Bizarre Cases of Mysterious Impossible Murders

History is littered with various unsolved murders and deaths. It seems some people are doomed to be remembered more for the mysteries surrounding their deaths than anything they ever did in life. Some of these are stranger than others, with clues that defy reason, and some of the weirdest of these are the so-called "impossible murders," which have happened within locked rooms with no sign of who the killer was or how they may have pulled off the crime and gotten out. Here we will look at a selection of truly strange unsolved deaths that occurred in locked rooms, and which are orbited by myriad bizarre clues. 

Perhaps one of the more well-known mysterious real locked room murders is that of the Polish immigrant Isadore Fink in the early 20th century. Shortly after immigrating to the United States, Fink set up a modest laundromat in New York City, where he lived in a tiny attached apartment. By all accounts Fink was an eccentric and reclusive man, mostly keeping to himself and rarely interacting with others in the neighborhood, and he also seems to have been obsessed with keeping himself safe from the crime that he perceived all around him. Indeed, his business and apartment were a veritable fortress, with double-locked doors and thick bars over all of the windows, which were also firmly nailed shut from the inside, all to keep trespassers and intruders out. It seems as if in the end it would ultimately do him no good.

On March 9, 1929, Fink went out to deliver some laundry, and shortly after returning home a neighbor named Mrs. Locklan Smith heard screams and some loud thumps coming from the apartment, as if someone were fighting, which spurred her to contact the police. Oddly, when the policeman arrived almost immediately after it was found that the apartment was completely sealed and locked from the inside, all of the windows remained barred and nailed shut from the inside, and there was no sign at all of anyone having broken in. The only way into the apartment was found to be a tiny transom window that was too small for a grown person to squeeze into.

Not wanting to disturb the crime scene, the police officer found a small, thin boy and had him wiggle and crawl through the transom window to unlock the door from inside. The apartment itself was found to be in pristine condition, with no signs of struggle and nothing apparently stolen or rifled through. The only thing out of place was Fink’s very dead body lying on the floor with three gaping gunshot wounds ripped through it. The immediate assumption was that he had killed himself, yet it would soon become apparent that there was no gun anywhere to be found, and there was also the fact that there was a close-range gunshot wound to his wrist, suggesting that it had likely been incurred while trying to defend himself from an attacker. Another wound to his chest was thought to have killed him instantly. Adding to the strangeness of it all was that no one else’s fingerprints were present anywhere in the apartment, and the neighbor who had contacted the police insisted that she had heard no gunshots, only bangs and bumps that sounded more like someone having a scuffle.

The lack of a weapon at the scene and the nature of the wounds soon had police considering it a murder, but there were still plenty of mysteries, such as there appeared to be no clear motive. Although Fink was a bit of an oddball he didn’t seem to have had any enemies, and nothing had been stolen from the apartment, including cash that was found in his pockets and drawers. Perhaps even more pressing was how someone could have gotten into that apartment in the first place, since everything was securely bolted down and locked shut from the inside, with only that transom window that a skinny little kid could barely get through.

The whole thing had investigators baffled, and they tried to come up with theories as to what had happened. One was that the shooter had shot through the transom window, but this was soon ruled out as the angle would have made it impossible for Fink to have incurred his particular injuries, especially the wrist wound, which was found to have gunpowder marks indicating it had been inflicted at point blank range. There was also the fact that even the transom window had been shut. Another idea was that he had started to have a fight with the assailant outside, during which time his wrist had been injured, forcing him to retreat indoors. The assailant might have then fired through the transom window to deliver the final fatal shot, but this was also deemed rather unlikely, especially since the neighbors had not seen any such altercation.

Yet another theory was that a very small and agile assassin had simply climbed into the apartment, shot Fink, and then left through the window rather than the front door, but this would mean that Fink was killed by a child-sized gun-toting murderer who left no fingerprints and stole nothing, and there was still the fact that no one in the area had heard the actual gunshots. More paranormal theories are that he was killed by a ghost or that he even physically manifested his potent fears of being shot. The murder of Isadore Fink has never been solved, no one has ever been apprehended for the crime, and the case has been discussed, analyzed, and debated ever since with no real answers in sight. The trail has long gone cold, it has been labeled an impossible and unsolvable crime, and it remains one of the most enigmatic unsolved murder cases in history.

From around the same era is the equally mysterious case of a man named Joseph Bowne Elwell. A wealthy socialite, professional card player, and playboy, Elwell’s playground was New York City in the early 1920s, but this would all come to an end on June 11, 1920, when his housekeeper let herself into the locked room and found him dead with a bullet hole to his forehead. Elwell was found sitting upright in a chair in his living room as if he had just been relaxing, and there was some unopened mail beside him and an open letter in his lap. On the side table next to him was the bullet itself, carefully placed up there as if on display.

When police arrived they quickly learned that the door to the room had been locked and bolted from the inside, as had been the rest of the house itself, and a search of the premises turned up no sign of the murder weapon, which had been a .45 automatic Elwell had kept for defense. Although the opulent house was full of cash and all manner of valuables nothing appeared to have been stolen, there was no sign of any struggle, and there was no indication of a break-in, nor any foreign fingerprints. Neighbors also reported not having heard anything out of the ordinary nor had they seen any suspicious individuals.

The state of the body was also quite strange, as Elwell seemed to have been murdered there as he sat relaxing in his living room. There was no sign that he had tried to fight someone off, no defensive wounds, nothing out of order, and he had been killed by a single perfectly placed bullet hole from about 3 to 5 feet away and at an angle placing the weapon as lower than his head, as if someone had just sat there, had a pleasant chat with him, and then suddenly blown his head off, after which they had bizarrely fetched the bullet to place it up on the table for all to see.

The motive was not particularly hard to find, as Elwell had made enemies all over the city by cheating people out of their money in high-stakes card games and unrepentantly running around with married women. In fact, there were so many potential suspects that police barely knew where to begin. That he was murdered was not hard to believe at all, but the who of it all remained a mystery. The best lead they could come up with was that the person must have been a fairly familiar and trusted individual to have not raised any alarm and put Elwell at ease enough that he would just casually look through his mail while they were there. As to who this could be, no one has a clue, and no suspects were ever arrested.

There was also the how of it all. How had the culprit managed to get into that apartment, kill Elwell as he calmly sat in his chair, and then leave the place locked from the inside, all while not being detected? Also, why had the killer picked up the bullet to put it on display on the table? Police had no idea, and still don’t. The murder of Joseph Elwell has never been solved and is such a mysterious case that it was the basis of the famous locked-room detective novel The Benson Murder Case, which is credited with helping to jump-start the genre of locked-room mysteries in fiction.

In later years we come to the case of a woman named Julia Wallace, who lived in Liverpool, England, with her husband, an insurance salesman named William Herbert Wallace. On the evening of January 18, 1931, Mr. Wallace arrived at the Liverpool Chess Club to receive a mysterious phone message from a man calling himself “R.M. Qualtrough.” The mystery caller had given an address and instructed the staff of the Chess Club to tell him that he was requested to go there to discuss an important insurance issue. Wallace had never heard the name R.M. Qualtrough, but nevertheless the following day he made his way to the address by train, but it soon became apparent that the address, 25 Menlove Gardens East, did not in fact exist. Indeed, asking around the area showed that no locals even knew of anyone by the name of R.M. Qualtrough. Frustrated and not a little puzzled, Wallace headed home, where a gruesome surprise awaited him.

Upon returning home, Wallace found that the doors had been locked from the inside, and when the doors were finally opened the body of his wife was found lying on the floor surrounded by blood-spattered walls. She had been brutally beaten to death, and police would estimate that she had been savagely bashed about the head with stunning force at least 11 times by some sort of heavy blunt object, although there was no sign of the murder weapon. In fact, there was no sign that anyone else had been there other than Mrs. Wallace, and no one in the area had seen anything suspicious. With no weapon, no evidence, and no witnesses, police were merely left with a mysterious dead body in a locked room.

As with the other cases here, robbery did not seem to be a motive, as her handbag, cash, and valuables were all there, and theories swirled as to who the killer was, what connection, if any, they had to the mysterious R.M. Qualtrough, and how they had managed to pull the crime off. Although there were found to be several people by the name of Qualtrough living in the Liverpool area, there was absolutely no evidence at all that any of them had placed the call, and all of them denied having any knowledge of Mr. Wallace or any involvement with the murder.

Much suspicion was cast on Mr. Wallace himself, as although there were no reports of any marital issues between the two there were some rather strange details that seemed to implicate him. One was that it turned out that the call placed by R.M. Qualtrough had been made at a phone booth just a few hundred yards away from the Wallace home at a time that would have conveniently corresponded nicely with how long it would have taken Mr. Wallace to get from there to the Chess Club. There was also the testimony of the tram driver who had taken Wallace to the bogus address, who claimed that the man had seemed suspiciously overeager to make it clear that he was a stranger to the area and did not know his way around.

This was all rather flimsy evidence against him, but Wallace was nevertheless arrested for the crime and actually convicted of it, although this charge would later be dropped after a reevaluation of the evidence. When Wallace was released it left no other potential suspects, no other leads, and far more questions than there were answers. When he died a couple of years later he took anything he knew to the grave with him, and the case has joined the pantheon of great unsolved murders. It has since been variously speculated that Wallace was indeed the killer and that Qualtrough was a bid for an alibi, or conversely that he was innocent and that it was another mysterious stranger in the shadows who placed that call to create a diversion while he murdered Mrs. Wallace. However, no clear motive, evidence, suspect, or murder weapon has ever turned up, nor has there ever been a consensus as to how the locked-room crime was carried out, and the murder of Julia Wallace remains murky and unsolved, to the point that author Raymond Chandler once said the case “will always be unbeatable.”

Moving on to the 1960s, we have the curious case of a man named Sam Borg. The 67-year-old Borg owned a quaint cafe in Malta and seemed to be well-liked by his customers and the people of the neighborhood, so he was not the type of person who someone would suspect would become the center of a strange, unsolved murder. In May of 1960, Borg was seen outside of a club in the Maltese area of North Melbourne, and at the time no one would have thought anything of it. Borg was known to be out and about frequenting various clubs and establishments, but it seems that in this case, this would be the last time anyone would see him alive. A few days passed after his last sighting, and friends became worried when he did not show up to his cafe and was not seen out and about as usual. After some time had passed, a friend went to his place and found no one would answer and the door was firmly locked.

Police were notified, and when they arrived at the scene they found the door to be stubbornly locked and bolted from inside. Indeed, a policeman finally had to climb up a ladder to gain entry to the residence through a window, which was also locked. When entry was finally gained, authorities were in for quite the baffling mystery. There was found Borg’s dead body, located under a bed in an upstairs room, wrapped in sheets and with rags draped around the head. The body had apparently been there for at least a few days, and it seemed obvious that the cause of death was severe injuries about the head caused by some sort of blunt instrument, which was later presumed to be a broken off chair leg.

It was all strange to be sure, but the weirdest part was that the room was completely sealed from the inside, with the windows locked and the door actually nailed shut from within. A closer inspection of the place found an unused pistol hidden within the very bed he was found dead under, and 100 pounds in cash, making robbery seem like an unlikely motive, although it would later be suspected that at least some money had been stolen. Oddly, there could be found no evidence of a break-in, the windows had all been locked, and the door nailed shut from the inside, so where had the killer gone? 

In the end, the crime was written off as a simple robbery, but the only explanation police could come up with for the killer’s escape was that they must have nailed the door shut and then exited through a tiny skylight high above the room barely large enough for a child to slip through. If this was true, then how had the killer accessed it and managed to squeeze through it and why hadn’t they just gone through the door rather than nail it shut and take the hard way out? No one knows, and it remains unsolved to this day. 

More recently, in 1995, a woman checked into the Oslo Plaza Hotel in Oslo, Norway, at 10:44 PM on May 31. At the time it was an opulent, luxurious hotel for the rich and famous, and this woman looked the part, dressed to the nines in expensive brand-name clothes. She checked in under the name “Jennifer Fairgate,” also sometimes spelled as “Fergate,” and at the time no one would have thought anything of it, just another classy rich lady checking into the opulent hotel. She booked a room for three nights, paying cash up front, and that was that. 

Over the next two days, things would get strange when no one saw her enter or exit her room until one day a staff member saw the reclusive lady slink into her room and put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign. The staff member thought it was odd enough that they contacted two phone numbers “Fairgate” had listed, but they were both bogus, as were the addresses she had given them. When the next day passed with no sign of the woman leaving her room, alarm bells were starting to go off, especially when she did not check out at her expected time. Worried staff ended up knocking on the door only to be answered by the thunderous boom of what was apparently a gunshot. Police were quickly notified.

When authorities arrived they had to force the door open, which had been locked and bolted from the inside, and in the room, they found the mystery woman’s dead body, dead of an apparent gunshot wound to the head. It at first seemed like a suicide pure and simple, but some strange clues would emerge. For one, the gun, which had had its serial number removed, was held upside down, not at an angle conducive to shooting oneself. There was also the fact that no blood or gunshot residue was on her hand. Her high-heeled shoes were also missing, there were found to be no labels on any of her clothing, and there were no toiletries in the room, no purse, no wallet, no keys, and no passport in the possession of the woman. There were also found a nearly empty bottle of men’s cologne in the room and a small black suitcase with over 20 rounds of bullets. What was going on here?

An investigation showed that she had also checked a "Lois Fergate" into the room with her, although no one on the staff had seen anyone else with her and she had only been seen alone. One employee would say they had seen "Jennifer" with a 25-40-year-old man going into the room with her, but this was never corroborated and this man has never been identified. Who he was or what part he had to play in this is unknown. To this day the only possible suspects in the case are the mysterious “Lois,” and a man staying across the hall from Frigate known only as “Mister F,” but there has never been anything conclusive, and the case remains ice cold, with no one even knowing who “Jennifer Fairgate” even was. 

Moving on into later years, on June 2, 2007, a young, 36-year-old man named Hugues de la Plaza left the company of his friends at the Underground SF bar in the Lower Haight of San Francisco, California at around 2 a.m. after a fun night out on the town. A security camera captured de la Plaza arriving at his home, a triplex with three front doors all in a row, and heading in for the night, and a neighbor heard the door close. At around 2:30 a.m., neighbors would report hearing loud footsteps and the door to Hugues' apartment slamming as many as three times. Nobody thought anything of it at the time, thinking it was just the man being drunk, but things were about to spiral into the weird.

The next morning, at around 8 a.m., a neighbor passed Plaza’s apartment and noticed what appeared to be a pool of blood seeping from under the door and blood all over the front porch. Police were notified, and when they arrived they were forced to break in through a rear door, as the house had been fully locked and bolted from within. When they gained entry, they did so to find de la Plaza dead, brutally stabbed three times in the chest, neck and abdomen, as well as exhibiting several blunt-force trauma injuries, including small abrasions to the forehead, lip and arm. All doors and windows had been locked and bolted from the inside, and there had been no sign of forced entry or struggle, so the only thing police could come up with was that he had committed suicide, but many things about this theory did not line up.

First of all, de la Plaza had reportedly been an upbeat, sociable man who had been excited about recently getting a promotion at work, and in fact, that was why he had been out celebrating that night. There was also no suicide note, no evidence of drug or alcohol abuse, and nothing about the young man at all that pointed to him having suicidal ideation. Also there was no knife actually found at the residence that could have been what killed him, only a pristine, clean knife in the kitchen, so where was the weapon that killed him? It also seems odd that someone would kill themselves by repeated, ruthless stabbing, let alone there was no knife found that could have been used. 

Despite all of this, police have held on to the idea that this must have been a suicide because no one could have gotten in and out to leave the place locked like that, even in the face of much disagreement from the man’s friends and family, and the whole thing is rather ambiguous officially labeled as a “suspicious death.” Was this really a suicide or was it murder? If so, what was the motive and how did they manage to escape the house to leave it fully locked from the inside? We may never know for sure. 

On Wednesday, September 15, 2010, a man named Greg Fleniken checked into Room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Hotel, in Beaumont, Texas. There was nothing strange about it at the time. He had been on the road for work, as was usual, and he kept in constant touch with his wife, but on this evening he would not make his nightly call. It was odd and out of character enough that his wife would call the police out of worry, and when they arrived at the room they were greeted by a locked door and no answer from within. Several calls to Greg’s phone got no answer, and it was decided to break in to see what was going on. 

Inside the darkened room, police took little time to find Greg’s dead body sprawled out on the floor, but there was little indication as to what had happened to him. There were no outward signs of injury, no bullet or knife wounds, no bruises, no obvious signs of blunt trauma. Considering he had been a heavy smoker it was thought that he must have just keeled over from a heart attack or stroke, especially since the doors and windows were all locked from the inside, there was no sign of a break-in or struggle, and his wallet was still in the back pocket of his jeans with a stack of $100 bills in it, so robbery wasn’t an issue, but a more thorough examination would launch the whole thing further into the bizarre.

An autopsy performed on the corpse would stand in stark contrast to the outward appearance of the body. It was found that the internal organs had severe trauma similar to a “car crash,” as well as massive internal bleeding. Weirdly, there was no immediate sign of anything amiss externally, except for a tiny tear in the man’s scrotum, so how had he incurred such ferocious internal injuries? No one had a clue, and interviewing neighboring rooms turned up no evidence of having heard or seen anything out of the ordinary. In the end, this one was sort of considered solved when it turned out that the men in the next room confessed to having accidentally fired a gun into the wall, which was presumed to have entered the victims’ scrotum and caused all of that damage, but the bullet was never found. There has been some argument against the bullet theory, considering that it was never found and the massive internal injuries were inconsistent with a bullet injury. A more likely explanation was that he really had been in a car accident and then crawled back to lock himself away in his room and die, but why would there be no external sign of trauma? What was going on here? Who knows? 

From the following year we have the strange case of a 27-year-old Philadelphia teacher by the name of Ellen Greenberg. On January 26, 2011, her fiancé, Samuel Goldberg, returned from the gym to find the door locked. Thinking that this was odd, he forced himself inside and was shocked to find Ellen dead on the floor, slumped against a cabinet in a pool of blood. When police arrived they found a grisly scene. The woman had been stabbed 20 times— with 10 stab wounds on her neck and head, including two wounds that had penetrated deep into her brain, as well as various bruises all over her body, yet there was no sign of any struggle or break-in into the dead bolted, securely locked home. 

The death was originally classified as a homicide, but strangely, the police suddenly concluded that this had been a suicide. This is despite the fact that few people commit suicide with 20 stabs to the head and body, including to the back of the neck, there was no suicide note, and plenty of arguments against suicidal ideation from friends, family, and even her psychiatrist, whom she had been seeing for anxiety issues. The family attorney Joe Podraza has remarked on the improbability of suicide, stating:

In this way, you're able to see the two — really lethal — wounds in the back of Ellen's head. You can tell that it's very improbable that Ellen could inflict the wounds from behind. She would not be able to generate enough force to self-inflict. I think it's so powerful that it's clear to me that there's a murderer walking among us, or murderers, and that's frightening from my vantage point.

The Greenberg family has continued to fight the official stance of suicide and we are left to wonder just what happened here. Finally we have a most remarkably bizarre case from as recently as 2020. In that year, a June Corfield, 84 and her son Stephen, 60, were found dead in their flat in Bracknell, England, after the landlord forced himself in for a wellness check after not hearing from them for several days. What he found inside was a pandora’s box of death and bizarreness. 

The two tenants were found dead slouched over at a table, but what was weird was what state the flat was in. Around them were cryptically arranged a total of 10 chocolate cakes, a note scrawled on a piece of paper saying “do not come in” found at the top of the stairs, as well as various other oddities. A Detective Sergeant Liam Butler would say of the surreal scene:

Every electrical item had been switched off or disconnected and there was no bedding or cleaning products inside. Light fittings had been emptied of bulbs and the boiler and heating were unused. In the bin was a newspaper dated December 2, 2019, despite the fact Mr Corfield was blind. All the electrical items were unplugged and the main electrical fuse box was turned to the off position. The light fittings did not have light bulbs in. There was not anything in the address that we would all recognise as items we would all use in our day-to-day living, such as working TV, internet connection, phones. It seemed very sparse. As you entered the lounge where you had the two sofas, officers found a female sat in one of the chairs, slouched backwards. To her right they saw a male, again slouched back in the chair with his head tilted forward but to his left hand side. Both plainly had been dead for some time. In between the two chairs were two Bush DAB radios and on the floor next to June's chair, was a handwritten note. At the foot of June's chair was an empty bottle, believed to be a water bottle. At the foot of Stephen's chair was a half-empty bottle containing clear liquid. Both bottles were tested and were found to contain a neutral, water-based liquid, the inquest heard. The note was filled with words, with some crossed out, but a section mentioned putting a message saying 'do not come in' at the top of the stairs.

Adding to the mystery was that a coroner could not figure out the cause of death and there was no sign of forced entry or struggled in the locked house. Alan Blake, assistant coroner for Berkshire, would remark:

June Corfield and Stephen Corfield lived a reclusive lifestyle, they had had no contact with family members for some years and were hardly known to their neighbours. The level of decomposition prevents the common sense inference that both had been dead for an appreciable period of time prior to when they were found. It is possible that June may have died first and that Stephen was subsequently unable to care for himself but I cannot make this as a finding of fact on the balance of probabilities. It is just one of a set of possibilities. The police made open-minded and appropriate inquiries. There was no evidence of third-party involvement and very scant evidence which could point to suicide. The rather cryptic and hard to decipher note ending in 'do not come in' which was left would not permit such an inference and I do not make such a finding. There is insufficient evidence to determine on the balance of probabilities whether this was an entirely natural death or whether there was an element of the unnatural about this death. It cannot be established whether neglect or self-neglect caused or contributed to the death and accordingly I am required to reach an open conclusion in relation to Stephen Corfield.

How can we explain this? Was this natural causes, a murder-suicide, or just plain murder? What is the meaning behind the numerous bizarre clues orbiting the bodies and why was there a note saying "do not come in" at the top of the stairs rather than on the front door, as might be expected? No one knows, and the crime is left unsolved. Indeed, none of the cases we have looked at here have been solved to everyone's satisfaction, and they remain curious specters lurking within the shadows of history's unsolved deaths.