Thus, we are given the bare facts of the murder. The old woman had "thick tresses" of her hair pulled out, her throat was cut so deeply across that when the police picked up the body, the head fell off.
Furthermore, the woman was completely covered with bruises, so terribly that the police assume that she was bludgeoned badly before her head was almost severed. The body itself was found lying in the courtyard four flights down from the woman's apartment, and it is impossible to determine how the body got into the courtyard because the room was completely locked from within.
Her daughter was choked to death, apparently, by the hands of an extremely powerful man, and she was stuffed up the chimney, head downward. It would have taken super-human strength to have put her there because it took such violents tugs to remove her.
The newspaper recounts how the old woman had just withdrawn 4,000 francs in gold from her bank; unaccountably, the two bags of money were found in the middle of the room, which was totally torn apart. The men who entered the apartment were all interviewed by the police, and all of the witnesses agree on one matter: There were two voices — one was the deep voice of a Frenchman and the other was a shriller, higher voice, but no one who heard that voice could identify the accent conclusively.
The physician and the surgeon both agree that Mademoiselle Camille was "throttled to death" and that "the corpse of the mother was horribly mutilated." All the bones of the old woman's leg and arm were shattered and many other bones (ribs included) were splintered. It is concluded that some kind of heavy club was used on her.
Because an acquaintance of M. Dupin is accused of the murders, M. Dupin receives permission to investigate the environs, a setting which is extremely intriguing since the newspapers report that the crime seems impossible to solve because there could be no way for a murderer to escape from the locked, enclosed apartment.
