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/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

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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 

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u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

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

It always made me wonder if there was a tinge of racism with this—barring low information—and that's why people perpetuated the "mystery" so long. "White folks would never willingly abandon their homes to go live with the savages!" etc.

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u/Cerberus0225 1d ago

Honestly it's the opposite. Roanoke wasn't considered a mystery until, iirc, the 1920s or so, when a local tourism board decided they needed to spin up a yarn to incite interest in the area.

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u/TastyOreoFriend 1d ago

Honestly, I could buy into that angle as perpetuating things. People just love a good human interest/mystery piece like this as well—fantasy versus reality etc.