Wisconsin
Wisconsin pair charged in alleged plot to stalk, poison and kill dating app liaisons
A Wisconsin boyfriend and girlfriend who have been charged with attempted murder are accused of trying to poison two women the man previously dated after he met them online, authorities said.
Paul VanDuyne Jr., 43, and Andrea Whitaker, 41, have each been charged with attempted murder, aggravated battery, recklessly endangering the public and stalking, according to criminal cases filed in the Madison region.
On Friday, they appeared in court separately in Janesville, in Dane County, which also is home to the state capital. Bail was set at $10 million for VanDuyne, who prosecutors said has access to substantial resources, and $4 million for Whitaker.
Pleas were not entered, and each remained in custody, according to jail records. The defendants have separate lawyers, who did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
One of the two victims — each of whom met VanDuyne on a dating app and saw him only a few times — described an experience discovering a stranger she later realized was Whitaker crouched next to her vehicle in her garage in April.
The woman is identified in redacted court records as the victim from Dane County; the other woman is identified as the victim from Rock County. The Dane County woman said Friday in court that she met VanDuyne more than a year ago, went on two dates with him and told him she was not interested in seeing him again.
“I was never his girlfriend, yet he and Andrea developed the delusion that I was,” she said in court Friday. “This delusion was so strong, they tried to murder me. Their actions and motivations are disconnected from reality. Both have shown their capacity for evil.”
Appearing at VanDuyne’s hearing, the woman said that after she discovered the allegations against the couple, she has people stay with her overnight, she installed a security system, and she hides her vehicle.
“I need the court’s protection,” she said. “The community needs the court’s protection.”
Prosecutors said VanDuyne met Whitaker online roughly during the time he dated the victims and carried on a relationship virtually as she took courses in the field of pharmacology away from the area.
Upon completing her courses, she moved nearby, and the two met in person in the spring, according to narratives presented in case documents.
VanDuyne graduated from Princeton University more than 20 years previously, the institution confirmed. He had a career as a mechanical engineer, his lawyer said in court Friday. Documents in the Rock County case say he was recently divorced and started dating the victims after having met them on dating apps or sites that were not named.
When he connected with Whitaker, the two embarked on a plot against the victims, prosecutors said.
The victim from Rock County came to the attention of authorities in early May when a doctor from the Wisconsin Poison Center reported that a woman was hospitalized with thallium in her system, the court documents say.
Thallium was once commonly used to kill rodents. Largely because of accidental poisonings, it has been banned from household use in the United States since 1965 and commercially since 1975.
The doctor, identified only by a last name, is quoted as saying, “The only way a human could have this amount of thallium in her system is if they were intentionally consuming it.”
Prosecutors said the victim reported no suicidal action and struggled to think of anyone who would try to poison her — the names she came up with were vetted — until VanDuyne came to mind, according to the documents from Rock County.
She told detectives about texts she had received in early 2025 from the man she knew only as Paul when they dated starting nearly two years before, the documents say.
She gave investigators VanDuyne’s number, and they started looking at him this month, according to the court documents.
She said he had sent her texts in the spring after months of no contact. In them, the Rock County victim said, he called her “evil” and blamed her for causing his girlfriend, Whitaker, to kill herself when she discovered their dating history, the documents say.
Whitaker did not kill herself.
In fact, court documents allege, she was integral to the plot to kill the two other women VanDuyne had dated, and they worked together to taint water bottles and vehicles with poisons they procured or, in one case, made from scratch.
In the May incident that sent the Rock County victim to the hospital, the woman took her middle-school-age sister to the movies but both became ill, according to the documents. The victim took her vehicle to a dealership, where workers reported a noxious smell and tossed out a storage tote they said contained an unknown substance, the documents say.
Because the woman and her sister described a smell of rotten eggs, detectives concluded the substance was hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.
Rock County Sheriff Curtis Fell said the Rock County victim was still in a wheelchair as a result of her poisoning. Without the medical care she has received — including an antidote flown overnight from California — she most likely would have died, he said.
The alleged plot affected the other victim, the woman from Dane County, not long afterward, in mid-May, when bystanders reported someone breaking into her vehicle at a Costco parking lot on two separate occasions, according to the documents.
A witness at the Costco parking lot reported seeing a man get into a Chrysler Pacifica minivan that was traced back to VanDuyne, authorities said in the documents.
After one of the incidents, the victim reported drinking bottled water she left in her vehicle and noticing it tasted terrible, the court documents say. The water tested positive for cyanide and thallium.
After they realized the two women may have been the victims of the same perpetrators, authorities took a second look at the Rock County victim’s vehicle and concluded it was the subject of break-ins or attempts with markings similar to those made in the Costco attempts, the documents say.
Detectives got a judge’s permission to track VanDuyne’s movements and found him traveling to the Rock County victim’s residence, according to the documents. After that trip, they allege, authorities found a trail camera hung on a tree across from the victim’s home.
In other instances, the couple worked together to use cyanide, thallium and abrin in multiple attempts to poison the victims, once even putting a powdery substance in the ventilation system of a victim’s vehicle, authorities said in the court documents.
Abrin can be made by grinding the seeds of rosary peas, authorities said in the documents.
On Thursday, a search of VanDuyne’s minivan turned up a tan bag with multiple vials inside, the court documents say. Authorities found rosary peas in the bag and a seed grinder at his home, the documents say.
An FBI hazardous materials team was called to help with the search, and members took an active part multiple times, the documents say.
The defendants were expected to appear in Rock County court next week to face charges of attempted murder and stalking for VanDuyne and attempted murder and aiding a felon for Whitaker.
VanDuyne is due in Dane County court again Aug. 4. Whitaker is scheduled for an appearance there July 2.
Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield shares his biggest spring takeaway
Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield shared his biggest takeaway from the spring following the Badgers’ four-set win over Northern Illinois.
MADISON – Kelly Sheffield has coached All-Americans, national players of the year, national champions and future Olympians in his 13 years as Wisconsin volleyball coach.
So Sheffield’s unique praise of Decelise Champion – a star pin-hitter from Puerto Rico who committed to the Badgers last fall – carries a lot of weight.
“Her highest-end potential is certainly as high as about anybody we’ve ever brought in,” Sheffield said. “She’s got a lot of work to get to where she’s capable of, and that’s on us as coaches and on her to help reach those dreams and goals. But when you’re watching people around her age, she’s different.”
That work is beginning earlier than initially expected after Wisconsin announced that Champion will reclassify from the 2027 recruiting class and join the Badgers as a freshman for the 2026 season.
Champion – currently 16 years old and turning 17 in September – will arrive with a resume that includes experience on Puerto Rico’s senior national team and the elite Italian club Volleyro Casal de Pazzi. That’s all while being strong enough academically to earn a GED degree and the necessary NCAA waiver for a few missing core classes.
“What made it really a lot better is that all of her grades at the different schools she’s been at have been fantastic,” Sheffield said. “She’s an excellent student. Was crushing it at a really, really good academic school in Italy in her third language.”
The timing of the June 12 announcement accounted for the second-last open roster spot for the 2026 season, but Champion and UW’s efforts to make the reclassification possible go back much earlier than that.
“We’ve known she’s wanted to do this since February,” Sheffield said. “We told our team in February that was the plan. And then we didn’t let anybody know publicly until she was done with her season. She just didn’t want to be a distraction for her team.”
Badgers have even more competition at pins
Wisconsin already had plenty of competition at the pin-hitting positions before Champion’s move to the 2026 class.
Grace Egan had a major role on the 2025 Final Four team, and Eva Travis had an impressive spring after transferring from UC-Santa Barbara. Others include Grace Lopez, Madison Quest and the highly-touted freshman duo of Halle Thompson and Audrey Flanagan.
Even with the upcoming addition of one more pin-hitter – and one with such a high potential – UW did not lose any players in the spring transfer portal cycle. Even the idea of someone leaving seemed outlandish to Sheffield.
“If they’re just going to get up and leave because somebody came, I would say that that person is probably chicken s—,” Sheffield said.
Sheffield’s praise of Champion’s proposal obviously does not come with a guarantee of playing time either at the crowded pin-hitting positions.
“I would say, yeah, she does have a chance of being out on the court for us this year,” Sheffield said. “But we’ve also got some other really talented people that play the pins.”
The outside and right-side hitters already on UW’s spring roster will have at least one key advantage over Champion in her freshman season – time.
Egan, Lopez and Quest are returning players (although Egan and Lopez spent their spring recovering from injuries). Travis, Thompson and Flanagan all enrolled in time to spend the spring with the Badgers and impressed in UW’s spring matches.
Champion’s arrival, on the other hand, will follow her participation in an Olympic-qualifying event for Puerto Rico. Sheffield expects that to be Sept. 2, which is the day before fall classes begin and already after UW’s first four matches of the season.
“She’ll be drinking out of a fire hose early on, no doubt about it,” Sheffield said. “Even though she’s been playing with her senior national team this summer, it will be a lot of things coming at her in her secondary language at 16, so there’ll need to be some patience along the way.”
His advice to Champion when she was on campus earlier in June was to “be where your feet are.”
“When she’s with her national team – even though we will have started our preseason, playing matches – don’t worry about us here,” Sheffield said. “Be where your feet are. Be the best you can be for your team there. … Then when you get here, you’re not thinking about your national team.”
Champion’s NCAA eligibility clock starts earlier
Champion’s reclassification comes with the drawback of beginning her NCAA eligibility one year earlier in her volleyball career.
Had she stayed in the 2027 recruiting class, she theoretically would have begun her college career shortly before her 18th birthday and exhausted her eligibility at age 22. Instead, she will begin her college career shortly before her 17th birthday and likely exhaust her eligibility at age 21.
Those scenarios take into account the NCAA Division I Cabinet’s unanimous approval on June 23 of a new eligibility model that will give players five seasons of eligibility in five years. (That replaces the current system with four seasons, redshirts and other waivers.) The NCAA noted that its decision is not final, however, until the meeting concludes on June 24.
“We’re certainly excited to have her this year, but if you kind of think over the course of five years, it’s probably worse for us that she comes a year early,” Sheffield said. “You expect her to be better at 20 and 21 than what she is at 16 or 17. … It really wasn’t something that we were pushing for, but she was ready.”
Of course, volleyball at age 16 or 17 looks different for someone like Champion who has been competing against much older players as a senior national team member and studying halfway across the world from her hometown of Dorado, Puerto Rico.
“When you talk to her, she doesn’t come across as somebody who’s 16,” Sheffield said. “She’s very mature, very easy to talk to, very driven. She’s independent. … She’s had a lot more life experience than most people her age, and that certainly comes across when you’re around her.”
Wisconsin
Cult-classic filmed in central Wisconsin returns to big screen, with enhancements, this weekend
STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAW) – A giant spider isn’t actually invading central Wisconsin this weekend.
But an enhanced, big-screen version of the cult-classic 1975 film The Giant Spider Invasion is crawling back into local theaters — and it’s bringing some central Wisconsin nostalgia with it.
The movie was famously filmed in Merrill and Stevens Point, and the updated 2026 release adds enhancements designed for a modern theatrical experience.
What’s new in the 2026 enhanced version?
Executive Producer J.B. Thompson says the team took the original 1975 film and enhanced it for the big screen in 2026, giving audiences a refreshed way to experience a movie that’s long been a Wisconsin oddity — and a point of pride.
Actor and Producer Dan Davies is featured in newly filmed scenes created specifically for this updated release.
Stevens Point’s role in the original film
While much of the film is associated with Merrill, Stevens Point Mayor Mike Wiza says Point also played a major role in the production — another reason the film’s return matters to local history buffs and movie fans alike.
Why does this movie still capture attention 50 years later?
Whether it’s the over-the-top creature feature story, the uniquely Wisconsin filming locations, or the nostalgia of seeing familiar places on screen, the group says the film’s staying power is real — even five decades later.
Screenings this weekend
The enhanced version of The Giant Spider Invasion is set for local screenings this weekend in Central and North Central Wisconsin. To purchase tickets for showings in Stevens Point, Marshfield or Waupaca, click here.
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