The story surrounds a baffling double murder where Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter are brutally murdered in the Rue Morgue, a street in Paris. C. Auguste Dupin reads the newspaper accounts of the murder, which reveal that the mother's throat was so badly cut that her head is barely attached and the daughter violently stuffed into the chimney. Oddly, the murder occurred in a seemingly inaccessible room on the fourth floor that was locked from the inside. Witnesses who heard the murder give very contradictory accounts, each claiming they heard the murderer speaking a different language including English, French, Russian and Italian. Dupin and his friend, the unnamed narrator of the story, live in relative isolation, venturing outside only at night.