THE PERFECT CRIME

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 159, 6 July 1940, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE PERFECT CRIME

IN outlining the tremendous success science can claim in combating the criminal, it may be thought that I am imputing to the expert criminologist a 'superhuman infallibility, disregarding the fact that many crimes still await solution. Not so. The worker in his laboratory can only analyse and interpret the material submitted to him by the workers in the field, and often they find little enough.

Tho detectives who inwstiL'ifed tins murder of Is-adore I* ink, fur instance, found little enough to it to the laboratory—three bulle.ts for llio ballistic ex|>ert, but no weapon with which they could be associated, and not a single fingerprint. As an interlude, ro to speak, we may glance aside in pa -sing at this ease; it offers a nice puzzle.

Who Killed Isadore Fink? How Isadore Fink was killed is as much of a mystery a~ why; some of the best brains in America have puzzled over both aspects and admitted defeat. Beyond all question, the. man was murdered, and it is equally beyond question that his body lay in a room locked and bolted on the inside. How then did the murderer escape in the few seconds' interval between the firing of tbe fatal shots and the arrival of the policeman? No one knows. It is the perfect crimu

The victim, Isadore Fink, lan.led in New York a couple of years after the war, a 20-year-old immigrant from a poverty-.stricken Galician village. For the ne-xt ten years he slaved Hi hours a day in an east side laundry, boarding every cent until he had" nearly a thousand dollars with which to realise his dream—a little laundry of his own.

In 1930, then, he opened his own laundry at 52, East One Hundred and Thirty-Second Street, a Harlem tenement house. 1' ink worked and slept in the front room on the ground floor, subletting the other two rooms that went with it to an old coloured! woiOan.

Every cent that Isadore Fink owned had been won bv toil and self privation, and the dread that he might be robbed of his few dollars obsessed him. He therefore made his little home-cum-workshop impregnable. He put a stout iron bolt on his side of the door between

ByF. Reeder

his room and the negress's. and another 011 tiie street door, in addition to two complicated locks; he. nailed up the narrow glass transom over his door, while inside the room's one window, which was always locked, he put up strong bars, so close together that a cat could hardly squeeze between the.m.

One bleak February evening, Tsadore Fink delivered a parcel of laundry to a customer and, returning about 10 o'clock, called at the tobacconist's shop opposite his own place for a packet of cigarettes. After chatting with the man behind the counter for about quarter of an hour, lie went back to his shop. '1 he tobacconist watched him cross tho street and let himself in, and pull down the windowblind.

A few minutes later the light in the laundry went out, and following soon after this three shots rang out. The old coloured woman in the room next to Fink's, a wakened by the first shot, heard his body fall. Then there was silence.

All Entrances Barred 1 lie startled old woman ran to the door, yoTling for the police, and the coloured constable 011 the beat came, running. Slie stammered out what she had heard.

The constable tried the front door to Fink's shop, but it was locked. He then accompanied the qld woman to her room, but the door leading thence into Fink's shop was also immovable. Back he went to the street, where a small crowd, including a number of boys, had gathered. The. policeman called for a volunteer to go through the transom and open the front door from the inside, and a hardy little coloured newsboy responded.

The policeman lifted the. lad up while he smashed the glass with the policeman's club. Then, squeezing through, the youngster dropped into the d«rk room. The constable heard him fumble with the locks and the bolt; then the door oj>ened, and the youngster scuttled out into the street as fast as he could.

The policeman we.nt in, and switched on the light. With blood oozing from two bullet wounds in his bead and one in his hand, Fink lay dead on the floor

near the l>ack of his shop. His body was still warm. The policeman took it for granted that Fink had committed suicide, and, having sent a bystander to phono the station, glanced around for the revolver.

Revolver Missing When a sergeant and two detectives arrived the policeman was still looking unsuccessfully for the gun. He had searched the. room; he had grabbed and searched the youngster who had climbed in through the transom; there was no sign of it. The sergeant and the two detectives joined the search, unsuccessfully. When the coroner arrived, and examined the body, he added to their complexities. Kink had been shot, he. said, with a .38 calibre revolver from a range of about two feet. The nature and position of the wounds were such that Kink could not possibly have inflicted them himself. The murderer must have taken the gun with him.

The search for the weapon now became a search for the, murderer's way of escape. The room was meagrely" furnished, with one part screened off by an improvised hanging, behind which was Fink's bed. On the door to the coloured woman's rooms the bolt was runted fast in its place, and an old spider web was stretched from door to lintel; the only window was locked on the inside, all the closely-spaced bars were in place., and the dust caked in the sash grooves showed that it had not been opened for weeks.

The frame of the transom was nailed and the constable, as well as the* boy who had climbed through, was definite that the front door had been locked and bolted on the inside. How, then, did the murderer leave the room? For 24 hours a corps of detectives searched that room minutely for a trapdoor or a secret panel; the only opening they discovered was a two-inch rat hole in one corner. Picked men of the New York Police Department went over the room a second time, and found no more. Their fingerprint experts could find no prints other than those of Fink and the first searchers.

Other investigators probed Fink's private life, as far back as his boyhood in Galicia before the war. They found that he had few frie.nds, but no "enemies. He was quite a negligible character in everyway. Why anyone should wish to ahoo't him is just as bafflinu a problem as how he was shot—and that is where the mystery stands.