WGN Channel 9 - John Drury and NewsNine - "Our Lady of the Angels Fire Confession" (1979)

Here's a segment from John Drury and NewsNine on WGN Channel 9, involving a confession from an unnamed person - then in his thirties, at the time on parole after serving time for arson and murder - in connection with the fire that destroyed the Our Lady of the Angels school on Chicago's West Side on December 1st 1958, killing 92 students and three nuns.

This clip starts off at the tail end of Drury's introduction of the report, by Alex Burkholder, which was filmed on August 20th 1979. Still photos of the fire burning and firehoses trying to put it out are shown before we get to the interview.

The unnamed person - not a student, but one who lived near the school and was wandering around the grounds at the time - maintained he started it accidentally, while sneaking a smoke in the stairwell. It came after an argument with his sister and mother who urged him to do something he didn't want to do at the time - going back to the school, due to its strict rules (where have we heard that one before?), and he didn't want to be "chained up." He usually smoked to "cool down."

Burkholder raises questions about the truthfulness about his account, and the confessors says anyone who calls him a liar may have been the one who'd actually set the fire.

But Chicago Fire Department Chief George Schuller - who was on the scene at the 1958 fire - believes the man is telling the truth. Schuller's quest to get at the bottom (with help from author and former Chicago Daily News reporter John Kuenster) has been done on his own time, and with his own financing, independent of his position, and blames then-Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn for being "uninterested" in getting to the cause, with a woman fingering her brother as the culprit; the confessor says he didn't know how she knew, but she knew. A photo Schuller took at the time showed the young arsonist on the scene.

The unnamed individual's confession was for the purpose of easing his mind, and unloading a pressure he said he'd been feeling for all those years.

Burkholder then encapsulates the arsonist's subsequent record after the Our Lady of the Angels school fire, including several around Chicago's Near North Side, and then ending up in prison, before he promises a continuation of his report on Wednesday (the 12th).

Before the tape cuts out, Drury explains that the look at the fire will be seen all week on not only his own show (which he refers to as The 10 O'Clock News) but also Night Beat.

(NOTE: Despite this confession, the cause of the fire remains officially unknown; the unnamed person eventually recanted his confession according to a subsection of a web page relating to the timeline of the Our Lady of the Angels school fire.)

This aired on local Chicago TV on Monday, September 10th 1979 during the 10:00pm to 10:30pm timeframe. (Date of airing gleaned from article in The Indianapolis Star, September 11th 1979.)

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