The Somerton Man has all but been identified as Melbourne-born electrical engineer Carl "Charles" Webb — but not everyone is convinced.
The identity of the well-dressed man, found dead slumped against a wall on Somerton Beach, has eluded detectives since he was found in 1948.
That is until July, when Adelaide-based academic and long-time researcher Professor Derek Abbott announced he and a US-based colleague had solved the mystery.
They said they identified Webb using DNA extracted from hair found in a plaster cast that was made of the body before it was buried.
But former policeman and Somerton Man enthusiast Gordon Cramer is not so sure.
"I'm not convinced that he is Carl Webb and it may be that he is in the end, but right now there isn't sufficient evidence to say he is Carl Webb," Mr Cramer said.
"I think he needs to be formally identified and properly identified by the police."
Police successfully exhumed the body of the Somerton Man last year, but are yet to release any details of their investigation.
In a statement they said they were "heartened" by Professor Abbott's findings, but ultimately it would be up to the Coroner to formally determine the Somerton Man's identity.
Mr Cramer, who was a police officer in the United Kingdom before moving to Australia, has been researching the Somerton Man for 12 years.
He says he has a great amount of respect for Professor Abbott's work, but believed the key to identifying the Somerton Man lay in the bones exhumed by police — in particular, his skull and teeth.
A dental chart drawn up by Dr John Dwyer, who conducted the autopsy on the Somerton Man in 1948, showed he was missing 18 teeth.
For Mr Cramer, who believes there is a chance the Somerton Man's skull was swapped before burial, the police investigation will have to show the DNA in the skull and body match, and then the DNA extracted from the body can be matched with that extracted from the hair.
Mr Cramer said the man who created the bust, Paul Lawson, was suspicious the skull had been tampered with or swapped.
"According to Paul Lawson, the skull may have been changed ... he thought the skull had been removed and may have been put back or another skull may have been put in his place," Mr Cramer said.
He also expressed some doubt in the quality of the DNA found.
But Professor Abbott maintained the DNA was of good quality and Carl Webb is the Somerton Man.
"I feel that they [police] will come to the same conclusion and there really is no doubt that this is Carl Webb," he said.
"It's 'beyond reasonable doubt' is the correct phrase, rather than one hundred per cent.
"Stranger things can happen, what if this family had yet another son that was adopted out for whatever reason and it's really the adopted-out son? [But] it's beyond reasonable doubt because it fits with the facts.
"It's very unlikely there's an adopted-out son because they were running a bakery in a town, they would be fairly well-off, there's no reason to go adopting somebody out.
"The facts are that Carl Webb doesn't have a date of death, he did leave his wife in '47, the Somerton Man was found dead in '48 and Carl Webb totally drops off the radar in '47."
He also dismissed any suggestion the hair in the plaster cast could belong to anyone other than the Somerton Man as the hairs were standing on end in the cast, as if plucked from the body.
"It will be a nice closing of the loop to eventually show the public if there is a match between the hair and the body," Professor Abbott admitted.
"If there is some technical glitch, for example if they couldn't get good enough DNA out of the body ... I'm confident that the hair result can fly on its own without need of the DNA from the body anyway."
Was Carl Webb a spy?
Gordon Cramer's interest in the Somerton Man was initially piqued by a Facebook group set up years ago by Professor Abbott to find a unique copy of the Rubaiyat.
A piece of paper with the words 'Tamam Shud' was found rolled up in a secret fob pocket of the Somerton Man shortly after his death.
It was later discovered the torn piece of paper came from a copy of the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, which was later handed into police by a man who said he found the book in the back of his car.
In the back of the book there was a telephone number of a nurse who lived nearby and a sequence of letters, which many believed was a code.
That code, amongst other circumstances, led many to believe the Somerton Man was a spy.
It is a theory Mr Cramer is still investigating.
"I would think if he is Carl Webb, there is more to the story, what is he doing with a rolled up piece of paper in his fob pocket ... that wasn't meant to be found by police. He hid it there," Mr Cramer said.
"I don't think we will ever know for sure who he is or what he was doing, especially what he was doing.
"I have my ideas of what he was doing, I think he was involved in espionage [and] whilst I have a lot of information that points to that, it's not stone cold proof."
Mr Cramer has been working on cracking the code found in the back of the book and has posted his findings so far on his blog.
There was another death in Adelaide, almost exactly two weeks after the death of the Somerton Man, that has aided Mr Cramer in his quest to crack the code.
The body of Tibor Kaldor was found at the Victoria Hotel in Hindley Street on December 13, 1948.
He had died of poisoning and had left a suicide note — but many suspected there was more to Kaldor's death given he worked for a company with known links to the Australian Communist Party.
Fellow amateur researcher and student criminologist David Morgan has taken an interest in Carl Webb since he was possibly identified as the Somerton Man.
By digging through newspaper archives, Mr Morgan found that Mr Kaldor lived just 10 minutes from Webb in Melbourne.
He said he was not convinced by the suicide note left by Mr Kaldor, whose naturalisation papers had just arrived in October 1948.
"It seems a strange time to commit suicide," Mr Morgan said.
"The link to Carl is speculative, but if you look at Carl's unused train ticket to Henley Beach and then Hindley Street, you can see these locations were close to each other."
Mr Morgan is not convinced Webb was a spy, but said he found it "curious" that the address listed on Webb's marriage certificate was once a mansion owned by Tristan Buesst, a major in military intelligence.
Mr Morgan said there were other residents at the mansion in 1941 who also had military links.
In 1942, Webb moved from the mansion on Domain Road to a flat on Bromby Street.
The same year, Signals Intelligence headquarters moved to Kellow House directly behind Webb's home.
Mr Morgan is working on the theory that Webb could have worked at Kellow House, perhaps as engineer fixing phones.
"So to rule out the engineer Carl Webb as not being linked to military intelligence during WWII would be foolish," Mr Morgan said.
'No-one wants the spy theory to die'
Professor Abbott said he was still investigating Webb's life and potential involvement in espionage, but he personally did not think there was a link.
"No-one wants the spy theory to die," Professor Abbott said.
He said he had no explanation for why the nurse's phone number was in the back of the Rubaiyat found.
"The only thing we can think of is that this chap is from Victoria and she was too. Perhaps they knew each other from Victoria," he said.
"This is something we are still investigating, we don't know what the connection is between the two of them."
Professor Abbott said the code in the book was likely related to Webb's love of betting on horses.
He admitted the theories were "banal" and disappointing for some enthusiasts.
"We've analysed the code over and over at the uni and we've come up with that it isn't really a code, it's just first letters of the English language," he said.
"People on the internet have expressed that, 'oh it's a bit disappointing, I wanted him to be a spy'."
