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If you've ever seen a vault door, it needs to be closed before the lock can be engaged.

Seeing as it's been almost a day, I'll give a little hint. In the OP, I said the room depicted in my diagram was "as the police saw it". I used that wording deliberately.

No, but clever.

I'm sure the unhooked-up toilet and its position has something to do with it, but I can't quite grasp it right now.

It's not like there's a lot of places for a killer to hide

You might want to run with that idea, Gideon...

While Gideon figures out the right answer I will give more wrong ones.

Was the man lying face-down or face-up?

Another question: are there any traces of gunpowder on his hands?

Even with pills, he couldn't have shot himself, how he's lying is of no consequence to the answer, no one is in the boxes(as has been stated), and there's nothing under the toilet.

Think outside the box a bit.

How could anyone reach the room and access the entrance door from the outside if it is surrounded by concrete on all sides?

Except beyond the door, silly.

If you look at the picture, the parts of the toilet fit perfectly into two of the boxes on the left. Did the old man take the toilet out himself, I wonder?

No unicorns, the door is intact, he genuinely had arthritis and keep digging, you're getting warmer.

I wonder if you say that this scene is "how the police saw it," that means that it used to look differently. Like Norroen's toilet-in-the-box theory.

Also, could he have locked the door himself using his elbows or something to spin the wheel?

Or with his legs, while lying on the floor (before being shot, of course).

Okay, a question. You say "a man was found in a locked room". How? I mean, the room must have been unlocked by someone or there must be some way to see into it from the outside, otherwise how would anyone know what's inside?

The police cut through the door.

Ah, right, missed that. Sorry.

Yet they would have to be looking through the ceiling to get the view depicted in the diagram.

I suppose this means that the door was intact prior to the old man's body being discovered. I also suppose that this information is given from our point of view, not from the point of view of the people that discovered the body (us being rather like the author of a novel, who, like a demigod, knows more about the plot than the characters do). Because otherwise it would not have made much sense: while cutting through the door, the police were too concerned about reaching the old man and might have missed something - and afterwards, all clues that might have been there would have surely been destroyed by their cutting through the door.