 Well shakin' booktube, my name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. Today's a bit of a different video. Today is... It's a serious video, right? I don't know why I'm laughing, it kind of is. Today I want to tell you a bit of a story. A story about the mysterious death of a troubled author that to this day has people speculating and arguing. A death that to this day a lot of people like to believe is still unsolved. Where's the fog? Where's the... Where's the fog? The fog? I'm... I'm trying to create an atmosphere here. Fog! I need fog! Today I want to tell you about Eugene Izzy and I want you to tell me in the comments what your opinion is on his death. Hey, I just uploaded a video to my second YouTube channel about the most disturbing kid show that I ever watched. Check it out at WolfTube. The year is 1996. Celine Dion and the Spice Girls are still everywhere with the radio and the day is as unremarkable as any other. The sun is making its descent and everyone is on their way home from work when a body is seen hanging from the window on the 14th floor of a downtown Chicago office building. The victim is crime fiction writer Eugene Izzy and the death is ruled as suicide. But a lot of people don't believe that and as you're about to hear they may have very good reason to be suspicious. Eugene was said to have had a somewhat troubled upbringing. His dad liked to hit the bottle and spend Eugene's childhood in and out of prison. It's fair to believe that this may have been a contributing factor in Eugene dropping out of high school to join the army. He spent quite some time in the military service although not doing much noteworthy aside from getting himself a high school equivalency degree and starting to participate in what would ultimately be his passion. Writing. After the army Eugene returned to Chicago and got a job at a steel mill. In this time he would marry and have children as well as continuing his interest in writing. However in that time a darker habit had started to consume him. Much like his father before him, Eugene developed an unhealthy addiction to alcohol. It was a problem that got worse and worse putting enormous strain on his relationship with his family and in particular his wife. It wasn't until he was laid off from the steel mill that Eugene finally quit drinking and made an effort to rebuild a relationship with his family who by that point had all but left him. It was with the support of his wife that Eugene spent the next couple of years writing book after book. Most of them were crime fiction novels about hard-boiled, iron-fisted tough guys facing down the mob. In 1987 Eugene was finally published. His book The Take was bought by Saint Martins for $20,000 which would be about $45,000 today so that's pretty good for a first whack. After that success followed quickly and easily with hit, upper hit and the reviews to prove it. With his newfound wealth he moved his family into a nicer area of Chicago and used the momentum to keep writing more books. Sadly though Eugene's success came to a rather abrupt end when what was to be his magnum opus, tribal secrets, flopped. This was a book that both he and the publisher Bentham Books had expected to put him among the greats. Unfortunately the critics thought otherwise. The problem now was that Bentham Books had paid Eugene quite a considerable advance and the sales just weren't fulfilling their promise. They blamed the writing and Eugene blamed the marketing so their professional relationships soured and then festered very quick. This all resulted in a very bizarre deal. Eugene was allowed to keep the advance but he would not be able to publish any more books under his own name for three years. See it was a weird deal because it's not exactly clear what Bentham Books gained from this. They still lost that advance money so in retrospect barring Eugene from publishing under his own name could have only been done out of spite. Eugene published some more books under the name Nick Gaitano but none of them saw success like his first run. The stress from that confrontation and the lack of acclaim as a result is likely why he sought help in therapy and a prescription to antidepressants things that would both be noted in his eventual death. Eugene Izzy was a private sometimes bitter and quiet man. He wasn't a fan of book signings or any other kind of public appearance but after getting the rights to publish under his name again people truly believed that he could make his way back to the top and maybe even cement a place along other famous noir crime writers. Sadly, he would never get the chance. So here we are back at his death found hanging from a window on the 14th floor. Considering the details of his life it doesn't seem all that unlikely that he did it himself, right? But it's not that simple. In fact, it's very, very unusual. When Eugene's body was retrieved he was found to be wearing a bulletproof vest. Even stranger was what the police found in his pockets. $400 in cash, brass knuckles, mace and a computer disk. Also discovered at the scene were countless notes in which Eugene had described phone calls he had gotten phone calls threatening him with death. People claiming to be friends of Eugene said that to research his newest book he had gone undercover within the Indiana militia a right wing and some would say white supremacist group at least at the time. These claims were never confirmed but it may explain why he had started sleeping in his office with a loaded gun. But wait, it gets weirder. I promise. You might now be wondering about that computer disk I mentioned. Well, the investigators were curious too. What they found was an unfinished manuscript for a story that Eugene was working on. A story in which a Chicago based writer is found hanging from a 14th floor window. His pockets containing nothing but brass knuckles and a can of mace. The murderers. Indiana militia. So what do you think? As far as I can tell it can be one of three things. Murder. Suicide. Or perhaps most bizarrely people believe he may have been role playing the scene from his manuscript and simply lost control. The sad truth is that we will probably never know. Eugene wrote stories about mysterious deaths perpetrated by shadowy gangster organizations and whether that's happened here or not his death does read like something from one of his own books. In this case, quite literally. So, what do you think happened to Eugene Izzy? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Catch ya.