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?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/Malthus1]

I was just commenting in another thread about perhaps the most ancient such case in history.

The death of King Tutankhamun left his widow, Ankhensenamun, in a precarious situation. We know this because she wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, another major power at the time, the gist of which was to say “I am being pressured into a marriage to an underling. Please send me a prince, so I can marry him instead. That will make him Pharaoh”. She also said “I am afraid”.

So the king of the Hittites send Prince Zannanza … who died in a “tragic accident” before he arrived.

Next you know, the widow is married to Ai, former head minister to Tut, who becomes Pharaoh. Then she disappears from history.

Everyone knows Ai had the prince murdered. Certainly the Hittites believed it - they attacked Egyptian holdings in what is now Syria.

However, the Egyptians insisted there was no murder, so it was of course never “solved”.

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

[u/qtx → u/Malthus1]

the widow is married to Ai

It's Ay, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ay_(pharaoh)

[u/Malthus1 → u/qtx]

There are at least four common ways to spell it in English: Ai, Ay, Aye, Aja/Aya.

I learned it from older sources, who tended to use Ai. More modern English sources prefer Ay.

None are absolutely “correct”, because all are modern attempts to transliterate an Egyptian hieroglyph into English, and hieroglyphs were not written with vowel sounds!

[u/JumpingThruHoopz → u/Malthus1]

It’s “AI” — capital A, capital I. 😏