March 31, 1980

When: March 10, 1980

What happened: Jean Harris, the 57-year-old headmistress of the Madeira Girls' School, planning to kill herself, went to see Tarnower, her lover and the author of The Scarsdale Diet, to say good-bye. She found another woman's negligee there and put the suicide weapon to another use. "I shot him—I did it," she said when police arrived but she also said that she had begged him to kill her, that they had fought over the gun and she had accidently shot the man she loved.

The betrayal: "Over the last couple of years, Hi Tarnower had begun to date another woman, Lynne Tryforos, 37,a comely blond employee of his Scarsdale Medical Group. She was two decades younger than the woman Tarnower had refused to marry for a dozen years. The new affair seemed cruelly public to Jean Harris. Tarnower would take Lynne Tryforos to dinner parties... and New York functions to which he had taken Jean Struven Harris."— from "The Headmistress and the Diet Doctor" in the March 31, 1990 issue of New York Magazine

The sentence: 15 years to life. She was released in 1993 after 12 years in prison.

The book: Very Much A Lady by Shana Alexander