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You've probably heard of the term locked-room mystery before. It is a crime that has committed

under circumstances in which it seems impossible for the perpetrator to have entered the scene,

committed the crime, and then left without being detected. To the point where it almost seems as,

though the culprit must have the ability to walk through walls. A classic theoretical example

would be a murder committed in a windowless room, with the door found locked from the inside.

Of course, locked-room mysteries are more often associated with works of detective fiction than

with real-life cases. But there are in fact a handful of true-blue real-life locked-room mysteries

that have left investigators bewildered, and that read like something off of the pages of an Agatha

Christine novel. The story of Lateeja Toro is one such case, and one that, due to the

baffling nature of the crime and the sheer amount of time elapsed since it took place,

is incredibly unlikely to ever truly be solved.

First, before we get into Lateeja Toro and the circumstances surrounding her death,

let's first take a look at the time and place of her murder. The year was 1937,

and the city was Paris, France. To say that this was a tense political era in Europe is very much

an under-exaggeration. Edolf Hitler had just come to power four years beforehand. Benito Mussolini

had been leading the fascist party in Italy for 15 years, and that was where Lateeja was originally

from, and the world was stepping onto the doormat of World War II. Most of Europe was a powder

keg about to explode, and that tension more than likely played directly into Lateeja Toro's murder.

The basics of her life are as follows. She was a young woman, only 29 years old at the time of her

...