VICTIM: Helen Potts

KILLER:  Carlyle W. Harris

1891

Young girls are often enthralled with young men they meet in the romance of a hot summer and act impulsively. Helen Potts is one such girl, who met a charming medical student and was romanced into a marriage for the purpose of sex on summers’ end.

 In 1891, a young finishing school student named Helen Potts was found dying in her dorm room; it was believed she had died from an overdose of morphine that she had gotten from her husband Carlyle Harris, a local medical student who she had recently married in secret because her mother disapproved.

            The two met in the summer of 1889 at a family cottage in Ocean Grove. Helen liked his “lightheartedness, carelessness, and brilliance.” They were inseparable all summer, and he proposed at the end of the summer. Carlyle’s mother refused to give permission for her daughter to marry; she was just too young, probably the reason Helen was able to be coerced into this hasty marriage in the

first place.  

            The two would not accept this decision and got married in secret at City Hall using the fake names, Charles Harris and Helen Neilson. Their deception was not discovered until August when Helen got ill.

            Harris had gotten what he wanted from his new wife, SEX, so he stopped seeing her until she came to him and told him she was pregnant.

            The scheme was discovered when Helen became ill and went to see her uncle, Dr. C.W Treverton. Mrs. Potts was told and came immediately. It was at this time she was told about the marriage. The cause of the illness was an operation performed by her husband. This surgery caused septic poisoning. Yes, the operation was an abortion.

            Mrs. Potts wanted the marriage made public and that the two have a proper wedding, but Harris insisted it would ruin his career and convinced Mrs. Potts to wait until after graduation. I guess Helen had no say in the decision. Harris convinced his mother-in-law to send her daughter to a boarding school. Perhaps this was his way of getting his inconvenient wife out of his daily life.

            Harris had bragged about his many conquests and confessed he had married other women just to get them to have sex with him."[He said he] could overcome any woman's scruples ... one method was to take a bottle of ginger ale and put in it a very large portion of whiskey, the other was to marry her, but under an assumed name. “ He had also performed abortions on many of these women.  Remember, he was not yet a real doctor and should not have been performing surgery. Could it be there were other women out there who had been butchered like Helen?

           

Helen suffered from terrible insomnia, so her husband gave her a prescription for morphine to help her fall asleep. One night, she awoke and told her schoolmates that she had a wonderful dream; they just told her to go back to sleep. Her response was “Yes, but I think it will be sleep of death.” Did she have a premonition?

            Shortly after, her schoolmates noticed she was breathing very heavily, and Helen complained of numbness throughout her whole body; eventually, she could not move. A doctor was ultimately called.  He used whiskey, atropine, digitalis, and electric shock and finally artificial respiration, but nothing could bring the girl around. She died the next morning.

The doctor found a pill bottle labeled “one before retiring” which was signed C.W.H. They brought Harris to the room where his dead wife was and all he said was, “My God, what can they do to me?” He was concerned because he was not yet a doctor and not supposed to be prescribing medication. The death of his wife seemed less important than his reputation. He said he had made sure she did not have enough pills to overdose. It was believed she had taken an overdose of her

sleeping medication…the morphine.

            Her mother convinced the authorities, though, that her daughter had a heart condition and that was the cause of the death. She was able to take her daughter home and bury her.

            But, the authorities were just not convinced, so they eventually had the body exhumed. In the autopsy, the heart was seen to be fine, but the brain was congested, a sign of opiate poisoning; in addition, there was morphine in the stomach and intestines.

            Under oath, Mrs. Potts admitted she lied about her daughter’s heart condition. She just didn’t want all the bad publicity and didn’t want the secret marriage talked about in the press.

            Harris had probably obtained the morphine when it was passed around, unsupervised, at his medical school during a lecture on the effects of morphine.

           

Harris was arrested. And even though his parents bought him the most expensive lawyers they could, he was still found guilty. Harris put forth numerous appeals, but when that didn’t work, he and one of his friends and supporters appealed to the Governor for a pardon or at least clemency. After doing his own research, the Governor decided to let the execution go forth.

            Harris appeared calm and rather theatric at his execution, “exaggerated and forced” almost. It “smacked of theatre.” He spoke of his own innocence and then was finally executed for what he had done to poor Helen Potts.

            Harris was so sure he had a foolproof plan to get sex from women, but Helen proved to be the one woman who would cost him his life.