Psycho Elevator Lady’s Murder Spree May 20, 1988

The woman was best known in Madison as the Psycho Elevator Lady, who spent hours riding up and down the Towers apartments on State Street. But her real infamy came later in Winnetka, Ill., where the 30-year-old spent 4 1/2 hours delivering poisoned juice and arsenic-laced snacks to her ex-husband, a psychiatrist, and homes where she had worked as a baby sitter. She tried to light a gas bomb at a school in Highland Park and also set a fire at a Winnetka home where she had once worked. Then she carried three guns into the Hubbard Woods school and shot several students, including the 8-year-old boy who died below a chalkboard. She fled to a nearby home and wounded a young man, then fatally shot herself. She was being treated for mental illness, but her motive for the rampage remains unknown.