(2 of 3)
The eight-woman, four-man jury—the class-conscious Harris would probably never admit they were her peers—began their deliberations by requesting all 400 pieces of evidence. As Lisa Zumar, mother of two, told the New York Daily News: "We wanted it all—the bloodstained pajamas, the .32-cal. gun, the bloodied bed sheets, the schematics showing the trajectory of the bullets, and the letters—including of course the crucial Scarsdale Letter." That frenzied, ten-page epistle, the emotional centerpiece of the trial, had been sent by Harris to Tarnower the morning of his death. "I have to do something besides shriek with pain," she wrote. She called rival Tryforos "a vicious, adulterous psychotic" and "a thieving slut." Harris described her pain, saying she felt "like discarded trash . . . You keep me in control by threatening me with banishment, an easy threat which you know I couldn't live with." To Bolen, the letter was proof of Harris' pathological jealousy. To Aurnou it was an emotional suicide note within a love letter.
On the second day of deliberation, the jury took its first vote: it was split. The crucial factor in the jurors' minds was Harris' detailed yet contradictory description of the shootings. They asked to have five hours of her testimony reread. Foreman Russell Von Glahn, a bus mechanic from Yonkers, had a clerk repeat aloud again and again the parts where Harris tried to recall how the shots were fired. Marion Stephens, a teacher from Rye, asked to have Harris' account of how she attempted suicide reread twice.
Then the jurors retired to a deliberation room dominated by wooden tables, where they joined in macabre re-enactments of the crime. "We used two tables to simulate the bed," recalls Marian West, an administrative assistant for a community service program. Von Glahn, donning the bloodstained pajama top, played the doctor, as other jurors came at him with the actual gun. "We did it many, many times," said one. "It was Jean Harris' testimony that convicted her," said Marie Jackson, a clerical worker. "We tried it like it was told. We couldn't see how he could have come in back of her and gotten shot in the hand. If there was a struggle over the gun, someone else would have been wounded." Added Geneva Tyler, a keypunch operator: "It was a lot of shots. If you're going to commit suicide, you only need one, in the right place."