The Mysterious Case of a Crime Novelist Who Predicted His Own Death

Some people seem to have a habit of leaving behind deaths that overshadowed anything they did in life, carving out a place in history as more interesting in death than they ever were before. Here we have the case of a writer who was heavily into the world of crime fiction and strange deaths, yet perhaps the strangest one is the one he predicted for himself. 

The author Eugene Izzi was born in 1953 and spent his whole life in the city of Chicago, Illinois. From an early age, Izzi had a rough childhood, was physically abused by his single mother and relatives, and was prone to trouble, getting into minor crimes. After dropping out of high school he enlisted in the army, after which he settled into a normal, blue-collar working life, working at the steel mills on Chicago's south side. There wasn’t much remarkable about him at the time, except for his penchant for heavy drinking, which along with various crimes he committed distanced him from his wife and two children. The two eventually went their separate ways, which sent Izzi spiraling into depression. He also lost his job and resorted to sleeping in the back room of a barber shop in exchange for cleaning up and helping around the shop. By this time he was pretty much at rock bottom, drinking all day and wallowing in his own misery. 

It was around this time that Izzi began to try his hand at writing, crafting a hard-boiled thriller set in the mean streets of Chicago called “The Take,” which he had published and spent some time promoting at book shops around the city. At the time, writing was a type of therapy for Izzi, and he was able to slowly pull his life back together, quitting drinking and reconciling with his family. He would continue to put out hard-boiled crime fiction, eventually landing himself a deal with the prestigious Bantam Books, which boosted his sales and credentials. Things really turned around for him at this time, his success and generally good reviews helping him to leave his old life behind and get his family a new house. 

However, he never truly reached the heights of other crime writers at the time, especially his hero Elmore Leonard, and his sales began to slump with the release of Tribal Secrets, ripped to shreds by reviewers and endangering his deal with Bantam. It led to clashes between him and Bantam, whom he accused of not doing enough to promote his work. Izzi eventually took up a pseudonym, Nick Gaitano, publishing three novels under that name, but unfortunately the only successful work was a book called The Criminalist, which was published after his death. Speaking of his death, he would become known more for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his demise than anything he had done in life.

In early November of 1996, Izzi began acting rather oddly. He became uncharacteristically distant and paranoid, claiming that he feared for his life, although he wouldn’t say why or from whom. So persistent was this paranoia and creeping feeling of dread that he moved his wife and children to a downtown hotel down the street from their apartment, where he spent much of his time alternating between feverishly writing and looking out the window for a threat no one could comprehend but him. At all times he carried a .38 revolver on him for his own safety. It seemed pretty odd to friends and family at the time, as he had no known enemies and no one could figure out what he was so scared of, but it would turn out that he had every reason to be frightened after all.

On December 7, 1996, Izzi was found dead, dangling from his office on the 14th floor, his neck wrapped four times in hemp rope that had been tied to the leg of his desk, the feet dangling just below the window of the room one story beneath his office. It was already odd because the room was firmly locked and bolted from the inside, and there was no sign of a struggle, but the state of the body made it all the more unusual. Izzi was clad in a Kevlar bulletproof vest, and in his pockets, investigators found brass knuckles, a can of "disabling spray" (likely mace or pepper spray), a couple of threatening notes containing the words “danger” and “beware,” and three computer discs thought to contain an unfinished manuscript. In his pockets were all of his identification and cash. On the surface, it seemed like a suicide, pure and simple, but things would only get stranger from there. 

First off, Izzi’s friends and fellow writers reported that he had feared for his life and had shown no signs of being depressed, much less exhibited suicidal ideation. Indeed, he had just signed a major contract with Avon Books and had been looking forward to getting his writing career back on track. Izzi had also been dreadfully afraid of heights, making jumping out of a 14th-story window with a rope around his neck an odd way for him to go about killing himself. Police disagreed, pointing out that he had been treated for depression, but more clues would begin to come in that just didn’t add up. Investigators soon found several clues that Izzi had been investigating a white supremacist militia group in Indiana, likely for a novel, and it was soon being theorized that he had maybe gotten in too deep. One Andrew Vachss, a New York lawyer and a crime novelist, would tell the Chicago Sun-Times:

You don’t wrap yourself in a Kevlar vest and carry a handgun if you’re relaxed about the environment around you. He was completely sane and dedicated to his craft, which happened to mean digging up dirt.

Another article in Esquire Magazine said of Izzi’s downward spiral into weirdness and his links to a militia group:

His friends said that Izzi’s idiosyncrasies—his secretiveness, his wariness of strangers—began to curdle into pathologies during this period. The mailbox in his apartment building bore no name, as if he was wallowing in his return to obscurity. He kept changing his unlisted phone numbers and the Mail Boxes Etc. outlets where he received his mail. He remained generous toward those close to him, gave to worthy causes despite his financial problems, but became increasingly distant from others. Some friends and family members said they thought he was going out of his way to alienate people. He was also becoming more paranoid. He pinned an obscene, threatening letter to his office wall. It came, he said, from a skinhead he’d interviewed for a new book he was working on, Bulletin from the Streets. There was something odd about this message, which was signed, cryptically, “Romantic Violence.” Izzi claimed he had sent a copy of the manuscript to the skinhead. The pages contained a fictional but very unflattering portrait of the young man. Why, I wonder, would Izzi have done such a stupid thing? How did the neo-Nazi thug find out the secretive Izzi’s address? Finally, did he really exist, or was he a creature of Izzi’s increasingly addled imagination? Printed in block letters, the note calls Izzi a “nigger-loving queer,” among even more vulgar descriptions, and then comes this prophetic warning: “You will swing from your neck from a light post afire!"

Before long, the story was all over the news and was the stuff of tabloids, a real-life whodunit mystery, and it would only get stranger still. There was found to be a threatening phone call placed to Izzi’s office from a payphone not far away with a woman on the other side of the line speaking in a stilted manner, as if reading from a script, describing how Izzi’s cover had been blown and he was going to die by “flaming rope.” In the meantime, investigators managed to crack the passwords to the discs that had been found on Izzi’s body, and it turned out to be a long, unfinished manuscript reading 800 pages. Within these pages, the writer had eerily crafted a protagonist that matched him to a tee, with many details of his own life illustrated in the character’s background. Yet this wasn’t even the really creepy part.

As the story rambles on, the protagonist gets involved in an Indiana-based militia group, just as had been speculated, and they sniff him out, after which he goes on the run. Then the story describes a group of militia breaking into the protagonist’s office, where he sits wearing a bulletproof vest, capturing him, tying him up around the neck, and then throwing him out the window. The passage is identical in every respect to Izzi’s hanging, with the only difference being that in the unfinished manuscript, he manages to pull himself back into his office and survives to overpower his assailants. 

How could this be? The manuscript had been written long before his death, yet it detailed everything point by point. Had he been merely acting out the scene from his book for research and had a freak accident? Or had he spookily predicted his own death down to the letter at the hadn’t of this shadowy, nefarious group? Or was this just some bizarre publicity stunt? Journalist Philip Caputo investigated the case, and would say of the suicide angle:

As an artist, Izzi had nowhere near Styron’s or Hemingway’s stature. Nor did he aspire to literary greatness. He wrote pulp fiction, albeit a variety of that genre that might be called “high pulp.” But as a suicide, Izzi is in a class all his own. The way he scripted and choreographed his death might well turn out to be his greatest creative achievement. The question is why he did what he did. That he was under treatment for depression barely explains things. Lots of people who are treated for depression don’t kill themselves. What, then, had driven him to such an extreme?

“The only reason you’re interested in him is because of the way he died,” Andrew Vachss said to me when I phoned him at his New York law office. Fair enough. I hadn’t heard of Izzi, mostly because I read very little crime fiction. But Vachss’s comment raised a question: Was Izzi seeking in the manner of his death a recognition he hadn’t achieved in life? I didn’t like myself for that thought, but it was impossible to ignore. Only a suicide can tell us the reasons why, and even he may not be sure. And so we are left free, within certain limits, to ponder and draw our own conclusions. Some who knew Izzi still cannot accept that he killed himself.

To this day the official consensus is that Eugene Izzi committed suicide. No one has ever been pursued as a potential suspect in the death, and it has never even been confirmed who this supposed militia group is or if they ever even existed at all. Many have disagreed with the suicide theory, and the entire case is orbited by various conspiracy theories, leaving it officially closed but still widely discussed and debated. We are left to wonder. What happened to Eugene Izzi? What brought him to be hanging out that window with his body bobbing in the wind against the bricks? Was it suicide, murder, an elaborate ruse, or something even stranger? We may never know for sure.