Firstly, please let me apologize for the length of this post. It might take you half an hour to read but it took me all day to write!
I have thought a lot about this case for the last year or so and I'd like to share what I think so it's all here in one big lump.
A lot of people have thought about these facts before and I also would like to acknowledge all of the hard work put in by everyone else on this (and other forums like it) before presenting my thoughts, as without them these ideas would not be in their present form.
I believe that the basic facts are the most crucial element to solving the mystery of this man’s identity.
They need to be considered and concentrated upon as they represent the most important clues in regard to the solution of this mystery.
This ‘mystery’ is exactly what this case has been manufactured to be, and that in itself, in my opinion, is the actual key.
Whether the mystery as to this man’s actual identity can be solved is another question.
Only the man who created this dilemma knew the answer and he may have been mistaken in his assumptions that these clues would lead to an answer to that question.
Conversely, it may be that there would never be any discovery made, and that may well have been his intention. If his identity can be discovered then he staked his actual life upon it. If he intentionally didn’t want his true identity to be known, then he knew that in his suicidal death he was truly to become ‘nothing’ in the world’s eyes, perhaps as he had seen himself in its eyes for the majority of his life.
Much of what I am assuming may well have been in this man’s subconscious and was never fully realised to him. However, it might be that he knew exactly what he was doing. I favor the latter.
Either way, I believe it is obvious that he wanted to create a mystery and his death was the only way he could do that. He wanted his story to speak out after his death and so deliberately he left clues. In order for his story to become known he may have actually forced himself to commit suicide, or at least he saw that in committing this act a valid reasoning that justified it in his mind and a stronger impetus for it than those reasons he saw for continuing to live. Without his suicide there would be no legacy.
He may well have found on his last day a fulfillment and happiness, albeit tinged with the sadness that had driven him to end his life.
In the context of all these assumptions, it impossible that he was not mentally ill, most likely suffering from a major depressive illness.
I think that the person who committed this suicide knew full well what he was doing when he did it. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve.
For example; he chose the name of a character from a book titled, ‘You Must Remember This’ to serve as a major clue as to who he was. It is no accident that years later there are numerous people searching for his identity and their thoughts, memories and dreams are haunted by him to this day.
‘Lyle’ wanted the world to know about his death and thereby to create for himself a fame and notoriety. This creation of a ‘legend’ has been a success as this forum, and the many numerous hits on Google that the name ‘Lyle Stevik’, evidence. There’s even a song named ‘Lyle Stevik’ now.
It is interesting and telling evidence of this theory that this man made sure that the name he used was, ‘Lyle Stevik’ and not, as the character in the book was named, ‘Lyle Stevick’ so that there would be a certain and very clear differentiation made between the two people, the character and the identity, in the future when people sought to discover who he really was.
There can be no mixing up these two entities accidentally and this too is deliberate.
What this shows is that the man who came up with this plan thought about it at length and very deeply. It would not be surprising if he didn’t spend time institutionalized for a depressive illness, perhaps for years. It would have taken a lot of time alone thinking to come up with the idea to create an enigma around yourself such as this.
It may be that it was within the confines of a mental institution that he formulated this plan and it was here that he came across and read the dark, trouble-documenting book, ‘You Must Remember This’ by Carol Joyce Oates. Perhaps, with the germ of suicidal ideation in his mind, he read this novel and worked upon how he could use this book and its title that veritably cries out, 'Do not forget me!' as he gradually formed his suicide plan over months or even years?
It is not uncommon for manic depressants to fixate upon their deaths like this.
In the book, the character Lyle Stevick is accused of something that he hasn’t done and it involves the subject of his political allegiances to a foreign nation. Maybe, with the background of 'Lyle' being ‘someone with a slight, possibly Canadian accent’ it can be assumed that a factor contributing to his discomfort in this world, (and possibly partly the cause of his depressive mental illness), was the fact that he was not a native born US citizen?
With the shocking events of 9/11 so recent as to be only one week earlier in the news at the time of his death, and there being an undeniable and palpable general hatred toward all ‘foreigners’ being manifest so succinctly in the US people (in general) at that time, (there really was), this character trait may well have caused him some additional increased psychic pain that burdened him to the point where he decided to follow through with his suicide plan. Finally, he decided that there was no point trying to integrate into this adopted nation as he had his whole life. Foreigners were now the enemy. Perhaps he had, as others have pointed out, come from somewhere in Eastern Europe where he had witnessed horrible attrocities as a child and now he saw his homeland attacked and people looking at him like it was his fault?
It may well be no coincidence that the belt with which he hanged himself was marked, ‘Made in the USA’.
If he had spent time in a mental institution I believe it was as a voluntary patient because it’s obvious that he was not a homeless itinerant without means. His clothes were clean, his nails were clean and looked after, his teeth were described by the Medical Examiner as ‘near perfect’ and had ‘had orthodontic work done’ which means he came from at least a middle class family. He was forced, not by economic, but by social circumstance to commit his act, thereby leading to the assumption that he had some type of disconnection to those around him who he loved the most. Anyone who commits suicide must.
If he had run away from a failed relationship, the fact that he’d obviously lost weight would have made him different looking from the state he’d been in when he was last seen by his friends and family. This may also have been part of his plan. It might have been that being overweight had been something he felt contributed to his relationship failure and so he had dieted, knowing that to be slim and handsome and dead would serve to hurt the person who had jilted him?
Perhaps, as with the character of ‘Felix Stevick’ in the novel, there had been some type of secret and socially unacceptable relationship going on, possibly with another family member, or a married woman?
This element of broken and forbidden romance and incest is a key plot element in, ‘You Must Remember This’. Was it that ‘Lyle’ was from a strict Eastern European, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern cultured family where arranged marriages were the norm and he had been involved in a secret affair with a girl who was one of his own relations, promised in marriage to another, and so the end of this secret romance triggered his disconnection and his suicide?
Perhaps this secret affair was conducted in motels, hence the fact that he gave to the motel desk clerk the home address of, ‘1019 S Progress st Idaho’?
It could be that this address he gave was that of the hotel where he and his lover had met for the last time and thus it served as a message to the person whom he had had the affair with?
The title of the novel from which he took his identity also lends itself to us another possible answer.
The other person, the, ‘You’ to whom he is referring, is possibly someone who also knew that book as well as he did and between them they shared an intimate and intrinsic knowledge of it. In the mind of his ex lover, somewhere in the shared memory of their relationship there is a knowledge of its content or of its title and its intrinsically identifiable link to him and so therefore he chose this name in order to communicate a message from ‘Lyle’ to that person if they were ever to commence searching for him? Perhaps he took it with him when he went to their meetings or he had read to her from it?
In that other person's mind at the remembrance of 'You Must Remember This' and with a summary Google search, he has become intrinsically linked to that novel by the 'legend' he has created in his mysterious death. Did he decide that this would be how the message that he had suicided could be communicated to this other from afar, as a message sent by him from beyond the grave?
It may be that ‘Lyle’ very much knew that the circumstances surrounding his death would be a difficult tangle to unravel and so this was also his deliberate intention. We know that he deliberately wrote, ‘SUICIDE’ on a scrap of paper so there’d be no question as to what this was. If it had been a murder then there’d by no ‘mystique’ surrounding his death. There'd be nothing to propel the public's imagination.
We all wonder ‘why?’ when someone deliberately ends their life but the murder of another is sadly completely understandable to most of us. This pivotal, one word message is fuel for the creation of the story that has followed ‘Lyle’s’ demise. He even put this 'SUICIDE' note in the rubbish bin to try and make it look innocuous when it was, in reality an incredibly important sign for those who would come later to try and work out this mystery.
He was fully aware of the importance of this act on catapulting his death and it’s circumstances into the public eye. This was a man who scrawled his suicide note across the Internet using the hands of others.
Some months prior he may have had decided to commit suicide, left the medical institution, abandoned his family and friends, stopped eating regularly, partly due to low funds, but also because he travelled a lot on foot. Having lost weight also might be an indication that he had previously been on antidepressant medication and had stopped taking it at the time he ‘went missing’.
If his acute depression affected his appetite and as a result of ceasing antidepressant medications (which are noted for their side effect of weight gain) this may be why he had lost weight?
After all, a trail of dispensed medication receipts makes for a solution and extinguishing of this mystery and the mystery was something that must be integral and maintained to the very end of his plan, if it was going to have the success that in life that he himself had, as the character ‘Lyle Stevick’ with his faltering second hand furniture business has in the novel, always managed to miss out on.
It may have been that he had some money and that it had lasted him only up until this last 20 dollars that he left for the room fee? No other money was reported as being found in the room. It may well be that there was a suitcase full of money but it was stolen before the police arrived.
From the simple fact that he took his name from the book, ‘You Must Remember This’, one can safely assume that the key is: that ‘you’ is someone who knows who he is and for us, the public, it’s just a matter of finding that person. Therein lies the difficulty. This may be the deliberate stumbling block. For it may be that the message for whom this entire episode was devised and perpetrated is actually already completely aware of it. They know who 'Lyle' really is and, for the same reasons ‘Lyle’ ended his life they are forever bound by the secretive circumstances of their relationship to speak nothing of it publicly. The answer to this we may never know.
To truly solve this mystery it may well be that the only answer we can ever receive is just to have pity for him, and understand that he saw himself as just a ‘nobody’ to whom the world showed no love and for whom there was nothing and no one to care about.
A man who lived unknown and alone and who so similarly died alone, unloved and with only this enigma he created as his legacy to play a trick on the world that ignored him and to pay it back for its cold disinterest in his life and his genius.
Ultimately, it could be that the ‘you’ is just ‘us’ and ‘Lyle’ wanted the world to consider all of the lonely people of whom he was just one, and so, in the act of dying, to give the world a mystery story that might change the attitude of someone, somewhere toward all of the poor, unfortunate, dispossessed and unloved people of the world?
To do this, he brilliantly calculated, constructed and created an elaborate mystery and with it a sensation that would sweep into the minds of many, because with his death he commanded the world of the future to remember it and himself, sadly, to become nothing more than just the curled up question mark, forever missing at the end of this statement;
“You Must Remember This.”