28 February 1918: H. C. Reynolds identity card issued. Did this woman die because her genitals were cut? He was fond of poetry and wrote several poems of his own, "most of them on the subject of death, which he claims to be his greatest desire", Dorothy stated. [66] Any thoughts that a positive identification had been made were quashed, however, when Elizabeth Thompson, one of the people who had earlier positively identified the body as Walsh, retracted her statement after a second viewing of the body, where the absence of a particular scar on the body, as well as the size of the dead man's legs, led her to realise the body was not Walsh. Ive already been on Trove to see if theres any presence of Charles Webb coming up in the old newspapers. And I think there is some truth to that., Authorities in Adelaide exhumed the Somerton Mans body last May and are currently conducting genetic testing on the remains. [84], In 2011, an Adelaide woman contacted biological anthropologist Maciej Henneberg about an identification card[85] of an H. C. Reynolds that she had found in her father's possessions. 1951: Dorothy Webb reported to be living in Bute, South Australia. Also written on the back cover was the phone number of young nurse later identified by Abbott as Jo Thomson who lived a five minute walk away from where the man was found dead. [18] About the same time, Ina Harvey, the receptionist from the Strathmore Hotel opposite Adelaide railway station, revealed that a strange man had stayed in Room 21 or 23 for a few days around the time of the death, checking out on 30 November 1948. The tags on his suit had been cut off, and forensic examiners suspected he had been poisoned. [79], J. M. Gower, secretary of the Largs North Progress Association, received anonymous phone calls threatening that Mrs. Mangnoson would meet with an accident if he interfered while A. H. Curtis, the acting mayor of Port Adelaide, received three anonymous phone calls threatening "an accident" if he "stuck his nose into the Mangnoson affair". Early 1950: Prosper Thomson's divorce is finalised. [3][4] South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified the result, but South Australia Police said they were "cautiously optimistic" about it. Or maybe a final goodbye to a lover.. [36] Public library officials called in to translate the text identified it as a phrase meaning "ended" or "finished" found on the last page of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There is a . The Somerton man mystery began in the early hours of December 1, 1948, when beachgoers found a body lying on Somerton beach in Adelaide. My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.[44]. "Somerton Beach Mystery Man", Transcript, Broadcast 27 March 2009. We knew this day was going to come at some point, she said. Abbotts research was undertaken with American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick. He said he had tracked down and spoken to Mr Webb's living relatives. Cryptic clues about man found on an Adelaide beach in 1948 spawned theories of jilted lovers and cold war spies but the truth may open up even more questions. Also inside were a shaving brush, shoe polish, a knife, scissors, a screwdriver and assorted attire, some of which was labeled with variants of the name T. They included a suitcase, items of clothing with their labels removed and incoherent writings believed to be a code. Dr Coxon said tests of this kind were highly complex but investigators would use "every method at our disposal to try and bring closure to this enduring mystery". They observed that the format of the code also appeared to follow the quatrain format of Rubaiyat, leading them to theorise that the code was a one-time pad encryption algorithm. [34], Early in the inquiry, Cleland stated, "I would be prepared to find that he died from poison, that the poison was probably a glucoside and that it was not accidentally administered; but I cannot say whether it was administered by the deceased himself or by some other person. 8:30a.m. to 10:50am: The Somerton Man is presumed to have arrived in Adelaide by train. The coroner will be asked to confirm the identification. The spot on Somerton beach, south of Adelaide, where the man was found on December 1, 1948. Did you talk to her about that at all?" Per a 1949 inquest report, a doctor who examined the Somerton Man's remains placed his time of death around 2 a.m. ), Carl 'Charles' Webb's prisoner-of-war brother bears resemblance to Somerton Man https://t.co/c7KcGhtiuI. In trying to solve the Somerton Man case, Abbott became part of it. [5], Carl Webbs father Richard August Webb (died in 1939) had emigrated to Australia from Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Anne Coxon of Forensic Science South Australia said: "The technology available to us now is clearly light years ahead of the techniques available when this body was discovered in the late 1940s," and that tests would use "every method at our disposal to try and bring closure to this enduring mystery". More photos, details and tidbits about. Derek Abbott, from the University of Adelaide, said that. x Some answers may come soon, some may take years, and some may never be answered, Abbott tells ABC. Is climate change killing Australian wine? [32] Mangnoson stated that "the car stopped and a man with a khaki handkerchief over his face told her to 'keep away from the police or else'". [9][30] There is no record of the station's bathroom facilities being unavailable on the day he arrived. Read about our approach to external linking. (The DNA studied by Abbott and Fitzpatrick came from the Somerton Mans death mask, not his body, and was analyzed as part of a separate, parallel investigation.) [35] Cleland remarked that if the body had been carried to its final resting place then "all the difficulties would disappear". 3. [44], In 1994, John Harber Phillips, Chief Justice of Victoria and Chairman of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, reviewed the case to determine the cause of death and concluded that, "There seems little doubt it was digitalis. [5], On 1 December 1948 at 6:30am, the police were contacted after the body of a man was discovered on Somerton Park beach near Glenelg, about 11km (7mi) southwest of Adelaide, South Australia. Bilsborow said: Now that weve got his name, theres still so many questions. Video, The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure, The mystery death haunting Norway for 46 years, MasterChef Australia host Jock Zonfrillo dies, NFL player's daughter, aged two, drowns in pool, Banana artwork in Seoul museum eaten by visitor, Donald Trump arrives in Scotland on golf visit, Indian 'killer' elephant relocated to tiger reserve, Ding becomes China's first male world chess champion. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. CNN . Bilsborow says the theory that Somerton man was a Russian spy emerged in the 1970s at the time of the cold war, particularly fuelled by the writing in the copy of the Rubiyt they interpreted as code. [24] He immediately checked his suitcase at the station cloak room before leaving the station and catching a city bus to Glenelg. Johnson identified himself at a police station. The 5-foot-11, 40- to 50-year-old man carried no money or identification. If the book was found one or two weeks before, it suggests that the man had visited previously or had been in Adelaide for a longer period. Although it was a very common practice to use name tags, it was also common when buying secondhand clothing to remove the tags of the previous owners. However, the police did state that the body was consistent with that of a man who had been a wood cutter, although the state of the man's hands indicated he had not cut wood for at least eighteen months. [113] In 1941, he married Dorothy "Doff" Robertson, a pharmacist and chiropodist. When Littlemore suggests in the interview that there may have been an espionage connection to the dead man in Adelaide, Boxall replies: "It's quite a melodramatic thesis, isn't it? There is no evidence that police knew in 1949 that she was not married. In fact, theres probably more questions than there were yesterday, when we didnt have his name. In all this soup and ocean of DNA cousins, we were able to connect one of them to Carls father and one of them to Carls mother, Fitzpatrick tells the Times. [116] She applied for a divorce on 5 June 1951, citing desertion. [14], According to the pathologist, John Burton Cleland, the man was of "Britisher" appearance and thought to be aged about 4045; he was in "top physical condition". Beachgoers found the body lying against a seawall on Somerton Beach in Adelaide on 1 December, 1948. A half-smoked cigarette was resting on his collar, and there was a line from a Persian poem in his pocket - but investigators had no idea who he was. [110], Carl "Charles" Webb was born on 16 November 1905, in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne,[110] the youngest of six children of Richard and Eliza. The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure. In 2019, ABC's Radio National released a six-part series titled, This page was last edited on 23 April 2023, at 05:58. [23] It was believed that the suitcase was owned by the man found on the beach. [52] In an interview many years later, Paul Lawson, the technician who made the cast and was present when Thomson viewed it, noted that after looking at the bust she immediately looked away and would not look at it again. By 4 December, police had announced that the man's fingerprints were not on South Australian police records, forcing them to look further afield. In the case were a red checked dressing gown, a size-seven red felt pair of slippers, four pairs of underpants, pyjamas, shaving items, a light brown pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, an electrician's screwdriver, a table knife cut down into a short sharp instrument, a pair of scissors with sharpened points, a small square of zinc thought to have been used as a protective sheath for the knife and scissors, and a stencilling brush, as used by third officers on merchant ships for stencilling cargo.[24]. [80] International circulation of a photograph of the man and details of his fingerprints yielded no positive identification. Is British seaman's identity card clue to solving 63-year-old beach body mystery? "[82] Phillips supported his conclusion by pointing out that the organs were engorged, consistent with digitalis, the lack of evidence of natural disease and "the absence of anything seen macroscopically which could account for the death". In October 1951, three years after the Somerton Mans death, Dorothy placed a notice in the Age newspaper stating that she had begun divorce proceedings against Webb on the grounds of desertion. Its hard to see this as anything other than intentional, Fiona-Ellis Jones, host of The Somerton Man Mystery podcast, tells the Australian Broadcasting Companys (ABC) Bridget Judd. [90], In October 2019, however, Attorney-General Vickie Chapman granted approval for his body to be exhumed to extract DNA for analysis. In 1949, Jessica Thomson requested that police not keep a permanent record of her name or release her details to third parties, as it would be embarrassing and harmful to her reputation to be linked to such a case. [14] "Francis" had not considered that the book might be connected to the case until he had seen an article in the previous day's newspaper. Meilan Solly In June 2010, Abbott obtained a photograph of Jessica Thomson's eldest son Robin, which clearly showed that he like the unknown man had not only a larger cymba than cavum but also hypodontia. 'Somerton man' mystery is 'SOLVED': Extraordinary twist in Australia's most baffling death 70 years after he was found dead on a beach with a coded note in his pocket. 15 January 1948: Boxall arrives back in Sydney from his last active duty and is discharged from the army in April 1948. He said it had been thrown into the back of his car around the time of the incident. South Australia Police consulted their counterparts overseas and distributed information about the dead man internationally, in an effort to identify him. [48] Thomson's daughter Kate, in a television interview in 2014 with Channel Nine's 60 Minutes, also said that she believed her mother knew the dead man. Theories abounded, including that the person - dubbed Somerton Man - was a spy. He then stated its absence was not unknown but that he could not make a "frank conclusion" without it. The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure. He had no wallet, no cash, and no ID. I was convinced that he was from Europe maybe a displaced person after the second world war [who] was here alone., But to find out that hes 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.. Born in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, on November 16, 1905, Webb was the sixth child of a German-born man and an Australian woman, writes ABCs Rebecca Opie. The divorce was granted in April 1952. Speaking with ABCs Ben Cheshire and Susan Chenery in 2019, Abbott speculated that Robin was the Somerton Mans son; Thomson, he proposed, had failed to identify him because she was in a relationship with another man who would go on to be her husband, and she just didn't want this ghost from the past coming back to mess up her current existence.. Mystery of dead man on beach: was he a Victorian? I sworebut was I sober when I swore? Hicks noted the only "fact" not found in relation to the body was evidence of vomiting. (Carls brother Roy also died in a prisoner-of-war camp the same year.) [11][12] Witnesses said the body was in the same position when the police viewed it. In reply, Boxall says "no", and when asked if Harkness could have known, Boxall replies: "Not unless somebody else told her." The pair analysed DNA evidence from hairs caught in a plaster cast made of the mans face more than half a century ago by investigators. "It's an story that has captured the imagination of people across the state, and, indeed, across the world - but I believe that, finally, we may uncover some answers," South Australian Attorney General Ms Chapman said. A potential granddaughter's DNA is planned to be compared to the unknown man's to see if it is a match. We had all these grandiose ideas about him being Russian, American and European. On December 1, 1948, an unknown man was found lying dead on the sand on Somerton Beach next to the neighborhood of Glenelg, about 7 miles (11 km) southwest of Adelaide, South Australia. [95] It was reported that the body was exhumed as part of Operation Persevere and Operation Persist, which are investigating historical unidentified remains in South Australia. The South Australian Grandstand Bookmakers Association paid for the service to save the man from a pauper's burial. 14 January 1949: Adelaide railway station finds the brown suitcase belonging to the man. 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. He gave Cleland a piece of paper with the names of the two drugs which was entered as Exhibit C.18. 30 November 1948. She said the news also turns on its head the theory in her documentary that Australian ballet dancer Robin Thomson was the son of Somerton man. [83] Other key evidence no longer exists, such as the brown suitcase, which was destroyed in 1986. [8] A search of his pockets revealed an unused second-class rail ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach; a bus ticket from the city that may not have been used; a narrow aluminium comb that had been manufactured in the USA; a half-empty packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum; an Army Club cigarette packet which contained seven cigarettes of a different brand, Kensitas; and a quarter-full box of Bryant & May matches. [113], The marriage was not a harmonious one, largely due to Carl's personality. Professor Abbott said after more than a decade on the case, the discovery felt like summitting a mountain. What was his cause of death? And from 4000 names, the pair narrowed it down to one - Carl Webb. The Somerton Man was a mysterious, unknown decedent, found on Somerton Beach near Adelaide, South Australia, on December 1, 1948. On December 1, 1948, the body of a man was found on Somerton beach. Webb was born in 1905 but was later identified as a person with no death record, Abbott said. Video, 00:02:36Who killed 'Little Red Riding Hood'? Although the last character in this line of text looks like an "L", it is fairly clear on closer inspection of the image that this is formed from an "I" and the extension of the line used to delete or underline that line of text. Abbott and Rachel married in 2010 and they have three children. The Somerton man mystery began in the early hours of December 1, 1948, when beachgoers found a body lying on Somerton beach in Adelaide. 14 October 2019: Attorney-General of South Australia grants conditional approval for The Somerton Man to be exhumed in order for a DNA sample to be obtained. One of the biggest mysteries in modern Australian history may have finally been solved. Working in conjunction with US investigator Colleen Fitzpatrick, Professor Abbott said that, in March this year, suspicions fell on Webb, who was born in 1905 but later identified "as a person with no death record". SA Police have been contacted for comment. This article contains content provided by Twitter. As to why the Melbourne man was in Adelaide, Abbott said: We have evidence that he had separated from his wife, and that she had moved to South Australia, so possibly he had come to track her down., Fitzpatrick said: This is an amazing mystery to solve. Abbott speculates that Carl had may have gone to Adelaide intending to find her. [63], In early January 1949, two people identified the body as that of 63-year-old former wood cutter Robert Walsh. Cookie Settings, Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via, Five Places Where You Can Still Find Gold in the United States, Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Otherand the Birds Loved It, Balto's DNA Provides a New Look at the Intrepid Sled Dog, The Science of California's 'Super Bloom,' Visible From Space, The True Story of the Koh-i-Noor Diamondand Why the British Won't Give It Back. 1 December 2 a.m.: Estimated time of death. However, a bus conductor named Leslie Francis Wytkin (or Wytkins) handed in a copy of the. "We can't say for sure, but we can speculate," he said. [14][18] On 22 November 1959 it was reported that one E.B. He had a clean-shaven face and appeared to be about 40 years old. [15] He was: 180 centimetres (5ft 11 in) tall, with grey eyes, fair to ginger-coloured hair,[16] slightly grey around the temples,[7] with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, hands and nails that showed no signs of manual labour, 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. However, in July 1949, Boxall was found in Sydney and the final page of his copy of Rubaiyat (reportedly a 1924 edition published in Sydney) was intact, with the words "Tamam Shud" still in place. [7] He was clean-shaven[7] and carried no identification, which led police to believe he had committed suicide. Carolyn Bilsborow, a film-maker and director of the documentary Missing Pieces about Somerton man, said the news was incredibly exciting. Detective H. Strangway and Constable J. Moss are enquiring. [107] However, mitochondrial DNA is only inherited through the maternal line, and therefore cannot be used to investigate a hereditary link between Rachel Egan, Abbott's wife, and the Somerton Man. In December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in a suburb of Adelaide. She recalled that he was English speaking and only carrying a small black case, not unlike one a musician or a doctor might carry. Abbott, who has researched the Somerton Man for more than two decades, met his current wife, Rachel Egan, through the case. Police conducted an Australia-wide search to find a copy of the book that had a similarly blank verso. To narrow down the pool of potential candidates, Abbott and Fitzpatrick plugged the Somerton mans DNA into the genealogical research database GEDmatch. As Hilary Whiteman reports for CNN, a new DNA analysis suggests the Somerton Man is Carl Charles Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne who vanished from the public record in April 1947.
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