“Somerton Man” this is how the most famous police case with a death in Australia became known. The mystery, only now solved 75 years later, began on December 1, 1948, when a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in the south of the country.
The man, dressed in a jacket and tie, appeared to be in his forties. He was seen lying in the sand on the same day of his death. After the death, police distributed a photo and tried to locate family members, but no one came to collect the body.
The place of death led police to rule the case a suicide although there is no evidence that this happened. An autopsy revealed blood in the stomach, a common sign of poisoning. Still, no one could determine what poison would have killed him, and there was no sign of violence.
The lack of a result allowed the story to gain strength in the region. Somerton is located in downtown Adelaide, a city of just over 1.2 million people today. Back then, however, the population was much smaller, which encouraged the formation of legends.
Now technology has helped crack the case — or at least part of it. Fueled by curiosity about Australia’s most famous death, engineer Derek Abbott has spent the last 15 years trying to understand who and what happened to Somerton Man. And he made interesting discoveries.
Somerton Man is actually Charles Webb, according to a 15year study from Australia. Image: Wikicommons/reproduction
pulling the first thread
The story became more mysterious when a pathologist found a piece of paper hidden in one of the dead man’s pockets. Imprinted on it were the words “Tamám Shud” “finished” in Persian.
This is the sentence that appears at the end of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Caiam’s poem Rubaiyat. Another man found the book in his car, believed to have been thrown through an open window. It appeared to be the exact crop of the page.
On the back were scribbled letters, which Abbott’s team identified as a likely sequence of initials. But the true meaning was never 100% clear it could be anything, such as the names of horses in a race.
Also on the back was a phone number that led to Jo Thompson, a woman who lived five minutes from where Somerton Man was found. She was always evasive during police interrogations.
However, one fact caught attention: Her son had no lateral incisors, a rare condition that is usually congenital. Oddly enough, the dead man was in the same condition. Could it be relatives?
unwinding the ball
After death, the mysterious corpse received a plaster mask. After several attempts to reconstruct the original appearance, investigators managed to salvage some of the deceased’s hair to look for clues as to who Somerton Man might have been in his DNA.
An interesting part of the investigation begins. Abbott and the other researchers were able to find clues from the twoinch shaft of a hair, even without the root.
“The hair shaft contains DNA that is mostly fragmented,” the engineer wrote. “For this reason, forensics have traditionally focused on the root and ignored the rest, although this practice is changing very slowly.”
With some DNA data in hand, the scientists looked for similar traits in GEDmatch Pro, a US genealogy database. It was then that they found correspondence with a distant relative who lived in Victoria, Australia.
From there it was possible to find the family tree of the unknown man with more than 4,000 people.
Who Was the Somerton Man?
Australian police have ordered the exhumation of Somerton Man in late 2021 for a full DNA analysis. With that the puzzle was complete.
Somerton Man is actually Charles Webb. He was born on November 16, 1905 in Footscray in a suburb of Melbourne. He studied at Swinburne University of Technology and worked as an electrical engineer in a drill factory.
He wasn’t related to Thompson’s son, so the missing lateral incisors are nothing more than a major coincidence. Webb married Dorothy Robinson beginning in 1941. In 1947 she filed for divorce on grounds of desertion.
Charles resigned between 1947 and 1948, and there is no record of him after that. When Webb died, the family was already fragmented. The parents were deceased, as were a brother and a nephew. His older brother was ill. Not even the family knew about him. In 1955, a sister who died left him a small sum of money in her will, believing he was alive and living in another state.
Another interesting fact is that he has been playing soccer since the 1920s, which would explain the athletic condition of his physique. But there are still unexplained facts. An example is knowing where Webb lived in his final weeks and the exact cause of death.
However, the main hypothesis is that the note left in his pocket is an indirect suicide message. “There is still room for research; There’s a lot we don’t know about Australia’s most famous death.”