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
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?
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
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 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.
