Thirty-year-old Polish laundryman Isidor Fink lived and worked in a large room on the ground floor of a tenement block on East 132nd Street in New York. Every door and window was secured with bars, bolts, and locks. Fink sublet two rooms at the rear to an elderly woman, but the door to these rooms was permanently bolted shut on both sides.

On March 9, 1929, Fink returned home at 10:15 p.m. At 10:30, the tenant heard screams and the sound of blows. She summoned a policeman, who found all the doors locked. Finally he sent a small boy through the transom to open the door. Fink’s body lay on the floor with two bullet wounds in the chest and one in the arm, which was powder-marked.

No weapon was found on the premises, the cash register was untouched, and all fingerprints were Fink’s. If this was suicide, where was the weapon? If Fink had been shot from a distance through the transom, how account for the powder marks on his arm? After 82 years, the laundryman’s death has never been explained.

On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick in a field in St. Louis. In his pockets were the two hand-printed documents above. Both the FBI and the American Cryptogram Association have failed to decipher the notes, so they’ve issued an appeal for help from the public.

Investigators believe the notes were written up to three days before McCormick’s death; his family says he’d used such encrypted notes since he was a boy. “Breaking the code could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide,” said Dan Olson, chief of the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit. “Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”

This is not an April Fools’ joke — the FBI’s appeal, including larger versions of the images, is here.

(Thanks, Bunk.)

In 2007 Irish police noticed an alarming trend: They had written more than 50 tickets to one driver, a Prawo Jazdy. In traffic stops he had offered Polish credentials with varying addresses, and the repeated citations had failed to improve his driving.

In June they realized their mistake: Prawo Jazdy is Polish for “driver’s license.”

See Nothing Doing.

Unidentified court transcript quoted by Rodney R. Jones in Disorderly Conduct: Verbatim Excerpts From Actual Cases, 1987:

Counsel: Could you briefly describe the type of construction equipment used in your business?

Witness: Four tractors.

Counsel: What kind of tractors are they?

Witness: Fords.

Counsel: Did you say “four”?

Witness: Ford. Ford. Like the Ford. It is a Ford tractor.

Counsel: You didn’t say “four,” you just said “Ford”?

Witness: Yes, Ford. That is what you asked me, what kind of tractors.

Counsel: Are there four Ford tractors? Is that what it is?

Witness: No, no. You asked me what kind of a tractor it was and I said Ford tractors.

Counsel: How many tractors are there?

Witness: Four.

On the evening of Jan. 19, 1931, the Liverpool Chess Club took a telephone message for one of its members. The caller, an R.M. Qualtrough, said he wanted William Wallace to visit him the following evening at 25 Menlove Gardens East to discuss insurance.

Wallace arrived 25 minutes later and took the message. The following evening he made his way into Liverpool by tram, only to discover that no such address existed. He made inquiries with a local policeman and a newsagent, then returned home and found that his wife had been beaten to death in their sitting room.

Had Wallace manufactured an alibi and then killed her himself? The telephone call had been placed from a box only 400 yards from Wallace’s house, but the message taker was certain the caller had not been Wallace. The crime scene was quite bloody, but no traces of blood were found on Wallace’s suit. A milk delivery boy insisted he had spoken to Julia Wallace only minutes before her husband would have had to leave to catch the tram.

Wallace was found guilty and sentenced to death, but an appeals court quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was unsupported by evidence. Wallace went free and died in Wirral in 1933. The crime remains unsolved.

If Wallace killed his wife, how did he manage it? If he didn’t … who did?

On Dec. 28, 1885, London grocer Edwin Bartlett was discovered dead in his bed. In his stomach was a fatal quantity of chloroform, but, strangely, his throat and larynx showed no signs of the burning that liquid chloroform should have caused.

Bartlett’s wife, Adelaide, was having an open romance with George Dyson, a local minister. It transpired that she had induced him to buy chloroform at local pharmacies in quantities too small to provoke suspicion, ostensibly to help treat Edwin, who was undergoing painful dental surgeries.

At trial, Adelaide’s defense was simply that she had no way to get the chloroform into Edwin’s stomach without passing it down his throat. The jury let her go.

“Now that Mrs. Bartlett has been acquitted,” remarked pathologist Sir James Paget afterward, “she should tell us, in the interests of science, how she did it.” Adelaide made no response. The puzzle of Edwin’s death has never been solved.

On July 12, 1942, someone shot Max Geller, the owner of Harlem’s Green Parrot Restaurant. The restaurant was locally famous for its namesake parrot, who had a useful vocabulary and could greet regular patrons by name.

No customer could identify the killer, and the agitated bird would cry only “Robber! Robber!” As the investigation foundered, someone suggested that perhaps it was saying “Robert! Robert!”

On the list of Geller’s regular customers detectives found a Robert Butler, a cab driver who had disappeared after the shooting. They traced him to the Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore, and he confessed: He’d shot Geller in a drunken rage for refusing to serve him. He was convicted in February 1944 and sentenced to 15 years.

He said, “I never did like that bird.”