Detectives Arrive At Crime Scene Before Noticing Something ‘Off’ About The Victim’s Apartment

Perhaps what makes the story of Isidor Fink so chilling is how, well, normal he was. Like so many Americans, his first glimpse of the U.S. was from a ship sailing towards Ellis Island. You see, Fink desperately wanted to leave the life he’d known in Poland behind.

Poland had suffered great losses during World War 1, and he couldn’t help imagining how much further he could go in the U.S. But Fink quickly learned that being an immigrant in New York City was less about making one’s fortune and more about survival.

So he worked, saving every penny he made until he had enough to put his business skills to the test. Still, by the time he was able to open his own laundry business, he had no choice but to do so in a dangerous part of town.

Located on East 123rd street, Fink made the best of it by living in the large ground-floor apartment that was attached to the laundry. Young and ambitious, he had nowhere to go but up. Before he could become a rich businessman, however, he had to make a few laundry deliveries.

On March 9th, 1929, Fink made a few routine laundry deliveries before turning in for the night. But what started as a normal evening turned into anything but when Fink’s neighbor, Mrs. Locklan Smith, suddenly threw open her door and ran, panicked, down the street.

When she arrived at the police station, she had a scary story to tell: At around 10pm, the late night had been interrupted by screams, followed by a banging noise coming from Fink’s place. When everything got quiet again, she’d gathered her courage and hurried to the police.

Obviously, this kind of story wasn’t unusual to the authorities. It was late at night and a dangerous part of town; there was little doubt that when officers got to Fink’s apartment, they’d either find evidence of a break-in or an unharmed Fink who’d accidentally misfired a gun.

But the police found neither. In fact, when they got to Fink’s apartment, they discovered that they couldn’t get into the apartment at all. The first officer at the scene, Albert Kattenborn, deduced that the front door had been locked from the inside.

And as an increasingly confused Kattenborn discovered, the windows were much too small for a grown man to crawl through. By then, a small crowd of curious neighbors had gathered around Fink’s front door, one of whom was a little boy.

This gave Kattenborn an idea. There was a small window on Fink’s front door, but it was just big enough for the little boy to be lifted through. But that’s when the police made another odd discovery: The window had been nailed shut from the inside.

They had to get into the apartment somehow, so Kattenborn simply smashed the small window and lifted the little boy through. Once inside, the boy was able to unlock the door…and what was waiting for the police inside the apartment left them stumped.

Fink was on the floor, two bullet wounds glaring up from his chest. At first glance, the officers assumed they were dealing with a robbery gone wrong. It wouldn’t be unusual, after all, for a business-owning single man in a ground floor apartment to be targeted.

But a sweep of the apartment immediately put the robbery theory to rest. Not only was nothing else disturbed in Fink’s apartment, including his drawers and cabinets, but he was found with money in his pockets. Could it have been point-blank murder?

Maybe, some of the officers suggested, someone had come inside, shot Fink, and simply locked the door behind them. But this theory was nixed in seconds when it was discovered that Fink didn’t just lock his doors — he’d bolted them shut from the inside.

The police hoped that they’d at least find a murder weapon of some sort, but even after a thorough search of the apartment, they came up empty. A dead body in a locked room with no gun to be found — how was this even possible?

As people demanded answers, the police had one more theory to investigate: suicide. The trouble was, it was very rare for someone to kill themselves by aiming at their chest. Even more confusing, there was actually a third bullet wound…

…and it was directly through Fink’s left wrist. Besides, how could Fink have shot himself without a gun? When the coroner reviewed the case, he was clear that Fink’s death was not a suicide. “The man has been murdered,” he concluded, and he even gave evidence.

“The position of the body and location of the wounds indicate, beyond doubt, that Fink could not have shot himself,” the coroner wrote in his report. What’s more, when the police swept the apartment for fingerprints, what they found made them more confused than ever.

The only fingerprints in the apartment belonged to Fink himself. They checked the windows, the door knobs, the walls — nothing. People started to come up with their own wild theories as to how Fink ended up dead, and the police even ended up following one of those leads.

The theory started to spread that Fink, paranoid about someone breaking into his apartment — hence the bolted doors and nailed-in windows — had created some kind of contraption in the wall that would immediately shoot and kill someone trying to break in.

Maybe there had been an accident with this contraption, or maybe a suicidal Fink had rigged it up to automatically kill him without him touching it? This theory obviously came to nothing, as a thorough search revealed that nothing was in the walls but plaster.

Two years after Fink’s death, New York City Police Commissioner Mulrooney called Fink’s murder an “insoluble mystery.” After all, it’s not every day that the city’s best and brightest in law enforcement are left shrugging their shoulders.

Even so, the case of Isidor Fink’s “perfect murder” became a common genre of detective fiction. People loved the idea of a seemingly-impossible mystery, and nothing captured their imaginations quite as much as when the Queen of Mystery herself, Agatha Christie, went missing.