The Somerton Man

I'm breaking the mold (my mold, which admittedly was already fractured and worn) here by blogging about something that is not literary or related to publishing or my frustrations with publishing or about the discord between the world of my imagination and reality or - you get the point. For those of you already familiar with the Somerton Man, you can probably jump ahead or just skip this post entirely. I have nothing new to add. All this information has ben analysed and debated over and over and over. But if you're still reading, let's go.

First: I love mysteries. You may have realised this when I blogged about Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But it has to be the right mystery. My criteria are vague. I'm not much for supernatural theories - magic is just science we haven't figured out yet, so nothing 'mystic'. I enjoy true crime, but not all true crime. I'm interested in crimes affecting women (I can make a sarcastic comment here but I won't), and not interested in crimes involving children. I'm interested in why people break the social contract, but I don't believe in making excuses for deviant behaviour either. (Life's hard, but it's not a character in your story and so it also doesn't owe you anything.) I particularly like frustrating mysteries, where there is a set of clues and the "truth", but the only way to link one to the other is to have been there and witnessed it.

Cue: the mystery of the Somerton Man. I referred to this offhand in a recent (time is relative) post, but let me explain why I'm writing about it now: the mystery was recently solved, except that it wasn't. We now know who he is, but not why he died or - well, you'll see.

On 1 December 1948, on a beach in Somerton Park, Adelaide, Australia, two horse-riders stumbled across a man in a suit. At first, they thought he was doing what people do at a beach (particularly, I would imagine, in a post-world war society): sitting on the sand, watching the waves and contemplating the choices he had made, but as they rode back home, they realised something was wrong. There was no obvious cause of death, and witnesses reported they had seen the man in the same position the previous evening from about 7 p.m.

He was dressed formally: in a shirt and tie, brown trousers and shoes, and a tailored double-breasted jacket, but he was not wearing a hat (remember: it's 1948). He did not have a wallet and there was no other form of identification in any of his pockets. In fact, the labels had all been carefully cut from his clothes. Police immediately suspected suicide, or perhaps a stroke (but that was not quite as racy).

But then the autopsy found his stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver and spleen all to be "deeply congested" while his heart was perfectly normal. The Somerton Man had been poisoned, but there was no trace of any poison in his blood or in any of the affected organs. The only conclusion the coroner could make was that his death was "not natural" and probably "not accidental".

(I'm going to condense time and mix details like this with the findings of the police's investigation because, well, I can. Also, I am going to leave out dead ends, like people incorrectly identifying the body to police, because you can read all that online but not here. The Wikipedia entry is a very detailed account.)

The coroner noted that the man's shoes were clean and had been recently polished, suggesting he had not been wandering the shore and considering the many ironies of existence. The sand around the body was not disturbed and there was no evidence of spit or vomit, which one would expect from a man dying of poison. Later, a witness would claim that he had seen one man carrying another in the vicinity on the night the Somerton Man died.

Found in various places on the man's person were: an unlit cigarette, a box of cigarettes (which contained several cigarettes of a different brand), an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a possibly used bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum and a half-empty box of matches.

The police were unable to identify the man using his dental records. Two newspapers ran the story, but all the tips flooded in in response to the publicity led to dead ends. So, the police made a plaster cast of the man's head and shoulders, the coroner embalmed the body and it was buried.

I know what you're thinking. It was my first thought, too. It's 1948 and the man has no identification, not even the labels on his clothes. Obviously, he was a spy, because the movies have taught me that every vaguely suspicious person in the 1940s was a spy. Apparently Adelaide was Spy City because there was a military research facility nearby and Australia's espionage (I mean, intelligence) organisations were going through some "changes", so they had a surplus. We'll make this The Theory to Beat.

The next "break" in the case (check out the lingo) was a piece of paper that was sewn into one of the man's trouser pockets, which was discovered several months after the body came to be just a body. (Note also that there was evidence he had tailored other spots on his own suit, which will be relevant shortly.) It was rolled up and on it was the phrase "Tamám shud", in a "foreign" script. The phrase comes from the final page of a book of poetry titled Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, translated from Persian to English in 1849, and it means "it is ended". The poems are all about living life with no regrets and, so, dying without any baggage (excuse the pun). It looked like the paper had literally torn from a copy of the book, rather than copied by hand.

Actual photo of the script, via Wikimedia Commons

That book turned up in the backseat of someone's car, which was parked near the beach and had its windows open because it was a different time. The final phrase had been torn out from the back of the book, so it cannot be coincidence. The car owner gave the book to police once he realised it was relevant to the case, but he said he did not know the dead man. Some reports say that the book appeared in the man's car a full week or two before the Somerton Man died, suggesting he was staying in the area and that he visited the beach at least once before his death.

The book contained two pieces of information. The first was a series of capital letters, written by hand at the back of the book, that were assumed to be a code:

Police scan of the handwritten code, via Wikimedia Commons

However, cryptologists have never been able to break the code and at least one professional organisation asserts that it cannot be a code. So far, this is very spy-like behaviour - except for the fact that this book landed in the police's hands at all - supporting The Theory to Beat. 

The second piece of information was a telephone number, also written at the back of the book. This phone number belonged to Jessica Ellen "Jo" Thompson, who claimed she did not know the dead man. However, police noted that she was being "evasive" (I am curious what exactly this entailed) and that when she was shown the plaster case, she looked like she was "about to faint" (you know, as women do). She then asked that her name and other details be removed from the case files (and the police complied). 

Jo died in 2007 and in 2014, her daughter Kate said she believed her mother did know the man but for some reason refused to acknowledge him. There were also details about her mother that Kate couldn't reconcile, like the fact that Jo spoke Russian but refused to say where or when she had learnt the language and she was interested in communism (which of course means she must have been depraved). The only clue her mother left her daughter with was the offhand comment that the Somerton Man was known "at a higher level than the police force". What are the chances that they were both spies? I've already covered the "surplus" of "agents" both in the area and after the war, so I'd say pretty decent.

The only information Jo would give the police is that she had owned a copy of the Rubaiyat during the war but she had given it to a soldier named Alf Boxall, and so for a while, police believed that Boxall was the Somerton Man. But in 1949, Boxall was found to be alive and in Sydney (with the wonders of social media, I imagine they would have found him sooner). He still had the book and the final page was intact (although technically, that doesn't prove that this book was the same one Jo had given him - apparently, it was not that rare a book).

In January 1949 (roughly two months after the Somerton Man's death), staff at the Adelaide railway station (remember the train ticket) reported that a suitcase had been checked in on the day of his death (30 November) and had not been claimed. The outer label had been removed. Inside were some of the normal things you'd expect to find: pyjamas, slippers, a dressing gown, a pair of trousers (although, interestingly, the cuffs of the trousers contained sand), underwear and shaving items (but no socks). But then there were some unusual things: a screwdriver, a well-worn table knife, a pair of scissors, a square of zinc and a stencilling brush (used on merchant ships).

Also in the suitcase was a spool of orange thread, which matched the thread that had been used to sew the scrap of paper into the Somerton Man's pocket.

A police photo of the discovery of the suitcase, via Wikimedia Commons

The labels on these clothes had been removed too, but the Somerton Man had not been as careful here: some of the clothes had different spellings of the name "Keane" stamped on them and there was a laundry bag with the same name. The clothes could have been second-hand (today we'd say "vintage"), but what are the chances that all of his clothes came from the same source? This was another dead end as the police could not find a missing person with the surname "Keane" or "Kean", not only in Australia, but in other countries too.

As I mentioned, leads continued to trickle in but none of them stuck.

Let's take a massive leap forward now, not only in terms of time but technology. Jo had also had a son, named Robin. In 2013, Robin's widow and his son gave an interview claiming that the Somerton Man was Jo's lover and Robin's father. The proof: the shape of their ears was the same (I kid you not). The police decided to re-open the case and exhume the body to try to extract some DNA evidence. That proved futile, as the body had decomposed too badly, but several strands of hair were found embedded in the plaster cast, which turned out to be viable.

There were a lot of "cooks" in the kitchen by now (most as unqualified as me), but a physicist and electronic engineer named David Abbott and a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick were on the trail with the hairs from the cast. They used the DNA they were able to extract and ran it through a "genealogy research database" (the home page of which claims that "Anyone can upload their DNA profile, analyze the results, and compare DNA shared with others"). They found a distant cousin of the Somerton Man and used that information to construct a family tree of a couple of thousand people (which, still, was the best lead anyone had had in 60-odd years). 

With a bit of sleuthing, Abbott and Fitzpatrick found their man: Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Victoria, Australia, who had disappeared in 1947. (I do have to point out that this investigation was private and did not take place with police assistance, and that it still needs to be verified by sources other than the media, but I'm going to go with the DNA evidence and the woman whose entire career is dedicated to this kind of thing (i.e. Fitzpatrick) over the organisation that did not find the identity of the Somerton Man in - let me calculate this again - 74 years.)

The information on Webb is pretty scant. He was apparently born in Melbourne in 1905 and then married in 1941. He was "an instrument-maker" and his wife was a "21-year-old foot specialist", according to an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine. Webb left his wife in 1947 and she started divorce proceedings (in  his absence) in late 1951, being apparently one of the only people who was not aware of the tantalising mystery brewing across the whole second half-century of the 1900s. He liked to read and write poetry, as well as bet on the ponies (those in the know now speculate that the "code" at the back of the book was a shorthand record of the horses he had bet on). Oh, and to nail this coffin shut, his sister was married to a man named ... Thomas Keane.

As I "hinted" at at the beginning of this post, the mystery is solved but not: we have a name and a bare timeline, but not the details of the tapestry, the meat of the pie (inside joke). Was Webb poisoned by someone else, or did he decide that life was just not worth the hassle? If the former, which I am going to tack to The Theory to Beat as the most likely, what was he poisoned with and why did it not show up in his blood or organs? Who was the man who allegedly carried him to the beach and then staged his body? Why was that scrap of paper sewn into his clothing? Why were all the labels removed from his clothes and from his suitcase? What happened in the year and eight months between when he left his wife and shuffled off this mortal coil without a soul noting his demise, at least in public? And what was his relationship with Jo Thompson?

Shakespeare had the innocent Juliet ponder, "What's in a name?" This story suggests not much, particularly if more than half a century has gone by between a man's death (which seems to be the most interesting thing about his life) and the opportunity to erect a headstone. All of which could be proof that he was a spy and doing a better job of hiding it than Jo Thompson. Alternatively, facing down the bleakness of existence in a really bleak decade, perhaps he thought he would do in death what he couldn't do in life: leave a mark, which is kind of like poetry writ large.

I still back The Theory to Beat, for the record. I'm invested in it now, which is proof of nothing. We have the evidence and there is the truth, but we have no way to link those two things together, except using a narrative (and until someone cracks the code of time travel - but then wouldn't we already see proof of someone already having returned to past and solved the mystery?). So I suppose in the end, this ended up being a literary post, in a sense.

A police photo of the Somerton Man's corpse, via Wikimedia Commons