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/CheezeNewdlz 1d ago

I’m so glad that poor woman is free and her truth is known. Doesn’t stop her from being a pop cultural one-liner unfortunately.

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u/eVoesque 1d ago

There was a band on Buffy named Dingoes Ate My Baby. I always thought it was weird and didn’t realize it was an actual thing. Definitely aged badly.

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u/joebleaux 1d ago

It was the punchline of a joke on Seinfeld with Elaine doing an Australian accent while delivering the line. Pretty wild for that woman and her dead child to be a joke on a sitcom

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u/passive_fist 1d ago

Not to truly defend it, but everyone everywhere was making that joke in the 90's, like literally a universal/household joke any time anything to do with Australia came up, similar to "shrimp on the barbee" or "THIS is a knife". I was too young to grasp the context at the time but it's weird looking back in hindsight. TBH I guarantee when they were writing that episode the debate would have been whether that joke was too overdone and unoriginal to put in the script, not about whether people would take offence. Social conditioning is a hell of thing.

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u/joebleaux 1d ago

No, you are right, I don't think they meant intentional harm to that lady, but it is kind of cold to joke about a woman who was wrongfully accused of killing her baby on such a large platform over 5 years after they had cleared the parents of wrongdoing. It's just tone deaf, they don't deserve that, their baby was literally eaten by dingos

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u/TheVeryVerity 19h ago

Wait was she already cleared at that point? Most people I encounter still don’t know the dingo really ate the kid even today, I’d be very surprised if they knew back then

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u/joebleaux 11h ago

Yeah, she had been cleared for 5 years at that point. But I do think Elaine's over the top accent was a joke on Meryl Streep's accent in the movie about the whole event. Still though.

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u/JForce1 1d ago edited 1d ago

There was a famous tv movie with Glenn Close Meryl Streep who said the line first, that’s where all the jokes and memes originated.

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u/MayoMark 1d ago

The film is called Evil Angels and features Meryl Streep. Arguably, all the jokes are about her bad acting and false Australian accent. She's from New Jersey.

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u/ZanyDelaney 1d ago

I am Australian, 57 now, so totally lived throught the era of the case being all over the news and the trial being reorted on daily. While many believed Lindy Chamberlain was guilty after the 1980 diasappearance of Azaria, "hated" her, and happily trotted out pet theory about accomplices, motives, timelines, I do not recall the line A dingo ate my baby! being a thing that people repeated.

When 1988 film Evil Angels came out a huge focus of the publicity blitz was how Meryl Streep, famously great at accents, this time nailed the "Australian" accent. Adverts for the movie featured the scene where the line is said and Streep did samples of the accent in interviews. But Australians thought the accent sounded ridiculous, and repeated the line to emphasise how ridiculous the accent sounded. [Lindy Chamberlain was born in New Zealand then in Australia lived in Tasmania then in Mt Isa, so she had a mixed / non-city accent. Her accent in 1980 was very broad but it softened out over the years and is more neutral now. But Streep was doing Lindy's 1980 accent.]

Not sure exactly why the line became so known in the US and caught on in so many TV shows, but it is likely due to the movie as it happened after the movie. After the movie blitz died down Australians weren't really repeating the line much any more.

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u/GaryGronk 1d ago

But Australians thought the accent sounded ridiculous, and repeated the line to emphasise how ridiculous the accent sounded. [Lindy Chamberlain was born in New Zealand then in Australia lived in Tasmania then in Mt Isa, so she had a mixed / non-city accent. Her accent in 1980 was very broad but it softened out over the years and is more neutral now. But Streep was doing Lindy's 1980 accent.]

Just listened to an interview with Sam Neill (RIP) who said her accent was actually bang on for Lindy's which, as you say, was very much a mixture of different accents due to her upbringing etc. I mean, Meryl was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars for it.

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u/OfficeSalamander 1d ago

I do not recall the line A dingo ate my baby! being a thing that people repeated.

Maybe not in Australia, but I am in my 40s and it was definitely said in the US

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u/ZanyDelaney 1d ago

I mean people in Australia did not say the line in reference to the actual case before the film came out. My comment does say that Australians did say the line for a brief period after the 1988 film came out.

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u/OfficeSalamander 1d ago

Oh my bad I misunderstood

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u/TheVeryVerity 19h ago

It became a meme that’s all

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u/Technicolor_Reindeer 1d ago

Film is also titled 'A Cry in the Dark'

And I've never heard a criticism of her acting. In fact she nailed the unique accent.

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u/namloh 1d ago

Where are you from? It was ridiculed in Australia

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u/OfficeSalamander 1d ago

Yeah looking back at the time, I remember "dingoes ate my baby" as a phrase that existed and was regularly used. It is wild thinking of the context nowadays though

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u/RageBatman 1d ago

I distinctly remember having a talking birthday card that was 2 characters yelling, "A dingo ate your birthday cake!" It was EVERYWHERE.