...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
The Unsolved Mystery
- 305 statements
- 57 feature instances
- 76 referencing feature instances
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In Mystery Fiction, the most common ending is the one where the mystery is solved. The detective figures out who the murderer is, the mask is pulled away, the villain shouts "And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for You Meddling Kids," loose ends are tied up, and everyone (except the villain, of course) goes home happy. Not so with some cases. In some cases, there are no answers. In some cases, the detective doesn't even know the right questions. This isn't just a Karma Houdini, where the bad guy gets away without consequences. This is where the characters - and the audience - don't even know who the bad guy is or where to start looking or perhaps what the hell just happened. Stock Unsolved Mysteries are those from history that have inspired many stories. It is a common feature of a Mockstery Tale, when the mystery plot is just pretext for philosophy or psychological drama. See also Criminal Mind Games, Riddle for the Ages, and What Happened to the Mouse? Compare That One Case. For a whole setting comprised of those, see World of Mysteries. Can very often result in an Audience-Alienating Ending. |
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Bullitt. The Cowboy Cop kills a key witness whom he was supposed to bring in alive, so they never find out who is behind the organized crime operation. Movie over. | |
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The Thing (1982). One of the main mysteries of the film is who, exactly, sabotaged the blood samples kept in storage. Early on, they narrow it down to either Gerry or Dr. Copper, neither of whom turn out to be The Thing. The other mystery is whether or not Childs became a Thing when he went missing shortly before the confrontation with Blair. The film ends with MacReady and Childs resigning to death from the arctic cold, both of them unsure if the other is human. For what it's worth, comic book continuations of the movie have it that MacReady is unambiguously human and that Childs was infected at some point. |
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House: Why was Kutner Driven to Suicide? Which was the point, according to Word of God. | |
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Probe's "Computer Logic": Austin is working on solving the murder of Donald Stonheim, a pilot who died while circumnavigating the Hudson Bay in 1921 and recently recovered. The police believe it to be an accident, but Austin noticed something in the left posterior fontanelle which indicates that Donald died before the crash. He plans to solve this mystery purely from the inside of his workshop, discovering motive, method, murder with the power of observation. | |
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In The Hunter, Martin hears about Doomed Predecessor Jarrah's work several times and eventually finds his skeleton, which has a bullet hole through its skull, but it’s never revealed who killed Jarrah. It could have been the company he quit working for, hunters from a rival company after the last Tasmanian tiger, the loggers whose jobs Jarrah was threatening with his environmental activism, or a random hunter who shot him by accident while hunting non-endangered animals. | |
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The Bank Job: It's never conclusively revealed which of the many parties involved in the eponymous robbery is guilty of of murdering Major Singer and Bambas, or whether their killers are working together or not. In-Universe, the epilogue mentions their murders are never solved. | |
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Broken Flowers does not reveal who sent Don the plot-instigating letter about his son, or if he really does have a son in the first place. | |
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The subplot regarding Matt's father in Another Code R is dropped about two chapters before the end of the game and not brought up again, even after most of the plot points are solved. Supposedly, the plan was for him to have a Spin-Off game in which the story would have been resolved, but the company went bankrupt before anything could be put into place. | |
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The "Ass Crack Bandit" from the Community episode "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics". The two main suspects are disproven and another attack occurs. Jeff and Annie try chasing the bandit, but give up when Shirley tells them that Pierce has died. At episode's end, the ACB remains at large. A writer retweeted a part of the script for The Grand Finale that implied that Annie was probably the ACB, but this could've been a joke. | |
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Several episodes of Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) cover several of these cases, including mysterious disappearances reported in American and Canadian national parks, as well as how the Dyatlov Pass hikers all died. | |
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The titular teen from The Body of Christopher Creed is never found, neither as a runaway nor as a corpse (a body is found, but the deceased is unrelated to the case). At the end, the protagonist receives several letters from people claiming to be Creed, one of which he decides to consider as genuine. | |
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Frederick Forsythe's book The Day of the Jackal. The titular assassin is killed trying to carry out his plot against Charles de Gaulle, but his real identity remains unknown to the end. | |
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Memories of Murder, based on the Real Life Hwaseong serial murders of Korea. | |
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The Adena Watson case on Homicide: Life on the Street. In fact, a lot of cases end up not being solved, since Homicide stuck very close to real life. | |
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Done in the Cracker episode "One Day A Lemming Will Fly." A teacher, in custody as a suspect, confesses to the murder of a school pupil, but then when he is alone with Fitz, tells him that he didn't commit the murder — but feels so guilty about his treatment of the boy (not to mention all the pressure the public, the police and especially Fitz put him under to "confess", lasting nearly two whole episodes) that he said he did it anyway. The real murderer is never identified, nor are any plausible suspects ever put forward. Worse, Fitz wasted so much time on this teacher, and the case has acquired such a high-profile, that his boss decides to ignore his pleas that he got it wrong and still try and convict the man for the crime. | |
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This is what happens if you don't get the Good Ending in Persona 4. The Bad one acts as the sad outcome, and the characters never ask themselves about the contradictions. | |
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In Minority Report, John Anderton never finds out what happened to his missing son. At most, Samantha implies he died shortly afterward. | |
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Murder in the Mews: Downplayed in "Dead Man's Mirror." The murder is solved, but it's never revealed who Gervase suspected of defrauding him when he summoned Poirot to his mansion, or if his suspicions were accurate. Poirot does note that the secretary and estate manager are both likely suspects, but never pursues this further. | |
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Black Death is about a group of soldiers who are sent out in order to investigate an idyllic village that seems to have been spared from the pestilence. Pretty much everything that they see in the village, whether it be a resurrected girl, a woman with supernatural powers, or the lack of disease, could have a rational explanation, or could in fact be the work of demonic powers. No one ever finds out. | |
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Farscape: who killed Salis in "Durka Returns"? Especially since one of the two main suspects is a regular character, and there's a common Epileptic Trees fanon that it was actually another of the regulars. | |
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The homicide case in Zodiac remains unsolved. The protagonist is pretty convinced that one suspect in particular is the Zodiac Killer, but his theory is never proven conclusively. This is Truth in Television. | |
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An in-universe example. In Batman: Arkham City, there is a sidequest named "Watcher in the Wings", about a mysterious stalker that Batman keeps seeing.When you finally confront him, he names himself Azrael and talks in riddles about a prophecy involving Batman and Gotham City. Batman simply says "I don't believe in fairy tales" and Azrael leaves. Hardcore Batman fans may recognize the character, but neither Batman nor the audience has any idea what he's predicting. Azrael would later return to confront Batman once more in Batman: Arkham Knight. | |
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One Seinfeld episode had Jerry getting increasingly frustrated that his Girlfriend of the Week refused to taste a piece of apple pie and wouldn't tell him why. Despite many efforts, he never learns why she turned down the pie, declaring the mystery "one for the ages." Similarly, in "The Seven," Jerry's Girlfriend of the Week wears the same dress on all of their dates with George, and Jerry tries to figure out why. This eventually drives him crazy and she dumps him before he can find out when she catches him starting to go through her clothes. |
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So many things about Twin Peaks. Namely, is MIKE a good guy or a bad guy? What about The Man From Another Place? What was the deal with The Log Lady? Who was that kid with the creamed corn? How is Annie? In fact, David Lynch initially intended the central mystery of the series — that of Laura's murder — to remain unsolved as well, but Executive Meddling forced him to change this. The movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, opens up even more questions. Why was David Bowie distorting the space-time continuum? What happened to the Chris Isaak character? Who was the Jurgen Prochnow character from Laura's dream? What was that monkey about, and who is this Judy person it mentions? |
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Two in Daughter for Dessert: Why exactly did Saul give the protagonist free legal representation? Who stole the toaster? Mortelli apparently knows, but refuses to say. |
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The Crying of Lot 49 combines this with Interrupted by the End, coming to a close seconds before the mystery may be brought closer to solution. Why? Because Thomas Pynchon enjoys messing with you. The novel is sometimes said to be the first of its own kind — "anti-detective fiction", where only the search itself and the questions asked matter, not the answers. | |
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The movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, opens up even more questions. Why was David Bowie distorting the space-time continuum? What happened to the Chris Isaak character? Who was the Jurgen Prochnow character from Laura's dream? What was that monkey about, and who is this Judy person it mentions? | |
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The Law & Order franchise has done this a few times, usually in the form of cutting to the credits right before the verdict in a controversial trial is read, or ending without revealing the outcome of a tough decision that the main character(s) or guest star is forced to make. Which is a Truth in Television on its own level: despite what shows like Perry Mason can lead you to think, a trial rarely can solve the mystery - most of the time, it can only establish what a reasonable person, relying on the evidence collected much earlier, should think about the claims put forward by prosecution and defense. | |
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BuzzFeed Unsolved investigates both the existence of the supernatural and real-life crime mysteries, though Foregone Conclusion dictates that the cases covered by them are left open-ended. Ryan's search for proof that ghouls and demons exist also has yet to be confirmed, though the evidence that he does manage to accumulate could point either way. | |
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This is the main drive of the plot of Mr. Holmes, an adaptation of the novel A Slight Trick of the Mind (see below). | |
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Played with in Rainbows End: the main villain is revealed to the reader in the beginning of the book, but none of the characters figure out who it is. The trickster, on the other hand, might or might not be an A.I. and is only ever seen as a holographic rabbit — not even his name is known. | |
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In The White Ribbon we never learn who committed the crimes. | |
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Ruby Quest. A girl wakes up in a coffin in some mysterious place, frees this guy from his prison downstairs, and together they start to make their escape and try to find some answers, in that order. They do get away in the end, and many answers were found, but so very much was left to shadows as well. Justified, though, due to the nature of the game. Word of God is that, had the players done a couple of things differently, more answers would have been uncovered. Notably, Filbert was supposed to explain a lot, but he ended up kind of, well, dead. | |
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Who sent the tapes and drawings to the family in Caché? | |
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Northern Exposure: In "All is Vanity", a man who no one in the small town knows drops dead of natural causes in Joel's waiting room, and the episode ends with it remaining unknown who he was or what he was doing in either Cicely or the waiting room. | |
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Sherlock Holmes: The story "The Five Orange Pips", from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Though Holmes is certain that the murderers, high-level members of The Klan, are on a specific ship, said ship apparently sinks at sea, and their identities are never determined. The Problem of Thor Bridge states that there were problems even Sherlock Holmes couldn't solve, but they were not published by Doctor Watson because the audience would have felt cheated: |
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Somebody Owes Me Money: Even after the killer is exposed it's still unknown who took Chet's money from the apartment. | |
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Bret King Mysteries: In The Comanche Caves, the gang's new friend Ned expresses hope that he'll find the lost loot from a long-ago train robbery. An outlaw jumped onto the train and stole a gold shipment at gunpoint. He threw the gold off the train as it passed a canyon, only to fall to his death in the process. The gold has never been found, and some people think that the robber had an accomplice waiting to pick it up, or that treasure hunters found it years ago. The gold is a Red Herring and the gang never learns what happened to it. | |
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The Cleveland torso murders, a series of shockingly brutal killings in Depression-era Cleveland, Ohio. Most of the details remain a mystery, including who the victims actually were. The killer targeted vagrants and sex workers, so only two (Edward Andrassy and Florence Polillo) out of at least a dozen were ever identified. The "at least" is because the exact number of victims, and even the exact timeline, is still unclear. What is known is that the police could not possibly have fucked up harder. Eliot Ness (yes, that Eliot Ness) became involved and employed methods like torturing a suspect (Francis E. Sweeney, who, coincidentally, was the cousin of one of Ness's political rivals) and burning a shantytown to the ground. The police also murdered another suspect, Frank Dolezal, after beating a false confession out of him. To this day, there are no leads, although some people believe Sweeney was the murderer based on Ness's largely unfounded suspicions. Oh, and the killer may also have been responsible for the lesser-known "murder swamp killings", which took place a train ride away in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The only thing positive about the killer is that it was a physically strong man with at least some knowledge of anatomy. | |
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Doctor Who: What the hell was the Midnight Creature? | |
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In Back to the Future: The Game, Doc kicks off the plot by using time travel to solve an unsolved mystery: who was the arsonist who destroyed a speakeasy in 1931? Not only did he not find out (a flying brick stunned him when he tried to investigate), but he was himself blamed. A few episodes later, Marty learns that it was Edna Strickland... and alters history so that everyone else knows it too, meaning that the Doc of the altered timeline never had any reason to go near the speakeasy in the first place. | |
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The Nancy Drew story The Clue in the Old Album is kick-started when Nancy witnesses a man steal an old woman's purse during a concert. Nancy goes after him and manages to retrieve the stolen property, learning on its return that the woman didn't care about anything in her purse except several letters. From there the story veers off on a completely unrelated tangent, and though the woman remains a central character, no one ever learns what was in the letters, or why they were so important. | |
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One CSI episode has a series of knife attacks, followed by murders of the same victim, committed by a man wearing a full-body latex suit. His pseudonym is Ian Moone, but that quickly proves an anagram of "I am no one". It later turns out all his targets were people who were publicly upstanding citizens with dark secrets,* an adulterous housewife, a paramedic who sets fires in order to rescue the victims, a woman who mercy killed her paralyzed son at his request making the killings a form of Vigilante Execution. But despite all they learn about him, they never find out Moone's true identity and they never catch him. | |
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Who Killed Captain Alex? Not even the director knew. The answer ended up being the intro to an entirely different movie. | |
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The show Unsolved Mysteries, of course. | |
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2666: Much like in real life, the serial murder investigation is never concluded. | |
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The Prisoner (1967). Why did Number Six resign? We never know. Whose side was the Village on? We can only guess. Was Number One a clone? A twin? A hallucination? | |
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Aguirre, the Wrath of God: It's never revealed what Don Pedro de Urzúa was holding in his hand, IF he was holding ANYTHING. | |
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In-universe in the Ace Attorney games — any incident that ends without a conviction gets a code of two letters and a number (e.g. DL-6) and becomes a cold case until a conviction is made or the Statute of Limitations expires. The case going unsolved/the criminal never being convicted is also the usual Bad Ending in situations where the player can get a Game Over. | |
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It's easy to go through the Laura Bow adventure games and have no idea what is going on. Even if you manage to get the good ending, it's possible you haven't figured out quite everything behind the mystery. | |
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In Cyberpunk 2077, V learns that the new mayor of Night City, Jefferson Peralez, and his wife Elizabeth have become the center of a Government Conspiracy in which someone killed the previous mayor and has been brainwashing the Peralezes for unknown reasons, giving them Fake Memories and altering their personalities with the player being unable to discover the truth behind it all. Johnny Silverhand theorizes that rogue AIs could be responsible, however the Mysterious Stranger from the "Sun" ending Mr. Blue Eyes can be spotted spying on them, and the Ambiguously Evil infrastructure company Night Corp has performed similar experiments in the past with Peralez having been one of their beneficiaries. What makes it even more bizarre is that it appears to be a case of Brainwashing for the Greater Good, as their captors seem interested in turning them into the "perfect" political couple and if Locked Out of the Loop Mr. Peralez declares his intent to combat homelessness. | |
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The main storyline of Web of Spider-Man #113-116 (June-September, 1994) is famous for introducing a murder mystery and never resolving it. The story arc has photographer Lance Bannon, a long-serving supporting character, working to develop a picture in the darkroom of the Daily Bugle. It contains the only glimpse of the unmasked face of Armored Villain FACADE. Bannon is murdered within said darkroom, and the investigation casts suspicion on several major and minor characters who have access to the offices of the Bugle, including J. Jonah Jameson himself. "Who is FACADE", and "Who killed Lance Bannon"? The storyline ended with no definite answers and the initial plan may have been to continue the tale in subsequent issues. But issue #117 introduced The Clone Saga and all other ongoing storylines were dropped. FACADE has since made a couple of cameos (in 2009 and 2012) whose main point was to remind readers that the case is still open. | |
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In the How I Met Your Mother episode aptly titled "The Pineapple Incident," Ted never does find out how or why a pineapple ended up on his nightstand. Eight years later, he finally finds out where it came from. The Captain likes to leave one on his porch as a symbol of hospitality. Drunk Ted stole it years before he ever met the Captain and it had absolutely no connection to anything else in that episode. | |
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The Cat Who... Series: In book #27 (The Cat Who Went Bananas), not only do the characters not find out what happened or who was responsible for the deaths of the book's victims (the actor who died in a car accident after supposedly being on drugs, and Alden Wade's wife who was shot by a sniper), the readers don't, either! It's also never quite confirmed if Alden was responsible for the theft of the book that was stolen from the new bookshop and subsequently turned up among his belongings. During the events of book #28 (The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell), Qwill attends a family reunion for the Ogilvie-Fugtree family, with plans to write a column on the subject, but it's called off when two rabbit hunters go into the woods and only one returns. The other is confirmed dead, but his murder is never solved for lack of evidence. All three major mysteries in book #29 (The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers) fall under this. The cause of the two major fires in the book — the Old Hulk (which was being renovated into a senior center) and Qwill's barn — is never discovered. The thieves who stole Nathan Ledfield's treasures from the museum that was to house them are never caught. Libby Simms, who dies of a bee sting, is confirmed to have died of foul play when it's found someone stole her kit to counteract bee venom — but just who did so is never identified. |
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Teen Power Inc.: Late in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a thief at the elementary school steals money from Liz and Tom's younger brothers. The person Tom and his brother suspect of the thefts is seemingly exonerated (and helps catch a mugger who has been terrorizing the adults of the town), and Tom admits that he never did learn who the elementary school thief is. In Breaking Point, one of the past mysteries about the potential Haunted House is revealed (along with the present day ones), but there is still nothing to explain other parts of the Back Story. Specifically, it remains unclear why the builder of the house disappeared while leaving his money behind, the next owner claimed the house was haunted, or seven subsequent tenants unexpectedly died of an apparent illness at the same time. |
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In the 1632-universe short story "The Vice President's Plane is Down", someone sabotages the eponymous plane, although everyone onboard survives except for a Disposable Pilot. The authorities initially investigate the crime as an attempted political assassination, but other potential motives show up. Another passenger on the plane was an aristocrat about to disinherit his brothers, who may have decided to kill him first. Additionally, it is suspected that the dead pilot was involved in a counterfeiting ring and alarmed his co-conspirators with his Suspicious Spending. The only witness to the crime flees town before he can be questioned. The story ends with the police chief admitting that he has no idea who the sabotage was really intended to kill, no way to pursue further leads, and no suspects for two out of the three possible motives. The Grantville Gazette short story "A Change of Hart" has the Hart brothers and their supervisor discovering someone at the explosives factory has been tampering with the production line scale to get away with stealing two pounds of explosives from every package they send out. They fix the scale and implement better security, but have no way of identifying or punishing the thief or thieves. The incident mainly serves as a Friendship Moment to make the three characters put aside their long-standing differences. |
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In Picnic at Hanging Rock, we never learn how or why the girls vanished. The novel did have a chapter that explained it, but the publishers decided to keep it a mystery in most editions. | |
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