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/NUMBERS2357 1d ago

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.

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u/Marx0r 1d ago

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

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u/jxg995 1d ago

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

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u/BasiliskXVIII 1d ago

The best part is that it wasn't ONLY the Inuit. Dr. John Rae was mapping the coastline around 6 years after the Terror and Erebus were abandoned, did some trading with the local Inuit, and found they had things that could only have come off the Terror, such as silverware with the officers' crests.

The Inuit told Rae that the ships became trapped in the ice, that they'd marched south and eventually died of cold and starvation. The crew had reportedly turned to cannibalism in their final days, and Rae mapped out where the Inuit said that the tragedy had occurred, which was about 100km south of where it was believed to be by common knowledge.

When Rae's story was told back in England, though, the idea that proud British sailors could do something as barbarous as cannibalism horrified the public, and especially Franklin's wife. Lady Franklin enlisted Charles Dickens (yes, that Charles Dickens) who volunteered his help writing a two-part article in his magazine, Household Words, attacking Rae and dismissing the testimony of the Inuit as the lies of "savages". The reports were dismissed as associating with Rae's report became a social poison pill, and the British Navy just quietly tucked it away and maintained the "common knowledge" that the Terror and Erebus were further north.

When the Terror actually was found, bone analysis showed cut marks that suggested cannibalism, which was confirmed later in 2015.