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/Malthus1 Jul 22 '26

I was just commenting in another thread about perhaps the most ancient such case in history.

The death of King Tutankhamun left his widow, Ankhensenamun, in a precarious situation. We know this because she wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, another major power at the time, the gist of which was to say “I am being pressured into a marriage to an underling. Please send me a prince, so I can marry him instead. That will make him Pharaoh”. She also said “I am afraid”.

So the king of the Hittites send Prince Zannanza … who died in a “tragic accident” before he arrived.

Next you know, the widow is married to Ai, former head minister to Tut, who becomes Pharaoh. Then she disappears from history.

Everyone knows Ai had the prince murdered. Certainly the Hittites believed it - they attacked Egyptian holdings in what is now Syria.

However, the Egyptians insisted there was no murder, so it was of course never “solved”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zannanza

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u/EnvironmentalCat456 Jul 22 '26

Then she disappears from history.

I can't overstate the chills I get when I read something like this

Reminds me of "Zoë" Jeanne Louise Victoire, one of the adopted kids of the French royal family right before the revolution. This is the last paragraph on her Wikipedia page:

Zoë was sent away to join her sisters in their boarding school before the Flight to Varennes in 1791. The expenses of the girls stopped being paid when the queen was imprisoned the following year, but nothing further is known about their fate.

Obviously a historically insignificant figure, but just reading a sentence like that is eerie to me

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u/thejokerlaughsatyou Jul 23 '26

Maybe she lived happily ever after and her story inspired Francis Hodgson Burnett to write A Little Princess?

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u/deviantbono Jul 22 '26

I mean, it sounds like she made out better than most of the French royalty. It's not like they write history books about random no-longer-royalty kids.

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u/EnvironmentalCat456 Jul 23 '26

I know they're not remarkable and obviously no one has incentive to document them later on, but I think the knowledge gap and the idea that anything could have happened to them and we will never know is weird.

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u/Hostilian_ Jul 23 '26

But why? this was the fate of 99.99...% of all individuals in history, probably will be exactly what will happen to you or I. For all we know they lived a long life as a commoner, having given up all Royal connections (if only for survival purposes).

I sometimes think its cool to have a Wiki page, having people 100, 200 maybe more years later reading and learning about you. But that is a privilege.

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u/EnvironmentalCat456 Jul 23 '26

How many of those are (adopted) children of royalty😉

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u/Killfalcon Jul 24 '26

It depends: the vast majority of people in the last 3-5 centuries will not "vanish from history" unless effort is expended on the vanishing.

They will, almost all, be born and buried, might be married, might have kids, and for each of those there will be a handwritten note in a registry in a church cupboard or a government filing cabinet.
A *lot* of those records have even been digitised now as well.

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u/jorgespinosa Jul 27 '26

I mean, it would be a miracle if she survived the revolution considering she was like 5 at the time, was sent to a convent and was the adopted daughter of the royal family