The Wassermans were, by 1984, semiretired and spending much of their time in Florida. When they were gone, their calls came every Sunday night, like clockwork, and always seemed to last 10 minutes. ”Norm would talk about his backhand and the weather,” Russell says.
On Oct. 18, 1985, Russell gave Laurie a new sweatsuit and a bouquet of flowers for her 28th birthday. She carried the flowers around with her long after they died, and she began wearing the sweatsuit everywhere.
Later that month he told her he wanted a separation. She placed a call to her parents in Florida but was crying so hard she couldn`t speak and handed the phone to Russell.
”I told Norm,” he says. ”Then I gave the phone back to her, and he said to her: `Okay, Laurie, hang in there. Don`t worry about it. We`ll be back in a couple of weeks.` ”
Laurie, grief-stricken, hung up and fell miserably back into Russell`s arms.
– – –
Laurie Wasserman Dann, who became a larger-than-life monster in death, was 5 foot 3 and weighed slightly less than 100 pounds most of her adult life. She was insecure, uncoordinated and, until her separation from Russell, quiet and withdrawn.
But the end of her marriage marked the beginning of a dramatic epoch in her life. She had few friends, no job and no prospects. She tracked down her old boyfriend, Jeff Kay, and began harassing him by telephone; she shadowed Russell and called police to make phony assault charges against him, and, police believe, she ransacked her parents` Glencoe house in April, 1986, then reported the incident as a burglary.
Glencoe Police Detective Floyd Mohr began his long association with Laurie Dann when he investigated the supposed burglary, which he suspected immediately was connected to the divorce proceedings.
It was Mohr who went to Norman Wasserman in May, 1986, to express his concern when he learned that Laurie had purchased her first handgun, a .357-caliber Smith & Wesson Magnum, from the Marksman gun shop in Glenview. She had answered truthfully on her Firearm Owner`s Identification card application that she had never been institutionalized for a mental disorder or convicted of a serious crime, and Wasserman pointed out to Mohr that Laurie had every right to own the pistol.
”I know, by law, your daughter can possess a gun,” Mohr replied. ”But in my opinion, it`s a bad idea.”
Wasserman agreed to store Laurie`s gun in a safe-deposit box, but when Mohr asked to verify the placement by taking a look at the safe-deposit box, Wasserman refused permission.
– – –
Early in the morning of Sept. 30, 1986, Russell Dann`s lung was punctured by an ice pick as he lay in bed in his townhouse on Green Bay Road in Highland Park. He never saw his assailant, but he told police that he believed his wife had attacked him.
The evidence in the case pointed toward Laurie, police records show, but Russell failed a lie-detector test in Highland Park, and the Lake County state`s attorney`s office decided the evidence against Laurie was therefore insufficient to bring charges.
Laurie, meanwhile, had embarked on a diligent program of bothering her enemies over the telephone, focusing particularly on Russell`s relatives and friends. Nearly all were silent calls in which Laurie would hang up immediately after her victims answered.
Highland Park Police traced the calls to the Wasserman house in Glencoe and the Highland Park house Laurie and Russell had purchased together in 1985. They arrested her for telephone harassment on Nov. 10, 1986, and again on Dec. 18, 1986, but both times lacked the concrete evidence to prosecute because others, theoretically, also had access to the telephones in the houses. The calls had been hangups.
Authorities also didn`t have enough evidence to prosecute Russell when, on April 20, 1987, Laurie told police he sexually assaulted her with a steak knife. In fact, authorities were by then plenty sick of what appeared to them to be simply an outlandish ”says-you-says-me” divorce battle between a couple of rich kids.
Their investigations withered from lack of interest.
”In any domestic situation, you don`t know who to believe unless there are independent witnesses,” Highland Park Police Chief Robert Rash explains. – – –
On Friday night, May 8, 1987, less than two weeks after the final divorce decree ended the marriage of Laurie and Russell Dann, Laurie took a kitchen knife and hacked up furniture and rugs in the Glencoe home of Marsha and Ned Robertson, first-time baby-sitting clients.
Laurie, who received a $125,000 cash settlement along with an agreement of 36 months` alimony at $1,250 a month, had taken up baby-sitting several months earlier. She was inexpensive by North Shore standards and related well to children because of her own dreamy, childlike qualities. But she was uncomfortable around most adults, often wore heavy coats inside the house and was not always scrupulous about her grooming.
The Robertsons confronted Laurie about the damaged furniture and about a pair of missing garage-door openers, and she invented a vague and transparent story about how she let a stranger into the house to use the telephone, then left him alone in the kitchen.
The Robertsons let the matter drop and never hired Laurie again.
The parents who took their complaints against Laurie the furthest were Bruce and Delores Benton of Glencoe, who employed Laurie for six months. They had started noticing small amounts of food missing and tiny cuts in their furniture and finally called police when $500 worth of steak and other food turned up missing after Laurie baby-sat.
A neighbor had seen Laurie hauling a large, heavy trash bag from the house to her car that evening, but Glencoe police still said the case would be hard to prove. Their best chance, the Bentons concluded, was to approach Norman Wasserman and seek restitution.
”I can`t believe my daughter would do that,” Wasserman said. ”I`ve never heard of her doing anything like that.”
Benton, however, informed him there was a witness and expressed an interest in settling the matter between the two of them. Wasserman never said he thought Laurie was guilty, but he agreed to pay the Bentons $400.
Then, when Glencoe police came to him with even more complaints about Laurie, he agreed to stop her from seeking any more baby-sitting jobs. He made sure, though, that she could continue working for the families that liked her. – – –
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Laurie Dann moved out of her parents` house and sublet a room in Kellogg, the university-run student dormitory at Northwestern, in the summer of 1987.
She was taking no classes and had no job in Evanston, and those who knew her said she did not appear to have any friends. All she ever seemed to do was watch television and ride the elevators at all hours.
Stephen Laughlin, who dated her that summer, once discovered that she had urinated on the carpet in front of his television set while he was out, and Andrew Stark, the person who shared the sublet with her, regularly found meat sitting out in the room, newspapers all over the floor and blood in the ice cube trays of the refrigerator.
In July Stark found her writhing in pain and unable to stand up straight, the result, he thought, of her having eaten undercooked or rotted meat. He offered to take her to the hospital, but en route she asked him to take her to her parents` house in Glencoe instead.
Edith Wasserman was pleasant to Stark. He expressed his concern that Laurie seemed to have no direction in life.
Laurie`s mother shrugged.
– – –
On Nov. 7, 1987, Laurie returned to the Marksman gun shop in Wesson Terrier.
On Nov. 9, 1987, Norman Wasserman wrote to Dr. Greist, a nationally recognized expert in the treatment of both OCD and manic-depression, at the University of Wisconsin Hospital: He had a daughter who could not live a normal life. Could Greist help?
Greist learned in his early meetings with Laurie that she was taking Anafranil-an experimental drug then approved only for testing by selected doctors in the United States. Greist was one of those doctors, but Epstein, in Chicago, was not. To get Anafranil for Laurie, Epstein had to telephone the Lud Bock Pharmacy in Montreal, where owner Lud Bock recalls speaking both to Epstein and Norman Wasserman.
”Technically, the fact that an unapproved drug was being shipped was illegal,” says Ray Mlecko, director of the Chicago office of the Food and Drug Administration. ”The shipper was performing an illegal act, and the doctor, technically, caused it to be shipped, so he played a role in an illegal act.”
For the FDA, it is not a big enough case to pursue. Epstein, though, is still the subject of an investigation by the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation because of his handling of the Anafranil prescription for Laurie. (Epstein declined to comment.)
The AMA Drug Evaluations book warns that Anafranil-like drugs ”should not be used in acutely agitated schizophrenic patients, and they should be used cautiously in those with mixed mania and depression, since they may convert a depression into a mania.”
Greist and his Israeli assistant Yorum Shwager could not include Laurie in their clinical tests of Anafranil because she had previously been taking it in a nontest environment. Instead, on Feb. 19, 1988, he prescribed lithium carbonate in hopes that it would work with the Anafranil to increase the brain levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, and control her obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
Dr. Mark Thoman, editor of the American Academy of Clinical Toxology newsletter, expressed alarm about the fact Laurie was combining strong prescription medications from doctors who were not communicating with one another.
”The combination of two psychoactive drugs is like a football on the field-you don`t know where it`s going to bounce,” Thoman says. ”We`re still not sure exactly how these drugs work on the brain cells, and their interaction could stimulate or suppress certain areas of the brain or cause someone to go completely out of control.”
At the same time, psychiatrists Ali and Wolpert, who believe Laurie may have been misdiagnosed, say they believe it is unlikely that the drugs she was taking played a significant role in her actions on May 20.
– – –
After seeing Dr. Greist in Madison for less than a month and showing some improvement, Laurie went home to Glencoe for the winter holidays on the weekend of Dec. 19, 1987.
Her first day back, she suffered a severe reaction to her medication, vomiting every 10 minutes for 12 hours.
At 7:44 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 21, the Wassermans placed a six-minute call to the Winnetka home of Dr. Henry Seidenberg, a prominent Chicago
psychiatrist. At 9:30 p.m. the next evening, Laurie spoke long distance to Dr. Greist at his home in Madison for 17 minutes; two hours later, she made 14 quick hangup calls to homes of people she wished to harass.
On Wednesday, Dec. 23, at 7:43 a.m., Norman Wasserman called Greist and talked for three minutes.
Late in the afternoon on Dec. 27, Laurie placed two harassing calls to Dann Brothers Inc., the insurance agency where Russell Dann works. In the six hours after midnight, then, she made 55 hangup calls.
On Dec. 29 she went to the Marksman in Glenview to pick up a .22-caliber semiautomatic Beretta that had been paid for several days earlier. Later that night she made 59 harassing calls between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Three nights later came another 28 calls betwen 1:52 and 2:30 a.m.
She returned to Madison very depressed. Her relationship with her parents, she told her doctor, was troubled and stressful.
– – –
Weight gain is a common side effect of Anafranil, and in the first five months of 1988, Laurie Dann ballooned to 140 pounds. Her daily feats of gluttony in Madison dismayed her acquaintances at the Towers, a luxurious, private dormitory inhabited mostly by the offspring of wealthy suburbanites.
She had become the ”psycho elevator lady,” riding the lifts at all hours, wearing winter gloves while she shoveled down prodigious amounts of food in the cafeteria. She sometimes moved robotically through the building and down the sidewalk, and students saw her at all hours watching the big-screen TV in the lounge, flipping rapidly from channel to channel to channel.
Lois Wander, who shared a two-room suite with Laurie, noticed that Laurie`s room was beginning to reek of urine and that she never studied, even though she said she was a student. Wander and other students would get together and ask, ”God, what is the deal with her?”
But Laurie was often calm and lucid. ”She would sit at the table and observe,” says Haley Bareck, a student from Arlington Heights who felt sorry for the lonely new arrival and asked her to join her group in the cafeteria.
”She had a great memory and knew everything about everybody. She knew where I worked, my boyfriend`s name and what classes I had.”
Once, she sat down at dinner and proudly announced that she had been bored that afternoon, walked into a dentist`s office unannounced and had two wisdom teeth pulled. She didn`t even have to pay, she said.
No one believed her, but Madison dentist Stanley Pollan did see Laurie one day and did extract two wisdom teeth. The bill was $204 and remains unpaid.
On Feb. 21, 1988, Norman Wasserman wrote Laurie a letter from Florida:
Dear Laurie:
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Yesterday, it actually got up to 88 degrees. It was really hot. Today it is raining and it has cooled down to the 60s . . . .
I hope that you got to see Dr. Greist and that he had some encouragement for you. We must believe that between Greist, Yorum and the entire medical establishment, they will come up with a complete cure for you . . . .
Take care of Laurie and keep her out of trouble!!
We love you,
Mom and Dad