Eleven

DECISION

ON MARCH 13, 1962, Judge Cilella rendered his decision. As the verdict was announced, the boy sat pensive in the courtroom next to his attorneys. His parents were not present.

Reading from his twenty-one-page opinion, the judge began his reasoning. “The child testified under oath in open court and denied [setting] the Our Lady of the Angels fire,” he said. “It is true he similarly denied setting the Cicero fires. However, his testimony was given on different days, with a week intervening.

“His denials of the Our Lady of the Angels fire, when considered in light of all the other evidence, were quite convincing. His similar denials with respect to the setting of the Cicero fires were not convincing.”

The judge overruled the earlier defense objection by admitting into evidence the school fire confession the youth had given John Reid, determining that the statement had been given voluntarily. But, he held, the confession was “contradicted by all of the circumstantial and physical evidence which was adduced in open court.”

The only similarity to known facts about the origin of the fire, Cilella observed, was the boy’s statement that he had set fire to the cardboard trash barrel in the basement of the school. The boy said the barrel was under the staircase, but Chief Kehoe and Sergeant Brown had testified that it was near the foot of the staircase. (On this point the judge was later disputed by investigators who claimed the boy’s description of where he started the fire was generally, though not precisely, correct.)

Another “discrepancy” Cilella found in the confession concerned the boy’s description of how he had jumped out the window into the fireman’s net. “The court finds this fantastic and incredible. This was not substantiated by his teacher or in the statement” the boy gave police eleven days after the fire.

“Under these circumstances, the court cannot speculate as to which of the material portions of the statement are true and which are false. The court is not convinced that the statement is true.”

Cilella also took issue with John Reid. “The court is troubled by certain of the circumstances surrounding the giving of the statement. This is particularly true of Reid’s assurances that the results of his examination [of the boy] would be held in confidence.”

Reid, the judge said, “knew that statements made to him could not be held in confidence if the process of the law demanded their disclosure. His representation to the child that his signature was needed on the statement in order that Reid might complete his file was transparently false. In short, the child and his parents were misled.”

Still, after dressing down Reid for the way he had obtained the confession for the school fire, Judge Cilella made a complete turnaround and accepted the confession Reid had obtained for the Cicero fires.

Concluding, the judge declared, “Upon the evidence before it, the court does not have an abiding conviction that this child set the Our Lady of the Angels fire. Such being the case, the court will not burden this child with the judicial determination that he is responsible for that tragedy.”

So ended the best case investigators could muster in their quest to resolve the school fire mystery. For setting the fires in Cicero, Judge Cilella ordered the boy sent to the Star Commonwealth boys’ center in Michigan. There the boy received psychiatric treatment to help cure him of his fetish for starting fires. He remained at the Michigan center until his release in 1965, when he entered military service and was sent to Vietnam.

Ironically, the youth’s release order from the Michigan boys’ center was signed by Walter Dahl, one of the lawyers who had defended him during the juvenile proceedings, and who by 1965 had become a judge on the Cook County Circuit Court.

AMONG THOSE interested in the case, opinion remained divided as to whether the boy had told the truth during his interrogation by John Reid. Despite Judge Cilella’s ruling, the boy’s description of how and where the fire started—details only the fire-setter would have known—corroborates much information compiled by investigators that had never been previously released. Investigators had never revealed the exact spot inside the school where the fire had originated. Nor had it ever been revealed that the blaze had in fact started in the ringed, thirty-gallon trash container. All news stories had reported in a general manner that the fire had started under the stairs in the northeast stairwell. In fact the fire’s origin was eight feet from the base of the stairwell, in the exact spot the boy had indicated in his pencil sketch of the basement. The only obvious discrepancy noted in the boy’s statement was the way he described his escape from the burning school building.

Also telling are the similarities between the apartment building fires the youth set in Cicero and the manner in which the school fire started—blazes which began in papers at the bottom of staircases. They further support the beliefs of Reid and other investigators who were convinced the boy was truthful in his confession.

Private investigator John Kennedy, though, remained noncommittal. “I’m not saying he did it, but this boy was there,” Kennedy said. “He had the opportunity. He was a pathological fire-setter. He told things about the fire that only we, on the inside, knew to be true. What the boy said corroborates how I think it was set.” Kennedy recalled that before 1962 “I was the only one with the courage enough to say officially that it was a set fire. I was all alone in the wilderness. Some people thought I was trying to take negligence off the Fire Department’s back. Others thought I was investigating for the school and trying to absolve the pastor. But they were wrong. It’s just that I came up with an answer some of them didn’t want to hear.”

John Reid, of course, could not be swayed in his conviction that the boy actually did start the Our Lady of the Angels fire. “One thing I could never figure out was the archdiocese doing what they did,” Reid said during an interview in 1976. “They didn’t want any of their kids being responsible for that fire. They sat on the judge. They sat on everybody.

“I know when I’m getting a false confession and I know when I’m getting a right one. I’ve been in this business since 1940, opened my own office in 1947. Over the years I’ve quizzed thousands of people. I’ve had more than three hundred murder confessions. If an examination is conducted properly, you get a pretty good reading on whether a person is being truthful or deceptive.

“The fluency of the boy’s story was quite regular,” Reid said. “He could tell me where he went after he came upstairs from the school basement. He told me about going to the Cub Scout meeting at his den mother’s house and how the woman became upset because she had heard about the fire at the school. His story seemed to flow very easily.”

When asked about the boy’s obvious falsehood in claiming he was pushed out the classroom window by his teacher, Reid dismissed that part of the boy’s statement as “fantasy.” “I think the kid wanted to tell somebody about setting the fire. He was ripe for it at the time.”

OFFICIALLY the Chicago archdiocese never attempted to resolve the cause of the fire, choosing instead to leave the question hanging. And though it could never be confirmed that Judge Cilella’s decision to exonerate the boy was influenced by the archdiocese or any other outside interest, a powerful political relationship shared between city and church, in conjunction with the legal system, appeared to be at work.

George Lindberg, Reid’s associate who witnessed the boy’s confession and who went on to become a federal district judge in Chicago, offered an interesting slant on the case. “The information we obtained,” Lindberg said, “is that the cardinal [Meyer] did not want this boy to bear the stain of being responsible for ninety-five deaths, and that the judge, therefore, was prevailed upon to throw the confession out. So it appears that Cilella’s decision was predetermined.”

Lindberg denied emphatically that the boy’s confession was coerced by Reid. “He is dead wrong,” Lindberg said. “I assure you that this was not a forced confession. Was he culpable? Absolutely. There is absolutely no question in my mind that he did it. He furnished details that only the fire-setter would have known. My view is that other than being there and seeing him light the matches, we got [through the interview and polygraph test] the next best thing.”

A close family friend of Judge Cilella’s remembers the pressure he faced at the time of the hearing. “Al was a Catholic and he felt obligated to the church,” replied the source, who asked to remain anonymous. “Afterward he took a real beating. His wife was incensed when he decided to let the boy off the hook. She really tore into him. ‘How could you do this? How can you look at yourself in the mirror when you know he’s guilty?’ That sort of thing.

“After that happened they used to argue a lot at the dinner table. He took a real beating from all corners, and it had a very detrimental effect. It wasn’t long after that he got sick and died. The stress was incredible. Privately he knew the boy was guilty. He wrestled with it and second-guessed himself for the rest of his life.”

Sister Andrienne Carolan knew the boy well. She taught him religion for four years and had counseled him on occasion at Our Lady of the Angels School. “He was the kind of boy who would say anything to get attention,” the nun recalled. “He didn’t know who his real father was, and he was searching for a masculine image. He loved Father Ognibene and Father McDonnell, not so much because they were priests, but because they were masculine images in his life. He was a practical jokester and used to do some dumb things, but I can’t say he would ever want to deliberately hurt somebody. In fact, if he misbehaved in class he’d be the kid who’d come up to you and say, ‘Gee, Sister, I’m sorry I goofed off today.’”

Others remember the boy differently. Robert Lombardo was a student in the suspect’s classroom. He recalled how, on the morning of the fire, he and another classmate were sent by Miss Tristano to look for the boy after he left to use the washroom and failed to return to the classroom in a timely manner. After going down to the basement, the pair located the boy in chapel of the north wing, leaving open to speculation that the youth may have considered starting a blaze earlier that same day.

“We found him right in front of the altar,” recalled Lombardo, who went on to join the Chicago Police Department and earn a Ph.D. in criminology. “He had obviously come out of somewhere. Whether it was in the boiler room or the back stairway behind the chapel, I don’t know.

“We called to him, ‘Hey, Miss Tristano wants you back in the room. C’mon, let’s go.’

“We grabbed him and he pushes away. He runs off. He’s gone. He took off running back behind the altar, to the stairs. We chased him a little but he was gone. We weren’t looking to wrestle with him or fight with him. We went back upstairs to the room and told her he didn’t want to go back to the room.

“On the same day we chased him around, when we were going home for lunch, he said to us, ‘One of these days I’m gonna be famous. One of these days you’re gonna read about me in the papers.’

“Of course we didn’t know what he meant. We didn’t pay any attention.”

Although Lombardo said he could not recall if the boy had left the room later that same afternoon, at least one other former student from Room 206 said she distinctly recalls seeing him leave the classroom shortly before the fire broke out. “I remember him raising his hand, right around two o’clock, asking to use the washroom,” she said. “He left that room and when he came back it wasn’t long before Miss Tristano noticed the smoke and had us evacuate.”

In 1958 Lombardo’s family lived around the corner from the boy’s home, near Ohio Street and Springfield Avenue. Lombardo hung around with the boy. “He came from a bad family situation,” Lombardo said. “He used to get beat a lot by his stepfather. His mother was not very nice to the other kids in the neighborhood. We all played together—all of us kids in the neighborhood who lived nearby. We were all juvenile delinquents—stealing lightbulbs from street signs and throwing them, and eggs from the dairy over on Ferdinand Street. But that was as far as it went.

“But he was the little firebug of the neighborhood. I remember he set the mailbox on fire at Hamlin and Ferdinand. He’s standing there one day throwing matches in it, starting it on fire.”

Lombardo’s family lived in the same Chicago apartment building the boy admitted setting fire to when he was interviewed by Cicero investigators. “It was a big court apartment building with an enclosed back porch,” Lombardo recalled. “He set it on fire and it was blazing like crazy. It didn’t destroy the building, but the Fire Department had to come and put it out.”

Lombardo remembers being interviewed by police in 1962, after the boy was identified as a suspect in the school fire. “I told them of the incident with him in the basement,” he said. “Nothing ever came of it. I thought for sure somebody would come back and question us again about it. But nobody did.

“We always thought the authorities, the police, would take care of it, make it right. It’s like your parents. When something was wrong, your parents always made it right. That’s how we looked at the fire. If someone set it, the police were like your parents. They would find out and make it right.”

IN THE DECADES after the fire, the “boy” became a man and settled into the life of a truck driver living in a Western state. In the course of two brief interviews he revealed how, after being released from the Michigan youth center, he spent two years in Vietnam during military service. But he was reluctant to talk about the events that changed the course of his life in late 1958 and early 1962.

He did, however, remain emphatic in denying that he had set the Our Lady of the Angels School fire. “I don’t want to open old wounds,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, I was a student at the school and that’s all. I asked the teacher if I could go to the washroom that day. That was it.

“I got my ass in a bind for setting fires in Cicero. I had experiences like a lot of kids have, setting fires in back alleys or in garbage cans. When they brought me in, it was like the law trying to pin a crime on the first guy they think did it.”

He was still bitter over the way he had been treated in the hearings in Family Court. “Ever hear about child abuse? That’s what I’d call it. They had me in the Audy Home in solitary confinement for three months, in a little room.”

And what about the damaging admissions he made to John Reid?

“He said to me, ‘Look, it’s coming out wrong on the polygraph. If you ever want to get out of here, you’d better give the right answers.’ I wanted to get home. So I signed some things and then my parents looked at me, horrified.

“I was wrongly accused, and I went through hell because of it. When you’re a little kid and spend as many hours as I did in that polygraph office, you’ll sign anything. Reid started the whole thing. He instigated it.”

The man said he didn’t care to talk in greater detail about the school fire. “I don’t feel like saying anything about it, because it happened so long ago and I don’t really remember. If I say something, I might say something wrong. I want to forget about it, and besides, who the hell is gonna say they’re sorry at me?”

DOUBTS ABOUT the boy’s culpability were first nurtured in the mind of fire investigator George Schuller in 1962, following the close of the Family Court hearings. Despite the persuasive evidence showing that the boy had a history of setting fires, that he had been in Our Lady of the Angels School on the day in question and had left his room shortly before the fire erupted, Schuller, a member of the Chicago Fire Department photo unit and arson squad, still harbored uncertainties about the young suspect’s confession.

Schuller was a lifelong resident of the city’s South Side. Before joining the Fire Department in 1950, he had served with the navy in the Pacific during World War II. Something about the case didn’t set right with him; he wasn’t convinced the kid knew all that much about the fire. Although he couldn’t put his finger on it, Schuller wasn’t satisfied that the cause of the school fire had been resolved.

The fire had had an enormous effect on Schuller, one he would eventually take with him to his grave. On the afternoon of December 1, 1958, he had raced to Our Lady of the Angels School from City Hall with another Fire Department photographer, Don Walpole. They reached the scene just as firefighters began bringing bodies out of the building. Schuller worked through the night, taking interior and exterior photos of the school, paying special attention to the burned-out classrooms in the north wing and to the basement stairwell in the northeast corner of the building. He used up all the film he had in one camera and had to borrow another camera to finish his job.

Schuller photographed each classroom, the stairways, and the hallways. The images jarred his emotions. He could see dead children piled three and four deep alongside the windows on the second floor. He remembered seeing a brand-new shoe lying amid the debris. In all the commotion and excitement, it had become hard to think rationally, and when he saw a firefighter carrying the body of a boy accidentally bump the child against a wall, Schuller yelled at him, “Hey, damn it, don’t hurt that kid.” He knew his words made no sense—the boy was dead—but that’s what seeing all those children had done to him.

Schuller photographed as many details as he could, including a clock in one classroom that had stopped at 2:47 p.m. He focused his camera lens on charred woodwork, overturned desks, debris that had accumulated in the stairwell, broken transoms, burned timbers in the cockloft, the basement heating system, books that lay open on desks, and the iron fence in the courtway that was eventually cut down with an acetylene torch. He took photos of a half-inch fire hose still folded neatly in a bracket near the front stairway, an unused fire extinguisher, portions of the sodden roof that had caved in over the second-floor corridor, and squares of acoustical tile that dangled haphazardly from classroom ceilings.

Schuller had stayed at the school until well past midnight, then had gone to his South Side home to wash up and snatch a few hours’ sleep before returning to the scene the next day. For the next three weeks he returned to the school day after day, searching, probing, taking pictures, scribbling notes, and listening to conversations among other investigators, a number of whom leaned toward the theory that the fire was intentionally set. It was an opinion Schuller subscribed to from the start. “Damn it, Ann,” he confided to his wife one night. “I know in my heart it was a set fire. But proving it is something else.”

So Schuller, who had risen to the rank of captain with the arson squad, quietly maintained his vigilance with the hope that someday he would uncover the complete truth about the tragedy. Although his duties with the Bureau of Fire Investigation required constant attention to a variety of arson cases throughout the city, Schuller could never totally shake the school fire from his conscience. Finding its cause became an obsession.

Schuller figured all along that it was probably some troubled kid who started the fire. Over the years he spent hours at the fire academy, poring over records, studying the names of students who had attended Our Lady of the Angels. If a young fire-setter was apprehended in the city or suburbs, he would check to see if the name matched that of any student enrolled in the school in 1958.

In 1970 Schuller was named supervisor of the Bureau of Fire Investigation, with the rank of battalion chief. By then, he was one of the few remaining officers of the bureau who had worked the Our Lady of the Angels fire.

On a wintry night in February 1971, Schuller’s life took a strange twist. He was called in to investigate a 3-11 fire which heavily damaged a North Side supermarket at Racine and Wilson avenues in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. Arson was suspected. After finishing his on-scene investigation, Schuller began to pick up his gear when a young woman stepped out of a nearby tavern. She had dark hair and a pretty face but was noticeably overweight.

“Hey, fireman,” she said, “you look cold.”

Schuller’s helmet and fire coat were coated with ice. “Yes,” he answered, “I am. That was quite a fire.”

The woman stepped closer. “I know who set it,” she said.

Schuller laughed to himself. “You must’ve had one drink too many,” he replied.

“No, I wasn’t drinking. My brother set that fire.”

“Your brother set that fire?”

“Yes, he did.”

Schuller looked closely at the woman. Maybe she was telling the truth. “Listen,” he said, “I’m cold and tired and I don’t know if you’re bullshitting me. It’s getting late. If you’re serious, why don’t you call me at the fire academy at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

The chief’s hands were so frozen he couldn’t unbutton his turnout coat. Instead he asked the woman for a scrap of paper and blew on his hands before jotting down his office telephone number.

“Here,” he said, handing her the paper, “call me at this number.”

The woman did call, and so began a strange odyssey for George Schuller in his personal quest to solve the mystery of the Our Lady of the Angels School fire. When the woman met with Schuller the next day, she appeared unkempt and sloppily dressed, and was suffering the effects of a bad cold. She implicated her brother in setting the supermarket fire, saying he lived with her and her husband in their nearby Uptown apartment on Malden Avenue. She said he had used pop bottles filled with gasoline to start the fire.

After checking out other details of her story, Schuller asked her to speak with detectives of the police bomb and arson unit. She did, but the detectives seemed disinterested and brushed her off. “I think you’re wasting your time, George,” one of the detectives told Schuller. “You fight the fires and leave the detective work to us. Forget about her. She’s goofy.”

As long as the police didn’t care to pursue the matter, there was little more Schuller could do with the lead his informant had given him. “You know,” he said, showing her to the door, “we can’t live without fire. We heat our homes with it. We cook with it. But when it gets out of control, it can kill.”

“I know all about that,” the woman replied. “I remember the Our Lady of the Angels fire.” The school fire had occurred twelve years earlier.

“Why does that stick in your mind?” Schuller asked quizzically.

“Because,” she said, “we lived kitty-corner from the school.”

Schuller was intrigued. “Why does that concern you?” he asked.

“Because my older brother set that fire,” she said matter-of-factly.

Schuller was stunned. “Your older brother?” he said. “Where is he?”

“He’s in Menard,” she replied, referring to a state prison in southern Illinois. “He’s doing time for arson.”

When the woman gave Schuller her brother’s full name, he fought to keep a straight face. He didn’t wish to appear overanxious. He knew the Bureau of Fire Investigation already had an extensive file on the young man. He was twenty-three and had been sentenced to prison in 1965 for setting thirty-three separate fires in Chicago, including a November 1964 blaze in a six-story warehouse on Illinois Street that left one firefighter dead and five others injured. The warehouse was located adjacent to the firehouse of Engine Company 42, whose firefighters were away battling another fire the youth had set earlier the same Sunday in a hardware store around the corner. At the time of the warehouse fire, the youth was seventeen and had been on parole for just two weeks as a result of a May 1963 rooming house fire he had set in the same near north neighborhood that killed two men.

If the woman was telling the truth about once living near Our Lady of the Angels School, Schuller could not figure out how her older brother, who had a long history as a troublemaker, could have escaped the notice of investigators who had combed the neighborhood around the school immediately after the fire, looking for just that type of problem youngster.

Reviewing the files on the woman’s brother, Schuller was unable to confirm that the family had lived in the building across the street from Our Lady of the Angels School at the time of the fire. He did learn, however, that the youth at the time attended St. Mary’s Training School for dependent children in Des Plaines, a suburb northwest of Chicago. Records at the school did not reveal whether the boy had been released to his mother during the critical period that extended from Thanksgiving Day through the first week of December 1958.

Schuller discovered that the boy had run away from the training school a number of times and had numerous demerits not only for being “out of bounds” without permission but for disobedience, stealing, smoking, and fighting. In a fit of anger, the youth had once tried to stab another resident of the school with a pair of scissors.

After soaking up all the information he could from the imprisoned arsonist’s file, Schuller made further contact with the sister, asking her to meet with him again. He wanted to show her a photograph he had taken outside Our Lady of the Angels School on the day of the fire. It was a crowd shot, and in it was an unidentified youth with a worried look on his face. The boy was dressed in a checkered flannel shirt and appeared to be about ten or eleven years old. When the woman studied the photo, she pointed to the youth in the crowd. “Yup,” she said, “that’s my brother.”

Schuller was intrigued. Although he had checked many sources, he had never been able to confirm the identity of the boy in the photo. He asked the woman if she would tell Fire Commissioner Quinn (thirteen years after the fire he was still commissioner) about her belief that her brother had set the school fire. She agreed. Schuller briefed the commissioner on what the woman had revealed to him, so when they met he came directly to the point.

“Tell the commissioner,” Schuller said, “who set the Our Lady of the Angels School fire.”

The woman looked at the pictures on the walls, then at the man sitting behind the desk. “My brother did,” she replied.

Quinn jumped up from his seat, slapping both hands on his desk top. “What did you say, young lady?” he exclaimed. “Will you repeat that?”

“I told you. My brother set that fire. He was the one who burned the school.”

Quinn was incredulous. “Jesus, George,” the commissioner said. “Don’t let her out of here until you get a complete statement from her.”

After repeating essentially the same story she had related to Schuller, the woman signed a statement and returned to her North Side apartment. Not long after, Schuller discovered that the woman and her husband had moved out of the city. They left no forwarding address. Schuller tried unsuccessfully to track her down. They had disappeared.

Schuller’s position as director of the Bureau of Fire Investigation kept him busy with more than nine hundred suspicious fires each year. He could no longer allow the school fire to consume his attention. Commissioner Quinn, despite his early enthusiasm over the woman’s revelation, had arbitrarily let the matter die. “I didn’t think the woman was right mentally,” Quinn later admitted. “The guy was in prison anyway, and if he did set the school fire, he couldn’t have been brought to court. In Illinois you can’t prosecute a kid for setting a fire if he’s under thirteen.”

Still, for Schuller the woman’s story seemed plausible, and he wasn’t about to let go of it completely. In the mid-1970s he began corresponding with the inmate at Menard and eventually made four trips to the prison in downstate Illinois. The prisoner was tall and lean, with long brown hair and long sideburns. He had a long chin and a sheepish grin. During extended correspondence with the prisoner, Schuller compromised himself on more than one occasion—by sending the suspect money and even offering to buy him a small television set. Wittingly or unwittingly, Schuller also coached the prisoner on certain aspects of the school fire. In the end, he finally obtained the prize he sought: a signed confession in which the convict admitted to setting the school fire.

In his confession the man wrote that on the afternoon of December 1, 1958, he had walked across the street from his home and sneaked into the basement of Our Lady of the Angels School to escape the cold and smoke a cigarette. He claimed he had tossed the cigarette butt into a trash container and left the building. His family did not see or hear from him for the next two days.

When the prisoner was paroled in 1979, he appeared on a Chicago television program with Schuller, who by that time held the rank of division fire marshal. The parolee’s name was never used, and with his back to the camera he was asked the following question: “Did you set the Our Lady of the Angels School fire?”

He replied: “I did start the fire. And like I told the chief [Schuller] before, it was a pure accident that it was set, and I had no intention of hurting anybody. I did go down in that basement and start the fire, but it was a pure accident.”

The man had been eleven years old at the time of the fire, so legally he was immune from prosecution. But his confession on television stirred up a hornet’s nest in City Hall. Commissioner Quinn had since died, and Acting Police Superintendent Joseph DiLeonardi and the city’s new fire commissioner, Richard Albrecht, challenged the validity of the parolee’s statement. “We get people confessing all the time,” DiLeonardi told reporters after a morning meeting with Mayor Jane Byrne.

Although the Our Lady of the Angels case had never been officially closed, privately police bomb and arson officials were certain the fire had been started by the Cicero youth who confessed in 1962 to John Reid. So too was DiLeonardi, a brash, flashy, fast-talking former chief of detectives who had spent most of his police career investigating homicides.

Police investigators assigned to check out the new confession wasted little time getting the truth out of the thirty-two-year-old ex-convict who had saved all his prison correspondence with Schuller. The letters were damaging to Schuller, because he had passed along information that helped the parolee put together a believable confession. In short order the police had the one-time prisoner admitting that his story was a hoax, that he had conned Schuller from the start.