Maybe they should have searched the rest of that wall for the body.
Anyone want to tackle this one?
In 1972, a 13 year old Tim Taylor climbed a 13,000 foot peak in California, and left a note behind in a film canister. It was just found this month. He gave his address, but his family hasn’t lived there for over 20 years.
Another Big Unsolved is the Dorothy Parker Quote - “This is a book that should not be tossed aside lightly; it should thrown with great force.”. I am pretty sure attribution to the sublime Ms. Parker can not yet be confirmed…
ETA: a thread I could find on it that I think is most recent: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=599661&highlight=Dorothy+Parker
I believe the whole Umkay mess from several month’s back sprang from just such a bit of detective work on the part of a Doper, who found “her” spewing the same spiel on another board.
Tim Taylor couldn’t have been all that hard to find. He had that TV show for years.
In all seriousness, did that ever have a end because I remember that thread all to well. As I recall the consensus was the OP made a typo which rendered it unsolvable.
I helped a guy find an old, obscure episode of Mystery! in less than an hour and a half. Feel pretty good about that one.
We still get credit though, right?
ETA: Max Torque - isn’t it fun when you only see one episode, and it’s the important one? I remember the first two times I saw an episode of The Simpsons. About a year apart. And it was the same episode.
-D/a
That’s what they said about hieroglyphics until they found the Rosetta Stone.
Oh, if we’re allowed to do that, the mysterious MSH.
Wow. The legend of the Dope grows.
-D/a
Well, here is my small contribution to this phenomenon. My original username here was teletype, hence the references to that name in the thread. I was pretty darned impressed with myself, to be honest. 
There was one today in General Questions asking about a “Screaming Preacher Boy” from 10 years ago. It was resurrected several times, and then another son of the boy’s dad appeared to shed some light on it. Then, the Preacher Boy himself showed up today or yesterday to post. Jury’s still out on whether he’s the real guy or not.
There was a post awhile back regarding a very technical detail about (IIRC) the space shuttle or space rockets or something similar. It turned out one of the Doper’s father-in-law was the original designer and he got the answer straight from the source!
This is the one I came to post. Was it about instrumentation on the space shuttle?