How to commit murder inside a locked room | Hacker News Reader

How to commit murder inside a locked room

tedgioia.substack.com

146 pointshooboy88 comments

How to commit a murder inside a locked room, off the top of my head:

- Are the windows locked? Otherwise it's a rock climber who can climb the side of the building. Some buildings are not that difficult to climb for a good climber.

- The murderer was not in the room when the murder happened. Poison or a trap of some sort. (Kinda boring.)

- The murderer was in the room when the murder happened, but locked the door behind themselves. (This one doesn't really work because the door is presumably of a kind that can't be locked behind you, or else no one would be surprised. Good to double-check, though, that you're sure the door couldn't have been locked behind someone leaving.)

- The murderer was in the room when the attack happened. The murderer attacks, then the murderer leaves, then the victim locks the door, then the victim finishes dying. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds: if someone nearly kills me and then leaves but it seems like there's a chance they might come back, hell yeah I'm going to lock the door, possibly even before calling for help.

- The murderer is a carpenter. They locked the door, pocketed the key, put the door back into the previously empty door frame, then left. (This is a bit far fetched if the victim was found soon after death; door frames are a lot of work.)

- The murderer is still inside the room, very well hidden. Say, inside the sofa where the stuffing should be, waiting very quietly until the investigation is over so they can leave.

> The murderer is still inside the room, very well hidden. Say, inside the sofa where the stuffing should be, waiting very quietly until the investigation is over so they can leave.

Not a murder, but this is essentially the resolution of a Spike Lee movie. (no name - no spoiler)

When I think couches with people inside I cant get Frank from Always Sunny climbing naked out of a couch out of my mind.

Ummm, I think it's probably spoiled from context and connection alone, right?

one of my favorites:

- The room doesn't even need to be completely locked, people just need to think that it was

In many TV shows it ends up being the person that first gets into the room (supposedly after the person is already dead, but not in reality) that does the killing. I.e. police, family member, medical staff, etc.

There's this fun Japanese crime mystery show called Galileo where a physics prof solves similar 'classic' crime story tropes.

My favorite 'modern' solution to the locked room was, spoilers!, that the door with a large handle to the room appeared locked at the time of the crime because the murderer was using a small hologram to make it appear locked from afar.

In fact, there's a huge literature genre in Japanese fiction: Honkaku, reanimated in the 90s as Shin-Honkaku. Do yourself a pleasure and go read Edogawa Rampo.

Also: it wasn't a murder, the apparent foul play is illusory.

Bonus points for any combination of the possibilities.

From the systems security mindset - the doors and the windows are only the most obvious ways to enter the room, not the only ones. If you secure them very well, then the walls, floor and the ceiling become the best points of entry. (Chimneys are kind of obvious)

Maybe the soon-to-be murderer just lifted the ceiling with a crane, killed the victim (thus becoming the murderer) and put the ceiling back in its place?

Depending on the room, the murderer could have blocked the chimney/windows from fresh air, letting the victim to suffocate to death.

- The murderer completely seals the room from the outside so that no oxygen can go in, and waits for the victim to suffocate.

- Similar but just prevents the victim coming out long enough for them to die of thirst.

- Murderer comes in with heavy machinery and breaks down the whole building except for the locked room, then lifts the locked room and drops it off a cliff.

Or throw some Havana style mystery in the mix.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58396698

> - The murderer was not in the room when the murder happened. Poison or a trap of some sort. (Kinda boring.)

Slow-acting poison seems easily the most obvious way to do it. I would hope every locked-room investigation quickly rules this out.

> - The murderer was in the room when the murder happened, but locked the door behind themselves. (This one doesn't really work because the door is presumably of a kind that can't be locked behind you, or else no one would be surprised. Good to double-check, though, that you're sure the door couldn't have been locked behind someone leaving.)

The clever trick might be in how the murderer managed to lock the door behind them. Using a magnet to shift the bolt, perhaps? (I'm sure this option must have been explored very early on in the locked-room genre.)

> Are the windows locked? Otherwise it's a rock climber who can climb the side of the building. Some buildings are not that difficult to climb for a good climber.

I'd probably rather just do a retrievable abseil to ground level to minimise risk. However I feel like we're subverting the meaning of "locked room" if it has unlocked egress points. ie ground floor window, or fire escape outside high window etc.

Carpenter here, how would you trim the door on the inside of you pulled it out?

That's gonna be pretty obvious.

In locked room mysteries the evidence seems to be saying that there are zero ways the crime could have happened. This makes them nice to solve because as soon as you work out one way it could have happened it's usually clear that it's the only way. Whereas with other murder mysteries you have multiple suspects and even if you have a guess there's no way to rule out everyone else.

See Vanity Fair's excellent long-form article "The Body in Room 348" for a real life example! https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/true-crime-elegan...

Without reading mode, that site is unusable. All those animated ads and banners are the blink tag all over again.

> Without reading mode

You answered yourself. Read View is great even with well-behaved sites, use it generously.

Edit: I retract my comment, Reader View shows about the last third of the article, and I had already blocked JavaScript there in a previous interaction. Vanity Fair sucks.

Or is it reader view the one that sucks?

It's the first case I've seen where Reader View shows incomplete content, and I use it almost daily because it makes long reads very comfortable. It might be that Reader View sucks, but I'm more inclined to blame Vanity Fair in this case.

Here is an alternate version of the story. https://icantbelieveitsnonfiction.com/2020/10/20/greg-flenik...

I find Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, followed by a visit to my favorite text editor often works like a champ -- even when scrolling is disabled and only a paragraph or two is visible.

Calling that article excellent is almost understatement. One of the most fascinating true crime articles I've read. Thanks for reminding me of it.

Excellent read indeed. Do you know any more that wood be at least in the same league?

Don't know where to find it, but I read another such mystery involving the same real life detective, that involved a girl who when into a motel, and never came out. I'm sure someone will know what I'm referring to.

OK, found it. And Ken Brennan is the stuff legends are made of. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/12/vanishing-blonde-...

Also, I read "In Cold Blood" in its original serial format in the New Yorker, and it was quite good (and long -- for a magazine).

this was a great read. I just had to keep reading, almost felt like following the people solving the mystery.

That just gave me a crazy idea for a game, based on some similar books I've read online. Make a game where, say, you revive every time and your goal is to survive some set period of time but it's a mystery how to do so as many things are out to kill you. Say you have X hours before a large bomb will wipe out your city or whatever and several folks are waiting to kill you in the mean time or such and the goal is basically a rather large escape room with survival as the prize.

You might like the game Twelve Minutes, your comment reminds me of it: https://twelveminutesgame.com/

Edge of Tomorrow builds on a similar premise (Tom Cruise explores a decision tree): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/

>Tom Cruise explores a decision tree

This is the most HN comment I've read all year!

Reminds me a bit of the famous "Wizard of Oz" description:

> Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.

Palm Springs tackles this subject matter as well, but as a comedy:

https://imdb.com/title/tt9484998/

And of course, Groundhog Day:

https://imdb.com/title/tt0107048/

Part of the Groundhog Day genre of movies. https://filmbabble.blogspot.com/2020/08/groundhog-day-is-gen...

Which is based on the short novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Worth reading if you liked the movie.

> Tom Cruise explores a decision tree

I want to see Netflix use that in their film description.

Also the recent Chinese drama "Reset" about two people stuck on a bus with a bomber and apparently no way to prevent the explosion, waking up each time only a few minutes before.

You might find the Sexy Brutale an interesting game, since it is also centered around a time loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sexy_Brutale

The plot of one of my favourite games, Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Outer Worlds), is about being stuck in a solar system where you die (avoiding spoilers intentionally) every 20 minutes and you have to figure out why.

One of my favourite games, the sense of mystery and the high stakes of the plot made it very intriguing to me.

Yep, it's the basis of Outer Wilds, one of the best video games of the last decade, but also others like:

-Sexy Brutale

-Life is Strange

-The Forgotten City (still playing this one)

-Twelve Minutes

There's also Return of the Obra Djinn which is a reverse-mystery thriller, in which you piece together what happened to a ship in reverse murder order.

Thats sort of the opposite of the game just released - Deathloop

And Deathloop is from Arkane Studios, who make very good games (Dishonoured in particular).

Havent had a chance to play that but I thought Prey was extremely underrated. Also hard as fuck on the harder difficulties however. Reminded me of a modern remake of the original Half Life on crack

Very good game, indeed. Clearly in the same tradition as System/Bio Shock.

The “Wandering” scenario from the Super Famicom RPG Live A Live[1] has a similar premise. You have a fixed amount of time before the final boss shows up, and you must find out ways to get and set traps that will affect that battle.

[1]: Which, by the way, is getting a Switch remake: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/live-a-live-switch/

Raging Loop on Steam will scratch that itch for you. Every time you die, you learn something new and new choices open up.

Not exactly the same but similar Zelda: Majora's Mask

You must complete your missions before the Moon collides with earth in 3 days or restart from the beginning.

Try reading Mother of Learning.

You might like the (very old) game Countdown. Although it's a bit broader than just a locked room at the start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(video_game)

You wake up with amnesia locked in a room in an asylum, and have to figure it out from there.

I’ve done an escape room puzzle that had precisely this kind of premise.

It reminds me of "428: Shibuya Scramble", a FMV-based visual novel that literally involves a bomb that will blow up in a very busy part of the city of Shibuya. At least that's the initial premise.

You have to make choices for different characters, and unless you get everything perfectly right, you die. There is often no way to know at first, but it is possible to go back in time and fix things up once you reach a bad ending.

This game is notable for having a perfect 40/40 score from Famitsu, a rare score usually only attributed to famous titles like some Zelda games. And yet, it is mostly unknown outside of Japan and it only got translated 10 years after it came out, in 2018.

One way to think about the popularity of locked-room mysteries is to think about the popularity of knock-knock jokes, or any other joke with a similarly well-worn setup.

Precisely because it's well-worn territory, the low-hanging fruit has all been picked, and the art is in coming up with a punchline that feels new or original.

"The Mystery of the Yellow Room," published in 1908 and considered one of the best of its time, might seem downright formulaic more than a century later, because so many variations have been published since.

So the challenge for the writer of a locked-room mystery in the 21st century is to work within the boundaries of the premise but still make it feel, to the reader, that the climax is surprising or otherwise novel.

I liked The Mystery of the Yellow Room better than Carr's when I was going through a locked-door phase. It's written well and unlike many of the others, the solution is pretty logical. And it has the best "when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" moments as well. "Starting on the right side of reason," as Rouletabille (sp?) puts it.

Umineko: When They Cry has a great deconstruction of the locked-room trope. It’s a very long story (5 gigabytes of voiced lines!), but a hugely entertaining deconstruction for any fan of the detective/mystery genre. One of the best mysteries I’ve ever read.

https://umineko-project.org/en/ is the definitive version, but please support the author by also buying the game on steam or elsewhere.

An example from Umineko that might tickle an HN reader's fancy: six people are found murdered in six different locked rooms. In the room with each body is the sole key to the door of one of the other locked rooms. Together they form a circular linked list of closed room murders.

I really like Umineko, and that is the first thing that came to mind from this article.

I gotta say the first episode (or was it the first two?) was rather off-putting for me because -- after a slow start -- it pretty much drags you through the mud with apparent fantasy elements that don't really seem to make any sense. I almost stopped reading.

I'm still not entirely sure what to make out of the whole story, but I'm so glad I didn't stop at the first episode. Actually I feel like I should read it again now that I'm more accustomed to the logic.

And yes it's a very long read. Estimates put it at around a million words.

Right now the MG release is 40% off on GOG.

https://www.gog.com/game/umineko_when_they_cry_question_arcs

https://www.gog.com/game/umineko_when_they_cry_answer_arcs

I think the question and answer arcs are about 1 million words each, putting the total closer to 2 million words. But once it was finished I wanted more.

For myself the biggest problem was the very long peaceful intro in episode 1. It’s a long time before anything happens (lots of world building and setup)… although when the “fishy aroma” music track finally drops the impact is amazing. And it just gets crazier and crazier from there.

Clearly those murders were done through magic.

By coincidence I have just finished JDC's "The Three Coffins" (AKA "The Hollow Man") [0], written in 1935, where at one point one of the characters break the fourth wall. He talks directly to the reader and laments that in the end the reader will be disappointed in the solution. Which I was, slightly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Man_(Carr_novel)

Douglas Adams did a great parody of this genre in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul:

> "Gilks!" he said. "Your smart-alec suicide theory. I like it. It works for me. And I think I see how the clever bastard pulled it off. Bring me pen. Bring me paper."

> He sat down with a flourish at the cherrywood farmhouse table which occupied the centre of the rear portion of the room and deftly sketched out a scheme of events which involved a number of household or kitchen implements, a swinging, weighted light fitting, some very precise timing, and hinged on the vital fact that the record turntable was Japanese.

> "That should keep your forensic chaps happy," said Dirk briskly to Gilks. The forensic chaps glanced at it, took in its salient points and liked them. They were simple, implausible, and of exactly that nature which a coroner who liked the same sort of holidays in Marbella which they did would be sure to relish.

> The final third of the book was wrapped in a thin, paper seal—and came with a promise that the purchase price would be refunded if the book was returned with the seal unbroken.

A freemium model of sorts.

Rather than book samples and movie trailers it would be interesting to be able to start a story and decide a fraction of the way in wether or not to purchase the entire content.

That's basically Kindle book samples, you get the first chapter or so free and then hit a purchase button.

> There are so many moving parts in some of his stories that you want to put down the book and sit back in awe that Carr can handle all of them without dropping a single strand. I’m tempted to describe this as a quasi-mathematical skill, but Carr always proclaimed his absolute hatred of math (which he called “the last refuge of the halfwit”)—and there’s even an anecdote about him punching a friend simply because he had mentioned the word algebra.

> Sometimes I feel I need to construct a GANTT chart just to understand the explanation at the end of some of these novels.

LOL

Jonathan Creek is always worth watching. 'Jack in the Box' and 'The Grinning Man' come to mind.

Big fan :-) Reading this discussion I was trying to remember his name, thank you.

Death behind a locked door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi

I'd love to see what Lock Picking Lawyer could do in terms of locking impossible doors from the outside.

I'd expect that committing a murder in a locked room doesn't really require much in the way of planning or knowledge. Put me in a locked room with someone and I don't need much (except the will and likely a weapon) to do the deed.

However, Getting away with committing a murder in a locked room is the hard part -- how do you exit the room and re-lock it from the inside? How do you make sure to remove all traces of you from the room? And a dozen other things that need to happen in order to get away with such a murder.

The intended meaning is pretty obvious, and explicitly laid it in the second paragraph.

>The intended meaning is pretty obvious, and explicitly laid it in the second paragraph.

Is it? As a native English speaker, the only thing that was immediately obvious (to me) from the title was that commit != getting away with.

If I ever decide to read TFA (highly unlikely), I'm sure I'll notice that part. Thanks for giving me the heads up though.

Locked room murder is a detective genre trope in all kinds of shows, books, and movies. The goal is of course to get away with it.

Committing a murder is really only an issue if you push it.

There's even an old Dragnet episode with a locked room 'murder' mystery plot:

- Man with gun enters home to confront his mother-in-law, and shoots the Bible she's reading

- The mother-in-law shoots the man, but the wound is not immediately fatal.

- Man stumbles into an adjacent study and locks the door behind him, then dies.

- Initially suicide is assumed, but the ballistics don't match the gun in his hand.

- The bullet he fired is stuck in the Bible he shot, undetected by anyone.

Kind of lame and contrived by comparison to Poe and others, but for a 1967 TV show...

Mystery show had an episode about this. They assumed someone poisoned the wine, but testing came up empty. The killer pumped gas into the room. It was hours before anyone noticed the death, at which point the gas had dissipated.

I think they either overlooked the fact that it would make everyone else queasy as it circulated around the hotel, or they assumed a lot of it would leak out through the walls, which is not necessarily a good assumption.

Not familiar with the gas used in the Mystery show, but if it was nitrogen pumped into the victim's room, nobody in the rest of the hotel would have felt anything. Nitrogen is an excellent asphyxiant, with no sensible difference from air.

Could this method even be detected in an Autopsy ?

I don't know. I doubt there would be any gross indicators (like petechiae incident to strangulation), but maybe there would be some subtle blood chemistry indicator.

Nitrogen asphyxiation is an occasional industrial cause of death. I haven't looked in to the post-mortem data.

On cop procedurals the coroner often claims the victim died of asphyxiation. Whether that's true or not I couldn't say.

I know there are symptoms of hypoxia that can be readily diagnosed in a living patient.

There are some questions that need establishing: Was the person murdered? Was it intended for the dead person to die inside a locked room? Any medical complaints/treatments which could have lead to the person dying? Any cause to murder that person? If murdered the method used could indicate background of the murderer? When is a scenario/situation not just a phishing exercise for some other purpose?

One needs to separate that there has been a murder with the perception there has been a murder.

The article mentions the possibility there has been no murder until someone enters the room and discovers/postulates there has been a murder.

What if no one ever enters, but no one ever leaves. Do we know the room is, in fact, not non empty, or is the room None?

Lots of classics in the genre. Two I've read recently (no idea if they are widely known) are

  The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizu
  In the morning I'll be gone by Adrian McKinty

The latter is the third in a series (police procedural set in Northern Ireland) and I'd recommend reading the first two first.

Saw this on Battlestar Galactica, killer vents the atmosphere from an external control box and escapes unseen. Later on its noticed that everyone in the room has died. ;) You think there would be alarms on an engineering station someplace that would fire off when the atmosphere gets thin.

Presumably the old BSG?

In the new BSG, atmospheric sensors feature in at least two episodes...the one where terrorists take over a bar, and in the one where Callie and the Chief get trapped in a launch tube.

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Measure_of_Salvation it was just the O2, but that really ought to have a sensor.

The running series of Death in Paradise (it is rather mundane but a welcome caribbean distraction for us northerners in those dark winter months) featured such a murder in episode four and I shall not spoil it, only say that I didn't expect that ending.

Did anyone ever read the Westing Game? Not sure why I thought of it just now, but I loved that book.

I tried scanning the article for recommendations of these locked room mysteries, but didn't go past the spoilers tagline.

Can anyone recommend where you can find these?

Is it safe to click?

Yes

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