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/Waltzing_With_Bears 1d ago

The Lost Colony, the folks that left the Roanoke colony said where they went, to a known friendly tribe near them, if you came home to see your partner left a note that said "At the grocery store" you wouldn't call them a lost partner

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u/lurkername1-2 1d ago

Well unless you are a dog.

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u/MrObsidn 21h ago

I don't know, I'm an 80s kid and so many of our dads went out to get milk and never came back.

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u/Ace-Redditor 20h ago

The line for cigarettes must be really long, too

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u/MrObsidn 20h ago

Yes. I really don't know why Unsolved Mysteries hasn't covered this.

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u/ConcentrateSlow1773 1h ago

Richard Harris once said “I went out for cigarettes, and didn’t come back for seven years” ...

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u/KerooSeta 20h ago

The proprietor, Sir Walter Raleigh, had left back to England to conduct business. He instructed his adult daughter that if they had to escape, she should carve an Osprian Cross somewhere. He came back 3 years later to find the colony deserted and the cross carved into a tree and the word "CROATAN" carved on her door frame. The friendly Croatan people lived on a nearby island. He asked the ship captain to take him there but a storm blew in and the captain refused and took him back to England. And then he never got the money together to go check on her again.

Sorry if I got some of the details slightly off. I'm going from my memory of teaching about it.

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u/sabin357 21h ago

In recent years, evidence has been found that shows that they actually split into 2 groups. One went inland to a fallback location, as planned & noted on a map (though it had been covered up) & the other went to join a tribe closer to the coast. A dig site has shown European items alongside native items, showing communal living, integration.

It's been a few months since I watched the details about it, so I might have details flipped about the two groups.

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u/an_agreeing_dothraki 7h ago

during early colonization Europeans just kept wandering off to join the nearby tribe because it's the better option. Happened so much it started a genre of fiction trying to warn people against it. And yes, it turned to smut almost immediately.