With her regal bearing and patrician accent, Jean Harris seemed to be the very model of the classic girls' school headmistress. She was always the proper lady.

In 1977, she was named headmistress of the Madeira School, an exclusive private school for girls set amid rolling hills in McLean, Virginia.

She sometimes lectured her students on honor and propriety, which made the events of March 10, 1980, that much harder to grasp. On that night, in Purchase, New York, the 56-year-old Harris shot and killed her longtime lover, Herman Tarnower, a millionaire cardiologist who was famous as the creator of the Scarsdale Diet.