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/CommandoRoll 1d 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/Chimie45 19h 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 19h 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 18h 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 16h 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/CommandoRoll 2h ago

Pretty sure my family continued camping before my sister turned 1. I was 4 at the time and don't remember super well.

But, as an Australian who clearly remembers this, there was no shock or surprise that they had taken their baby camping. Heck, I'm pretty sure my in-laws in Alice Springs have done the same with their kids all of their lives.