A South Australian academic’s claims to have identified “Somerton man” as a 43-year-old electrical engineer from Melbourne could finally provide answers in one of Australia’s most infamous cold cases.
For 73 years, the identity of a well-dressed man found slumped by a sea wall of Somerton beach, south of Adelaide, in 1948 has been a mystery – leaving room for theories featuring jilted lovers and cold war spies.
When no one came forward to identify “Somerton man”, authorities were left with only cryptic clues to guide them. A jacket and tie with their tags cut off, unused train and bus tickets – and a scrap of paper with the printed words “tamám shud”, meaning “finished” in Persian.
The doctor who carried out the autopsy at the time of the discovery believed the man had died from heart failure due to poisoning, and the coroner didn’t rule out murder.
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.
South Australian police have not released a statement on the identity of the man or provided an update on their own investigation following the exhumation of the man’s body last year.
The coroner will be asked to confirm the identification.
Abbott’s research was undertaken with American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick. The pair analysed 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.
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. It has been one of the most interesting cases in Australia’s history. It’s much more than identifying the Somerton man as Carl Webb, it’s also solving the mystery of how and why he died – that may take years.”
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 [who] 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.”
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.
The links to Thomson go back to the scrap of paper with the Persian words for “finished” found in the man’s fob pocket in his trousers. The phrase was identified as coming from the classic book of Persian poetry Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
The police had asked the public if anyone had a copy of the book with the last page missing, and a man came forward with the last page torn out. He said it had been thrown into the back of his car around the time of the incident.
The copy not only had its last page torn out, but also incoherent writing believed to be a code on its back cover. 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 Rubáiyát they interpreted as code.
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.
When Thomson was taken by authorities to visit a death mask of Somerton man’s face, the taxidermist present, Paul Lawson, told ABC’s Australian Story last year it was obvious she knew the man.
Abbott had attempted to contact the Thomson family, but upon finding both Jo Thomson and her son Robin Thomson dead, sought expert opinion which showed biological links between Robin and the Somerton man – likely due to sharing the same rare dental and ear conditions, on top of the muscular calves which helped Thomson become a professional dancer.
Fitzpatrick said the DNA evidence disproves any genetic relationship with Robin Thomson, and therefore Abbott’s own wife – Robin Thomson’s daughter, Rachel Egan – whom Abbott met during investigations.
Bilsborow said: “Now that we’ve got his name, there’s still so many questions. In fact, there’s probably more questions than there were yesterday, when we didn’t have his name.
“We still don’t know who he is, or what he was doing. Was there a connection with Jo, the nurse? Was it suicide?
“My feeling has always been that it’s been suicide, that Rubaiyat was known as a kind of suicide handbook,” Bilsborow said.
She said although it looked as if there was nobody alive now that would remember him, she hoped to turn to the archives to answer new questions the findings opened up.
“I’ve already been on Trove to see if there’s any presence of Charles Webb coming up in the old newspapers. Just trying to put together a paper trail of who he was, or might have been.
“There’s almost a sequel film here, [not] of ‘who is Somerton man?’, but now it’s ‘the mysterious case of Charles Webb’.”
