The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Thinking the telephone was out of order, she left to go to a phone booth at the nearby Community Center to summon help, but by then the housekeeper, Suzanne van der Vreken, and her husband, Henri, had already reached the police. A police car approached and Harris led it to the house, and stepped out into the night to be greeted by Henri shouting to the police, “She’s the one! She did it!”

  3

  Jean Harris was arrested for the murder of Herman Tarnower and on November 21, 1980, went on trial. The charge was murder in the second degree.

  It was a case in which both sides apparently were certain of victory. The defense believed that Harris’s story of an attempted suicide would be confirmed by the evidence. The prosecution scented victory because it felt that no jury would believe that Harris, while trying to commit suicide, would fire no fewer than three bullets into Tarnower’s body.

  According to the press, most courtroom observers—and most Americans—agreed with the prosecution, and simply didn’t believe Harris’s story.

  During the trial seven forensic experts, including my friends Dr. Cyril Wecht, the former Chief Medical Examiner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a world-famed pathologist, and Professor Herbert MacDonell, one of the country’s leading authorities on ballistic and bloodstain evidence, testified for the defense. Their forensic findings caused great difficulties for the prosecution. In fact, in what may be an unprecedented action in a homicide case, Deputy Medical Examiner Louis Roh, who performed the autopsy of Herman Tarnower, changed his interpretation of his original autopsy report in court.

  The credibility of Harris versus the prosecution began with the question of whether or not there had been a struggle. Harris said that the shots that killed Tarnower were fired while they were battling over the gun as she attempted to shoot herself with it. The prosecution could not accept the concept of a struggle, because it would indicate that the shots might have been accidental, or even that Tarnower’s own hands had misdirected the gun toward himself. Therefore the prosecution’s scenario included no hint of a struggle for the weapon. In its story, the shooting was deliberate, and from a distance. In the vivid words of the prosecuting attorney: “She confronts the doctor. She gets the gun. She is in control now. She has power…. The doctor [is] seated on the bed…. The defendant [points her gun] and shoots it…. The bullet goes through Herman Tarnower’s outstretched [right] hand and enters his chest….”

  According to the prosecution’s scenario, Harris then deliberately shot Tarnower a second time, in the shoulder, as he lunged toward her. Falling back, he brushed the gun, causing her to fire a third bullet into a cabinet built into the headboard behind the bed. He recovered, went to the bathroom and when he returned pushed Harris onto the bed, causing her to fire another wild bullet through the balcony doors. Finally, as he tried to telephone the housekeeper, Harris deliberately shot him once again, this time the bullet striking his arm, and he collapsed.

  In sum, in the prosecution’s presentation of the case, the three fatal wounds occurred this way: Harris stood at the foot of the bed as Tarnower sat up and held out his hand, and she cold-bloodedly fired at him, the bullet going through his hand into his chest. Then he lunged at her, and she aimed and fired again, the bullet going down through his shoulder and into his lung. Finally, when he was on the phone, desperately seeking help, she deliberately shot him again, this time in the arm. The two “wild” shots occurred not in a struggle but when he brushed her gun accidentally, and again when he pushed her onto the bed.

  One of the immediate problems with this recreation of events was that Tarnower’s blood was found on the cylinder of the gun, and indeed had seeped deep inside it. The forensic experts for the defense argued that this could not have occurred during casual “brushings”—the only times which the prosecution admitted that Tarnower even touched the gun. However, this was just one instance, the defense said, which showed that Harris’s version of events was true, and the prosecution’s was not. And there were many more controversial clues—beginning with the first shot through the hand.

  In his original autopsy report, Deputy Medical Examiner Louis Roh had stated that the hand injury was a “through-and-through” wound, in which the bullet “had not been recovered,” and that four shots struck Tarnower’s body. But only five shots had been fired, and two of them were wild. So Roh later said only three bullets struck the body. The bullet through the hand, which he had previously thought was not recovered, had actually entered Tarnower’s chest, causing both wounds.

  This new testimony was important because if Harris had fired through an outstretched hand into Tarnower’s chest, she was a deliberate murderer. If instead the gun was fired during a struggle at the foot of the bed, and the bullet had lodged not in Tarnower’s body but somewhere else in the room, it supported her story that she was trying to commit suicide.

  The issue was Jean Harris’s credibility—and so a war raged in court over that first shot.

  The defense sent ballistics expert Herbert MacDonell to the scene of the crime with Jean Harris to reenact the shooting. There MacDonell discovered a hole in the glass balcony door, and a bullet gouge in the balcony floor outside. When he drew a string from the gouge through the bullet hole in the glass door, its trajectory led directly to the spot at the foot of the bed where Harris said she had fired the first shot in an attempt to kill herself.

  When MacDonell testified about his on-the-scene inspection, the prosecution team battled back on two fronts: one, they claimed that the gouge on the balcony floor was not a bullet gouge at all, and, two, they had “proof” that the shot through the hand had not gone wild through the balcony door, but, instead, entered Tarnower’s chest after traversing his hand.

  Back to the stand came Dr. Roh with an addition to his autopsy report. He now stated he had discovered, after the autopsy, that there was “palm tissue” inside the chest wound, proving that the shot had gone through Tarnower’s hand into his chest. Also, he said, the chest wound was cylindrical, not round, indicating that the bullet was “tumbling” when it struck the chest, so it must have struck an intervening object. And finally, no “soot,” or particles, from the bullet had been found around the chest wound, which proved that the bullet had struck another object, “cleaning it off,” before it struck the chest.

  Forensic scientists can tell the distance of a weapon from the wound in this manner. Soot around a wound indicates a shot up to three or four inches away. Beyond that distance, up to about three feet away, no soot is found, but unburned metallic particles will be seen around the skin surface of a wound, which forensic scientists call the “tattooing effect.” Longer-distance shots leave no evidence of powder or particles on the skin surface.

  To the witness stand came seven distinguished forensic scientists who rebutted Dr. Roh, sometimes angrily. The so-called palm tissue in the chest, Dr. Wecht and others said, was not such tissue at all but collagen, a microscopic cartilage element found everywhere in the body. The bullet hole in the chest was cylindrical, not round, not because the missile had first gone through a hand, but simply because Tarnower was bending foward at the time he was hit. The lack of powder or “tattooing” around the chest wound meant only that the gun was fired more than three feet away.

  Thus the angry courtroom battle over the first shot raged on and, I believe, fundamentally altered the outcome of the trial, for a reason neither side planned. That shot was significant in indicating who—Harris or the prosecution—was telling the truth. Apparently the jury believed the prosecution, but there was much more forensic evidence that might have altered that belief, and this evidence was mentioned barely or not at all at the trial because of the time expended quibbling about the hand injury. Almost ninety percent of the forensic experts’ testimony revolved around that one shot.

  In the ebb and flow of courtroom battles, confrontation tactics often dictate the course of the trial and, in doing so, may obscure the most important forensic evidence. I believe that is what happened in
the Harris case.

  Courtroom presentation of forensic evidence is a problem which we in the profession know we must somehow improve, and progress is being made. In the universities today, courses in such presentations are being taught, but we have still not solved the basic problem of presenting clear, narrative analyses that juries can understand, because the American judicial system is based on confrontation, not presentation.

  The fact that important forensic evidence in Jean Harris’s trial was either lost in the uproar over the first shot or not presented in a way that the jury could understand was particularly damaging in this case because, more than in most cases, its outcome then had to turn not on the evidence, but on the jury’s perception of the defendant herself, as to whether or not she was telling the truth. Unfortunately for Harris, by all reports she was a disastrous witness for herself, appearing arrogant and snobbish on the stand. Worse, during her time in the witness chair the prosecution gained the right to read a long, bitter letter she had sent to Tarnower on the very day he died. The letter was full of rage against Lynn Tryforos, and seemed to provide a motive for the killing.

  On February 25, 1981, Jean Harris was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years to life in prison. She is now in the Bedford Hills, New York, Correctional Facility.

  4

  Because of its forensic aspects, I was intrigued by the Jean Harris case and decided to investigate it for myself. I began by reading transcripts of the forensic testimony at the trial, plus the news reports in The New York Times, various magazine articles and two fine books by journalists about the trial: Mrs. Harris, by Diana Trilling, and Very Much a Lady, by Shana Alexander.

  Later on, as my investigation progressed, I obtained copies of the original autopsy report, the hospital reports made by physicians attending Dr. Tarnower’s body when it arrived, and all the laboratory records of the various forensic tests in the case made at the request of the police by the Department of Laboratories and Research, Forensic Science Laboratory, Valhalla, New York.

  From these sources, I was surprised to discover major flaws in the prosecution’s scenario of murder. Like most people who had followed the case from afar, I had believed Harris to be guilty. But now, studying the evidence as a forensic scientist, I made one discovery after another which bothered me. First and foremost, it seemed to me obvious from this evidence that a struggle for the gun had taken place—and yet the jury had accepted the prosecution’s contention that no struggle had occurred and that Harris had shot Tarnower deliberately, and from a distance.

  To begin with, I noted that all the bullet tracks in Tarnower’s body were clustered in one area, as happens when two people are wrestling for control of a gun. Further, the bullet tracks in his body were all at different angles, also typical of a weapon involved in a struggle. Other evidence of a struggle was the bullet wound in Tarnower’s arm. The prosecution said that this wound was inflicted when Tarnower was sitting on the bed, telephoning the housekeeper, and Harris fired down at him. But the autopsy report stated that the track of the bullet in the arm was upward. This upward angle could not have occurred if she was standing above him. Obversely, it would have occurred if Tarnower’s body was above hers during a struggle.

  Also, Jean Harris was left-handed. When she was physically examined after her arrest, bruises were found on the inside of her upper left arm, and such bruises on the gun arm almost always indicate to coroners that there was a battle for the weapon. In sum, a struggle definitely had occurred—just as Jean Harris had testified.

  As for the famous first shot, the prosecution’s contention that Harris had shot Tarnower through his outstretched hand was disproved, I believed, by the location of the hand wound. The bullet passed through the fleshy area of the skin between the thumb and the index finger. In a struggle this is one of the most common locations for a hand wound. The victim grasps the muzzle to push the gun away, it fires, and the bullet goes through that fleshy area of the semi-closed fist.

  I believed that the prosecution’s version of the outstretched hand (and therefore deliberate murder) was wrong for yet another reason. The bullet had passed through Tarnower’s right hand, and from my experience I’ve learned that right-handed people (as Tarnower was) do not throw up their right arm to ward off danger. Instinctively they put up their left arm, reserving their stronger arm for further use.

  But perhaps the most glaring flaw of all in the prosecution’s case, in my opinion, concerned Tarnower’s trip to the bathroom. According to Harris, Tarnower went to the bathroom after the first struggle for the gun, which began when she placed the gun at her temple and climaxed with the hand wound. The prosecution contended that Tarnower walked to the bathroom after being shot through the hand into the chest, and again down through the shoulder. The bullet in the chest cut a major vein to the heart and pierced the lung. The shot through the shoulder was even more devastating, traversing the body downward for seventeen inches, fracturing three ribs, rupturing the lung and the diaphragm, and tearing into the right kidney.

  According to Deputy Medical Examiner Roh, those wounds meant that Tarnower went into “irretractible shock” within five to ten minutes, when death occurred. And yet, after sustaining these catastrophic wounds, with only five to ten minutes to live, Tarnower supposedly walked to the bathroom, examined his injuries, then returned to the bedroom, shoved Harris aside, and sat down to telephone the housekeeper.

  I don’t believe that the victim of such wounds could have crawled to the bathroom and back, let alone walked, while so near death.

  In further corroboration of Harris’s story was the presence of soot around two of Tarnower’s wounds, which indicated that those shots had been fired at close range, not, as the prosecution claimed, from a distance. In sum, I concluded that Jean Harris’s version of events that night, not the prosecution’s, was probably the truth. But how to prove it?

  From my preliminary examination of the forensic evidence, I had determined there were two major facts I must research that could prove to me, once and for all, whether or not Harris had told the truth:

  1. The blood trail that Tarnower made en route to the bathroom. If Harris was telling the truth, and Tarnower had suffered only a hand wound after that first shot, the trail should be a thin line of blood drops from the hand. If, instead, as the prosecution alleged, he had been wounded in three places, massive blood should have been found on the carpet.

  2. The gouge in the wooden floor of the balcony. If that was really a ricochet mark of a bullet, as MacDonell testified, and its trajectory though the hole in the glass door could be traced to the spot at the foot of the bed where Harris said she was standing during the first struggle for the gun, then again Harris was telling the truth.

  The prosecution said that the tragic events of that night began with Harris deliberately firing into the chest of Tarnower. Harris said they began with Tarnower pushing the gun away from her temple as she tried to kill herself. Murder or attempted suicide? I was determined to find out.

  5

  Herbert MacDonell, a tall bearded man, is colorful in every sense of the word and an expert in two fields: ballistics and bloodstain evidence. He is the author of dozens of books and articles on analysis and testing, and he teaches courses in the subjects at Elmira College as well as at his own “Bloodstain Institute.”

  In the summer of 1984 I flew to Binghamton, New York, where MacDonell lives, to interview him about the Jean Harris case at which he had testified for the defense. He met me at the airport and drove me to his home on a lovely wooded street. Inside, his house appeared to be a conventional suburban home, until he took me down to the basement and I suddenly found myself in a very sophisticated forensic laboratory, equipped with modern devices of all kinds for MacDonell’s use in his profession. After a tour of his laboratory, we sat at a little table in his kitchen, the sun pouring in through a window, and I asked him to tell me what he knew of the dark night of Tarnower’s death.

&nbs
p; He began by showing a Christmas card Jean Harris had sent him from prison: “Merry Christmas to all your students. If the case had gone to jury right after you testified I’d have walked out a free woman.—Jean Harris.”

  “The actual physical contributions I made to the defense were never written up,” MacDonell said. “In fact, “20/20” [the ABC television show] did a whole program on the Jean Harris case and never mentioned any of the seven forensic scientists who testified she was telling the truth.”

  On the kitchen table, MacDonell had assembled several large files filled with photos and documents relating to the trial. “Was Jean Harris telling the truth?” he said. “I checked every step of her story, and in every instance I discovered that the scientific evidence supported her story—and disproved the prosecution’s.”

  MacDonell found a picture in one of his files and held it up to me. The picture showed a string, tracing the trajectory of a bullet from the gouge on the balcony through the hole in the glass door to a person holding the string waist-high at the foot of the bed. “For example, the first shot,” he continued. “When Jean and I were at the house together, she was out of the room when I ran the string from the bullet gouge to the position at the foot of the bed, so I thought I’d test her when she got back. I said, ‘Jean, exactly where were you when that first shot was fired?’ She went to the precise spot at the foot of the bed where my line had reached, when I did the test earlier.

  “But then I had a bigger surprise when I finally got hold of the official police photos of the crime scene. The police had dozens of photos the defense hadn’t yet seen. I got them—and realized why they couldn’t have been eager for the defense to see them. Look at this.”

  MacDonell selected a second picture which was almost identical to the first, only this time a police investigator was holding the string at the foot of the bed. “They did the same test before I even came along!” he said. “The police had to know that the angle of the bullet shot was just as Jean said. So what did they do? They started saying the ricochet mark on the balcony floor was not a bullet ricochet, even though one of their own investigators admitted it was a ‘fresh gouge.’” He shook his head. “The prosecution hated that bullet gouge.”