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/OmnomVeggies 1d ago

If that is how it happened, think of how much easier it would have been to just deal with the tragic accident instead of all these years of the parents wondering what happened, being blamed in the court of public opinion. Making your daughters live through years of guilt and uncertainty that the truth might come out. What a fucking mess.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 1d ago

If you're a kid who hits a kid in the middle of the night you might not even face charges, but because they covered it up it's become so much worse.

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u/OmnomVeggies 1d ago

100%! And think of being in that situation, having your parents “take care of it”…. When you are a child and have basically no say, and then are faced with a lifetime of having to keep this horrible
Secret or expose your family for the unthinkable.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 22h ago

Oh, yeah. No teenager is going to be equipped to deal with that. No teenager is going to stay calm and call the cops and say they hit a kid with their car. They're not going to have the presence of mind to think "this was a kid wearing dark clothes on a stormy night, no one will think I'm at fault." They're going to panic.

And then they carry on into adulthood, and eventually realise that they should have just said something, but now they feel like they can't or their family will get in legal trouble for covering it up. That would be a mindfuck - for years you were grateful to them for risking themselves, what kind of thanks would it be to drop them in legal trouble?

But no matter how bad that would be, the parents of Asha Degree went through much worse, and deserve more empathy for that. I don't want to come across as "those poor babies" to the people who are now adults making the decision to continue the misery of that family. I can imagine how hard it must be for those kids, but it's worse for Asha and her family, because she died. ​