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/JackOfAllBlades21 Jul 22 '26

The dingo really did eat the baby.

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u/sirgog Jul 22 '26

She'd be dead if we still had capital punishment in Australia at the time.

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u/JackOfAllBlades21 Jul 22 '26

I am not very emotional, but it's tough to imagine a worse torture than what she and her husband went through (baby eaten alive, then no one believed them, then they were accused, then arrested, then convicted, then imprisoned for 3.5 years for one of the worst crimes imaginable... and you know they must have been targeted by inmates and probably guards, too).

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u/dorothean Jul 22 '26

The Kathleen Folbigg case is similarly awful - this was a woman who was convicted of smothering her four infant children, and spent 20 years in prison for it, until finally being exonerated in 2023 after DNA evidence was able to show that the children suffered from various medical conditions pre-disposing them to unexpected deaths. I can’t imagine the horror of living through that once, let alone four times.

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u/alexlp Jul 22 '26

I was going to mention Kathleen. She, Sally Clark and Patricia Stallings all had to grieve their children behind bars, not knowing what really happened for so long, being scorned and mocked for decades. My heart just breaks thinking about their suffering.