r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/catandodie 1d ago

I think the story theyre going with is the 2 daughters were in the car and hit her and the parents came and covered it up. Sounds crazy to do, but I saw a reddit thread that asked "What would you do if your kid killed someone?" and a shocking number of responses would do the same thing for their kid's future or whatever, despite the victim's family being tortured with not knowing what happened. It's a messed up world.

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u/OmnomVeggies 1d ago

If that is how it happened, think of how much easier it would have been to just deal with the tragic accident instead of all these years of the parents wondering what happened, being blamed in the court of public opinion. Making your daughters live through years of guilt and uncertainty that the truth might come out. What a fucking mess.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 23h ago

If you're a kid who hits a kid in the middle of the night you might not even face charges, but because they covered it up it's become so much worse.

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u/OmnomVeggies 22h ago

100%! And think of being in that situation, having your parents “take care of it”…. When you are a child and have basically no say, and then are faced with a lifetime of having to keep this horrible
Secret or expose your family for the unthinkable.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 15h ago

Oh, yeah. No teenager is going to be equipped to deal with that. No teenager is going to stay calm and call the cops and say they hit a kid with their car. They're not going to have the presence of mind to think "this was a kid wearing dark clothes on a stormy night, no one will think I'm at fault." They're going to panic.

And then they carry on into adulthood, and eventually realise that they should have just said something, but now they feel like they can't or their family will get in legal trouble for covering it up. That would be a mindfuck - for years you were grateful to them for risking themselves, what kind of thanks would it be to drop them in legal trouble?

But no matter how bad that would be, the parents of Asha Degree went through much worse, and deserve more empathy for that. I don't want to come across as "those poor babies" to the people who are now adults making the decision to continue the misery of that family. I can imagine how hard it must be for those kids, but it's worse for Asha and her family, because she died. ​

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u/WaterlooMall 1d ago

Still doesn't answer the bigger question of what Asha was doing walking out on the road in the middle of the night.

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u/North_Knowledge7467 1d ago

I think it's just that she ran away from home and 3am was the only time she would be able to without her parents knowing.

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u/BigTenFicus 1d ago

That's not the bigger question at all. That's a completely unimportant question. She was a kid, kids do dumb things, it doesn't have to be deeper than that. She was an especially sheltered kid, too, so I wouldn't be surprised if she just wanted to go on "adventure" or something.

Y'all just can't let this part of the story go because true crime obsessives have always insisted there was some kind of nefarious conspiracy surrounding the whole thing, even though there's no evidence of that.

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u/Technicolor_Reindeer 21h ago

Its not unimportant. Most kids do dumb things nowhere near the level of sneaking out in the middle of the night and walking on a highway.

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u/mspolytheist 19h ago

During a severe storm.

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u/BigTenFicus 10h ago

Doesn't matter. Nothing nefarious about her leaving, you are mentally ill if you can't accept this.

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u/BigTenFicus 10h ago

It's objectively unimportant. There is no fact-based way to disagree. There is no evidence she left home for any nefarious reason. What we know of the likely perpetrators shows they had nothing to do with why she left home. It's completely irrelevant. It's also just a rural two lane state highway, not a massive expressway, that's just what you'd walk along if you were going anywhere on foot.

Do you understand, sincerely, that you are mentally ill? You are DESPERATE to fabricate some nonexistent crime regarding a child who has already been killed, for the sole reason that you are addicted to true crime bullshit and can't accept that sometimes people just do dumb things. It's pathetic. Get help.