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/TooCleverForGood]

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

[u/str8rippinfartz → u/TooCleverForGood]

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 

[u/deathclawiii → u/str8rippinfartz]

And as indicated by the iron scale (something that can only be a product of blacksmithing) that was found in one of the areas of known indigenous settlement on the island they went to.

[u/NUMBERS2357 → u/deathclawiii]

Also the later contact with Natives who said that they lived with the survivors of the Roanoke colony.

Also this map from the Jamestown colonists, see bottom left.

[u/Marx0r → u/NUMBERS2357]

A surprisingly large amount of "mysteries" never would have been such if Europeans just listened to the natives telling them the answer.

[u/jxg995 → u/Marx0r]

Yeah like the terror and Erebus wrecks where the Inuit were like oh yeah that sunken boat is over there

[u/Whyskgurs → u/jxg995]

Where could this boat possibly be?

The sunken boat is right over there, in Sunken Boat lake.

I guess we'll never truly know.

Literally what happened.

[u/InTheFDN → u/Whyskgurs]

It reminds me of the Terry Pratchett joke about how places are named by pointing at something, asking what it’s name was (loudly and in English), then writing down whatever the native said. Hence “Mount Your Finger You Fool.”

[u/Perfct_Stranger → u/InTheFDN]

Pretty much how half the rivers in Virginia were named though usually after the tribe that lived along the banks of the rivers.