Several weeks before his daughter went on a murderous rampage, Norman Wasserman, then 58, sat down in his vacation condominium in Boca Raton, Fla., and in neat block printing wrote a letter:
Dear Laurie:
This is probably the most important and hardest letter that I will ever have to write.
I am going to ask you to do me the biggest favor (you know how hard it is for me to ask anything from anyone). I am going to ask you to go against all of your instincts and let yourself be hospitalized and treated by Dr. Greist. I DO realize how hard that this will be for you. I DO realize what I am asking you to do for me, but I would do anything for you. I would also do anything to have even an 80 percent Laurie back with us. (That is their improvement rate.) I feel that, at this time, this is the only possible course to take so that you will be able to cope . . . .
You know that you cannot continue to ignore the doctors and hope that the medication which you are taking will suddenly produce a cure . . . .
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Laurie, once again, I do realize what I am asking of you. I think that this is my only chance, at this time, to get Laurie back. PLEASE contact Dr. Greist and set up the arrangement . . . . Please give us (including you) a chance to have Laurie back. We will be there with you and YOU will be in control.
If you do this for me, I am giving you formal, written permission to put me in the home for the very old people, when my time comes, with NO guilt at all. (You know that I am not looking forward to that.)
PLEASE set it up with Dr. Greist. For me, if not for yourself.
I love you,
Dad
Just days earlier, Dr. John Greist, Laurie Dann`s psychiatrist in Madison, Wis., had taken the first steps to have her committed to a mental institution. Under Wisconsin law, such involuntary hospitalization requires that a doctor establish in front of a hearing panel that his patient is mentally ill and dangerous to self and others.
Greist had ample evidence of Laurie`s mental illness from his observation and office treatment of her at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, but he was not sure if she was dangerous. Accordingly, he telephoned her father in Florida for information and guidance.
Wasserman did not tell Greist all he knew-that Laurie had threatened and harassed her enemies for the last two years, that she was suspected of stabbing her ex-husband with an ice pick and of setting small fires in dormitory rooms, that she had stolen and destroyed the property of her baby-sitting clients and that she had exhibited a strange, ritual fascination with raw meat. He also did not mention that she owned three handguns, the last two of which, court records indicate, he had paid for with his credit cards.
Greist gave up the effort. She ignored her father`s subsequent plea. As had happened so many times before, Laurie Wasserman Dann had again slipped through the cracks, and a month later she delivered or mailed poison to more than two dozen locations, tried to light a bomb in a Highland Park elementary school, did set fire to a house with three people inside, shot six children, killing one, in a Winnetka elementary school, fired upon a man who tried to help her and then took her own life.
The events of that day 12 months ago have been replayed and recounted hundreds of times, yet the question remains:
What was the matter with Laurie Dann?
Though elusive, the answer may be that although she was mentally ill, there was likely nothing extraordinary about her illness-many people are emotionally or mentally disturbed yet remain nonviolent.
She was, rather, the product of an extraordinary failure. The societal institutions of the family, medicine and the law each faltered at critical times. Those who might have been able to stop her didn`t; those who wanted to help her couldn`t.
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People who were with Norman Wasserman late in the afternoon of Sept. 7, 1987, when he inspected his daughter`s hellish apartment at the Kellogg Living and Learning Center on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University, say that he walked in and didn`t bat an eye.
Garbage filled the kitchen cabinets above the sink. The ice in the freezer was covered with blood from the meat Laurie had been hoarding all summer. Her damp, reeking clothes were wadded up in open boxes. Newspapers and bags of cookies lay all over the floor, and the air hung heavy with the smell of urine and rotted food.
He and Laurie began to pack her belongings under the watchful eye of building managers and an officer from the Northwestern Department of Public Safety. Laurie was suffering from emotional disorders, Wasserman explained.
”At this point,” he told the officers, ”criminal charges may not prove to be worthwhile.”
Laurie had been involved in a series of bizarre incidents ever since she had sublet the room beginning June 15. She had attempted to open other students` mailboxes while wearing rubber gloves and had used a stolen building passkey to gain access to rooms other than her own. Building supervisors found evidence of small fires in two rooms she had entered and had called in several complaints to police about her.
In addition, a total of seven large pieces of raw meat had turned up hidden in various locations throughout the building. Andrew Stark, who found himself sharing a suite with Laurie that summer, said she left meat dripping in the oven whenever she cooked and left raw meat in the refrigerator uncovered on a plate so that the blood would drip down onto other food.
At the September meeting with Laurie and her father, building administrator Mark Boney and building housing director Andrew Burke confronted Laurie about her being caught in unauthorized areas. They also asked her why she was trying to get into mailboxes with rubber gloves on.
Norman Wasserman interrupted and said, ”Laurie has some emotional problems. Let`s drop the subject.”
Laurie, visibly agitated, turned and said loudly to her father, ”Dad, you know why I wear rubber gloves!”
”Laurie has problems,” Wasserman said. ”We`re going to start getting her medical attention.”
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Laurie Wasserman, the only daughter of a wealthy North Shore accountant, was a shy young woman with long brown hair and an attractive figure. She had plastic surgery in her youth to pin back her ears and reshape her nose, and in college she never had a problem attracting the attention of young men.
Her most serious relationship before marriage was with Jeffrey Kay, a premed student whom she met at the University of Arizona in a psychology class in the fall of 1978.
They dated for nearly two years, and as they seemed to grow more serious and Kay came closer to graduating, Norman Wasserman initiated a heart-to-heart talk with the young man that, in retrospect, seemed to him like a warning.
”Don`t tie yourself down at this point in life,” Wasserman said. ”Don`t tie yourself to a serious relationship.”
When Laurie later told her parents that Kay had broken off the relationship, they consoled her, ”You`ll find another boyfriend.”
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They were right; Laurie did find another boyfriend-Russell Dann, a brash, wealthy Northbrook insurance executive who came into her life in 1981 as she was foundering as a continuing-education student at Northwestern University, her third college, and working as a cocktail waitress at the Green Acres Country Club in Northbrook.
”Hi, cutie!” were Russell`s first words to her. He touched her playfully on the nose and turned away.
They met more formally at Bennigan`s in Northbrook and had their first date at La Creperie on North Clark Street in Chicago. She told him she was a graduate student in hospital administration at Northwestern who was conducting a research project and writing a book with another student. She seemed intelligent enough, and he had little reason to doubt her other than the way her textbooks cracked at the spine when he opened them, as though they had never been used.
As she went though marriage, divorce and various relocations, her lying became increasingly skillful and elaborate. Over and over she reinvented her life, telling associates and prospective employers that she was variously a schoolteacher, a hospital administrator, a psychologist, a journalism student, a business student, a nursing student, a computer expert and a Seventh Day Adventist. She staged crimes to report to police, adopted an alias (Lori Porter) and lied to police who questioned her after she vandalized the homes of her baby-sitting clients-all without an apparent flicker of conscience.
Her ability to lie combined with the apparent reluctance of her mother and father to acknowledge the severity of her problems may have made it extremely difficult for psychiatrists to treat her effectively, doctors now say.
”Psychotic people often can be crafty and secretive,” says Dr. Michael Jenike, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist. ”A large part of the business is what people tell you. You can`t subpoena the truth out of their brains.”
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So just what was the matter with Laurie Dann?
Her maternal grandmother and paternal great-grandmother both suffered from depression. However, Norman Wasserman, his daughter and her doctors appeared convinced that Laurie`s problem was Obsessive-Compulsiv e Disorder, known as OCD. The disorder is a nonviolent syndrome usually marked by ritualistic and repetitive acts, such as hand-washing and hoarding, and obsessive behavior such as wearing protective gloves to avoid contamination.
During Laurie`s stay in Madison from late November, 1987, to the middle of May, 1988, she was under the care of two psychiatrists. One, Dr. Phillip Epstein of Chicago, was treating Laurie for OCD with a promising experimental drug, Anafranil, obtained through a pharmacy in Montreal in violation of Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
The other, Dr. Greist, began prescribing her 600 mg. a day of lithium carbonate, a drug used to treat both OCD and manic-depression.
Greist knew Laurie was getting drugs from Canada, but he did not know how. Laurie and her parents, Norman and Edith, did not volunteer that she had been treated by other psychiatrists, and because of confidentiality guidelines, Greist could not pursue the issue.
”A doctor can talk to past doctors only with the consent of the patient, unless it`s an emergency,” says Dr. Syed I. Ali, a forensic psychiatrist and the director of Du Page Mental Health Services, Ltd., one of three doctors who examined the Laurie Dann files for The Tribune.
The gaps in information and communication, Ali says, may have caused the doctors to miss a more serious underlying mental disturbance and underestimate the danger she posed.
The Laurie Dann case points up ”a very controversial issue,” says Dr. Patrick Staunton, head of Psychiatry at Lutheran General Hospital and past president of the Illinois Psychiatric Society. ”Sometimes there is a greater good that transcends confidentiality. But at what point does a psychiatrist say a person is dangerous? The prediction is fraught with difficulties. Any psychiatrist goes through this type of thing all the time.”
Under partially informed care in Madison, Laurie`s behavior around the dormitory where she lived grew increasingly strange, students who knew her say, and her telephone harassment turned explicitly violent. She gained a significant amount of weight, alienated her friends and began to shun her doctors.
In the aftermath of May 20, 1988, Norman and Edith Wasserman refused police requests to sign waivers that would allow Greist and other doctors who treated Laurie to discuss her treatment in detail.
”If I had permission, I would be willing to try to provide some partial answers,” Greist says. ”If all the care-givers who ever saw her could sit down together, we could give a much better picture than we now have.”
In fact, psychiatrists who have examined a history of Laurie`s life now say her overall behavior pattern indicates that her obsessive-compulsive acts may have been only symptoms of deeper-and potentially more dangerous-mental ailments.
”The longitudinal picture suggests a psychotic process more serious than Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” says Dr. Edward Wolpert, also a former Illinois Psychiatric Society president.
”The intensity of her abnormal behavior and thinking, her lack of concern for herself and her actions with meat would suggest schizophrenia,”
Dr. Ali says. ”Her mood swings and shifts from aggression into depression would suggest bipolar disorder (manic-depression).”
”If a patient came to me and I knew she had slashed furniture and put meat inside it, I would attempt to institutionalize her,” Wolpert adds. ”It appears she took the meat so she could do something ritualistic with it.”
The manufacturer`s warning on Anafranil from Ciba-Geigy Corp. states:
In seriously depressed patients, the possibility of suicide should be borne in mind and may persist. Activation of latent schizophrenia or aggravation of existing psychotic manifestation in schizophrenic patients may occur. Patients with manic-depressive tendencies may experience hypo-manic or manic shifts.
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Laurie Wasserman and Russell Dann were married on Sept. 11, 1982. The couple moved into Russell`s condominium in Northbrook, and Laurie began to work at a succession of low-paying jobs, from which she was almost always fired because of sloppy work habits and poor interpersonal skills.
”She would make it out like she was being wronged,” Russell Dann says. ”And after hearing the story, I would always get mad and say, `How could those sons of bitches do that?` She loved it. That`s how she got attention.” But despite her husband`s encouragement and frequent exhortations that she do something with her life, Laurie became less and less able to deal with the real world. She could not care for the new clothing that her parents showered on her, allowing it to pile up in the closet, and her car filled up with trash and crumpled money. She started sleeping most of the day, then staying up half the night worrying that she would disappoint Russell and destroy her own marriage.
”You`re the only person who ever loved me,” she told him. ”I have a great house in the suburbs, and we belong to a country club. Where am I going to go if I lose you?”
Russell said later, ”I didn`t have a wife, I had a daughter.”
Laurie began seeing Highland Park psychiatrist Dr. Robert Greendale, who treated her with mood-regulating medication, Russell says. On March 12, 1984, she called Greendale and said she no longer wished to see him.
The doctor immediately wrote her a letter:
I am genuinely concerned about your ability to cope with the problems that you have been struggling with. I think it is important for you to realize, if you don`t already, that the nature of your problems go back long before you married your husband and it relates very much to your childhood upbringing. . . . Furthermore, the use of medication can only result in a symptomatic improvement and not in a definitive cure for the kinds of difficulties that you are experiencing. Medication can also only be appropriately administered under an on-going doctor`s observation and care . . . .
In Russell`s eyes, Greendale`s reference to problems in her childhood referred to a lack of communication and warmth from her parents. ”There was no love,” Russell says. ”There was no affection.”
Russell and Norman Wasserman went fishing together one morning shortly thereafter, and Russell showed his father-in-law the letter. ”He had no reaction,” Russell says. ”He never said anything about it, and he never mentioned it again.”