Initially, I was introduced to Cain’s Jawbone through TikTok earlier in October. However, at the time, I watched the video, shrugged, and kept scrolling as it didn’t capture my attention. It wasn’t until a month later, when my friend and I were walking through Barnes & Noble together, that we discussed our time in the summer solving murder mystery games. My friend suddenly stopped and said, “We need to do this one murder mystery I’ve heard about. It’s apparently one of the hardest ones ever to solve.” I initially thought it was an exaggerated statement until I started the journey of trying to solve Cain’s Jawbone myself.
And boy, let me tell you, the first 50 pages in, I felt like my head was ready to explode. At some point, I needed to put it down and step away. The first thing I said when I stepped away? “What the heck did I get myself into?”
What is it?
Cain’s Jawbone is an almost 90-year-old murder mystery puzzle written by Edward Powys Mathers. The murder mystery comes in a form of a book with 100 pages you must rip out to solve the puzzle. The catch? The entire 100 pages are out of order, and there are six murders that you must name by full name and their victims, meanwhile attempting to piece together the correct order of the said 100 pages. According to calculations, the combinations of the correct order are almost endless; however, to be precise, it comes out to a number with 158 digits. There is a lack of clarity on the exact number of how many people have solved the puzzle. However, the general consensus is either 3 or 4 people in the entire world.
As stated inside the book itself, in 1934, a prize of £15 was offered to those who could solve the puzzle correctly first. Two people got the correct answer: Mr. Sydney-Turner and Mr. W. S. Kenndey. They were rewarded with £25 instead, higher than the original prize money. The original prize money is estimated to be worth around $1,556, and the amount they were rewarded instead is estimated to be worth $2,594 as of today.
Interestingly enough, it is reported that these 100 pages were reported to have been accidentally printed and bound out of order. This created an inviting space for readers to send in their guesses with the millions of combinations. To this day, the solution remains a secret. Unbound, the publisher of the current version of the book, has decided to “revive” the competition once again. They are offering a prize of $350 to spend supporting other book projects at Unbound for readers who send in the correct solution on the answer sheet located inside the book.
My own Experience
I am an avid lover of good mystery that needs to be solved. However, this one gave me a run for my money. I started out enthusiastically with my colored markers and pens, multiple sets of note sheets, sticky notes, and stickers. I ended with my floor laid out in piles of pages. I only had minuscule guesses as to why they were in the said pile and a pounding headache. That was my first time doing it. I only managed to get through about 50 pages before I called it quits for the night because after feeling like my brain was melting, I knew it was time to stop.
Some people spend months researching and analyzing the case. Looking online on Reddit and TikTok, some people dedicate hours of their time to this—hanging up pages with dozens of notes on their wall, attempting to solve it as though it was an FBI crime board. I considered doing this until I realized the floor had more than enough room for me to brainstorm.
Final Thoughts
If you’re a fanatic about a good mystery or murder mystery case, I would definitely recommend you try this out. It’s an unusual experience you wouldn’t get based on the old 1930’s dialect they used and how chaotic it is. I recommend taking anything you see online about this puzzle with a grain of salt because as convincing as Cain’s Jawbone Subreddit may seem, you never know for sure what’s the correct theory and what is just a long shot at piecing together an idea. Be careful not to let it overtake your mind or do. Maybe you’ll be the next person to solve the “unsolvable” puzzle.