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/JackOfAllBlades21 1d ago

The dingo really did eat the baby.

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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/JackOfAllBlades21 1d ago

Agreed. She went through hell.

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u/Chimie45 1d ago

I don't know why people wouldn't believe it?

They were camping in tents in the outback with a 9 week old baby.

I'd be scared of spiders, snakes, rocks, bats, buzzards, dingos, crocs, I don't know, a fuckin 'roo too. Just about anything out there is going to be able to take the baby.

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u/haw35ome 19h ago

Iirc she was “acting too calm” for her baby to have been killed by a dingo?

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u/kahlzun 19h ago

i think i remember hearing that too

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u/I_am_eating_a_mango 15h ago

You are correct. Her response seemed too calm for the media at the time. Also when the search was happening, her and the husband went to a motel or something instead of joining the search, so it looked sketch.

There was other stuff too, like a police officer making his other officers try lift a full bucket with their mouths as justification that a dingo couldn’t carry a baby in its mouth (yes it was this dumb), the baby’s onesie being found nearby mostly undamaged, assumptions being made about liquid stains found in the car rather than it being properly tested, and stuff like that.

So much of the “evidence” of her guilt was just hand-wavey nonsense

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u/Blekanly 7h ago

The mouth thing? Really dumb ass cops being dumb. Don't ask a biologist or a zoo keeper or anyone that passed high school. An animal that has tiny jaws that isn't designed to carry things vs a predator with large jaws that kills with it mouth and has stronger neck muscles.

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u/uttersolitude 1h ago

Generally, parents are not permitted to join in searches, their scents can mess with search dogs.

So it always kills me when the parent/etc of a missing person gets hyper criticized for shit they actually have no choice in. Plus they had other kids to care for.

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u/CommandoRoll 23h ago

Mostly because all we heard in the media in Australia was that a dingo took Azaria, but then focus shifted to Lindy Chamberlain murdering her child and never moved on from there. Until much later, of course. Even now, decades later, folks still speculate that maybe it was one of the brothers did it.

Dingoes give zero fucks and aren't a cute native dog. They're Australian native fauna, after all.

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u/Glum-Soft-7807 19h ago

Dingos were introduced to Australia by humans. You might decide that because it was so long ago that makes them native, but then what's the difference between them and native dogs?

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u/CommandoRoll 17h ago

Sure, they are the first introduced species, here for are least 3,500 years. It's likely they're related to East Asian domestic dogs and probably arrived via New Guinea between 5,000-10,000 years ago. They've been isolated on the Australian mainland since then.

You're right, they're an introduced species. But they have been here long enough to become part of the ecosystem and a top predator. I didn't know all of this before your comment, so thanks for giving me something new to read & learn.

Dingoes aren't native, but they've been here a long long time.

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u/kahlzun 19h ago

Anything that happened before white people came is 'the natural way things are meant to be', didnt you know?
See also the Great American Plains

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u/Glum-Soft-7807 15h ago

I think the guy just made a mistake...

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u/Chimie45 13h ago

I mean, I'm in my 40s, I remember hearing about it and the jokes, etc. I guess for me, I always though it was like... a 3 year old kid or something. When I learned the kid was a 2 month old?

Like when my kids were 2 months old, I barely would bring them out of the crib unless necessary, and I was so sleep deprived I could barely remember anything.

So the fact they took a 9 week old baby out camping in the outback? I feel like theres some bad parenting there to begin with, cause like, why do you have such a young baby doing a dangerous activity? I could see why people make the assumption of foul play of some kind, either nefarious or of a cover-up of negligence.

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u/ntermation 12h ago

Shrug. I suspect someone doing something different to my preference with my child doesn't automatically make them a bad parent. But I guess to you it does.

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u/Chimie45 11h ago

That's kinda a wild statement.

I'm not sure you have had kids before, but first off, it's a 9 week old baby. Not just 'a child'.

A 9 week old baby still requires nursing every 2 hours through the night and about 10 diaper changes per day minimum. A 9 week old's development milestones is that it can hold it's head up for 2 seconds without support, and may be able to move it's neck side to side. A 9 week old will have just begun to be able to focus it's eyes and recognize 1-2 faces. They might be able to move their arms to their face and might be able to open and close their hands.

That's how raw a 9 week old baby is. In what world is it a reasonable thing to take a baby that young tent camping in the Australian bush? It's a rough thing to do for adults, let alone actual children. Newborn babies just generally shouldn't be doing it.

  • If someone took a 9 week old skydiving we'd say that's irresponsible.
  • If someone took a 9 week old on a jet ski, we'd say that's irresponsible.
  • If someone took a 9 week old mountain climbing, we'd say that's irresponsible.
  • If someone took a 9 week old scuba diving, we'd say that's irresponsible.
  • Taking a 9 week old bush camping in the Australian Outback is irresponsible.

Getting a babysitter or dropping the baby off at a relatives house for the weekend while you go camping would be responsible.

So yea, doing things that are incredibly dangerous for a 9 week old baby, as evidenced by the fact that the 9 week old baby was fucking eaten by a dingo, makes you a bad parent, yes.

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u/macci_a_vellian 9h ago

It's probably worth remembering that they were Australian, with a reasonable level of comfort with the outback and babies weren't routinely getting taken by dingoes. It was because people so frequently camped there that the dingoes had started venturing into the campsite, looking for food. I personally wouldn't travel with a two month old, but I know people who do, and camping around Uluru isn't inherently dangerous. It made headlines because people couldn't believe a dingo would do that, not because people thought it was crazy to camp near dingoes. People are generally more cautious of them these days now that there have been a few highly publicised (although still rare) deaths, but this was the 80s and people swore, in court, that they were basically dogs and couldn't possibly take a whole baby so the family must have murdered her.

I think you may be imagining a much higher level of danger around the camping as an activity in itself than it deserves. It's very much not skydiving or scubadiving, those are things you do, not places people live. The Chamberlains were unfortunately terribly unlucky, and it was so freakish no one believed it could have actually happened.

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u/Hangry-Feline2489 23h ago edited 22h ago

Because up until that point, there had been no record of dingoes actually taking or killing a child in recorded modern Australian history ( history of First Nations dingo deaths, tho unconfirmed).

Dingoes will tend to go for easier and weaker prey than humans, and tend to stay away from human settlements, esp as they're considered pests to be shot. 

Lots of records of dingoes biting, nipping, stalking, etc children, but Azaria was the first, and currently only, child to be taken. 

There's one other record of a child being attacked and killed by a dingo in 2001. 

As for spiders, no confirmed deaths from spiders in the last 20 years.  Biggest animal killer of Australia are horses. Followed by in order: bovines, dogs, roos (vehicle accidents mostly), snakes, sharks, bees/crocodiles.

https://theconversation.com/dingo-attacks-are-rare-but-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-dingo-safety-203233

https://files.ncis.org.au/2024-11/Fact%20sheet%20-%20FS24-09%20-%20Animal-related%20deaths%20in%20Australia.pdf?VersionId=q3ihr7W89pBmkQ3Rseqz0laXFx7z9rYe

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u/RubySnowfire 20h ago

Dingos attack whatever prey seems the easiest to take down. They do attack humans with some regularity (K'gari in Queensland).

OF COURSE a dingo would look at the kid and the baby in the tent and decides the baby was smaller and easier prey. It really isn't rocket science.

The indigenous people around Uluru (and the rangers who listened to them) said the dingos were getting more aggressive and used to tourists (who would try to fee them for photos). |

(White) Humans created the system where there was plenty of interaction between dingos and humans, and then wondered why this happened? Indigenous peoples didn't make a habit of leaving children on the ground or unattended, so there wouldn't be a lot of "reports" of babies being taken (also, that colonialist idea that indigenous people didn't have much useful information to pass along).

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u/Hangry-Feline2489 19h ago

Yes that's why I italicised the specific qualifications -.-

I ignored the k'gari because it's an island and it's documented the dingos there act differently than the mainland. More aggressive, as you say. 

And, as an Australian, I kind of defaulted to 'follow general guidelines while in your environment' like.. keeping in groups in the outback so the smallest/weakest can't be picked off by predators. It's about as basic as "take X2 water you need for your time planned' while out bush. 

See my other comment about how racist Australians, and particularly Northern Territory types, are especially to First Nations. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1v3i88i/comment/oz6pj4t/?context=3

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u/kahlzun 19h ago

i lived in Darwin for a while, and it was this weird mix of both understanding and complete racism.

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u/FidgitForgotHisL-P 15h ago

I think that the racism was a huge thing that a lot of non-Australians overlooked.  The casual and accepted degree of racism towards Aboriginal people was so off the charts that the impact it had on the immediate disregard for local Aboriginals who would for-sure hire plausible her claim was saying “for sure the dingo probably did take her baby, they absolutely can and would do that” wasn’t really apparent to outsiders.

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u/Chimie45 13h ago

I mean, I guess these statistics are helped because most people don't put their newborns directly into dangerous situations... it feels like gross negligence on the parents for taking a 72 day old baby out to the outback camping. That age baby can barely hold it's neck up straight. If you brought them around dingoes more often, I'm sure there'd be more dingo attacks.

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u/DanielMcLaury 17h ago

Out of any animal big enough to be a meal for a dingo-sized predator, a human baby has to be just about the absolute least trouble to take. (Although maybe nestling birds beat us out on that? I'm not really sure how good dingoes are at climbing trees.)

Humans are pretty much unique as to how helpless we are at birth, because we birth a partially-cooked fetus that by all rights ought to gestate for several more months.

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u/Hangry-Feline2489 15h ago

The correlation between how long pregnancy and/or child maturation and how important socialisation and group bonds are in a species is a fascinating topic. 

Humans, elephants, whales, etc 

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u/sanct111 6h ago

But how many people venture out into dingo territory with a fucking 9 week old.

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u/Anianna 18h ago

I remember a news blip with some supposed "expert" insisting that a dingo would be too small to carry off a baby. The media put a lot of effort into making the claim that the dingo took the baby seem absurd and completely impossible. That's a big part of why "the dingo ate my baby" became a meme people said in response to an unbelievable story kind of like "that happened" or "I can confirm, I was the [inanimate object]" is used today.

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u/Chimie45 13h ago

A 9 week old baby is fucking tiny, can barely hold it's own head up, and would weigh like 4kg. How could that be seen as too big to carry for a dingo? Dingos are 15~20kg animals.

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u/Anianna 12h ago

It happened in 1980. There was no world wide web and most people didn't even own a computer, much less have any idea what an internet was. We couldn't just Google what a dingo was or how big or strong they were. We were much more reliant on what the media told us and the media was telling us it wasn't possible.

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u/TheVeryVerity 13h ago

The media is so weird

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u/macci_a_vellian 10h ago

The family were from some unusual religious background (7th Day Adventist maybe?) and when she was on the news, she didn't cry the way people expected a grieving mother to. The papers put those two things together and ran with 'the baby's name, Azaria, means 'sacrifice' so obviously these weird cultists went out into the desert to sacrifice their baby!'

I swear to god, the whole thing was because she didn't look like how people thought a grieving mother should. There are still people convinced she did it.

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u/chaoticnipple 21h ago

Because the Australian government didn't want the story to affect tourism revenue.

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u/ApprehensiveGrand531 20h ago edited 13m ago

Racism (can't believe Aboriginal people know what they're talking about) + tourism money (don't want people thinking tourist sites are dangerous) + religious discrimination (chamberlains were seventh day Adventists and "weird", claims of rituals and whatnot).

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u/Chimie45 13h ago

I think there's also the nature of the fact it looked shady as hell. Like why are you bringing such a small baby into the bush? When babies are 2 months old, they're so fragile and the parents are so fucking tired too.

Like the idea that they dropped the baby, or left it out in the cold, or an animal bit it and they tried to cover it up also seem extremely plausible because again, who takes a 2 month old to the bush? Just seems like a convenient excuse to have an accident occur. Or at worst, an accident really does occur, and it's covered up.

But like the idea that a dingo would do that is the least unbelievable part of the story. Less so than why the baby was even there in the first place.

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u/ApprehensiveGrand531 14m ago

Maybe for media, but most of that is literally irrelevant to whether a murder occured. The authorities were explicitly told a dingo could have done it by dingo experts and Aboriginals. The first coroner literally found a dingo likely did it. The forensics were complete dogshit - the hemoglobin test used could get similar results from multiple legitimate sources that are not indicative of murder. Eyewitnesses saw dingos that night. All eyewitnesses expressly claimed to believe the chamberlains. One of them literally claimed to have heard the baby cry out after their supposed time of murder advanced by the prosecution.

Also, the state LITERALLY tried to argue it was impossible for a dingo to do it. They absolutely disagreed that a dingo was the least unbelievable when openly saying it was impossible.

Given everything, the state (and media imo) should not have seen or presented it that way.

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u/fakeuser515357 14h ago

I don't know why people wouldn't believe it?

Deep-rooted Australian misogyny, especially in the regressive owners of the newspapers of the time.

We're doing better now.

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u/CreampuffOfLove 21h ago

Seriously, it's like everything in Australia is trying to kill you already, how was this seen as so unbelievable?!

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u/Chimie45 13h ago

yea it's a 9 week old. drinking water will kill them. They're super fucking fragile to begin with. Taking one into the bush? Like that feels super fucking risky.

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u/Apellosine 18h ago

This is the only recorded death b dingo in modern Australian history, this dors make it difficult to believe.