NORTH RIVERSIDE, Ill., Oct. 12  Mary Anne Coffey read the clippings about her father, Richard C. Mugler Sr., shortly after he died 14 years ago.  The family had imagined that some dignified business profile surely would have been written about him sometime in his long career at the helm of a New York shoring company.  Instead, the headlines stunned them.  Two Held in Graft on City Contracts, The New York Times wrote on June 4, 1940, describing the arrest of Mr. Mugler and a business partner and the suspension of city inspectors in the wake of the arrests.  Reading on, Mrs. Coffey, who is now 75, learned how a young bookkeeper who worked for her father had later been charged as well, how that bookkeeper had died, and how, not long after the unexplained death, Mr. Mugler and his partner had walked away from the whole episode, acquitted of financial wrongdoing.  It was on that day that Mrs. Coffeys suspicions that her father might have had something to do with the young bookkeepers death were born, a thought that she could not let go. And so a homemade investigation began, a modern-day Agatha Christie sleuthing for an answer that no one else  no authorities, no family of the deceased bookkeeper  was demanding.  Mrs. Coffeys son Bill, 41, joined the effort, spending scores of hours searching computer databases and scanning genealogy Web sites from his basement here in suburban Chicago. Mother and son called courthouses in New York, the mayors office, the historical museums.  This year, they drove cross-country to stand in the spot in Manhattan where they eventually learned the bookkeeper, William Sebek, had died. They searched the New York neighborhood where the one witness to the death once lived, and, awkwardly enough, tracked down the young accountants family in Maryland, where they met his relatives over dinner at a suburban diner.  Despite all that, the Coffeys seem to have stirred up more trouble than answers. Some of Mrs. Coffeys relatives are furious with her for even suggesting that her father might have been involved in Mr. Sebeks death. Some of Mr. Sebeks relatives have gone from curious to afraid, worrying there may still be someone out there who would not want the story of his death revealed.  Even a phone operator at the New York medical examiners office, on hearing why the Coffeys were seeking the official report on Mr. Sebeks death, politely suggested they might not want to talk so openly about it, the family says.  Mrs. Coffey gets a distant look in her eyes when pressed about why she does not simply forget the whole thing.  It seemed to me, she said, that I should seek to pursue it just for my own peace of mind and for my children to have their grandfather completely exonerated.  I hope my suspicions will be wrong, she went on. That will be the best possible outcome  to find proof that what I fear is wrong. I loved my father, and I sometimes wonder if I am being evil to even suggest that he could have had something to do with William Sebeks death.  Mrs. Coffey described a cheery, ordinary life growing up with two brothers and her parents in the Bronx in the 1930s and 40s. She said her relationship with both her parents was warm and loving and remained so through their lives.  Her father, she said, was a sternly ambitious, hard-working, disciplined engineer who was also devoted to his family and spoiled his three children as much as he could. He arrived home in his signature bow tie promptly each night at 6 for the family dinner. He even bought his children a pony. For his grandchildren, he set up croquet at his summer home in upstate New York and dug ponds so they could swim.  Mrs. Coffeys mother, Mary Grannis Mugler, had been one so pious, so stuck on truth-telling that in her 63 years of marriage she would often tell her husband, when he asked her to claim he was not home if phone calls came for him, that he had better step out on the porch so she did not actually have to tell a lie to a caller.
Mary Anne Coffey has been trying to unravel a mystery surrounding her father and the death of his bookkeeper.