A North Shore baby-sitter with a history of ”bizarre” behavior went on a shooting rampage Friday morning in Winnetka, killing one young boy and wounding five other schoolchildren and an adult before apparently taking her own life during an eight-hour police siege.
Before the most violent day in the village`s history was over, a woman identified as Laurie Dann, 30, had set fire to a home where she was employed as a baby-sitter; gone to a nearby elementary school and shot six pupils, one in a washroom and five in a classroom; invaded a nearby home and shot one of its residents; and, police said, finally ended her life.
Nicholas Corwin, 8, was killed at Hubbard Woods Elementary School, 1110 Chatfield Rd. He was pronounced dead at Highland Park Hospital about an hour and a half after being shot in his 2d-grade classroom.
The homicides were Winnetka`s first since May 23, 1957, when police officer Robert Burke was killed in the line of duty, police said.
Shooting victims Friday night in Evanston Hospital were Lindsay Fisher, 8, listed in critical and ”pretty unstable” condition with chest and abdominal wounds; Kathryn Miller, 7, in critical but stable condition with wrist and chest wounds; Robert Trossman, 6, in critical but stable condition with chest and stomach wounds; and Mark Tebourek, 8, in critical but stable condition with a gunshot wound to the neck.
All but the Fisher girl were talking to their parents or grandparents, said Dr. Joseph Hageman, director of the pediatric intensive-care unit. Hageman said Lindsay Fisher was conscious but on a respirator, and ”required a lot of help” in blood clotting.
Victims in Highland Park Hospital were Peter Munro, 8, and Philip Andrew, 20, both in serious but stable condition with chest wounds. Andrew was shot in his family`s home at 2 Kent Rd., Winnetka, while trying to wrestle away a gun from Dann. It was in the Andrew home that the woman`s body was found by police shortly after 7:10 p.m.
Police and other law-enforcement officials said they had been seeking to arrest Dann this week on charges of making threatening phone calls and attempted blackmail. She also had been arrested in Madison, Wis., in March and accused of stealing wigs and hairclips from mannequins at a J.C. Penney store. Winnetka Police Chief Herbert Timm said Dann had been making harassing phone calls to family members of her ex-husband in Highland Park and to a former boyfriend in the West. The FBI had been preparing federal indictments against her because the calls to the former boyfriend crossed state lines, he said.
Laurie Dann`s final odyssey apparently began shortly before 9 a.m. Friday, when a fire broke out in the Ravinia Elementary School, 763 Dean Ave., Highland Park. It was touched off by an ”incendiary device,” police said-a bottle containing flammable liquid.
An unknown woman was seen leaving the school shortly before the fire broke out, school officials said. Police later said Dann was a suspect in the fire, which was extinguished quickly.
At 9:30 a.m., Chief Timm said, Dann went to ”a Jewish day-care center in Highland Park, carrying a can of gasoline,” but was denied entrance.
Then, shortly after 10 a.m., Winnetka firefighters were summoned to a home blaze at 1250 Forest Glen Dr. South, a few blocks northwest of the school.
But even as they were fighting the house fire-which police said was set by Dann, who tried to trap the home`s owner and two of her children in the basement-the shooting at the elementary school had begun.
Timm said eyewitnesses said the young woman walked unchallenged into the school, carrying at least three weapons, and entered a boys` washroom, where she shot Robert Trossman.
Winnetka Police Sgt. Patricia McConnell said two students who had been in the restroom ran into their classroom to tell their teacher about the ”woman with a gun.” The teacher went to the restroom and found the injured student lying on the floor, near a .357 Magnum revolver.
The wounded boy got up and ran to a nearby classroom. By that time, the young woman had entered the school`s Room 7, which housed a 2d-grade class. After announcing ”This gun is real” and ordering the children to gather on one side of the room, she opened fire, McConnell said.
A substitute teacher, identified by police as Amy Moses, 30, was in the classroom Friday. She tried to wrestle away the guns, said Supt. Donald S. Monroe of Winnetka District 36, but the woman managed to break free and left the school.
”The teacher put her hands on the woman`s wrist,” but at that point the shooting had begun, Monroe said. The substitute teacher stayed with the wounded children while the other pupils left the room through a rear door and went to the principal`s office.
McConnell, one of the first police officers to arrive at the school, said the first thing she saw was ”two children in the arms of their teachers. The two kids had been shot. They were out on the steps,” she said.
Police said Dann apparently returned to the late-model Toyota automobile she had driven to the school and tried to drive away, but she drove onto Hamptondale Street, a dead end, and ran into a tree. She abandoned the car and ran across a small wooded area, then entered the kitchen of the large house at 2 Kent Rd. where Ruth Ann Andrew was talking with her son, Philip, 20.
The young woman, wearing a T-shirt and shorts and carrying a ”package”
on her back, was carrying at least one handgun. ”She said she was being attacked,” said Mrs. Andrew, who said she first thought the young woman was playing a joke. ”She seemed all mixed up,” Mrs. Andrew said.
Her son talked to the woman, persuading her to make a telephone call, Mrs. Andrew said. Chief Timm said Dann called her parents ”and told them she`s sorry, she had shot someone.” Shortly afterwards, she said, her son tried to disarm the woman, but Dann shot him in the chest.
Andrew, a student at the University of Illinois, managed to leave the house, where he collapsed in the driveway and later was picked up by an ambulance.
During the commotion, Mrs. Andrew and three other residents of the home escaped.
Police arrived at the scene moments after the woman had entered the home and immediately surrounded it. Then the vigil began, with police pleading with the woman to give up. Her parents and former husband also came to the scene as the siege continued. More than 100 police officers from the area were involved at various times, Timm said.
”Please come out of there, if you can hear me, please. Laurie, please come out. Laurie, pick up the phone,” Dann`s father, Norman Wasserman, pleaded over a bullhorn.
Chief Timm said an immediate rush was not made on the house, even after it was determined Dann had no hostages, because police feared she had an
”incendiary device” like the one found at Ravinia School. He said police wanted to take the woman alive to determine if she had in fact planted bombs elsewhere on the North Shore.
Police finally entered the home shortly before 7:30 p.m. and discovered Dann`s body. They said they found no flammable devices.
”She shot herself in the head with a .32 caliber revolver,” said Lt. Eric Bennett of the Winnetka police.
Dann had been employed for about 18 months as a baby-sitter at the Forest Glen Drive home of Mr. and Mrs. Padraig Rushe, but was informed recently that the family was moving to New York and would no longer require her services.
Mrs. Rushe told police ”she had known about it for the past week.” In recent months, the baby-sitting duties had been gradually ”phased out,”
anyway, Mrs. Rushe told police.
Dann, whom Mrs. Rushe described as a ”reliable baby-sitter,” arrived at the Rushe home shortly after 9 a.m. Friday to take two of the Rushe children, boys aged 4 and 6, to a ”carnival” in Evanston. She returned to the home about an hour later, police said.
Mrs. Rushe said Dann took the two boys down into the basement; when the mother followed them, Dann said something about having to go out to her car. Seconds later the basement stairs were engulfed in flame. The mother and two children ran to a corner utility room, broke a window and managed to escape. Dann apparently was already on the way to the school.
Throughout the day, Winnetka, a generally peaceful village of about 28,000 residents listed in a Roosevelt University study last year as the nation`s 22d wealthiest suburb, was jarred by police, fire and ambulance sirens as the tragedy moved from location to location.
The scene was most wrenching at the school itself, where concerned and weeping parents converged rapidly as word of the schoolroom shootings spread. The school has an enrollment of about 300, but only about 200 students were in the building Friday; about 100 were on a field trip to Chicago.
Supt. Monroe met the frightened parents at the door and told them that counselors, clergymen and workers schooled in crisis control had come to the school to help the uninjured children through the trauma. School was not dismissed until the normal final bell at 3:15 p.m.-”because the shooter was still at large,” he said.
Although the children generally go to their nearby homes for lunch, the school was ordered sealed to everyone but police and counselors, with pizza from a nearby delivery firm brought in to feed the youngsters.
At Evanston and Highland Park Hospitals, parents of the injured children gathered. Hospital administrators ushered them to private quarters to await word of their children`s conditions, away from reporters and television camera crews.
Tension also was high at the Kent Road home. Specially trained hostage situation teams wearing protective clothing and carrying heavy weapons positioned themselves around the home, occasionally shouting through bullhorns to the woman who they believed was hiding inside, possibly heavily armed.
Shortly before 7:30 p.m., Chief Timm, as he had done several times throughout the day, approached a stand cluttered with microphones to announce that police had entered the home through a basement door at 7:10 p.m. and, after securing the basement and first floors, found the woman`s body in a child`s bedroom on the second floor. A gun was found next to her, Chief Timm said.
At 10 a.m. Saturday, parents, teachers and pupils have been asked to gather at the school to begin the long task of learning to cope with unexplainable violence and death.