Nine

DOUBT

THE INQUEST drew to a close on Tuesday, December, 16. Sergeant Drew Brown of the police bomb and arson unit was recalled and asked if his expanding investigation into the fire’s cause had revealed any new information.

“We have processed almost seven hundred youngsters by taking statements from each one,” Brown said. “About thirteen hundred youngsters have been talked to to try to find the answer.

“We did find out there definitely had been smoking in the stairwell, and we definitely found out there was some delay in getting this alarm.”

Brown’s testimony responded to revelations that several older pupils—all boys—were seen smoking by other students in a washroom in the school basement on the afternoon of the fire. Another pupil also told police that in September he had seen boys smoking at the bottom of the northeast stairwell where the fire had started.

The sergeant said questioning of students produced “a boy who states he saw two youngsters in the stairwell smoking. This is the first time we have come across anyone who puts them right in the stairwell. And they were lighting matches.”

“Did you get any information that would be helpful from the crime lab?” Coroner McCarron asked.

“We took a whole step from the back stairwell to the crime laboratory to distill the material to see if any gasoline had been used, if any volatile liquids could be obtained from it,” Brown said. “They stated that water was all they could get out of this plank.

“We have submitted every bit of physical evidence available at the scene to the Police Crime Lab. Photos have been taken. We have revisited the scene a score of times. We have discussed this twenty-four hours a day with nearly everyone we could talk to. We talked to adults in the neighborhood, and it’s status quo on the whole thing.

“We do not know yet whether it was arson, although the evidence—the balance of the evidence—must indicate that it was accidental.” Later, after further questioning, Brown said he would classify the fire as one of “undetermined cause.”

Wyatt Jacobs, an attorney representing the Catholic Bishop of Chicago, then examined Brown.

“You say you found some combustible material in the stairwell,” Jacobs began. “Tell us what it was.”

“We found some papers that children had written,” Brown answered. “We found newspapers that dated back to October 20th. We found the remains of what appeared to be three cardboard boxes.”

“Where was that located?”

“That one particular box was right under the window there the fire appeared to have its start. It was filled with whiskey bottles.”

“Empty?”

“Yes, the bottles were broken.”

“Did you find any evidence that there were matches in the well?”

“I didn’t find any matches, no.”

“You used this word ‘arson’ carelessly. Do you have any evidence at all?”

“I stated that this is an undetermined fire as far as we are concerned.”

“Then you do not have any evidence that it was arson?”

“That is correct.”

“But you are not ruling out arson at this time?” Deputy Coroner Harold Marks asked.

“No, sir,” responded Brown.

After Brown was excused, Monsignor Cussen, the parish pastor, was summoned as the final inquest witness. As the clergyman approached the stand, McCarron asked for the cooperation of news photographers. “If there are going to be any pictures taken,” he ordered, “take them before and after, but not while the witness is testifying.”

The coroner then turned to Cussen. “Will you tell the jury and tell me what you know about this incident, please?”

“Well, that Monday afternoon,” the pastor began, “I had been in the boiler room shortly before two o’clock. I was talking to the janitor.

“I returned to the rectory and I received a call that the truck from the Salvage Bureau had come out for clothes we had gathered from a drive the week preceding. We called the school and asked the sisters to send over some boys. She sent something like thirteen boys to help these men load the truck on the Hamlin Avenue side of the hall. They were just finished when one of the boys says, ‘The school’s on fire!’

“I ran through the hall and came out to the front just as the first engine—85—pulled up. I went in the first door of the school, the east door on the Iowa Street side. I went up to the second floor and we opened a window. Civilians followed. We got them organized and we took every child in that room but one.”

The pastor said he then tried to get through to the north wing of the school where students were trapped, but was driven back by smoke. “It was heavy, kind of oily, and black.”

“I came downstairs and then went over to the north end of the building,” he said. “Youngsters were coming down the ladders. I did all I could there to aid these children. Some of them lost their heads and jumped. With the aid of civilians, we picked them up and brought them over to the place north of the school and set them there in the alley until the ambulances came along. That’s about it.”

“Monsignor Cussen,” Dale Auck asked, “if there was an accumulation of material and debris in this stairwell, apparently someone knows when it was put there and how it happened to be there. Do you know who that person might be?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Have you any opinion as to the source of this fire, what started it?”

“No, I haven’t. The only thing that bothered me was that it was more or less a flash fire; it went so very fast. I was in the boiler room about a half-hour before that, talking with the janitor. There was no sign of smoke.”

“Is this stairwell a generally used stairs? I mean, there is no reason why people are not used to using those stairs?”

“No. They use it. We don’t use it for entrance and exit to the school because it faces an alley and there is a great deal of danger because traffic is particularly heavy in that alley. It is open to anyone to use it. I have to use it myself when I have been in the building, going from the first floor to the second, or from the second to the first.”

“The exit door at the bottom is closed?”

“No. It has to be open at all times.”

“People coming out of public buildings have a tendency … to light up their cigarettes just before they leave. Is it possible an adult may have dropped a match or cigarette in the stairwell?”

“It could be, because it’s off the alley. Anybody could get in there.”

The pastor was then asked what procedures were followed regarding the sounding of the school’s fire alarm. He said the school had had six fire drills since September.

“Can anyone sound the alarm?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could any teacher evacuate a room without asking permission?”

“Oh, yes, yes. In fact, that is what I thought this was when I came out of the church hall because of all the children on the south side of Iowa Street and the west side of Avers. I thought it was a drill until I saw the smoke in the back of the school.”

“Monsignor, did you ever receive any notices from local governmental agencies with reference to violations?”

“No, I haven’t. Not at any time. I think we were superior as far as good housekeeping was concerned because I have been more or less a crank on that type of work. The school was in good physical condition. It was an old building, yes, but we brought it up to date. It was well kept. The youngsters were very clean. In fact, they would even clean up the street in front of the school.”

Cussen then asked to make a final statement. “I have been a priest for forty years,” he said, “and I have been associated with children all that time. I do not think I will ever be satisfied until we find what caused this fire.”

As the doors closed behind them, parents attending the inquest came away with little new information to help salve their grief. The cause of the fire was still a mystery, and several parents criticized McCarron’s questioning as irrelevant, repetitious, or sometimes downright inept. Parents also were irritated over the reluctance of some city officials to pinpoint responsibility. Had a neutral observer listened to the testimony, he might have thought the inquest was designed simply to absolve the living rather than show concern for the dead.

IT TOOK the coroner’s jury nearly three weeks to complete its findings. On January 7, 1959, the panel reconvened and announced its conclusion that Joseph Maffiola, Marilyn P. Reeb, and Wayne Frederick Wisz had: “Died on December 1, 1958, in Cook County Hospital from asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation and other causes, due to external violence caused when the deceased, together with ninety others, came to their deaths, victims of a fire of undetermined origin that took place in Our Lady of the Angels School, located on the premises commonly known and described as 909 North Avers Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

“From the testimony presented, we, the jury, are unable to determine whether this occurrence was accidental or otherwise.”

Roy Tuchbreiter, foreman of the jury, embellished these findings: “Judging from the evidence presented, the fire originated in the stairwell at the northeast corner of the school building and had been burning for some time before it was discovered. However, the exact point of origin cannot be established and we therefore have reached the conclusion that the cause of the fire is undetermined.”

Attached to the jury’s report was a list of twenty-two nonbinding recommendations for fire safety in school buildings. Among others, the report cited the following four suggestions:

—Provide an approved automatic fire sprinkler system in all school buildings;

—Enclose all vertical passageways with incombustible construction and protect all openings into them with approved fire doors;

—Provide approved fire barrier doors at all corridor and room partition openings;

—Provide an approved automatic internal fire alarm system whose components incorporate smoke and heat detectors, and which is linked directly to the Fire Department.

Our Lady of the Angels School would have to be graded as deficient with regard to the jury’s key recommendations, but at that time, if the same safety standards had been applied throughout the nation, hundreds of other aging school buildings would have been considered equally deficient. Still, it took an unusual combination of circumstances to expose the vulnerability of Our Lady of the Angels School, including—as some investigators insisted—the unproven reality that the fire had been set.

In the end, because the school fell outside the 1949 municipal code, both the city and the Chicago archdiocese skirted criminal liability. Never was there any mention of convening a grand jury in Cook County to hear evidence of possible criminal negligence against either entity, despite the release of a scathing report on the fire by the National Fire Protection Association, whose authors clearly blamed city and archdiocesan officials.

The school fire deaths, the NFPA reported, “are an indictment of those in authority who have failed to recognize their life safety obligations in housing children in structures which are fire traps. Schools that lack adequate exit facilities and approved types of automatic sprinkler or detection equipment, which possess excessive amounts of highly combustible interior finish, substandard fire alerting means and poor housekeeping conditions must be rated as fire traps.”

THE FINDINGS by the coroner’s jury were immediately criticized for being too inconclusive and for failing to fix responsibility on any person or institution.

“It’s like they wanted to wash their hands of the entire matter, sweep it under the rug,” recalled John Trotta, whose thirteen-year-old son, John David, had died in Room 211.

Trotta had attended the inquest, listened to the witnesses, and came away feeling that he still didn’t have the answers he was entitled to as an aggrieved father who had lost his only son. He had gone to the inquest hoping to submit a list of questions to the jury. “I gave them to the foreman of the jury, and you know what he says to me? He says,’ We don’t want to do anything that will embarrass the archdiocese.’ Can you believe that?”

One of Trotta’s questions had to do with the time Jim Raymond said he first saw the fire and the time Mrs. Maloney, the housekeeper, called the Fire Department.

If Raymond was correct in saying he first noticed the fire at 2:30 p.m., and immediately notified the housekeeper, then why the twelve-minute delay? One possibility is that Raymond was wrong about the time. Another is that the housekeeper may have first tried to verify the fire report with the pastor or some other authority figure. Another more likely explanation is that Raymond, despite his claims to the contrary, may indeed have spent several minutes trying to fight the fire in the stairwell before running to the rectory.

“That was something we always suspected but were never able to pin down,” recalled George Schuller, who, as a lieutenant assigned to the Chicago Fire Department’s arson squad and photography unit, investigated the fire and photographed the building’s charred ruins. But even if this was true, Schuller said, it would be a natural reaction for which he could not fault Raymond. “Everything went wrong there,” he said. “There was a delay in calling us, and then when we were called we got the wrong address and were sent to the rectory. But that first company on the scene did everything humanly possible. They called right away for a 2-11. But it was too late.”

As for Raymond himself, the fire and the coroner’s inquest took a terrible personal toll, one from which he never fully recovered. Before the fire he had been held in high regard. Afterward his reputation faltered. The point of the inquest was to gather information from key witnesses. Instead, for Jim Raymond, it was like a murder indictment.

“Those people were searching for straws,” John Raymond, his son, later recalled. “My father was just a handyman janitor taking care of a lot of buildings. Nobody complained about his work before that. I think they were looking to rough someone up after this deal. It was the turning point of his life.”

Others who knew the janitor also saw the “sloppy housekeeping” charges as off base. “He could always be seen sweeping up the floors and cleaning this and that,” remembered Father Ognibene. “He had a big job, a lot of buildings to take care of. That fire didn’t occur because of any negligence on Jim’s part, that’s for sure. Yeah, it was an old building, but it was a clean building.”

Although allegations of the janitor’s negligence were never proved, the stain they left upon Raymond’s name lingered long afterward. In neighborhood taverns and coffee shops, not all those who talked were convinced that Raymond was merely a fall guy. Maybe he did have something to do with it. If not, why didn’t he take a lie-detector test? And what about the trash in the stairwell? There were rumors he liked to drink. Maybe he tipped something over in the boiler room.

Nor was all the talk behind Raymond’s back. Parents who passed him in the street muttered accusations, and there were occasional death threats. “I don’t remember my father saying anything bad about it,” John Raymond recalled. “My father was very quiet and remorseful. But I do remember hearing him crying all the time. He was shook pretty hard. I think what bothered him more than anything was that if he’d gotten there sooner, he could’ve got everyone out of the building.”

Jim Raymond gradually withdrew from other people and became a loner. A beer drinker like many of his blue-collar friends before the fire, he turned to hard liquor. “He’d either go down to the corner and find his bar stool or just come home and find his bed,” John Raymond said. “We’d find him there in the middle of the day, just lying in his bed. He became a very lonely man.”

In time Raymond’s life slowly fell apart. He never received true vindication. When a new Our Lady of the Angels School opened in 1960, a new janitor was hired to maintain it. Raymond was relegated to taking care of the church and rectory. In 1965, when Monsignor Cussen retired as pastor, Reverend Donald F. Kelley, a retired navy chaplain, was named as his replacement. By that time Raymond’s drinking had worsened considerably, and a decision was made to let him go altogether. In 1968 the Raymond family moved to a suburb just outside Chicago. Jim Raymond never went back to work. He died of cancer in 1978 at the age of sixty-three.

WHILE THE INQUEST was in progress, many agencies and groups of investigators were examining the fire scene. The most comprehensive and credible report on the origin and cause of the school fire was made by John Kennedy.

A private fire and arson investigator based in Chicago, Kennedy had a brassy, cocky way about him that often annoyed his peers. He was a big man—six feet, four inches tall and weighing 230 pounds. He liked to smoke enormous Havana cigars and unabashedly fancied himself as “the world’s greatest arson detective.”

“When I hit a fire scene,” he once commented, “I look for clues even most firemen don’t know about. Every fire leaves ‘fingerprints’ that tell what happened—you just have to know enough about chemistry to read ‘em.”

Kennedy prided himself in pioneering the “Pointer System” in detecting the origin of a fire. “Fire travels upward once it starts,” he explained, “so you look for the lowest point where there is evidence of burning. I perfected the method of tracing the path of a fire back to its source from a study of the burned flammables.”

During World War II Kennedy rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the navy, survived three ship sinkings, and later was transferred to intelligence with the responsibility for investigating fires within the naval establishment. After the war he became a special agent for a group of mutual fire insurance companies, making investigations that took him to virtually every state in the nation. Later he formed his own investigative agency, lectured at fire schools and seminars, and helped train police and fire department arson squads. Among his pupils were Lieutenants Jimmy Kehoe and George Schuller of the Chicago Fire Department.

On December 3, two days after the disaster, Kennedy had been retained by the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company to investigate the Our Lady of the Angels fire. The company was the insurer of the school building, the damage to which had officially been set at $125,000.

It took Kennedy more than three months to complete his findings, and on April 15, 1959, he delivered his report in the downtown office of the insurance company in the presence of Monsignor Cussen. The flamboyant investigator complemented his thick, typewritten report with copious photos of the interior of the school and with diagrams he charted on a chalkboard, showing the exact spot where the fire originated and the pipe shaft through which the hot air, gases, and smoke vented into the false ceiling above the school’s second-floor classrooms.

“The manner in which the fire spread to the upper portion of the structure was most unusual,” Kennedy said. “The fire evidently was smoldering for a long time, estimated to be at least one half-hour and possibly as long as forty-five minutes before the discovery and alarm at 2:42 p.m. This means the fire was burning as early as 2:12 p.m.

“The superheated gases and smoke which vented to the cockloft were forced to the west and accumulated in an area over the second-floor corridor at almost the exact center of the roof. You don’t need a direct application of flame to wood to start a fire. All you need is a high enough temperature and wood will lose its ability to dissipate heat. This superheated air and smoke caused a second ignition sometime later when sufficient oxygen was admitted to this area beneath the roof.

“In addition to this principal method of spreading the heated gases, the hot air, smoke and later fire mushroomed up the open back stairwell to the roof area, and also entered a thirty-by-thirty-inch open ventilation grille in the cockloft almost immediately over the stairwell.

“It is quite evident the roof space over the center and east portions of the second floor of the school had been superheated long before the discovery and reporting of this fire. It is quite possible that, although witnesses do not report seeing any smoke or fire in the second-story roof area prior to discovery, a fire of severe proportions was actually burning in this concealed space at the time.

“It is reported that some fifteen minutes before discovery of this fire that the nuns and students in Room 208 and the room directly below had complained of heat in the rooms. It was undoubtedly the superheated gases and smoke passing up through the east wall of Room 208 and the room below which caused the temperature rise. There is little doubt that this is the manner in which the fire spread from the point of origin and caused a second and more serious burning beneath the roof.”

None of this information was revelatory, but Kennedy now made one of his typically authoritative assertions. “The cause of this fire,” he said, “is undoubtedly that of a human agency. It is very probable that this is a fire of incendiary origin.

“Although no definite suspects have been identified at this time, it is entirely possible that in the future some individual or individuals may be apprehended and charged with arson in connection with this fire.”

Kennedy said he based his conclusion on the absence of “any machinery, equipment or any electrical wiring in the stairwell which could have malfunctioned and accidentally caused the fire. In addition, spontaneous ignition has been eliminated as have all the so-called ‘natural causes.’

“This fire had to be set by a human being, either accidentally or intentionally.”

Supporting his contention about the incendiary nature of the fire, Kennedy cited evidence he had discovered in the sacristy of the basement chapel.

“In the sacristy, a distance of about sixty feet from and with open access to the point of the fire’s origin,” he said, “I found several matches and a match book. These matches, some of which had been lit and some which had not, had been torn from the book and scattered about on the top of a wooden table. This was done in such a manner as to indicate someone had torn matches from the match book, igniting some of them and tossing them indiscriminately about this area. From the condition of the soot and smoke which had settled over the table, matches and match book cover, it was evident that this had been done prior to the fire and possibly immediately before the fire. The soot covered the top of the match book and matches, but the surface beneath them was clean.”

After listening to Kennedy’s explanations, Monsignor Cussen looked at the investigator and said, “Well, that’s the only thing that makes sense of all the stories I’ve heard.”

In his report Kennedy left no doubt there had been an accumulation of material at the base of the stairwell. “These materials,” he said, “included two metal containers, a third container constructed of cardboard, a roll of linoleum, a brass scale of the platform type, a metal bookcase with adjustable shelves, a metal hand snow plow, some felt cloth which may have been used for rags or polishing, some newspapers—possibly as much as thirty pounds, more than three textbooks, a large wallpaper sample book, remains of a cardboard box, a roll of metal screen, and some bound test papers. These findings were confirmed by me. The items I enumerated are a minimum number of confirmed items found in the stairwell basement. There might have been more.”

The fire had smoldered for at least a half-hour, Kennedy concluded, because of “the severe baking of the boiler room door which was caused by an even distribution of heat over a period of time and further corroborated by a similar-type baking of the door jambs of the girls’ toilet room.

“The door to the boiler room was metal clad with wooden braces and although the wood was severely and deeply charred, the metal held and kept the fire from transmitting into the boiler room.

“The wooden door to the girls’ washroom was burned, but from the nature of the burning, it appeared as though the door resisted the heat for some time before the fire burned through. This is due to the fact the fire was a smoldering type or covered fire, and did not receive sufficient oxygen to blaze up and cause more smoke, flames and other noticeable by-products that would have resulted in an earlier alarm.

“Instead, the fire continued to burn slowly and to generate heat. It was confined to the small stairwell area partly because of the closed doors to the boiler and girls’ washroom and also because of the metal-clad surrounding walls. The smoke robbed the area of oxygen, preventing the fire from burning through and erupting.”

In his investigation Kennedy said he had visited the police crime laboratory at least ten times to learn if any accelerant had been used in setting the fire. He watched as materials taken from the stairwell were analyzed.

“The tests proved negative,” he said. “No accelerant was used.”

Kennedy’s complete findings were never disclosed to the general public, so parents of the school fire victims were never fully apprised of the facts. Because Kennedy was a private investigator hired to determine how the fire started, the information he collected during his probe was not shared by the archdiocese with anyone, including those most affected by the tragedy.

IN THE MONTHS following the fire, the tragedy at Our Lady of the Angels School slowly faded from public consciousness. Interest in solving the mystery waned. As time went on, the story of the school fire was no longer front-page news or the lead item on evening newscasts.

On March 10, 1959, Valerie Thoma, a cheery, fourteen-year-old eighth-grader who had leaped from a second-floor window with her clothing aflame, died in St. Anne’s Hospital. She had been in Room 209 and had remained in the hospital since the day of the fire. Valerie suffered head injuries in her fall but had been taken off the critical list. She was undergoing skin grafts and other medical reconstruction when her body finally failed her.

William Edington, sandy-haired, thirteen years old, and an eighth-grader from Room 211, was the last victim to be claimed by the fire. He was burned over 80 percent of his body. Burns covered his back, his chest and abdomen, part of his legs and arms, the right side of his face, and his right ear. In the hospital he was the most polite child, and everyone loved him. Twenty-five times he went into surgery for skin grafts, with 6,000 square inches of preserved skin from donors used to cover his open wounds. Another 240 square inches were transferred from his mother’s thigh and applied to his back. But in the summer his liver began to fail, and jaundice set in. On August 9 he died, 251 days after the fire.

With Edington’s death the arithmetic was complete. The final death toll from the school fire reached ninety-five—fifty-five girls, thirty-seven boys, and three nuns.

IN AUGUST 1959 Monsignor Cussen granted his first newspaper interview since the fire and said publicly for the first time what many had long believed to be true. “There’s no doubt in my mind that somebody set that fire,” the pastor said.

Cussen had recovered from a stroke he suffered in May, brought on by the stress and anguish over the fire, and admitted he had lost fifteen pounds. It was the first in a series of strokes he would suffer later in his life.

“I used to wake up dreaming about it,” he said, “but not anymore. I sleep better now. Since I’ve been sick, I’ve been able to get a good night’s sleep. For a while they didn’t think I was going to make it. Too much tension, I guess. But I feel a lot better now.”

In the interview the pastor made another stunning disclosure not widely known by those in the parish—that someone had tried to set fire to Our Lady of the Angels Church that June, six months after the school tragedy. The fire had flickered out before causing serious damage. Burned pieces of a curtain had been found on the floor of a confessional. The arsonist had taken two candles from vigil lights in the church and placed them beneath a bench in the confessional. The curtain, removed from a door in the confessional, was set ablaze, but the fire died quickly in the small enclosure.

“There’s some nut loose,” Cussen said.