Gramophone

The gramophone, an ordinary record player, becomes the crucial device in a staged suicide. Its turntable spindle and power-cable opening offered a route for a concealed thread to manipulate the key from outside the room, making a door locked from within appear to support the death as a suicide.

Forensic Clues

The machine’s exterior carried ash consistent with the fire in the waste bin, but examination inside it uncovered a different trace: high-quality, thin but strong thread twisted around the turntable spindle. One end appeared to have been severed by flame. This distinction mattered because analysis also found ash inside the lock—and on parts of the key—that could not have come from the waste-bin fire. The gramophone connected those otherwise puzzling traces.

The Locking Mechanism

Arnold Gentry described a possible reconstruction, while making clear that the laboratory was still testing it and that the evidence did not itself establish what had happened. A thread tied to the spindle could pass through the power-cable aperture, wrap around the key head, and run through the keyhole. With the key placed in the inside lock and turned almost far enough to engage the bolt, playing a record would wind in the slack and exert enough pressure to turn the key. The machine could be switched on from outside using the mains switch.

In the proposed method, the thread—or much of it—would first be soaked in accelerant. After hearing the lock click, the perpetrator could ignite the loose end hanging from the keyhole. The flame would travel through the lock and burn around the key head, freeing the thread attached to the spindle so the record could resume playing. Gentry presented this as a hypothesis for the investigators to assess, not as a conclusion established by the forensic findings alone.

Role in the Staged Suicide

The later confession confirms that the gramophone mechanism formed part of the murderer's staging. The murderer acknowledges that the setup involved burning threads and says paper was burned in the waste bin partly to conceal ash traces left by them. Among the papers was the victim’s son’s letter, which the murderer did not want left behind; additional sheets were burned to suggest an abandoned attempt to write a farewell note. The gramophone thus served not merely as a prop: its operation helped produce the apparent locked-room scene, while the fire and burned papers were arranged to obscure the mechanism and shape how the death would be interpreted.