The Somerton Man Case ( Mystery of the Somerton Man ), or the Taman Shud Case, is one of Australia's greatest unsolved mysteries.
It revolves around an unidentified man found dead on a beach in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1948. The case is named after the Persian phrase tamám shud, meaning "is over" or "is finished" or "the end" or "it is ended", which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man's trousers. The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th century poet Omar Khayyám.
Physical appearance of the body was described as
180 centimeters (5 feet 11 in) tall, with grey eyes, fair to ginger colored hair, slightly grey around the temples, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, hands and nails that showed no signs of manual labor, big and little toes that met in a wedge shape, like those of a dancer or someone who wore boots with pointed toes; and pronounced high calf muscles consistent with people who regularly wore boots or shoes with high heels or performed ballet.
He was dressed in a white shirt; a red, white and blue tie; brown trousers; socks and shoes; a brown knitted pullover and fashionable grey and brown double-breasted jacket of reportedly "American" tailoring. All labels on his clothes had been removed, and he had no hat (unusual for 1948) or wallet. He was clean-shaven and carried no identification, which led police to believe he had committed suicide. Finally, his dental records were not able to be matched to any known person.
Autopsy report was
The heart was of normal size, and normal in every way small vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion. There was congestion of the pharynx, and the gullet was covered with whitening of superficial layers of the mucosa with a patch of ulceration in the middle of it. The stomach was deeply congested. There was congestion in the second half of the duodenum. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach. Both kidneys were congested, and the liver contained a great excess of blood in its vessels. The spleen was strikingly large ( about 3 times normal size ), there was destruction of the center of the liver lobules revealed under the microscope. acute gastritis hemorrhage, extensive congestion of the liver and spleen, and the congestion to the brain.
Further details are written below (Details and images are gathered from various online resources)
At 7 o'clock on the warm evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide. As they walked toward Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed man lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. He was lolling about 20 yards from them, legs outstretched, feet crossed. As the couple watched, the man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground. Lyons thought he might be making a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette.
Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position. Looking on him from above, the woman could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit, with smart new shoes polished to a mirror shine-odd clothing for the beach. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. They commented between themselves that it was odd that he was not reacting to the mosquitoes, they had thought it more likely that he was drunk or asleep, and thus did not investigate further.
It was not until next morning that it became obvious that the man was not so much dead to the world as actually dead. John Lyons returned from a morning swim to find some people clustered at the seawall where he had seen his "drunk" the previous evening. Walking over, he saw a figure slumped in much the same position, head resting on the seawall, feet crossed. Now, though, the body was cold. There were no marks of any sort of violence. A half-smoked cigarette was lying on the man's collar, as though it had fallen from his mouth.
The body reached the Royal Adelaide Hospital three hours later. There Dr. John Barkley Bennett put the time of death at no earlier than 2 AM, noted the likely cause of death as heart failure, and added that he suspected poisoning. The contents of the man's pockets were spread out on a table: tickets from Adelaide to the beach, a pack of chewing gum, some matches, two combs and a pack of Army Club cigarettes containing seven cigarettes of another, more expensive brand called Kensitas. There was no wallet and no cash, and no ID. None of the man's clothes bore any name tags-indeed, in all but one case the maker's label had been carefully snipped away. One trouser pocket had been neatly repaired with an unusual variety of orange thread.
By the time a full autopsy was carried out a day later, the police had already exhausted their best leads as to the dead man's identity, and the results of the postmortem did little to enlighten them. It revealed that the corpse's pupils were "smaller" than normal and "unusual," that a dribble of spittle had run down the side of the man's mouth as he lay, and that "he was probably unable to swallow it." His spleen, meanwhile, "was strikingly large and firm, about three times normal size," and the liver was distended with congested blood.
In the man's stomach, pathologist John Dwyer found the remains of his last meal-a pasty-and a further quantity of blood. That too suggested poisoning, though there was nothing to show that the poison had been in the food. Now the dead man's peculiar behavior on the beach-slumping in a suit, raising and dropping his right arm-seemed less like drunkenness than it did a lethal dose of something taking slow effect. But repeated tests on both blood and organs by an expert chemist failed to reveal the faintest trace of a poison. "I was astounded that he found nothing," Dwyer admitted at the inquest. In fact, no cause of death was found."
An eminent professor, Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks suggested that a rare poison (either digitalis or strophanthin) was used. He suspected strophanthin.
A full set of fingerprints was taken and circulated throughout Australia-and then throughout the English-speaking world. No one could identify them. People from all over Adelaide were escorted to the mortuary in the hope they could give the corpse a name. Some thought they knew the man from photos published in the newspapers, others were the distraught relatives of missing persons. Not one recognized the body.
By January 11, the South Australia police had investigated and dismissed pretty much every lead they had. The investigation was now widened in an attempt to locate any abandoned personal possessions, perhaps left luggage, that might suggest that the dead man had come from out of state. This meant checking every hotel, dry cleaner, lost property office and railway station for miles around. But it did produce results. On the 12th, detectives sent to the main railway station in Adelaide were shown a brown suitcase that had been deposited in the cloakroom there on November 30.
The contents of suitcase were equally inscrutable. There was a stencil kit of the sort "used by the Third Officer on merchant ships responsible for the stenciling of cargo"; a table knife with the haft cut down; and a coat stitched using a feather stitch unknown in Australia. A tailor identified the stitch work as American in origin, suggesting that the coat, and perhaps its wearer, had traveled during the war years. But searches of shipping and immigration records from across the country again produced no likely leads.
The police had brought in another expert, John Cleland, emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide, to re-examine the corpse and the dead man's possessions. In April, four months after the discovery of the body, Cleland's search produced a final piece of evidence-one that would prove to be the most baffling of all. Cleland discovered a small pocket sewn into the waistband of the dead man's trousers. Previous examiners had missed it, and several accounts of the case have referred to it as a "secret pocket," but it seems to have been intended to hold a fob watch. Inside, tightly rolled, was a minute scrap of paper, which, opened up, proved to contain two words, typeset in an elaborate printed script. The phrase read "Tamám Shud."
The body started decomposing so it was buried, sealed under concrete in a plot of dry ground specifically chosen in case it became necessary to exhume it. As late as 1978, flowers would be found at odd intervals on the grave, but no one could ascertain who had left them there, or why.
In July, fully eight months after the investigation had begun, the search for the right Rubaiyat produced results. On the 23rd, a Glenelg man walked into the Detective Office in Adelaide with a copy of the book and a strange story. Early the previous December, just after the discovery of the unknown body, he had gone for a drive with his brother-in-law in a car he kept parked a few hundred yards from Somerton Beach. The brother-in-law had found a copy of the Rubaiyat lying on the floor by the rear seats. Each man had silently assumed it belonged to the other, and the book had sat in the glove compartment ever since. Alerted by a newspaper article about the search, the two men had gone back to take a closer look. They found that part of the final page had been torn out, together with Khayyam's final words. They went to the police.
Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane took a close look at the book. Almost at once he found a telephone number penciled on the rear cover; using a magnifying glass, he dimly made out the faint impression of some other letters, written in capitals underneath. Here, at last, was a solid clue to go on.
The phone number was unlisted, but it proved to belong to a young nurse who lived near Somerton Beach. The nurse was named " Jessica Thomson ( Jessica Ellen "Jo" Thomson (born Jessie Harkness) nick name Jestyn ) ". She lived a five minute walk away from where the man was found dead. Reluctantly, it seemed (perhaps because she was living with the man who would become her husband), the nurse admitted that she had indeed presented a copy of the Rubaiyat to a man she had known during the war. She gave the detectives his name: Alfred Boxall.
At last the police felt confident that they had solved the mystery. Boxall, surely, was the Unknown Man. Within days they traced his home to Maroubra, New South Wales.
The problem was that Boxall turned out to be still alive, and he still had the copy of the Rubaiyat Jestyn had given him.
It might have helped if the South Australia police had felt able to question Jestyn closely, but it is clear that they did not. The gentle probing that the nurse received did yield some intriguing bits of information; interviewed again, she recalled that some time the previous year-she could not be certain of the date-she had come home to be told by neighbors than an unknown man had called and asked for her. And, confronted with the cast of the dead man's face, Jestyn seemed "completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance she was about to faint," Leane said. She seemed to recognize the man, yet firmly denied that he was anyone she knew.
That left the faint impression Sergeant Leane had noticed in the Glenelg Rubaiyat. Examined under ultraviolet light, five lines of jumbled letters could be seen, the second of which had been crossed out. The first three were separated from the last two by a pair of straight lines with an ‘x' written over them. It seemed that they were some sort of code.
Here is what they found
WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB
And there, to all intents and purposes, the mystery rested. The Australian police never cracked the code or identified the unknown man. Jestyn died a few years ago without revealing why she had seemed likely to faint when confronted with a likeness of the dead man's face. And when the South Australia coroner published the final results of his investigation in 1958, his report concluded with the admission:
"I am unable to say who the deceased was… I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death."
Even though the case was closed but retired Australian policeman Gerry Feltus (author of the only book yet published on the case ) and Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide made some useful progress on their own.
Abbott has discovered that at least one other man died in Australia after the war with a copy of Khayyam's poems close by him. This man's name was George Marshall, he was a Jewish immigrant from Singapore, and his copy of the Rubaiyat was published in London by Methuen ( a seventh edition ).
Going through the police file on the case, Gerry Feltus stumbled across a neglected piece of evidence: a statement, given in 1959, by a man who had been on Somerton Beach. There, on the evening that the Unknown Man expired, and walking toward the spot where his body was found, the witness (a police report stated) "saw a man carrying another on his shoulder, near the water's edge. He could not describe the man." At the time, this did not seem that mysterious; the witness assumed he'd seen somebody carrying a drunken friend. Looked at in the cold light of day, though, it raises questions.
[[[[ Recent Updates ]]]]
In 2011, an Adelaide woman contacted biological anthropologist Maciej Henneberg about an identification card of an H. C. Reynolds that she had found in her father's possessions. The card, a document issued in the United States to foreign seamen during World War I, was given to Henneberg in October 2011 for comparison of the ID photograph to that of the Somerton man. While Henneberg found anatomical similarities in features such as the nose, lips and eyes, he believed they were not as reliable as the close similarity of the ear. The ear shapes shared by both men were a "very good" match, although Henneberg also found what he called a "unique identifier"; a mole on the cheek that was the same shape and in the same position in both photographs. "Together with the similarity of the ear characteristics, this mole, in a forensic case, would allow me to make a rare statement positively identifying the Somerton man."
The ID card, numbered 58757, was issued in the United States on 28 February 1918 to H. C. Reynolds, giving his nationality as "British" and age as 18. Searches conducted by the US National Archives, the UK National Archives and the Australian War Memorial Research Centre have failed to find any records relating to H. C. Reynolds. The South Australia Police Major Crime Branch, who still have the case listed as open, will investigate the new information. Some independent researchers believe the ID card belonged to Horace Charles Reynolds, a Tasmanian man who died in 1953 and therefore could not have been the Somerton man.
Prof Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide said on Monday he believes the man found on 1 December 1948, was Carl "Charles" Webb, a 43-year-old electrical engineer from Melbourne.
Abbott's research was undertaken with American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick. The pair analyzed DNA evidence from hairs caught in a plaster cast made of the man's face more than half a century ago by investigators.
Fitzpatrick told the Guardian she and Abbott started with a match in a DNA database (a so-called DNA-cousin to Somerton man) and then built out his family tree until they found someone who fit the description of who they were looking for.
"The tree included about 4,000 people when that happened."
Webb was born in 1905 but was later identified "as a person with no death record", Abbott said.
Carolyn Bilsborow, a film-maker and director of the documentary "Missing Pieces about Somerton man", said the news was incredibly exciting. "We knew this day was going to come at some point," she said.
"We had all these grandiose ideas about him being Russian, American and European. I was convinced that he was from Europe - maybe a displaced person after the second world war was here alone."
"But to find out that he's Australian, from Victoria, and that he died, and no one obviously noticed he was missing, or no one followed up with the police that he was missing - I find that particularly kind of tragic."
Professor Abbott said their investigations had also found a link to the name "T Keane" which was printed on the Somerton Man's tie.
"It turns out that Carl Webb has a brother-in-law called Thomas Keane, who lived just 20 minutes' drive away from him in Victoria," he said.
In 2009, he tried to find a woman whom the police interviewed in their original investigation because of a phone number in the poetry book. She had died, however, as had her son, a professional ballet dancer whose distinctive teeth and ears resembled the Somerton man. Dr. Abbott managed to interview that man's daughter, Rachel Egan, a meeting that led to courtship and then marriage in 2010.
He further added that there was sufficient DNA evidence to "definitively" disprove any links with his wife Rachel Egan, whose father - ballet dancer Robin Thomson - was believed to have potentially been a descendant of the Somerton Man.
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