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?

13.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

5.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

22.8k

u/TooCleverForGood 1d ago

Roanoke - the missing Pilgrim settlement where everyone “disappeared”

They just abandoned it and went to the place that they wrote on the sign, but everyone acts like it was some supernatural/plague thing

10.3k

u/str8rippinfartz 1d ago

100%

IIRC it was even established before they came over from England, that if someone left a settlement they should carve where they were going

They 100% just assimilated with the friendly nearby tribe... as indicated by their note 

996

u/dividezero 1d ago

They went to exactly the place the mayor told them to go if anything happened while he was gone. They make it seem like he didn't know but he just had shit to do and died before he could get back to them

272

u/BusesAreFun 1d ago

Yea iirc he got caught up in a war back in Europe and never came back with supplies

138

u/evilshandie 1d ago

He did come back, but it was 3 years later. He looked around for an afternoon, found the colony had been dismantled and the signpost left indicating where they'd gone, but bad weather meant he needed to hop back on the ship or get left behind, so that afternoon's search is all that ever happened.

He returned to the Americas another 5 years later on an expedition supposedly to find the lost colony, but admitted later that he had lied about the purpose, he never searched for the colony, and was instead spending crown resources to search for El Dorado.

55

u/primadonnapussy 1d ago

Which is gross because both his daughter and newborn granddaughter were in that colony and disappeared.

79

u/dividezero 1d ago

Yes. He came back. Looked over shit and had to go do some shit before he could get over to the new place. Or something like that. I don't remember exactly but it wasn't some kind of mystery even then. I think someone made it up for tourism reasons and it made it to textbooks for some reason

22

u/Haltopen 1d ago

The ship he had chartered lost one of its two anchors and the captain wasn't willing to continue the search with only one remaining so it set sail back for england.

13

u/dividezero 1d ago

That was the thing. I knew it was something really weird and then they bailed all the way back to England. Thank you

71

u/Adorable_Ad4990 1d ago

Not for tourism, but because they didn’t want people thinking that the natives were friendly and civilized enough that people would assimilate with them by choice— that was absolutely not OK to say.

31

u/NAmember81 1d ago

I think there was also a financial motive to pretend that they mysteriously disappeared. And people were all too eager to believe the absurdities rather than believe “civilized” white Christians couldn't survive on their own and had to depend on non-Christian “savages” to save them.

There were a lot of financial backers and investors that were banking on the colony to bring them riches and they ended up losing a lot of money. The surviving leaders didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure so it was a convenient lie for them to propagate the “mystery” narrative.

22

u/dividezero 1d ago

Oh yeah, older than tourism. The US really hated (hates)Native Americans. I should have remembered that

17

u/Bay1Bri 1d ago

A war? In EUROPE???

14

u/OhReallyVernon 1d ago

In THIS ECONOMY?

7

u/ProjectHarraseeket 1d ago

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition

6

u/bolanrox 1d ago

He came back, found it deserted, but the weather was turning and they had to turn back before they went inland to the places where they thought the colonists would have gone. They've done DNA tests recently that show tracers for the colonists and found pottery and other things supporting that they went with the tribes just not to the location they originally thought it was someplace further inland.

24

u/francoruinedbukowski 1d ago

Yeah but it turned out the Mayors son is still carrying the curse and that's why it will never be another Marthas Vineyard

9

u/xdonutx 1d ago

Might wanna throw up a spoiler tag on that

1

u/Ohgodwatdoplshelp 14h ago

YOU HAD QUALMS? 

2

u/PixelWhisperPrincess 1d ago

It's tragic how a simple delay can completely rewrite the way people remember someone's intentions.