Is he too old to be the young intellectual who hanged himself in Louisiana a couple of years later? He's a bit older than the estimate (would have been 22 or 23 by then) but there's some resemblance and the whole disturbed genius thing sounds like the Louisiana kid.
From the suicide note quoted in the UID's thread:
LA - LA - Belle Chasse, WhtMale, 16-17, hanged, suicide note, Feb'75
He left a suicide note, addressed to "mom and dad" which read in part: "When you stop growing you are dead. I stopped growing long ago. I never did develop into a real person and I cannot tolerate the false and empty existence I have created".
He included this notation for the police who would eventually find him: "You are bound to preserve domestic peace and order. If you pursue who I was (and spend hundreds of dollars) you will accomplish little. There are no legal consequences of my death or any kind of entanglements. All that can happen is that you will shatter the domestic peace and order of two innocent lives. Do not deprive them of the hope that their 'missing' son will return . . .Let me be, let it be as if I wasn't ever here. Simply cremate me as John Doe."
He goes on to say "It is best if I cease to live, quietly, than risk that later I will break and shatter by violence or linger years under care. I implore you to see a psychiatrist in order that you might understand my death and my life. Ask thoroughly about what I was and you will see that it is not tragic that I am gone, but more natural than if I continued."
In a section entitled "why you should not feel responsible", the young man wrote: "I was born with a definite pervasive melancholy . . .what frustrated me most in the last year was that I had built no ties to family or friends. There was nothing of lasting worth and value. I led a detached existence and I was a parody of a person - literally and figuratively. I didn't tell jokes - I was a joke".
The suicide note is quite lengthy, and cites the writings of Emile Durkheim, a philosopher and psychologist. The young man said Durkheim called suicide "an inner direction of homicidal feelings against someone else."
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