I was flattered to be contacted by a subsidiary of the New York Times to contribute to a forthcoming article about an unsolved real-life locked room, the Isador Fink murder. I dutifully submitted answers to questions I was given and eagerly awaited the result, which was this rather spectacular production:
https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/facebookwatch/limetown-fink.html
Unfortunately, almost all my input had been discarded!
Here’s the original Q&A NYT article
Sorry to hear your input was ignored!
The case is an interesting one, but never understood, even if it was an actual locked room murder, why the police deemed it an unsolvable mystery. An adult could not have crawled through the transom, but a full-grown person could have stuck an arm through it and slide the bolt into place with a stick or iron-thread. Something that could have been taken from the laundry shop.
If you want to punch it up a little, to use in a fictionalized account of the case, you can have the murderer shoot the victim inside the room and muffle the shots by wrapping cloth around the barrel of the gun. The murderer than proceeded to fake scorch marks on the body with the hot-iron from the gas-stove and bolted the door in the way described above. She then pretended to have overheard a fight and called the police. Hey, Fink would probably been less cautious with a neighbor than a stranger and the locked room-trick would have given her an alibi, because she apparently had no access to the room. 😉
Ingenious theory!
I fail to understand why the police failed to solve this seemingly simple case. As TomCat mentions, the bolt could have been pushed in from outside using the transom.
The situation is much, much more difficult in Le Tigre Borgne by Paul Halter ! The victim is alone at the top of a tower protected by 3 doors, 2 bolted from inside and the third locked with a key found on the body of the victim. Also, the entrance to the building is well-guarded !