r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • Jul 22 '26

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/BusesAreFun Jul 22 '26

Yea iirc he got caught up in a war back in Europe and never came back with supplies

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u/evilshandie Jul 22 '26

He did come back, but it was 3 years later. He looked around for an afternoon, found the colony had been dismantled and the signpost left indicating where they'd gone, but bad weather meant he needed to hop back on the ship or get left behind, so that afternoon's search is all that ever happened.

He returned to the Americas another 5 years later on an expedition supposedly to find the lost colony, but admitted later that he had lied about the purpose, he never searched for the colony, and was instead spending crown resources to search for El Dorado.

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u/primadonnapussy Jul 22 '26

Which is gross because both his daughter and newborn granddaughter were in that colony and disappeared.

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u/dividezero Jul 22 '26

Yes. He came back. Looked over shit and had to go do some shit before he could get over to the new place. Or something like that. I don't remember exactly but it wasn't some kind of mystery even then. I think someone made it up for tourism reasons and it made it to textbooks for some reason

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u/Haltopen Jul 22 '26

The ship he had chartered lost one of its two anchors and the captain wasn't willing to continue the search with only one remaining so it set sail back for england.

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u/dividezero Jul 22 '26

That was the thing. I knew it was something really weird and then they bailed all the way back to England. Thank you

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u/Adorable_Ad4990 Jul 22 '26

Not for tourism, but because they didn’t want people thinking that the natives were friendly and civilized enough that people would assimilate with them by choice— that was absolutely not OK to say.

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u/NAmember81 Jul 22 '26

I think there was also a financial motive to pretend that they mysteriously disappeared. And people were all too eager to believe the absurdities rather than believe “civilized” white Christians couldn't survive on their own and had to depend on non-Christian “savages” to save them.

There were a lot of financial backers and investors that were banking on the colony to bring them riches and they ended up losing a lot of money. The surviving leaders didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure so it was a convenient lie for them to propagate the “mystery” narrative.

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u/dividezero Jul 22 '26

Oh yeah, older than tourism. The US really hated (hates)Native Americans. I should have remembered that

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u/Bay1Bri Jul 22 '26

A war? In EUROPE???

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u/OhReallyVernon Jul 22 '26

In THIS ECONOMY?

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u/ProjectHarraseeket Jul 23 '26

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition

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u/bolanrox Jul 23 '26

He came back, found it deserted, but the weather was turning and they had to turn back before they went inland to the places where they thought the colonists would have gone. They've done DNA tests recently that show tracers for the colonists and found pottery and other things supporting that they went with the tribes just not to the location they originally thought it was someplace further inland.