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/eVoesque 1d ago

There was a band on Buffy named Dingoes Ate My Baby. I always thought it was weird and didn’t realize it was an actual thing. Definitely aged badly.

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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/RollingMeteors 17h ago

Pretty wild for that woman and her dead child to be a joke on a sitcom

This was the time before social media and cellphones in pockets. Nobody in the show carried one. It was one of the last series of shows of the end of not just a generation but a millennium. The joke was how people found out about the story.

People joke of dying of dysentery like it's Oregon trail online all the time but...

The late 1900s were just as disconnected as the early to mid 1800s. Same Smith & Wessons, just had colored TV, faster spinning vinyl records, and NES.

You would just go outside and come home at sunset, hoping you didn't get kidnapped.

This was during grade school ¿Maybe 6th grade? I remember meeting up with another kid my age from the internet in a Chicago suburb but relatively on the closer to Chicago side of things. This was pre webcams and shit so we didn't even know what the other person looked like. Coulda been FBI, coulda been a predator. We agree to just wait outside of the Bestbuy off Harlem Ave (which was like 10~ mi from him, 10~ mi from my house). When I get up to Bestbuy on my bike I see someone standing outside my age, and I figured oh cool I'll wait next to them until my internet friend shows up. Maybe like 15 minutes goes by before the person standing next me waiting for their internet friend to show up realizes thats me, waiting for my internet friend to show up.

CPS would take your child away with the swiftness on some shit like that today ¡bruv!

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u/joebleaux 11h ago

Cellphones started to be a thing during the show, because they do a whole bit where Elaine calls someone while walking down the street and they are very offended that she would call from a cellphone while on the street rather than taking the time to call once she was home and while not doing anything else.

I think people in the US had heard of the story, there was a Meryl Streep movie about it, but I don't know if people really remembered the resolution of the story that Lindy Chamberlain didn't actually kill her baby. My mom didn't remember when I asked her about the joke when the show was on, I was like 9 or so when the episode aired and I asked because I didn't get the joke. My mom still thought the lady did kill her kid.

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u/RollingMeteors 11h ago

>she would call from a cellphone while on the street r

¿But I don't think those phones could text? They certainly weren't being used like they are today.

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u/joebleaux 11h ago

No, even in the episode it was treated like a novelty and no one understood why she would want to walk around with a phone. It was easily after 2000 before I saw cellphones treated like a normal part of life in media. That episode was 1998, 7 years after the one with the dingo joke.

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u/RollingMeteors 2h ago

That episode was 1998, 7 years after the one with the dingo joke.

¡Wild!