Glencoe police considered Laurie Wasserman Dann dangerous enough that they asked her parents to turn over her .357 Magnum handgun to them two years ago, the village`s top police official said Monday.
Though the parents said they would cooperate, the .357 Magnum was one of three weapons Dann wielded Friday in a shooting spree on the North Shore that left one boy dead and injured six other people before she killed herself.
The failure to take her gun away illustrates how law-enforcement authorities consistently came up empty-handed in dealing with Dann, despite numerous run-ins-and how her parents always were there to help her.
Glencoe police, who were aware of Dann because of allegations that she had made harassing phone calls and had committed theft, learned in 1986 that she had bought the .357 Magnum. That information prompted them to contact her parents, Glencoe Public Safety Director Robert Bonneville said.
Her father, Norman Wasserman, of Glencoe, would not turn it over to police but ”agreed to have it locked up in the safety deposit box,”
Bonneville said Monday. The family and Dann felt that she needed the gun to protect herself against her ex-husband, Bonneville said. Wasserman declined to speak with a Tribune reporter Monday.
Bonneville described the Wassermans as cooperative with police, but he said they ”refused to believe” that their daughter was making the harassing phone calls and they took her side in the other incidents.
”In at least two instances,” Bonneville said, Wasserman made restitution to families for whom Dann worked as a baby-sitter or domestic after she became a suspect in thefts of food and clothing from those homes.
In both cases, Bonneville said, the department lacked any substantial proof that Dann was responsible for the thefts. He said that Wasserman made a $400 restitution to one family while insisting that his daughter was not responsible, and the restitution was not a factor in the department`s decision whether to bring the charges against her.
Bonneville said he had assigned an investigator to the allegations against Dann, 30, and ”in his discussions with the family, (he learned) she had received some kind of psychiatric counseling.” That detective told some of the people who had received threatening calls that Dann`s psychiatrist said she would not harm herself or anyone else, according to one of those people.
But her ex-husband, Russell Dann-who said she stabbed him with an ice pick-disagreed with that assessment.
Dann, interviewed on ABC`s ”Nightline” television news show Monday night, said police seemed to believe the wound was self-inflicted.
At the request of Highland Park police, Dann took a lie-detector test, which he failed. ”It was the worst day of my life,” he said. Laurie took the test and passed, he said in the interview.
”Usually when I went to the police, I came away feeling more like a criminal than a victim,” said Dann, who said he tried to get her arrested numerous times.
”Every time I said what happened to me she made up a story about something I did to her,” Dann said.
Dann said that in a telephone conversation he had with his ex-wife she admitted to stabbing him.
”I said you need help, and she said: `I know. What do I do?`
”Why did this have to happen?” he asked. ”Why couldn`t have it been stopped? Here was a person reaching out for help. She didn`t get it. It was a matter of time before this time bomb exploded.”
On Monday, Winnetka, Glencoe, Northfield and Wilmette police, along with the Cook County sheriff`s police, formed a task force to investigate Dann`s Friday spree and her troubled past.
Police also reported that a total of 15 packages of poisoned food and beverages now have been discovered by authorities, apparently delivered by Dann to acquaintances and former employers before Friday`s shootings. No one has been seriously harmed by the tainted food, some of which also was left at two Northwestern University fraternity houses.
It also was disclosed Monday that Dann ”did have a relationship” with a family at Ravinia School in Highland Park, where police said she set a fire early Friday morning. Later, she drove to Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka, where she shot the six children, killing one, before fleeing to a nearby Winnetka home. There she shot a 20-year-old man and later killed herself with a single gunshot to the head.
Dann had been a baby-sitter for children who attended Hubbard Woods but was told last week that they would be moving and would not need her services. The reason that she left tainted food at the two fraternities still is not clear, though she lived for a time in an apartment building for graduate students there.
Wasserman persuaded his daughter to leave the Northwestern building after complaints that she was harassing other residents there, according to university officials. Dann was a suspect in thefts at the building and allegedly left raw meat under the cushions of chairs.
Wasserman apparently also intervened in a case involving harassing phone calls from Dann to a college boyfriend in Tucson, which had begun in 1985, investigators said. The calls stopped for a time in early 1987 after a lawyer for the man wrote a letter to Dann`s parents threatening legal action for damages, according to Lou Spivack, deputy Pima County attorney.
Spivack said that the calls to the Tucson man, a doctor, resumed last January and culminated with a death threat May 9 recorded by authorities. In the call, Spivack said, Dann said she would kill the doctor and his family
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”and make it look like the doctor`s wife did it.”
Janet Johnson, the federal prosecutor in Tucson to whom the case was assigned, said she had planned to seek Dann`s indictment last Wednesday for threatening the doctor`s life.
But that plan was dropped in favor of bringing multiple charges against Dann in Madison, Wis., where she had been arrested for shoplifting, in hopes of having her jailed without bail. Dann had lived in Madison since January.
The proposed charges centered on alleged death threats against the doctor, her former husband and her ex-husband`s sister. ”The doctor was willing to prosecute,” Johnson said. ”He just didn`t want to do it alone.” On May 13, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Madison were advised by the Phoenix FBI office to find and question Dann about the threats and possibly to arrest her. ”We had no address for her, and we were not able to catch up to her,” FBI agent Kent Miller said Monday in Madison.
Miller said Madison police notified the FBI on Sunday night, May 15, that officers, responding to complaints of neighbors, had found Dann in an apartment. When FBI agents set out the next day to question her, Miller said, Dann was gone and her whereabouts unknown. She apparently had returned to Glencoe.
Police in Madison said that, since Friday, material had been found in Dann`s apartment that indicated she was familiar with poisons and making bombs.
Bonneville, who oversees police protection in Glencoe, said his department already had conducted one review of its handling of the complaints against Dann and will be reviewing the department conduct again. He said that a preliminary review indicated the department acted properly.
According to Bonneville, over the last two to three years there were a total of roughly nine complaints against Dann handled by the department. Six of those were for harassing phone calls and three were for the thefts.
”We did all we could with the information we had and the proof we had,” he said. ”. . . We tried but we didn`t have enough information (to arrest or prosecute her).”
He said that about six months ago four friends of Russell Dann asked for a meeting with him to discuss forming a task force with other suburban departments to stop Laurie Dann from making harassing phone calls.
One of those men advised the department just a few weeks ago that a threatening phone call had come to his house, supposedly from Laurie Dann. Bonneville said the man`s wife had answered the phone and the caller threatened to kill either his wife or child.
Lake County also investigated charges against Dann. ”In essence, we didn`t have much to go on,” said Michael Waller, first assistant state`s attorney, who reviewed police reports in which Dann was suspected of stabbing her former husband with an ice pick. ”He didn`t see her do it. No one saw her do it. There were no fingerprints or anything to link her to the incident.”
Lake County State`s Atty. Fred Foreman said Monday that as part of the grand jury investigation, Norman Wasserman was asked to voluntarily turn over telephone records but refused to do so.