The Crime Novelist Who Wrote His Own Death Scene
Eugene Izzi’s unpublished manuscript described a death almost exactly as his own. Did the writer predict his own demise, or was this all an elaborate, attention-getting ruse?
By Philip Caputo Esquire
This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Esquire. Get access to every Esquire story ever published at
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He was a powerfully built man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with thick, dark hair, a prominent nose, piercing eyes, and an intensity that electrified some people and intimidated others. On December 7, 1996, he committed suicide in a spectacular fashion, after leaving a trail of clues designed to lead the police and the public to conclude that he’d been murdered by an Indiana militia group. For a while, his colleagues in the midwestern chapter of the Mystery Writers of America novelists whose minds run in winding channels of plots and conspiracies bought into his fiction. Within hours after
A photo from the National Archives of Norway depicts the Armenian leader Papasyan seeing what s left after the horrendous murders near Deir-ez-Zor in 1915-1916. (Image: Bodil Katharine Biørn - National Archives of Norway/Wikipedia)
Just one week prior to his 1939 invasion of Poland and the mass slaughter that followed, Adolf Hitler asked rhetorically, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Such a depraved sentiment indicates why it is so significant that President Joe Biden, this past Saturday, became the first US President to formally classify the persecution committed against the Armenian Christians in Ottoman Turkey from 1915-1923 as “genocide”.
The Armenian genocide, healing, and faith catholicworldreport.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from catholicworldreport.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Globe and Mail Sarah Berman Published April 16, 2021 Bookmark Please log in to listen to this story. Also available in French and Mandarin. Log In Create Free Account
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JANE ROSENBERG/Reuters
Sarah Berman is an investigative journalist based in Vancouver and the author of Don’t Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM
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No story worth telling can be summed up in two words, and yet “sex cult” has endured as a shorthand for the NXIVM case.