Jean Struven Harris (April 27, 1923 – December 23, 2012) was the headmistress of The Madeira School for girls in McLean, Virginia, who made national 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.

Harris worked as the headmistress of the Madeira School for girls in McLean, Virginia, while continuing her long-distance relationship with Tarnower.

In the 1970s, Tarnower hired Lynne Tryforos, a divorcée more than thirty years his junior, to work as a secretary-receptionist at the Scarsdale Medical Center.

On March 10, 1980, Harris made a five-hour, 264-mile drive from the Madeira School in Virginia to Herman Tarnower's home in Purchase, New York, with a .32 caliber revolver in her possession.

[4] Harris was released on $80,000 bail raised by her brother and sisters and signed into the United Hospital of Port Chester for psychiatric evaluation and therapy.

The case went to trial at the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, New York, on November 21, 1980, and was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney George Bolen.

Harris took the stand and testified at length in her own defense, but the jury rejected her story that the shooting had been accidental and convicted her of second-degree murder after eight days of deliberations.

Judge Russell R. Leggett ordered her confined to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, New York, for the minimum of 15 years to life.

[7] Eleven years after Harris's conviction,[8] Governor Mario Cuomo commuted the remainder of her sentence on December 29, 1992, as she was being prepped for quadruple bypass heart surgery.

She was released from prison by the parole board and initially planned to live in a cabin in New Hampshire, but later moved to the Whitney Center, a retirement home in Hamden, Connecticut.

In the 1995 movie Dolores Claiborne, the journalist daughter Jennifer Jason Leigh asks her mother, Kathy Bates, why she killed her husband.

In the 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Summer of George", Raquel Welch plays herself portraying Harris in a fictional Tony Award-winning musical about the murders called Scarsdale Surprise.

[10] The October 4, 2013, episode of the show Deadly Women tells Harris' story from when she met Tarnower to when she killed him.

On November 16, 2015, Walters aired an episode on American Scandals called "Jean Harris: The Headmistress Murderer".