Tastes Like Burning

By Matt Wood in News on Dec 20, 2005 4:53PM

David Cowan made his name writing a book about a famous Chicago fire. No, not that one, but the 1958 fire at the Lady of Angels School that killed 92 students and three nuns. The book, To Sleep With the Angels, has been on Chicagoist's to-read list for a long time, but now we probably won't be able to read it with the same reverence. On Monday, its author plead guilty to setting fire to a storage building of a church on the northwest side in June and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Besides the obvious irony, Cowan's case is rather bizarre. The trial also featured answering machine messages that he left for his brother-in-law, threatening to pull his teeth out with pliers, stab him, and stuff his body in a sewer. Cowan, a former Bellwood firefighter, reportedly suffers from bipolar disorder and has a drinking problem. He was a janitor at the church where he set the blaze, even breaking a window of the building to help spread the fire. Fortunately no one was injured.