 Speaking at a news conference late Wednesday, Pct. 4 Constable Ronald Hickman identified the victims as a man, a woman and four children ages 4 to 13. He said a 15-year-old girl was the only survivor at that hour. 
 
 He said investigators were trying to sort out the exact family relationships. 
 
 It was "obviously a domestic situation that went south," Hickman said. "Probably a divorce or at least a separation." 
 
 He credited the victim who gave police a description of the suspect with providing "critical information" to authorities: the name of the gunman and where he was going next. 
 
 "While quickly responding to that location, we saw him coming up to that residence where other relatives of that family lived and we assumed he meant to shoot them as well," Hickman said. 
 
 Public records indicate that Stephen Robert Stay and Katie Stay, ages 39 and 34, were living at the residence on Leaflet Lane, though they do not appear to have been the owners of the house. 
 
 A web page from the Houston Association of Realtors listed Stephen Stay as an area real estate broker and listed the home's address as his contact information. 
 
 Residents on the quiet suburban street where the shootings took place were stunned by the violence in their neighborhood. 
 
 Family 'close-knit' 
 
 A woman who said she lives across the street from the house described the family as "close-knit." 
 
 "It was a Mormon family," she said. "They were very sweet and their kids were very shy. This is a sad, sad day." 
 
 The woman, who asked not to be identified, said five children and two adults lived in the house. 
 
 John Barros, a real estate agent, said one of the residents of the home where the shootings took place was a broker with whom he worked. 
 
 "It's a great family … very religious," Barros said. "They pray every day." 
 
 Wesley Carr, who lives nearby in the Enchanted Oaks subdivision, said the Spring neighborhood is typically quiet. 
 
 "I've lived here 20 years. It's a very quiet neighborhood. It's not a through area," he said. "People just don't come here." 
 
 Second shooting this year 
 
 The shooting on Wednesday comes six months after another Harris County family was found shot to death in their Cypress home. 
 
 The deaths of Maoye Sun and Mei Xie and their children, Timothy Sun and Titus Sun, which made headlines across the globe and shook the Chinese-American community, has not yet been solved. 
 
 Their bodies were found about 7:30 p.m. Jan. 30 at their home in the 14000 block of Fosters Creek Drive. 
 
 The couple was last seen on Jan. 24. The boys attended school at Sampson Elementary the day before. 
 
 Chronicle photographer Brett Coomer contributed to this report.
– 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."