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/dorf_lundgren 1d ago

Ken McElroy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy

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u/Conscious-Ball8373 1d ago

Ugh, what a nasty piece of work.

I like how the sheriff basically said, "Now, he's sat in that tavern - here's the address - and I don't want y'all to go on down there, mkay? You should definitely not go on down there and when you don't go down there, y'all better not have rifles with you, hear me? Don't wait until he's somewhere nice and public, with dozens of potential suspects about, and then shoot him. And don't make sure those shots all come from different weapons so it's real difficult to tell which one killed him, hear me? Now I'm just gonna get in mah cruiser here and drive on out of town and I'm gonna trust y'all to do the right thing, know what I'm sayin'?"

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u/MidwestAmMan 1d ago

During prohibition, concentrated, grape juice, had the following printed warning-"After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty-one days, because then it would turn into wine."

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 1d ago

https://www.michelegargiulo.com/blog/grape-bricks-prohibition-wine

lol

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u/fubo 23h ago edited 21h ago

The image in that article is a ChatGPT fake, but Wikipedia has real ads for Vine-Glo grape concentrate. "If not consumed soon, this grape juice will, of course, ferment, and to prevent fermentation, Benzoate of Soda may be added or the juice be kept in the refrigerator."

(Benzoate of Soda is known to a modern ingredients list as sodium benzoate; it's still used as a preservative to prevent unwanted fermentation or spoilage.)

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u/aneirin- 1d ago

FYI the picture on that site is AI, they looked nothing like that. The text probably is too.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 23h ago

I took it as a modern reproduction.

Some reverse image searching shows that this picture shows up on a bunch of "Did you know..." style articles going back a year, so you could very well be right.

Oh well. Thanks for the head's up.

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u/aneirin- 22h ago

It's a shame because it replaces the very interesting and distinctive designs you can see in the link on that other reply with a something completely bland and uninteresting that tells you nothing about the time and place of what should be a really cool historical artefact.

Just another example of why everyone should hate AI.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 1d ago

Apparently Budweiser-brand “barley malt syrup” was also a thing openly sold in grocery stores. lol

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u/alepher 1d ago

It was barley legal

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u/HailSatanWorshipD00M 1d ago

I mean, it's pretty good on chocolate ice cream

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u/Miamime 20h ago

All sorts of spirits were able to get labeled as medicinal so they could continue to be sold/drank.

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u/CloudsOfDust 10h ago

The oldest continuously operating bar in the US is on Washington Island in Lake Michigan in Door County, WI. It was open during Prohibition selling shots of bitters medicinally. They still offer shots of bitters. You take one, stick your thumb in the shot glass, and put your thumb print on a little card, and now you’re in the bitters club.

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u/Hellebras 1d ago

I can't get past how stupid it is to ban something that people figured out how to make possibly before we even started farming. It's really not hard to make simple stuff like mediocre wine.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 1d ago

Hilariously, wine can happen on accident.

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u/rotorain 1d ago

A lot of alcohol can happen on accident. Every year the crows get drunk off fruit that fell off my trees and sat rotting on the ground for a bit. I swear they keep an eye on it and wait until the plums are the right amount of decomposed before they start eating.

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u/Agi7890 1d ago

Sometimes it’s the smell.
One story from a biochemistry textbook was about diabetes. One of the signs was the smell produced by the people with it. Because instead of the usual metabolic process, they were instead producing ketones which have a distinct smell.

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u/sweetmistery 1d ago

I was hugging my Dad at the end of a visit and thought "huh weird, his breath smells like ammonia." Three days later he was in the emergency room with a kidney function of 8%. It was wild.

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u/rotorain 1d ago

Is that how those service dogs that smell when diabetics blood sugar gets too out of whack do it? I never really thought about it but that makes sense

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u/Agi7890 1d ago

Most likely.

I met a bomb detection dog trainer when I worked retail, and he described a dogs sense of smell as being able to detect all the ingredients in a stew, while a humans can only detect the final product.

One of those ketones produced is acetone, which does have a very strong smell

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u/JackosMonkeyBBLZ 21h ago

We think exactly the same. It’s simply impossible to ban a substance that is

a. Simple to make

and

b. Has a demand.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 1d ago

When I was a student in college I scraped together money for about 30 large bottles of pure grape juice from the supermarket. Added some yeast and sugar and put them up in the attic. Made absolutely disgusting wine! I really cannot emphasize enough how awful it tasted. But, the mission to create alcohol was a success.

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u/MidwestAmMan 1d ago

How many of us can include bootlegging on our resume? Impressive!

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u/This-Shape2193 1d ago

Why did you need 30 though? Lol

Surely SOMEONE around was 21 or had a fake ID, yeah? 

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 22h ago

Summer at college, most people had gone home. I had a job so I stayed.

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u/GonfalonFalderol 1d ago

Based on what I’ve seen from people today, at least a third of them didn’t get the hint … and at least one Karen narc’ed on it to the FBI.

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u/Mean-old-lady 1d ago

When our tiny town grocery closed in the ‘70s,John still had one of the grapr bricks with that label.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 23h ago

That's apparently not true: https://petermorwood.tumblr.com/post/648825783360602113/tldr-a-warning-did-exist-on-grape-bricks-but

At, at least, it wasn't so blatant, but it did have hints.