Isidore Fink: The real life locked room murder that stunned New York in 1929
As the success of the Knives Out series has proved, if there was even a grain of doubt before, everyone loves a murder mystery.
The third film in Rian Johnson’s throwback series of absolute bangers was 2025’s Wake Up Dead Man, a movie which concerns itself with a classic locked room mystery. The basic idea of these murders is that they occur in places that seem impossible for the perpetrator of said murder to escape from. Think The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe or the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Speckled Band.
They’re a riotous watch, especially in the likes of Wake Up Dead Man, which allows the audience to speculate with the supernatural before bringing everything back down to earth right at the death.
It is hokum, though. Real-life murders don’t work like that because in real life, things aren’t that glamorous or mysterious. The vast majority of the time, people are killed and there are so many points of escape that there’d barely a point of investigating them. Or, the rest of the time, the killer is caught within hours of the event, right?
Well, not quite. The truth is often stranger than fiction, as the saying goes. People have been killing people since there have been people to kill, and really, it was only a matter of time before someone took another person’s life in a way that truly baffled law enforcement of the time. In this case, the time was 1929. The place was New York City, and the victim was Isidore Fink. A name truly worth any detective thriller of the time and beyond.
Like many hard-boiled detective stories, it takes place late at night in the mean streets of the South Bronx.
Isidore Fink didn’t seem like a man with enemies. He was the 30-year-old proprietor of a laundry business on East 132nd Street. One couldn’t be too careful in a rough neighbourhood like East 132nd, yet still, Fink was. He wouldn’t even let strangers into his business as customers and kept his doors and windows bolted shut at all times. However, at 10.30pm on March 9th, 1929, his neighbour, Mrs Locklin Smith, called the police in a state of panic, saying that they could hear fighting in Funk’s apartment.
The officers arrived to find Fink’s front door typically locked, and a window of his atypically ajar. They paid a local to pry the door open before squeezing inside. Upon entering, they were met with the sight of Fink lying dead after being shot through the chest twice. A suicide, perhaps? It would have appeared so if the weapon was to hand, but there wasn’t a gun in the place. Officers even tore the place apart looking for one, down to removing the apartment’s floorboards.
The fact that Fink had a hot iron in the gas stove at the time of his discovery, along with Mrs Locklin Smith’s original testimony that she had heard fighting, pointed to one thing: murder. Had the killer fired through the window from the outside? No. A wound on Fink’s hand showed the telltale signs of a close-range gunshot wound, and there were numerous signs in the apartment of a physical struggle between Fink and his assailant.
So, whoever the murderer was, they were small enough to enter and leave through that window. Yet they also hadn’t thought to simply unbolt the front door the way the child who’d let the police in had. Any attempt to figure out the perpetrator from the motive fell apart as well. Fink barely associated with anyone and had no enemies. A robbery? Nothing had been taken from Fink’s apartment. There weren’t even any fingerprints in the apartment other than Fink’s.
A few people had theorised that Fink had been shot outside his apartment before entering it and bolting himself in, but at the time, no one could believe that a human being was capable of that. It wasn’t until nearly 15 years later, when a man in Scotland had shot himself in the head and walked home before finally dying, that anyone realised that the human body was capable of something like that. Considering that the freshest fingerprints of Fink’s in his apartment had been on the bolt to his door, it seemed like how Isidore Fink had died had finally been revealed.
Yet who did it, and why? It looks like we’ll never know for sure.