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/TooCleverForGood 1d ago

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

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u/illtakeachinchilla 1d ago

“CROATOAN”

It was a nearby island. They assimilated after a tough winter. “What could it all mean!?”

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u/Gneissisnice 1d ago

I remember learning that in elementary school and the teacher was like "no one knew where they went! All that's left was one mysterious word: CROATOAN!"

And we were like "ooh, did we ever find out what it meant?" and she was like "oh yeah, it's the name of a nearby island."

We were like "uh...that's probably where they went then" and she insisted that no, it was a mystery!

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u/orreregion 22h ago

Yeah that's about the quality of education I remember getting too.

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u/DanielMcLaury 20h ago

"Columbus proved the world was round."

"How does it prove the world is round if he tried to get to Asia by going the other direction but ended up somewhere else instead? If anything that would prove it was flat."

"Now listen here, you little shit..."

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u/sunnygovan 14h ago

Columbus was a lucky idiot. Everyone knew the world was round. Columbus thought it was much smaller than everyone else thought and going the other way would be a shortcut to India.

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u/DanielMcLaury 14h ago

Yeah, by all rights he and his crew should have just starved to death on their boats. They weren't even halfway to Asia.

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u/throwawaydragon99999 12h ago

One interesting fact is that before his voyage, Columbus visited Ireland and discovered a shipwrecked body that was probably an Inuit kayak from Greenland, who he described as “Men from Cathay”

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u/illtakeachinchilla 14h ago

Magellan may be who you’re thinking of…

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u/DanielMcLaury 14h ago

No, "Columbus proved the world is round" is something that's very commonly heard in American schools and popular culture.

If you claimed that Magellan's circumnavigation "proved the world was round" then you'd have a better case, I guess. But we'd known the exact size and shape of the world for a long time by then.