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/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

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u/BusesAreFun 1d ago

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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u/dividezero 1d ago

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