Before she began her bloody shooting spree at a Winnetka grammar school, Laurie Dann tried to deliver death up and down the North Shore in the form of tainted food and beverage, police said Saturday.
Crime labs were testing suspicious food packages that Dann left at two Northwestern University fraternities, a graduate school building and several North Shore homes, police said.
Evanston police said some of the food left at the university was laced with arsenic, and at least nine people, including two children, were checked for signs of poisoning.
A doctor in Ann Arbor, Mich., told a Northwestern University track star who had sampled snacks delivered to his fraternity house that he suspected he would find traces of arsenic, but test results were not final late Saturday.
Police said that many of those who received the mysterious gifts were named on a list found in Dann`s apartment in Madison, Wis. Police said a syringe that could have been used to inject the foods with contaminants was found at her parents` Glencoe home.
Winnetka Police Chief Herbert Timm said that the packages show that Dann was bent on committing murder Friday even before she opened fire on a class of helpless schoolchildren at the Hubbard Woods Elementary School, 1110 Chatfield Rd.
More Top Picks Best Gym Machines For Abs
An 8-year-old boy, Nicholas Corwin, was killed, and six other people were shot by Dann before she killed herself Friday.
Dann`s plot for death and violence apparently was formed long before she walked into the school, armed with three handguns, Timm said. ”This was not a situation that was spontaneous,” he said. ”It obviously took some planning and some time.” She apparently visited more than a dozen locations Friday morning, Timm said.
At first glance, Dann`s biography might not suggest a tendency to violence. Raised on the North Shore, the daughter of a wealthy family and a graduate of New Trier East High School, she attended the University of Arizona before returning to take a job at an insurance agency-and marrying the boss`s son.
Closer inspection reveals, however, that Dann had a history of making threatening telephone calls; that neighbors in her Wisconsin apartment building said she rode up and down in elevators for hours; and that her former husband suspected that she had sneaked into his apartment and stabbed him with an ice pick.
Friday, her bizarre behavior turned violent. Police said she set at least one fire, was turned away from a day-care center while carrying a gasoline can, and then went to a home in Winnetka where she was a regular baby-sitter. Shortly after 10 a.m., Winnetka firefighters were called to that home, at 1250 Forest Glen Dr. South. Dann had set a fire there, but the children and their mother managed to escape.
During her rounds of the affluent northern surburbs, Dann left packages on porches or stuffed them in mailboxes, Timm said. They contained cereal treats, popcorn and pouches of orange drink.
Greg McCullough, a member of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, ate a cereal treat from a paper plate left on the fraternity`s porch early Friday, fraternity members said.
”To the ATOs, from your little sisters,” said a note attached to the package. On Saturday, McCullough was called away from a Big Ten track meet to get emergency tests, said Bruce Madej, the university`s sports information director.
At the Psi Upsilon house, a similar package was left with the note
”Enjoy, from your little sisters,” fraternity members there said.
Next to the snacks was a plastic chemical bottle that said `arsenic.`
When they found the packages Friday morning, ”We thought it was a joke,”
said Chuck Friedman, a member there.
But calls from a former member warned them that it wasn`t. The name of the former member, Scott Freidheim, was on the list that police in Madison found in Dann`s apartment after learning of the shooting spree.
Freidheim, who lives in Winnetka, received his own package Friday.
”My mom picked it up from the front step,” said Freidheim, 22. ”She said, `Too bad, it looks as though the birds ate it.` ”
On Saturday morning, the family got a call from the FBI, which was contacting the people on the list to warn them of possible trouble. Freidheim immediately called an old friend at the fraternity house.
”He said, `You know what? We got one, too,` ” Freidheim said. ”I said, `Listen, put it in a corner and call the DPS (the university`s Department of Public Safety) right away. She may have done it to other fraternities, too.` ”
Dann had been connected with the university. During the summer of 1987, she subleased a university apartment at 1725 Orrington Ave., Evanston, said Kenneth Wildes, director of university relations.
But within 2 1/2 months, university police had received four complaints from residents there. Dann was harassing them-leaving raw meat to spoil under the cushions of neighbors` chairs and placing junk in their mailboxes, Wildes said. She was also a suspect in some thefts there.
Officials sought out her father, Norman Wasserman, and he persuaded her to leave the building. The apartment was used to house graduate students at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management-and that school`s headquarters also received a mysterious package of cereal cookies Friday, university spokesmen said.
Those incidents weren`t the only ones that Dann had been involved in. Others who knew her-particularly those who were friends with her former husband-reported harassing and threatening phone calls from Dann.
Deerfield police reported three such complaints from onetime friends of Dann, who had lost contact with her after her divorce-and that loss of contact apparently upset her, said Sgt. David Turnbaugh. Some of the calls, which began in 1986 and continued through this year, were traced to Dann`s home.
In one case, the caller said that the victim of the harassment ”is going to die,” according to a police report.
Over the last year and a half, at least three separate suburban police departments received complaints from several families because of similar, repeated calls from Dann, sources said. The other two departments are Highland Park and Glencoe.
It seems remarkable to people who knew her that this deeply troubled woman was not intercepted by someone on her path to self-destruction over the last 10 years.
Those whose lives intersected Dann`s along the way-in Tucson, in Madison, Wis., and elsewhere-were left to ponder what might have happened had she snapped and struck at them instead.
More Top Picks Skateboards And Scooters
”This woman has a tremendous history of mental problems,” said Lou Spivack, deputy attorney of Pima County, Ariz.
Spivack knew Dann when they were students at the University of Arizona in the late 1970s. He double-dated with her and her boyfriend, who is now a doctor in Tucson.
The memories of those days remain vivid, Spivack said, because the doctor had asked for his help in stopping threatening telephone calls he received from Dann off and on since 1985, long after they had broken off their relationship.
Dann returned to her family`s home in Glencoe after leaving Arizona. She began working as a receptionist at the Dann Brothers Insurance Co. in Northbrook in May, 1979, and three years later, on Sept. 11, 1982, she married Russell ”Rusty” Dann, the son of one of the owners.
They were living in a $275,000 home at 367 Hastings Ave. in Highland Park when they separated in November, 1985. She filed for divorce in 1986, citing
”irreconcilable differences.”
In the fall of 1986, while the couple were separated, an intruder slipped into an apartment where Russell Dann was living in Highland Park and stabbed him in the chest with an ice pick as he slept. The ice pick punctured a lung. Dann told police he did not see the intruder. He suspected his estranged wife. No charges were filed.