A doctor obsessed with his own non-traditional medical theories claims he was trying to cure his ailing wife when he rejected the advice of other medical professionals and instead treated her with copious amounts of a mineral called selenium. But after she died in 2018, Manhattan prosecutors charged him with poisoning her.
“You don’t get to be so sure of your ideas that you watch your wife whither away and die in front of you,” Assistant District Attorney Heather Pearson told the jury. Prosecutors said Harris had been giving his wife a dangerous dose of selenium for months to treat the symptoms of what other doctors believed was lupus — a diagnosis that Jeffrey Harris repeatedly rejected. They said he was convinced his wife had elevated levels of mercury in her body — a theory they said was disproved by multiple tests — and gave her excessive amounts of selenium, as well as a host of other supplements.
At one point, Tammy Harris weighed 77 pounds, Pearson said in court as she showed a bar graph of her decline in weight over time. During closing arguments, prosecutors showed photos of a tiny, frail woman, her bony body laid across her bed. “He was trying to save her,” Goldman said during his closing statement, which went on for about five hours. “He was convinced that he was.”
Goldman argued Tammy Harris had been ill long before her death, citing text messages and medical records that described an array of symptoms over the years.