A mystery nearly three quarters of a century old has been solved by cutting-edge DNA technology.
The so-called “Somerton Man” was found, apparently sleeping, on Somerton Park beach near Glenelg, about seven miles south-west of Adelaide, South Australia on December 1948.
He was well-dressed, in a shirt and tie with an “American-style” double-breasted jacket, but all of the identifying tags had been removed from his clothing.
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A search of the dead man's pockets revealed an unused train ticket, an aluminium comb that had been manufactured in the USA, a half-empty packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, some cigarettes and some matches.
An unlit cigarette was found on the man’s chest but most mysteriously a scrap of paper printed with the Persian phrase tamám shud, meaning "is over” was found in one of his pockets.
The book of poems from which the page was torn was later found.
On the inside back cover, detectives read through indentations left from previous handwriting – a telephone number, another unidentified number and text that appeared to be a coded message.
The code has never been deciphered.
The telephone number belonged to a local woman named Jesica Thomson, who told police she had never met the dead man and had no idea why he would have had her telephone number.
The man’s cause of death was presumed to be poisoning, although no poison was ever definitively identified.
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After a post-mortem the pathologist stated: "I am quite convinced the death could not have been natural… the poison I suggested was a barbiturate or a soluble hypnotic".
In those years, shortly after the end of the Second World War, paranoia about the Soviet threat was running high and there was widespread speculation that “Somerton Man” was involved in espionage.
The Woomera rocket base and a uranium mine were both comparatively near the beach where the man’s body was found.
Despite an international search, the man’s identity was never established… until now.
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Somerton man’s body was exhumed for DNA testing in May 2021.
Dr. Anne Coxon of Forensic Science South Australia [FSSA]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”.
She said her agency would use "every method at our disposal to try and bring closure to this enduring mystery".
While FSSA have yet to announce any conclusions, Adelaide University researcher Derek Abbott says he has established that the mystery man was Carl 'Charles' Webb, a 43-year-old electrical engineer and instrument maker from Footscray in Melbourne.
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Abbott sequenced the DNA from strands of the man's hair that were trapped in a plaster cast of the man’s face made by police in the late 1940s.
Working with renowned American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, Abbott reconstructed the mystery man’s family tree and established that Carl Webb was a DNA match for the dead man and that he had disappeared after divorcing in 1947.
"It's like one of these folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve and we did it," Fitzpatrick told CNN.
Abbott says that he had not taken his findings to South Australia Police, as they were conducting a "parallel investigation."
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