Locked In
- Ryan Wilmot
- Aug 17
- 6 min read
Locks offer the ultimate promise of security. We rely on them to keep what is ours safe while keeping unwanted visitors out. Initially crude and made of wood, locks have increased in complexity over the centuries. Despite their many intricacies, locks aren't infallible.
But what happens when the promise of security is broken, and a lock becomes not a barrier, but an accomplice to an impossible crime? Let's step into a real-life case that introduces us to one of crime fiction's most notorious tropes: the locked room. This isn't just a story. It's a truth locked away by a single, impossible question. How?
The Impossible Room
The year is 1929, and New York City is a living paradox. On one side, architectural marvels symbolize the city's ambition and prosperity. The Roaring Twenties brought a vibrant cultural scene, which included jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and Broadway. Yet despite its booming potential, 1929 was the beginning of one of the worst financial crises the United States had ever seen—the Great Depression.
On the other side of the paradox, unemployment began to rise, accompanied by slowdowns in industries like car manufacturing and farming. Even with the symptoms of a severe financial ailment, Wall Street was reporting good health. The problem was that the speculation and fever-pitch trading became more real than the looming reality, and a crash was imminent.
During this time, the working class, especially immigrants, encountered a harsh reality far removed from the illusion of prosperity. New York's tenement housing was a hotbed of disease, and the city was a place of great divides, where a life of simple labor could turn dangerous or exploited. It is in this city of grand promises and grim realities that our story unfolds. Here, the life of a quiet laundryman would become a chilling paradox of its own—a murder so impossible, it seemed to defy the very laws of logic.
The Case
The New York Times reported on the puzzling case...
On the corner of 4 East 132nd Street, in the dim light of a late Saturday night, a quiet laundryman named Isidore Fink was at work. He was a man accustomed to caution, so much so that he was known to bolt the doors and windows, allowing no strangers to enter his place of business.
Just before midnight, a woman named Mrs. Locklin Smith was startled by a commotion from Fink's laundry. She heard a desperate struggle and the sound of muffled blows. Fearing the worst, she called the police. When they arrived, they were faced with a baffling sight: the door to Fink’s laundry was locked from the inside. They had to use a small child to slide through a transom above the door to unbolt it.
Inside, they found Isidore Fink dead. He had been shot twice in the chest and once in the hand. Fatally wounded, he lay on the floor. Oddly, he still had seven dollars in his pocket, ruling out robbery as the motive. Gunpowder residue on Fink's left hand indicated that he was shot at close range. The police were left with an impossible problem. How did a killer get into a room locked from the inside, commit the murder, and then disappear without a trace?
The Logic of the Fink Case
Let's examine this event through the lens of logic. The goal of this deductive process is to create an exhaustive list of all possible ways the crime could have happened, then use the available evidence to eliminate every option but one. Disclaimer: I won't list all possibilities; instead, I'll let you fill in some gaps. Here are the theories:
The killer(s) were hiding in the room when the police arrived.
The killer(s) shot Mr. Fink in the room, left, and Mr. Fink locked the door afterward.
The killer(s) used a secret or previously unknown passage.
An accomplice assisted the killer(s) in escaping through the transom after the door and window were secured.
The killer(s) shot Mr. Fink from outside the building through a small opening.
The killer was Mr. Fink; he committed suicide.
We can break some of these scenarios down using formal logic. The events fall under a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of conditions. What does that mean?
Mutually exclusive: Not all of the conditions can be true at one time. For example, Mr. Fink could not have killed himself and used a secret/unknown passage to escape.
Exhaustive: The conditions account for every possible way the crime could have been committed. (Once again, I'm not providing a comprehensive list.)
The power of logic isn't in grand leaps but in careful, methodical strides. This is why every reasonable possibility—even those that seem absurd—must be included in our list of how the crime was committed.
After establishing the facts, the investigation should follow the principles of a disjunctive syllogism. This is based on the simple principle of 'either/or' logic: 'A or B, and if it is not A, then it must be B.' Basically, a process of elimination utilizing comparison.
Let A represent the theories where the action of the crime was committed outside of the room. These include scenarios where:
The killer(s) shot Mr. Fink from outside the building through a small opening.
The killer(s) shot Mr. Fink outside the building, then moved his body into the room and staged the scene.
Mr. Fink was shot in the hallway, ran back into the room, and bolted the door behind him.
Let B represent the theories that the killer(s) were present in the room and used a method of deception or obfuscation to make it appear as though events unfolded within the locked room. In these scenarios, Mr. Fink played an unwitting accomplice to the obfuscation. These scenarios include:
The killer(s) hid in the room and left after the police finished their investigation.
The killer(s) used a secret or unknown passage to enter and exit.
The killer(s) worked with an accomplice to escape through the transom.
The killer(s) shot Mr. Fink in the room, left, and Mr. Fink locked the door.
Scenarios in A seem the least likely of our possibilities. We can strongly argue against them because physical evidence, such as a blood trail or bullet holes, would likely be found leading to the room if the crime had occurred outside. The reports don't indicate this. Furthermore, the gunshot residue on his hand suggests he was shot at close range, making it highly improbable he was shot from a distance or in another location.
With this evidence, we've taken a crucial step in our deduction: we can confidently state that the crime did not occur outside the laundry. Therefore, we are left with only one logical conclusion: the killer was in the room and used a method of deception to escape.
Lessons Learned
"In a radio interview two years later, the New York Police commissioner called the Fink case an 'insoluble mystery,' effectively declaring the case cold." Just as the police gave up, so shall we. Disjunctive syllogisms are all about comparing, weighing the balance, and eliminating choices until you are left with the most probable answer. But they are no substitute for hard evidence and rigorous police work. Just as Sherlock Holmes said in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," "Data, data, data, I cannot make bricks without clay." We need more information to explore the scenarios in set B. Without that data, we would be blindly speculating.
The Isidore Fink case, an "insoluble mystery" as the police commissioner declared, teaches us a crucial lesson: while formal logic is an indispensable tool, it is no substitute for data. The disjunctive syllogism enabled us to eliminate the most improbable theories and deduce the most likely method of the crime, but its capacity is limited.
The science of deduction is a two-part process. It requires both a rigorous logical framework to analyze the possibilities and the hard, physical evidence to prove or disprove them definitively. The Fink case teaches us that without both, even the most elegant logical deduction is powerless to solve a crime.
Beyond the need for data, the Fink case also teaches a valuable lesson about assumptions. Did you catch how the police commissioner framed the department's inability to solve the crime? He described the crime as an "insoluble mystery," implying that he believed the case was impossible to solve. He may have been correct, but the assumption of defeat often tends to be self-fulfilling.
In modern cases, investigations are often solved by following social connections. Mr. Fink was a relatively private man, and he didn't open his doors to strangers. This suggests that he knew the person who killed him. The locked room is a sort of red herring, a distraction from what matters. Sure, we want to understand how it happened, but the motive of the crime would likely yield a stronger candidate pool than knowing how the room was locked.
Regardless, cases like this teach us that assumptions can be a dangerous thing, especially when they come from the people responsible for obtaining a resolution. The Fink case proves that even the most airtight logical framework is worthless without the evidence to support it, and that sometimes locked rooms keep their secrets.
SOURCES
The New York Times. "HUNT ON IN HARLEM FOR TENEMENT SLAYER; Police Puzzled by Motive in the Shooting of Laundryman--Deny Women Were at Scene." The New York Times, March 11, 1929. https://www.nytimes.com/1929/03/11/archives/hunt-on-in-harlem-for-tenement-slayer-police-puzzled-by-motive-in.html
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