Murder of Nick Corwin
Laurie Wasserman Dann (c. 1958 - 20 May, 1988) was an American murderer. Dann grew up in Glencoe, an affluent northern suburb of Chicago. She was the daughter of accountant Norman and Edith Wasserman.
In 1985 she was suspected of attacking her husband Russell Dann in his sleep, by stabbing his chest with an icepick. The case was dropped, and the couple divorced in the same year.
In 1988 she started to make nuisance phone calls that turned into death threats to an ex-boyfriend she dated 18 years earlier. She was already under investigation by the FBI for extortion as she was demanding money in return for halting the phone harassment.
Shortly before going on a shooting spree which ended in her suicide, she delivered marshmallow and rice cereal snacks tainted with arsenic to Alpha Tau Omega and Psi Upsilon fraternity houses at Northwestern University in Evanston. Attached to the snacks was a note that read, "To the ATOs, from your little sisters."[1] Several students were treated for poisoning.
On 20 May 1988, the 30-year-old Dann walked into a second grade classroom at Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka, Illinois carrying three pistols and began shooting children, killing an eight-year-old boy - Nicholas Corwin - and wounding five others before fleeing. She entered a nearby house where she shot and wounded a 20-year-old man before killing herself.
Also before killing herself, she traveled to Ravinia Elementary School in Highland Park, Illinois where she left an incendiary device. The bomb was found and prevented from detonating.
Dann had long suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and other mental illnesses. Subsequent blood tests revealed that at the time of the killings, Dann was using lithium and anafranil, generically known as clomipramine.
There were also reports that, just before the shootings, Dann mailed as many as 24 packages of tainted food and juice to friends and acquaintances in Wisconsin and California and several suburbs north of Chicago. (United Press International - May 26 1988)
A made-for-TV movie, Murder of Innocence, was broadcast by CBS on November 30, 1993. The movie was based on the book of the same name by Eric Zorn, but the names of the characters were changed. Valerie Bertinelli was cast as Laurie Wade, a character based on Laurie Dann.
External links
- http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/lauriedann.html Summary and quoted contemporaneous news reports.
- ^ Ray Gibson and Linnet Myers, "School Killer Left A Trail Of Poison Fraternities, Homes Receive Tainted Food," Chicago Tribune (22 May 1988) 1.