Women who Kill

7. Women’s Rights and Wrongs

7 women’srightsandwrongs 359 1 On March10,1980,when Jean Harris pulled the trigger of her .32 caliber Harrington & Richardson in the bedroom of Dr. Herman Tarnower in Purchase, New York, I was on vacation. Friends sent me the initial reports of the shooting, saying the case was right up my alley. When taken into police custody, Harris reportedly had “severe bruises on her face and arm”; and her attorney, Joel Aurnou, implied that she might have killed in self-defense. “We have not ruled out the possibility that Jean Harris might be a victim,” he said. But those early reports also described a “new girl in the ball park”: Lynne Tryforos, the “young, exotic-looking and beautiful assistant” at the Scarsdale Medical Center, long “involved” with her boss, the society cardiologist whose 1979 diet book made him a multimillionaire. The killing rated headlines because the victim was a famous man. Who hadn’t delivered at least two weeks of her/his life into the hands of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor? And the alleged murderer was an uppermiddle -class lady (Smith ’45), headmistress of Virginia’s ritzy Madeira School for girls. The press, assuming that whatever happens to “important ” people must be important, seemed obliged to give it significance. When Tarnower’s neighbors hinted that the killing capped a lovers’ triangle , reporters began to call it a “classic case.” Yet it seemed to me almost from the outset that the case was at once far too predictable and far too unusual to be significant. “Now,” I thought, “we’ll hear endlessly about woman’s helpless passion for her man, about slavish devotion and jealousy and unrequited love.” That was the predictable part; but because jealousy is in fact a motive that seldom impels women to murder, the Harris case seemed atypical of women’s homicides and therefore unlikely to reveal much beyond itself. In January 1981, while Jean Harris took the stand in a Westchester courtroom to tell her story to a jury of eight women and four men and to a regiment of reporters and eminent female authors, I sat on the edge of an uncomfortable plastic chair in the overheated officers’ lounge of a prison in Indianapolis, Indiana, and listened to the stories of women confined to that stark compound for ten years or fifteen or more. These 360 women had helped me by sending information for this book, and because no woman in prison ever has enough visitors, I went to see them. All of them were killers. Some killed by accident; meaning merely to prevent or to stop a beating , they delivered death instead through a chance blow or a hair trigger. Others, like Carol Ann Wilds, struck quickly in self-defense. “Fuck that baby,” Gary Wilds had shouted, punching his wife’s belly, distended by pregnancy. “I’ll kill that baby, too!” Then she snatched his gun and pulled the trigger again and again until the bullets were spent. Some few women painstakingly planned ahead. Tiny, gaunt Joyce DeVillez, wrapped in a soft plaid shawl against some invisible cold, told me about her twentythree years as a hostage to her husband Bernard; unable to escape and afraid that her battered teenaged son would kill Bernard if she didn’t, she hired a hit man. (Today, after seven years in prison, she says that given the choice between life with Bernard and life behind bars, she would choose prison.) In all these cases—from accident to justifiable homicide to premeditated murder—the women were impelled not by passionate, possessive love for their men but by deadly fear. “When I get out of here,” said Ruth Childers, whose shotgun went off by accident, “I’ll never have a gun around the house again.” “If I ever get out of here,” countered Joyce DeVillez , “I’ll never have a man around the house again.” It is not Jean Harris but these women, battered and sexually abused, turning at last against their assailants, who are the “classic” homicides of our time. In November 1980, as Jean Harris went to trial, a jury in Atkinson County, Georgia, found Elaine Mullis, a battered wife for thirteen years, guilty of murdering her husband Connie and sent her to prison for life. Her twelve-year-old son, who witnessed the killing, testified that Connie Mullis, drunk and stoned, had attacked Elaine earlier that day. Late in the evening, while she stood...