Locked Room Mystery - True Crimes

True Crimes

• Alfred Russel Wallace described events occurring in the Baltic in 1844: "During the disturbances at the Cemetery of Ahrensburg in the island of Oesel, where coffins were overturned in locked vaults, and the case was investigated by an official commission, the horses of country people visiting the cemetery were often so alarmed and excited that they became covered with sweat and foam. Sometimes they threw themselves on the ground where they struggled in apparent agony, and, notwithstanding the immediate resort to remedial measures, several died within a day or two. In this case, as in so many others, although the commission made a most rigid investigation and applied the strictest tests, no natural cause for the disturbances was ever discovered."
• George Colvocoresses, captain of the USS Saratoga during the American Civil War was, according to his biography, mysteriously murdered in Bridgeport, Connecticut on June 3, 1872 while on his way to New York. According to his great-great-granddaughter, however, his insurers later alleged that his death was a suicide, as the bullet wound he suffered was conveyed at close range through his heart, without the bullet penetrating his outer garments. It remains unexplained why, if this were the case, he would choose the busiest time of day on a busy street, nor why his shirt remained tucked in his trousers after death.
• According to a report in The New York Times, March 10 and 11, 1929, Isidore Fink, of 4 East 132nd Street, New York City, was in his Fifth Avenue Laundry on the night of March 9, 1929 with the windows closed and door of the room bolted. A neighbor heard screams and the sound of blows (but no shots) and called the police who were unable to get in. A young boy was lifted through the transom and was able to unbolt the door. On the floor lay Fink with two bullet wounds in his chest and one in his left wrist, which was powder-marked. He was dead. There was money in his pockets, and the cash register had not been touched. No weapon was found. The man had died instantly, or almost instantly. There was a theory that the murderer had crawled through the transom. But to do so he would have had to be no bigger than a small boy and would have had to leave the same way, as the door was bolted. Another theory had the murderer firing through the transom, but Fink's wrist was powder-burned, indicating that he had not been fired at from a distance. More than two years later, Police Commissioner Mulrooney, in a radio-talk, called this murder in a closed room an "insoluble mystery." The crime was said to have inspired William March's "The Bird House" and Ben Hecht's "The Mystery of the Fabulous Laundryman."
• On the 16th of May 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was found stabbed to death in an otherwise empty 1st class compartment of the Paris Metro. The subway train had left the terminus, Porte de Charenton, at 6:27 p.m. and had arrived at the next station, Porte Dorée, at 6:28 p.m. Witnesses at both stations swore nobody was seen getting in or out of the compartment, and witnesses in both adjacent compartments swore that nobody had tried to enter the one where Mlle. Toureaux's body was found. The murderer had one minute and twenty seconds at his or her disposal. Neither the murderer nor the method of his or her escape was ever discovered.