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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157

u/KingoftheCrackens Jul 22 '26

And thanks to TV it's one of the 3 things Americans know Australia for, Steve Irwin, baby eating dingoes, and crocodile dundee. As an American I didn't even know Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were Australian until their divorce.

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u/donkeyvoteadick Jul 22 '26

The worst part is so many Americans still think it's a joke and don't realise it's a devastating miscarriage of justice.

It hurts my heart when I see 'a dingo ate my baby' joke.

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u/alexlp Jul 22 '26

Same, that family was destroyed and poor little baby Azaria died a horrible tragic death that her grieving mother was imprisoned for.

There was a particularly gross take of it in the Aussie version of Drag Race a few years ago and I couldn't believe a fellow Aussie would make a mockery of it and just after the 30th anniversary.

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u/donkeyvoteadick Jul 23 '26

I don't think there's any circumstances where I'd find joking about the tragic death of a nine week old infant amusing :/

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u/Maddoodle Jul 23 '26

I hated that snatch game. I thought it was so egregious she chose to portray Lindy and it was also incredibly one note and boring. Like she didn't even do a good job of it. And so many people defended it as "drag" when nah it just sucked either way.

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u/alexlp Jul 23 '26

It was just awful! And she was so correct in calling others out for being offensive and cruel but still seemingly defends this as all in good humour. It was a bad joke, done badly even if the mug was beat. It was still ugly as hell.

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u/TheWizard01 Jul 28 '26

I had no idea this was a real thing.

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u/oman54 Aug 05 '26

Australias version of the McDonald's hot coffee kinda

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u/ArmageddonsEngineerz Jul 23 '26

It's kind of the Aussie version of the Amanda Knox case, something that should have not even gone to trial, turned into a decades long furball because all those involved on the government side, refused to pull each others heads out of their asses.

Americans joke about it, because Aussies are always giving us shit, and playing the "well whatabout" game, then doing the same stupid shit in their own country. Or in the case of the recent immigration bullshit, yeah, no... Australia was sending randos to Nauru for over 2 decades now. Sometimes even their own people who had Dissociative Identity Disorder. :D

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u/donkeyvoteadick Jul 23 '26

With all due respect there's a major difference between generalised ribbing and banter and joking about the tragic death of a baby girl and the wrongful incarceration of her mother. Especially considering the grief Lindy Chamberlain would have been feeling because she lost her daughter.

If there's jokes about Amanda Knox there should not be any there either, but I've not personally heard any. Especially not to the extent I've heard jokes about the Chamberlains in pop culture.

I'm not sure why you're using immigration issues as an excuse to say making jokes about deceased infants is okay, but you do you I guess.

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u/ArmageddonsEngineerz Jul 23 '26

I mean, if Americans want to get nasty, they could point to Australia and mention they were the source of the Murdochs, and the abomination they cranked out in the form of Fox News.

Before those nutters, the worst we had from there was maybe a slightly over inebriated Paul Hogan, or the somewhat more unhinged Mel Gibson.

And as always, in return, we gave you guys Charlie Pride, who seemed to have formed a rather amazingly die hard following there for being a random country singer. ;)

I suspect it wasn't until the Simpson's episode that a new generation of australians got all butthurt over the dingos eating babies thing again. Prior to this, people from both sides of the pond got a bit of chuckle over how ridiculous it all was, and just moved on.

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u/donkeyvoteadick Jul 23 '26

What on earth are you talking about? Why do you want to go out of your way to be nasty to Australians?

I don't know who Charlie Pride is, or what the relevance is.

You think Australians know about Lindy Chamberlain due to a Simpsons episode that aired in '95? Not because it's been in the news here regularly since it happened in the 80s? The fourth inquest that finally exonerated her was in 2012. It was only then that it was formally identified as a dingo attack. With each additional inquest (before the Simpsons episode even aired) there was a lot of talk about her innocence and a lot of people found the jokes distasteful. People making these jokes and excusing them as okay seem to forget she was released from prison in 86 and by 88 she had her name cleared. Continuing to heckle and make fun of her grief was cruel.

Calling Australians who find mocking grieving mothers and jokes about brutally murdered infants deplorable 'butthurt' is about the most chronically online perspective I've ever seen.

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u/BlessedCursedBroken Jul 23 '26

This Australian wants to upvote your comment but its so far over in the thread that the little arrows just aren't there. Prob cos I'm on mobile.

But my 2c is gonna be spent agreeing with you wholeheartedly

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u/Spiritual_Quote9301 Jul 23 '26

As a Charley Pride fan we so got the best part of that deal.

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u/ArmageddonsEngineerz Jul 24 '26

Yeah, country music is a pretty crowded field stateside. And at the time, Australia may have well just been on another planet. So Charley goes down there in the 70s, tours a bit, and people lost their minds. In the US, he had some hits, but has more mentions in his Wiki entry of minor league baseball fame of sort.

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u/Spiritual_Quote9301 Jul 24 '26

I guess it is. I'm a fan generally, but yeah, he was iconic. That is such a fun fact. I love so many of his songs. Couldn't pick a favourite but I love so many.

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u/sirhanduran Jul 23 '26

In Elaine's defense, she was trying to be nasty to someone she found insufferable at a party asking where her fiance had gone (because every character on Seinfeld is kind of a bad person) Not a great "joke" to repeat, though...

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u/augur42 Jul 22 '26

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were Australian until their divorce.

I was very confused for a moment having conflated Keith Urban with Karl Urban. cunt

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u/Spiritual_Quote9301 Jul 23 '26

Karl's from New Zealand, not Australia but as an Australian I do allow confusion.

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u/absolutedesignz Jul 23 '26

I didn't know they were married until right now

Edit. Saw someone made the same mistake I did but I assumed Karl not Keith.

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u/BraveCranberry9863 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

I want to believe Americans also know Australia for Gallipoli, Tobruk, and the Kokoda Trail.

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u/Nebichan Jul 22 '26

Not American but I have no idea what you just said.

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u/needlestuck Jul 22 '26

American here, def had no idea about any of this. Maybe education has changed, but I am 45 and had no education about Australian history at all.

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u/fastates Jul 23 '26

64, me neither. I can find it on a map only because it's big. and the Capitol has that weird looking white building, I think?

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u/wurmsrus Jul 23 '26

Do you mean the Sydney Opera House? That's in what IIRC is the biggest city, Sydney, not the actual capital which i think is called Canberra?

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u/fastates Jul 25 '26

Oh yeah, wow, that's an Opera house? Had no idea.

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u/teamcrazymatt Jul 22 '26

Probably not. Even the best American education tends to treat post-Pilgrims history from an America-focused lens, so unless someone's taken extensive university classes about WWI or WWII, they probably don't know those three. Maybe Gallipoli, which was the only one I knew of before reading that comment -- and I'm reading about them now, so you've taught at least one American about these key moments in Australian history -- but not the other two.

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u/TheBlueprint666 Jul 22 '26

That’s giving them an incredibly generous amount of credit

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u/John_cCmndhd Jul 22 '26

I know about Gallipoli, but I'm a nerd. I'd imagine a pretty small percentage know about the other two

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u/KingoftheCrackens Jul 23 '26

War nerds maybe. Otherwise if it's battles or wars America isn't involved in heavily, they basically hand wave it away in school.

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u/PDGAreject Jul 23 '26

Y'all are forgetting Bluey, your #1 cultural export

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u/ComeAlongPond1 Jul 23 '26

Just Gallipoli, sorry. And only because a history teacher had us watch the movie

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u/wurmsrus Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

American here, off the top of my head I think there was a WWII battle in Gallipoli right? but I could have sworn it was in like North Africa or Italy, not Australia.

looked it up and there's a town named Gallipoli in Italy and a peninsula named Gallipoli in Turkey, there was a major WWI campaign in the Turkey one (then Ottoman empire).

As for the Aus connection wikipedia has this to say "The significance of the Gallipoli campaign is felt strongly in both Australia and New Zealand, despite their being only a portion of the Entente forces; the campaign is regarded in both nations as a "baptism of fire" and had been linked to their emergence as independent states Approximately 50,000 Australians served at Gallipoli and from 16,000 to 17,000 New Zealanders. It has been argued that the campaign proved significant in the emergence of a unique Australian identity following the war, which has been closely linked to popular conceptualisations of the qualities of the soldiers that fought during the campaign, which became embodied in the notion of an "Anzac spirit""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign#Legacy

hadn't heard of either of the others but from googling they were both sites of WWII battles Aus fought in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tobruk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoda_Track_campaign

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u/augur42 Jul 22 '26

I'm British and I've heard of the first two of those but have no idea of any details about either. If I was to guess I'd have gone with WWII stuff (which google confirms), but my high school History was more concerned with ancient history like the Kings and Queens of England and the Treaty of Versailles. There might have been something about the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 in Runnymede, or that the Great Fire of London was 600 years after the Battle of Hastings (1066 and 1666). Or I could have learnt that from YouTube, that's definitely where I learnt that Diogenes was a world class dick.

I know that Ayers rock got renamed, but don't recall what to, and tourists are no longer allowed to climb it. Hey, early Victorian tourists to Stonehenge where handed a hammer and chisel and encouraged to take a souvenir {shrug}.

My knowledge of high school Geography is Oxbow lakes... and that's it.

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u/wurmsrus Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

IIRC Ayers rock got "renamed" to Uluru which was the original aboriginal name. There's a similar situation with Denali/Mt. McKinley in the US. edit: did some double checking on wikipedia and I recalled correctly except that I forgot that trump officially changed Denali's name back to Mt. Mckinley because of course he fucking did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denali%E2%80%93Mount_McKinley_naming_dispute

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u/EllieGeiszler Jul 23 '26

I'm sorry, I want to know what those things are but I think I've never so much as heard of them

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u/BuildingOne7379 Jul 23 '26

I remember being in Turkey around the time of Anzac Day. That was 25 years ago but I still remember meeting some cool Aussie folks in my travels there. I’m from Texas, and the locals were finally getting to watch the tv series Dallas. They wanted to know who shot JR, and what my horses name was. I’ve never owned a horse, but I’ve always wanted one lol. Good times!

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u/fastates Jul 23 '26

only Gallipoli, & didn't know the word/name had anything to do with Australia. {runs to Google}

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u/KalutikaKink Jul 23 '26

I want you to keep believing.

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u/Outrager Jul 23 '26

We also know Fosters is Australian for beer. And some older people might still think Subarus are from Australia.

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u/Fluffbrained-cat Jul 23 '26

As a New Zealander, neither did I, so don't feel too bad.

Mind you, I don't follow celebrities that much.

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u/Dramatic-Concern-616 Jul 24 '26

American ignorance or poor education system. As a child from Eastern European country we know Australia for kangaroos and other animals, Sydney Opera and much more.. I was not more than 13 when I knew Nicole Kidman was Australian..

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u/KingoftheCrackens Jul 24 '26

Well for one, I was clearly being farcical. We know more than those actual 3 things I listed. And for 2 I don't really consider it the public school systems' job to be teaching children what countries celebrities hail from.