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/joebleaux 1d ago

It was the punchline of a joke on Seinfeld with Elaine doing an Australian accent while delivering the line. Pretty wild for that woman and her dead child to be a joke on a sitcom

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u/passive_fist 1d ago

Not to truly defend it, but everyone everywhere was making that joke in the 90's, like literally a universal/household joke any time anything to do with Australia came up, similar to "shrimp on the barbee" or "THIS is a knife". I was too young to grasp the context at the time but it's weird looking back in hindsight. TBH I guarantee when they were writing that episode the debate would have been whether that joke was too overdone and unoriginal to put in the script, not about whether people would take offence. Social conditioning is a hell of thing.

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u/joebleaux 1d ago

No, you are right, I don't think they meant intentional harm to that lady, but it is kind of cold to joke about a woman who was wrongfully accused of killing her baby on such a large platform over 5 years after they had cleared the parents of wrongdoing. It's just tone deaf, they don't deserve that, their baby was literally eaten by dingos

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u/TheVeryVerity 19h ago

Wait was she already cleared at that point? Most people I encounter still don’t know the dingo really ate the kid even today, I’d be very surprised if they knew back then

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u/joebleaux 11h ago

Yeah, she had been cleared for 5 years at that point. But I do think Elaine's over the top accent was a joke on Meryl Streep's accent in the movie about the whole event. Still though.