Confession clears up Wisconsin mystery

He wasn't on his deathbed, but John Clavin's confession about a college prank cleared up a long-running Wisconsin mystery. And, while Loch Ness was not involved, a body of water was.

Clavin recently owned up to the 1969 prank -- he stole a large, wooden "S" that hung on a tower at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Clavin and a couple of his fellow art students deemed the sign unsightly, so they pulled it down and chucked it in the Red Cedar River.

"We looked up at the old, rickety 'S' and thought it would be really nice to remove it," Clavin told WEAU. "We climbed up with tools and removed it quite nicely.... I threw it in the river because the worst thing is someone could find it and put it up again -- that would be horrible. It was so rotten it needed to go."

In the years since the stunt, Clavin has gone Hollywood: He's worked as a post-production sound engineer for NBC Universal on television shows such as Law and Order and feature films including The 40 Year Old Virgin and Just Like Heaven, according to The Dunn County News (which has a photograph of the original sign before it was swiped).