Jean Harris
Headmistress; convicted murderer
Jean Struven Harris (April 27, 1923 – December 23, 2012) was the headmistress of The Madeira School for girls in McLean, Virginia, who made US news in the early 1980s when she was tried and convicted of the murder of her ex-lover, Herman Tarnower, a well-known cardiologist and author of the best-selling book The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.
Biography
Born Jean Struven on April 27, 1923, in Chicago, Illinois, to Albert and Mildred Struven, Harris was the second of four children. She went to Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, before attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1945, she graduated magna cum laude from Smith with a degree in economics. After college, she married Jim Harris and they had two sons by 1952. In 1965, Harris divorced her husband, who died in 1977.
Harris met Tarnower, a cardiologist (later known as the "Scarsdale Diet Doctor" following the publication of his popular diet book), in December 1966, the year after her divorce. They then began a 14-year relationship. Though Tarnower showered Harris with gifts and exotic vacations, he had relationships with multiple other women during these years.
Harris worked as the headmistress of the Madeira School for girls in McLean, Virginia, while continuing her long-distance relationship with Tarnower.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15492494. VIAF identifies the subject as 24104110. The Library of Congress control number is n81088291. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 2012, 1945 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Harris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.