Lars Thorwald Attacks Jeffries and Falls to His Death While Fleeing is the confrontation that turns Hal Jeffries’s suspicions into an immediate struggle for survival and, afterward, a confirmed murder case. Trapped in his chair, Jeffries realizes that his telephone has not merely gone dead: the wire has been cut inside the house, placing the danger close at hand. Thorwald’s attack ends with Inspector Boyne intervening as Thorwald tries to escape across the buildings. Thorwald falls to his death, and a search of the unfinished apartment above his confirms where Anna Thorwald’s body was concealed.

The Cut Line and the Threat Inside

The severed telephone line is the decisive change in Jeffries’s understanding of the danger. At first, he treats the silence on the line as a possible interruption and tries to restore the call. Then he recognizes that the wire has been cut nearby, inside the house, rather than disconnected beyond it. The cut therefore announces not only that he has lost his means of calling for help, but that someone has entered his immediate surroundings.

The recognition comes with a sense of time running out. Jeffries thinks of the earlier delay in the case as a final, fatal instance of the pattern he has called delayed action. He believes that even reaching Inspector Boyne now would not bring help quickly enough. The neighbors around him might hear a shout, but he judges that they could not identify the source and reach him before the attack ended. He does not call out, not from courage, but because he sees no practical use in it. The scene makes his isolation concrete: the people are nearby, yet distance, confusion, and the time required to respond leave him alone with the threat.

Jeffries’s Improvised Defense

Jeffries cannot get up from his chair, so his choices are limited to what he can reach and what Thorwald might see in the dark. He pulls down a bust, uses a steamer rug that had been cushioning the chair, and arranges the two against his shoulder to suggest a seated figure. He then lets his head and shoulder hang over the chair arm and imitates the heavy breathing of someone asleep. The deception is an attempt to make Thorwald direct an attack at the apparent figure rather than at Jeffries himself; it cannot guarantee safety, but might create a brief chance to react.

As he waits, Jeffries considers the different dangers of a close attack and a gun. He thinks that if Thorwald uses a knife or strikes him, he might still be able to grapple with him, whereas a gun would leave little prospect of escape. The narration thus keeps the tactical calculation within the limits imposed by Jeffries’s immobility: he cannot meet Thorwald on equal terms or flee, and must depend on concealment, the narrow possibility of surprise, and whatever happens next.

Thorwald enters without Jeffries hearing the door open. The silence is consistent with his skill at handling knobs and hinges, and the fact that this door is directly behind Jeffries makes the unnoticed entry especially consequential. Jeffries senses a current of air and understands that the approach has reached the room. A shot flashes through the darkness and destroys the bust on his shoulder. The makeshift substitute has taken the immediate impact, but the attack is not over. Thorwald moves toward the window, apparently seeking a way out; when Jeffries shifts into the narrow space beside the chair, Thorwald turns and fires again at close range. Jeffries is not hit, and the second shot does not end the encounter.

Flight and Fatal Fall

Thorwald’s attention turns from Jeffries to escape. He drops from the window into the yard, then crosses two fences and returns toward his own building. His route depends on the connected yards and the buildings’ windows; an open window that had been left ajar for ventilation gives him a way back inside. The detail matters because his flight is not simply a dash away from the scene: it is a quick, shifting attempt to use the layout of the adjoining buildings to get beyond pursuit.

Jeffries watches Thorwald climb toward his own windows and then change course, moving upward past the fifth and sixth floors toward the roof. Inspector Boyne has meanwhile reached Jeffries’s side. He sights toward Thorwald and recognizes the height from which the man may fall. On the parapet, Thorwald remains exposed for a moment, still trying to act before he is stopped. A shot rings out from above. Thorwald releases his gun and goes over the edge; he misses the fire escape and falls to the ground below. The account establishes the fall as fatal, closing the pursuit with Thorwald’s death rather than an arrest.

The episode reverses Jeffries’s helpless position without erasing its cost. He has been unable to leave his chair or summon help, and his improvised defense has not itself stopped Thorwald. The escape attempt brings the confrontation into view of Inspector Boyne, whose intervention ends it. Jeffries survives, but the man he suspected is dead, and the case still requires the physical confirmation that the authorities had not yet found.

The Search and the Delayed Confirmation

After Thorwald’s fall, Jeffries identifies the place he believes will resolve the mystery: the Rear Apartment on the Fifth Floor at 525 Benedict Avenue, above Thorwald’s. Its kitchen has a cement floor raised above the level of the other rooms. Jeffries explains that the raised floor had been built as an inexpensive way to meet fire requirements while creating a dropped living-room effect. He urges Inspector Boyne to have it dug up. This is the scene’s shift from immediate survival back to the reasoning behind Jeffries’s accusation: the location and construction detail point the search toward a specific hiding place.

Inspector Boyne goes to the apartment at once, crossing through the basement and over the fences to save time. Because electricity has not yet been connected there, those searching use torches. In about half an hour, Inspector Boyne signals from the window that the search has confirmed Jeffries’s conclusion. The discovery supplies the evidence that the failed earlier search had not produced and ties the pursuit of Thorwald to the concealed fate of Anna Thorwald.

Inspector Boyne does not return to Jeffries until nearly eight in the morning, after the dead have been taken away. He then acknowledges that his earlier handling of the case was mistaken. The man sent to examine Thorwald’s trunk had been instructed to check its contents, not to verify the description of the woman; a tenant questioned two days earlier had supplied details that did not agree with that description. Inspector Boyne says he recognized the discrepancy only later, when it came back to him after he had gone home. Jeffries names the recurring problem as delayed action and admits that it nearly killed him.

Significance in the Case

The confrontation joins two kinds of delay that had threatened to keep the truth out of reach. Jeffries’s warning was not acted upon decisively, and his own recognition of the danger comes only after Thorwald has cut the line and entered the house. In the attack, time contracts to seconds: Jeffries cannot move, the phone cannot connect him to help, and the nearby neighbors cannot arrive soon enough. Once Thorwald is dead, however, the case still turns on a patient, concrete inference about the raised cement floor and on a search that produces confirmation within half an hour.

The ending resolves the central accusation without making the earlier failures disappear. Thorwald’s death stops his escape, while the discovery in the upstairs apartment establishes the concealed crime. Inspector Boyne’s later admission also locates part of the delay in the investigation’s own procedures: the trunk was examined without checking the woman’s description, and an earlier tenant’s account was not reconciled with it in time. Jeffries’s phrase for this pattern becomes both a description of the police’s belated recognition and a measure of his own near-fatal wait. The event therefore concludes the immediate pursuit while showing how the truth depended on details noticed, overlooked, and finally connected.