On December 23, 1883, Henry Rathbone attacked his family in a fit of madness. He fatally shot his wife in the head and then attempted to kill the children, but a groundskeeper prevented him from doing so. Rathbone then stabbed himself five times in the chest in an attempted suicide. Blaming his crime on an intruder, Rathbone was charged with murder and declared insane by doctors. He was convicted and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane in Hildesheim, Germany, where he died on August 14, 1911. The couple's children were sent to live with their uncle, William Harris, in the United States. Harris was buried in the city cemetery at Hanover/Engesohde. Her husband was buried next to her upon his death in 1911. In 1952, the Rathbones' remains were disinterred and their remains disposed of in accordance with the German cemetery's policies i.e. the couple's surviving family lived overseas and could not regularly tend their graves. In popular culture Clara Harris kept the bloodied white dress she wore on the night of assassination. Unable to bring herself to wash or destroy it, she eventually stored it in a closet in the family's summer home near Albany. After experiencing what she claimed was a visit from Lincoln's ghost, Harris had the closet in which the dress was stored covered with bricks. In 1910, Henry Riggs Rathbone, Harris and Rathbone's eldest son, removed the bricks and had the dress destroyed reportedly claiming that it had cursed the family. The dress was later the subject of the 1929 book The White Satin Dress, by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. In 1994, Thomas Mallon released the novel Henry and Clara, a fictional account of the lives of Harris and her husband. Harris was portrayed by actress Mercedes Herrero in the made-for-television film The Day Lincoln Was Shot, by actress Eleanor Perkinson in the made-for-television film Killing Lincoln, and by uncredited actresses in two films pertaining to the Lincoln assassination, The Conspirator and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. References External links A Case of Mistaken Identity of the most Famous Photo of Clara Harris 1834 births 1883 murders in Europe 1883 deaths American expatriates in Germany American people murdered abroad American socialites Burials in Lower Saxony Deaths by firearm in Germany People associated with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln People from Albany, New York People murdered in Germany Women in the American Civil War