'You Light Up My Life' songwriter Joseph Brooks, accused rapist, commits suicide: cops

Detectives take Joseph Brooks from the Special Victims Unit to Manhattan Central Booking after he was charged with rape in 2009.

Joseph Brooks, the Oscar-winning composer of "You Light Up My Life" who was awaiting trial for rape while his son faced a murder trial, killed himself Sunday in his Upper East Side apartment.
Brooks, 73, was found dead with a plastic dry cleaning bag over his head and a towel wrapped around his head and neck near a hose attached to a tank of helium gas.
He left a note, but cops would not reveal its contents.
The body was discovered at 12:30 p.m. in his apartment at Lexington Ave. and E. 63rd St. by a friend expecting to have lunch with him, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Suicide by helium is relatively rare, but it is recommended as painless and easy by the world's best-selling suicide how-to book, "Final Exit." The setup is variously called a "helium hood" or an "exit bag."
Neighbors said Brooks, who had a stroke in 2008 and shuffled to court on a cane, recently looked very gaunt.
"I saw him the last two days, and he looked very ill. He looked like a depressed man, a dying man," said Elizabeth Zoch, 75, a psychoanalyst. "Truly, he looked like a dying man."
M. Jack Stone, 51, an artist who lives in the penthouse above Brooks, said the old man was losing weight and looked terrible.
"He was facing serious charges and had nothing to live for. I'd have done the same thing," Stone said.
Brooks had a penchant for hiring escorts, and neighbors said they often saw beautiful young women leaving his apartment.
Brooks' ballad "You Light Up My Life" as recorded by Debby Boone was the number one song of 1977 and the biggest hit of the 1970s. It was the title song of a movie that Brooks wrote, directed and produced and won the Oscar for Best Song.
In 2009, Brooks was arrested on charges of raping 11 young actresses whom he lured to his apartment with the promise of movie roles. He was awaiting trial on 82 counts of sexual abuse.
His son, Nicholas Brooks, 25, is awaiting trial on charges that he strangled his girlfriend, swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay, at the posh Soho House private club last year.
Father and son had a contentious relationship, and the father had reportedly not contacted his son since his arrest.
Susan Karten, lawyer for the Cachay family, called it all a "terrible, terrible tragedy."
"A father is accused of the sexual abuse of so many different women and the son is jailed on murder charges - it's just a horrible mess," she said.
Cachay's family "doesn't wish these people harm" and would not oppose the son being let out of Riker's to attend his father's funeral, Karten said.
"Even though he comes from a messed-up family, it's still his biological father," she said. "It doesn't affect the murder case."