Michael Hainey was six years old when his uncle came to his house and told him and his brother that their 35 year-old father was dead. Bob Hainey had died of a heart attack on a North Side street, as one of the obits put it, "while visiting friends." He began to wonder about some of the small differences in the obituaries between newspapers and about some of the vagueness in the accounts of his father's death that he grew up hearing from his uncle and mother. So after graduating from Maine South High School and becoming a journalist himself, Michael set out to discover the truth behind his father's mysterious death.