Police story The crime of the closed room is the story of the first serial killer in American history. Most of the crimes raise confusion, anxiety and panic in terms of the causes and motives that led to their commission or the method of murder that was practiced on the victim, or in terms of the killing tool used.
There are crimes committed for personal reasons and motives, and there are crimes that are committed without cause except for mere murder, which are usually committed in a more heinous way. However, there are troubling and provocative crimes not in terms of the aforementioned reasons but in terms of the manner in which they were carried out temporally or spatially when all indications indicate the impossibility of their occurrence, leaving the impression of the existence of ethereal beings or evil ghosts that can kill the average person in the most common way.
Mr. Isidor Fink, 30, crossed the Atlantic, immigrating from Poland to America, to settle in the eastern part of New York City in the late nineteenth century.
After he settled there, he founded a small business of launderette. Isidore was a lonely man without a family, but he did not have any enmities as well, and his relations with his neighbors who lived next to him were good and friendly. He worked daily to wash clothes, iron them, then deliver them to their owners and return to his small residence attached to the laundry, which is The predominant housing model for small business owners at the time.
On the night of March 9, 1929, Isidore finished handing customers clothes as usual and returned to his residence at ten in the evening, and at 10:30 p.m.,his neighbor close to him, Mr. Loklan Smith, heard noisy noises of screams and screams coming from Isidore's residence. Immediately, he sensed that something dangerous was going on. Loklan went to bring the police, and by chance, there was a policeman very close to the place.
A very short time elapsed between the neighbor hearing the voices and the policeman's presence at Mr. Isidore's residence, maybe only two or three minutes.
The policeman inquired of the neighbor and took his words about what he heard. Then he knocked on the door, and when no one answered him, he decided to enter the house, but when he tried to open the front door, he found that it was locked from the inside, so he went to the back door,but it was also locked from the inside. The windows of the dormitory were all nailed from the inside, in addition to being very small openings for an adult man to forcefully pass through if he tried to break them. The policeman broke one of the windows and then asked a young boy to get inside the house and open the front door for them
The policeman entered the dwelling and inspected it and found the body of Isidore lying on the ground with traces of three bullets, two of which were in the chest and the third was on his left wrist, as this was evident from the effects of gunpowder on his wrist.
The policeman tried to look for secret doors inside the house and searched through all the walls to see if there were hidden entrances leading to the basement that ends away from the house, but he did not find any of that. The first impression that they saw the crime scene and the impossibility of another person at the scene was that the victim committed suicide by shooting himself.
But where is the crime pistol ?
There was no pistol at the crime scene at all, and usually when someone commits suicide by shooting himself with his own pistol, it makes sense for the pistol to be lying on the ground near it or at least holding it in his hand, so how did the pistol disappear? From this it is easy to guess that another party committed the crime, then he disappeared with the pistol in a mysterious and strange way, and thus the initial impression which indicated that Mr. Isidor Fink committed suicide, would he kill himself and then hide the pistol and close the doors and windows?
There were no lost items and all the valuables of the victim's residence were still present, even the money that was in his pockets and in the cash drawer was not stolen from him, which led to the exclusion of the motive of the theft. And the gas iron was still working and was placed on the ironing board, and it did not take much time since Isidore left it by his hand to burn the cloth under it, which means that the policeman came to the scene of the crime very shortly after committing it.
Fink Isidore's customers said that during the past year he was behaving somewhat strangely. It made them feel uncomfortable because no one was allowed to enter except for those he knew and that when they entered the laundromat he insisted on locking the doors, and they assured that Mr. Issidor had no enemies. However, he was terrified that someone had robbed his shop, which was a justifiable fear in that neighborhood.
There were no fingerprints at the crime scene except those of Mr. Isidore only, and if there was a murderer, as the data indicated, then how did he enter and how did he exit? It is impossible for someone to leave the house and then close the doors and windows from the inside when he is outside. In addition, the policeman came to Isidore's residence in record time, and he did not encounter any man coming from there while crossing the street while he was coming to the residence.
Fink Isidore's death was so inexplicably unique and bizarre that even the most brutal theorists admitted defeat in front of his plot. The authorities could not think of a solution to this puzzle except that they guessed that the killer was a circus player or a gymnast with high flexibility who made a surprise visit and managed,without attracting attention, to crawl through the upper window with a narrow corridor, then shoot at Fink from afar, and escape from Through the same window, he simply despises the most common way of coming through the front door.
But according to what the first witness, a neighbor of Isidore, said, he heard screaming and fighting before calling the police. This means that the killer was in the house and fought with Fink before he killed him, and then the effects of gunpowder on Fink's wrist indicates that the shooting was from A very close distance, in a way that shows that the killer was standing in front of him. This all excludes the idea that the killer fired from the upper window and then crawled back out.
This crime raised questions from its occurrence to this day, and many policemen are still studying the crime file in order to try to deduce how it happened.
Did the killer arrange the crime scene and lock the doors and windows while he was leaving? And if he did that, how could he have locked it from the inside while he was outside? And how was he able to do this in such a short time, between hearing the screaming sounds and the presence of the policeman at the place, so that the iron did not take time to burn the cloth that was placed on it? Or did he exit through a hidden door or from an unknown passage or in an unknown way, as no one saw him while he was outside, while the locks on the doors remained without moving?
But the question that ran on the minds of everyone who saw this story is: Was the killer who committed this crime a ghost? Perhaps no one can refute this idea just because they cannot prove it.