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Eugene Izzi’s unpublished manuscript described a death almost exactly as his own.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