Who Was The Somerton Man?

   At 7pm on the evening of November 30,1948, John Lyon and his wife were walking along Somerton Beach, just south of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. They noticed a well dressed man lying on the beach with his head propped up against the sea wall. The man was lying with his legs outstretched and his feet crossed. As the couple passed, they saw him raise his right arm and then it fell to the sand. John said it looked like a "drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette". A half hour later they were walking back the same way and noticed the same man was still there. There he was in his nice suit and polished shoes, an odd way to dress for lounging on the beach. He was still with his left arm laid out on the beach. The couple figured he was asleep, maybe passed out drunk. There were mosquitos buzzing all around his face. John commented to his wife "he must be dead to the world".

 

       The next morning John Lyons would discover how right he was. As he was returning from a morning swim, John noticed a cluster of people gathered around the area where he had seen the drunk man the day before. As he approached the group he saw a man slumped over in much the same position as the man from yesterday. The body was lying there, legs out, feet crossed, cigarette half smoked lying on his collar, but this man was not drunk, he was dead. This was the man John and his wife saw the day before, this was the Somerton Man! 

 

This case endures to this day as one of the greatest mysteries of Australia. No one is sure who the man is, why he ended up dead on the beach, or even how he died. Dr. John Barkley Bennett put the time of death at no earlier than 2 a.m., noted the likely cause of death as heart failure, and added that he suspected poisoning. The contents of the man’s pockets were spread out on a table: tickets from Adelaide to the beach, a pack of chewing gum, some matches, two combs and a pack of Army Club cigarettes containing seven cigarettes of another, more expensive brand called Kensitas. There was no wallet and no cash, and no ID. None of the man’s clothes had any name tags—indeed, in all but one case the maker’s label had been carefully snipped away. One trouser pocket had been neatly repaired with an unusual variety of orange thread. A day later a full autopsy was carried out and revealed some more strange things. It revealed that the corpse’s pupils were “smaller” than normal and “unusual,” that a dribble of saliva had run down the side of the man’s mouth as he lay, and that “he was probably unable to swallow it.” His spleen, meanwhile, “was strikingly large and firm, about three times normal size,” and the liver was distended with congested blood. In his stomach they found his last meal and more blood. He had eaten a pasty, a folded pastry with a savoury filling, typically of seasoned meat and vegetables. The blood in the stomach also suggested poisoning but there was no evidence that the food was the cause of any poisoning. The poisoning theory seemed to concur with the strange behavior the man exhibited on the beach, instead of drunken behavior it could have been the behavior of a man who had been suffering the effects of poisoning. Now, while this theory made sense given the evidence, repeated tests on both his blood and organs by an expert chemist failed to reveal the faintest trace of a poison. “I was astounded that he found nothing,” Dwyer admitted at the inquest. In fact, no cause of death was found. Among all this weirdness, other odd things were noticed. The dead man’s calf muscles were high and very well developed; although in his late 40s, he had the legs of an athlete. His toes, meanwhile, were oddly wedge-shaped. Testimony given by one experts went as follows: 

 

      I have not seen the tendency of calf muscle so pronounced as in this case…. His feet were rather striking, suggesting—this is my own assumption—that he had been in the habit of wearing high-heeled and pointed shoes.

 

Another expert had suggested that given these irregularities that maybe the man was actually a ballet dancer. 

 

Putting all this together made… Well… Zero sense. The coroner was informed by an eminent professor that the only practical solution was that a very rare poison had been used—one that “decomposed very early after death,” leaving no trace. The only poisons capable of this were so dangerous and deadly that the professor would not say their names aloud in open court. (My mind goes to Ricin, a highly potent toxin produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant.) Instead, he passed the coroner a scrap of paper on which he had written the names of two possible candidates: digitalis and strophanthin. The professor suspected the latter. Strophanthin is a rare glycoside derived from the seeds of some African plants. Historically, it was used by a little-known Somali tribe to poison arrows. 

 

At this point everyone was thoroughly and extremely confused. They took a full set of fingerprints and sent them all over Australia and then around the work to try and figure out who this guy was. There were no matches anywhere. They started bringing people with missing relatives into the mortuary to see if anyone recognized the man, no one did. 

 

By January 11, the South Australia police had investigated and dismissed pretty much every lead they had. The investigation was now widened in an attempt to locate any abandoned personal possessions, perhaps left luggage, that might suggest that the dead man had come from out of state. This meant checking every hotel, dry cleaner, lost property office and railway station for miles around. But it did produce results. On the 12th, detectives sent to the main railway station in Adelaide were shown a brown suitcase that had been deposited in the cloakroom there on November 30. The staff could remember nothing about the owner, and the case’s contents were not much more revealing. The case did contain a reel of orange thread identical to that used to repair the dead man’s trousers, but painstaking care had been applied to remove practically every trace of the owner’s identity. The case bore no stickers or markings, and get this, a label had been torn off from one side. The tags were missing from all but three items of the clothing inside; these bore the name “Kean” or “T. Keane,” but it proved impossible to trace anyone of that name, and the police concluded–an Adelaide newspaper reported–that someone “had purposely left them on, knowing that the dead man’s name was not ‘Kean’ or ‘Keane.’ ” So, a subterfuge! Spy games! (I just love that word)

 

The police had brought in another expert, John Cleland, emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide, to re-examine the corpse and the dead man’s possessions. In April, four months after the discovery of the body, Cleland’s search produced a final piece of evidence—one that would prove to be the most baffling of all. Cleland discovered a small pocket sewn into the waistband of the dead man’s trousers. Previous examiners had missed it, and several accounts of the case have referred to it as a “secret pocket,” but it seems to have been intended to hold a pocket watch. Inside, tightly rolled, was a minute scrap of paper, which, opened up, proved to contain two words, typeset in an elaborate printed script. The phrase read “Tamám Shud.” 

 

Frank Kennedy, the police reporter for the Adelaide Advertiser, recognized the words as Persian, and telephoned the police to suggest they obtain a copy of a book of poetry—the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. This work, written in the twelfth century, had become popular in Australia during the war years in a much-loved translation by Edward FitzGerald. It existed in numerous editions, but the usual intricate police enquiries to libraries, publishers and bookshops failed to find one that matched the fancy type. At least it was possible, however, to say that the words “Tamám shud” (or “Taman shud,” as several newspapers misprinted it—a mistake perpetuated ever since) did come from Khayyam’s romantic reflections on life and mortality. They were, in fact, the last words in most English translations— not surprisingly, because the phrase means “It is ended.” Weeeeird!

 

Taken at face value, this new clue suggested that the death might be a case of suicide; in fact, the South Australia police never did turn their “missing person” enquiries into a full-blown murder investigation. But the discovery took them no closer to identifying the dead man, and in the meantime his body had begun to decompose. Arrangements were made for a burial, but—being aware that they were disposing of one of the few pieces of evidence they had—the police first had the corpse embalmed, and a cast taken of the head and upper torso. After that, the body  was buried, sealed under concrete in a plot of dry ground specifically chosen in case it became necessary to exhume it. Oddly enough, As late as 1978, flowers would be found at odd intervals on the grave, but no one could ascertain who had left them there, or why. 

 

In July, a full eight months after the investigation had begun, the search for the right Rubaiyat produced results. On the 23rd, a Glenelg man walked into the Detective Office in Adelaide with a copy of the book and a strange story. Early the previous December, just after the discovery of the unknown body, he had gone for a drive with his brother-in-law in a car he kept parked a few hundred yards from Somerton Beach. The brother-in-law had found a copy of the Rubaiyat lying on the floor by the rear seats. Each man had silently assumed it belonged to the other, and the book had sat in the glove compartment ever since. Alerted by a newspaper article about the search, the two men had gone back to take a closer look. They found that part of the final page had been torn out, together with Khayyam’s final words. They went to the police.

 

Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane took a close look at the book. Almost at once he found a telephone number penciled on the rear cover; using a magnifying glass, he dimly made out the faint impression of some other letters, written in capitals underneath. Finally they had a solid clue!

 

So where did the clue lead them? Well the phone number was unlisted. But have no fear… They traced the number to a nurse who lived near Somerton Beach. The nurse has never been publicly identified. She is only known by the nickname Jestyn. She revealed to investigators that she had indeed given that book to a friend of hers, a man she knew in the war. She also gave them a name, Alfred Boxall.

 

Boom! Mystery solved!!! Right? Well maybe not so much. Detectives felt they had figured out the identity of the dead man. Except for the fact that when they tracked down Alfred Boxall in new south wales… He was still alive. Oh and also, the copy of the book he received from the nurse… He still had it and it was still intact. The gentle probing that the nurse received did yield some intriguing bits of information though; interviewed again, she recalled that some time the previous year—she could not be certain of the date—she had come home to be told by neighbors that an unknown man had called and asked for her. And, confronted with the cast of the dead man’s face, Jestyn seemed “completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance she was about to faint,” Leane said. She seemed to recognize the man, yet firmly denied that he was anyone she knew. 

 

That left the faint impression Sergeant Leane had noticed in the Glenelg Rubaiyat. Examined under ultraviolet light, five lines of jumbled letters could be seen, the second of which had been crossed out. The first three were separated from the last two by a pair of straight lines with an ‘x’ written over them. It seemed that they were some sort of code. They sent the message to Naval Intelligence, home to the finest cipher experts in Australia, and allowed the message to be published in the press. This produced a frenzy of amateur codebreaking, almost all of it worthless, and a message from the Navy concluding that the code appeared unbreakable:

 

          “From the manner in which the lines have been represented as being set out in the original, it is evident that the end of each line indicates a break in sense.

 

There is an insufficient number of letters for definite conclusions to be based on analysis, but the indications together with the acceptance of the above breaks in sense indicate, in so far as can be seen, that the letters do not constitute any kind of simple cipher or code.

 

The frequency of the occurrence of letters, whilst inconclusive, corresponds more favourably with the table of frequencies of initial letters of words in English than with any other table; accordingly a reasonable explanation would be that the lines are the initial letters of words of a verse of poetry or such like.”

 

The Australian police never cracked the code or identified the unknown man. The nurse, Jestyn died in 2007, so there's no possibility of ever getting her to reveal why she reacted the way she did when seeing the cast of the man. And when the South Australia coroner published the final results of his investigation in 1958, his report concluded with the admission:

 

I am unable to say who the deceased was… I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death.

 

And that's where the case sits

 

And that's it… Thank you guys and good night.

 

Oh wait… You want more? Fine.

 

The information on the initial case and investigation came from a great article on smithsonianmag.com

 

There… Still not enough…ok ok

 

So what about this nurse then. Turns out her actual name is Jessica Thompson and she passed in 2007 as stated earlier. Police had always felt she knew more than she was letting on. Her daughter would later say in an interview that she thought her mother knew the dead man. The reason her message was not released earlier is because she requested a pseudonym as she felt her connection to this case would be embarrassing. Why? Interesting. Some think that her real name is important because it may hold the key to deciphering the code. As stated earlier, her reaction to seeing the cast of the man led many people to think that she definitely knew the man. In a video we found the man who made the bust describes how when Jessica was brought in to see the bust she saw the likeness when a sheet was removed from it and immediately looked down and would not look at the bust again for the rest of the interview. It was during that interview that she gave them the information of Alfred Boxall. So the question remains with Jessica… Did she know the man? If she did know the man, why was she so informed to distance herself from this case? Was she involved in some way?

 

As far as the man himself, there are many theories floating around. One of the most prevailing theories is that he was a spy! We got us some James bond shit going down! Or maybe not. Others say he was involved in the black market as evidence but the clipped labels on his clothing. So he was dealing in babies and knock off clothing on the black market!!! Maybe not.  Well let's look into these theories and see what you guys think. 

 

One man who thinks there is a spy connection is Gordon Cramer, a former British detective with links to former intelligence officers. He says parts of the code match with Morse code letters found in the World War II Radio Operators Manual. He believed micro writing hidden within the letters of the five lines of code appeared to refer to the de Havilland Venom — a British post-war jet, still on the drawing board at the time.

 

He also saw the Somerton Man’s death coinciding with the start of the Cold War and, according to Mr Cramer, the visit to Adelaide of high-ranking British officials and weapons trials at Woomera — the later site of nuclear testing. So this guy thinks that's a link to show he may have been some sort of cold war spy. Other things that people say pointing to him being a spy include the family of our nurse friend telling 60 minutes Jestyn, aka Jessica Thomson may have been a Russian spy! And even crazier… That she may have had a son with the Somerton Man! This theory is further backed by another article we found. Derek Abbott, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Adelaide has spent over a decade studying the case. 

     

        “What makes this kind of go viral is, I think, just all the strange things. It kind of just gives you that creepy shiver down your spine.” 

 

DNA, Abbott said, is a key to solving the mystery. “I’m not so interested in how he died, but giving him his name back is the most important thing.”

 

Abbott also noticed that the man also had two distinctive features: canines next to middle teeth and ears with large upper hollows. After examining the mysterious letters of the code in the late 2000s, Dr. Abbott said, “I kind of fell down the rabbit hole.” In 2009 he tried to track down Mrs. Thomson (our nurse friend) for an interview but found that she had died two years earlier. She had a son who had been a DUN DUN DUNNNN professional ballet dancer, Dr. Abbott learned, and photos showed he had distinctive teeth and ears similar to the Somerton man’s. Oh shit son! Abbott decided to then track down this man but unfortunately he had died mere months before Abbott made his discovery. COINCIDENCE?? He found out that Thomson's son had a daughter of his own… So guess what… He tracked her down. And guess what… SHE was dead… Actually no that's not true she’s still alive. The woman's name was Rachel Egan. Ms. Egan had never heard of the Somerton man, but she agreed to help Dr. Abbott in his effort to name the man who might be her grandfather. Dr. Abbott laid out that scenario: “The Somerton man had Jessica Thomson’s number. He was found dead a five minutes’ walk from her house. Rachel’s dad was only 1 year old at the time, with no father. So you kind of put two and two together — but until it’s absolutely confirmed, you never know.”

 

And Dr. Abbott acknowledged that, if usable DNA was obtained from the exhumed remains, it might in fact show his wife had no link to the Somerton man. “All I can say is there’s lots of twists and turns in this case, and every turn is pretty weird,” he said. 

 

Want another weird twist? Abbott and Egan fell in love and were married in 2010. And yes that part is true. 

 

So, while he himself doesn't necessarily back the spy theory, his life of work could lend credence to said theory. 

 

Several years ago, Ms. Egan had her DNA analyzed, and links were found to people in the United States (including relatives of some guy named Thomas Jefferson… yes, that Thomas Jefferson). More recently, links were also found to the grandparents of the man that Jessica Thomson eventually married. “So my head is spinning,” Dr. Abbott said. “Does that prove she’s not connected now to the Somerton man? Or does that prove that somehow the Somerton man is related to her assumed grandfather? It’s getting all complicated, so complicated that I’m just going to shut up now and let the DNA from the Somerton man speak for itself.”

 

Another strange connection that could lend itself to a spot connection is the remarkable similarities to the Mystery of the Isdal woman. On November 29, 1970, while hiking Isdalen (Ice Valley) near Bergen, Norway, a father and his two daughters witnessed a horrifying sight. Wedged between the rocks of the hiking trail, they discover a badly burnt female body. The labels of her clothes had been cut off and any distinctive marks had been removed as if to make her completely unrecognizable. The front side of her body had been severely burnt and she was found in a boxer’s position, fists clenched. When you look into this case there are many similarities to the Somerton Man that we may just go ahead and cover in a bonus!

 

Again, Thomson's own daughter believed the Somerton Man to be a spy and that her own mother may have also been a spy. She said her mother taught English to migrants and spoke fluent Russian. Jessica had once told her daughter that “someone higher than the police force” also knew the identity of the mysterious man.

 

Another theory is that the Somerton Man was involved in illegal activities involving the black market that sprung up after WWII. People point to the missing labels on the clothes as pointing toward that possibility. Abbott who we discussed earlier had said that this seems a more likely route than the spy route. If he was involved in some sort of black market goings on or something similar, it would definitely explain the urge for someone to go to many lengths to keep his identity a secret. But what would the rest of the clues mean? Was the page or of the book meant to send a message to someone else? Some think the code found may have had something to do with black market shipments or deliveries, or possibly locations. Without solid evidence though this is pretty much all just speculation. 

Many people are also subscribing to the theory that this was just a case of a jilted lover. They believe that the Somerton Man and the nurse were lovers and that they had a child together. After this some people think that Thomson rejected the Somerton Man for some reason and it led to the man taking his own life. This theory seems most plausible but at the same time, why has no one been able to figure out who this man was. It also makes sense in the line of Thomson being embarrassed by being involved in the case and her unwillingness to discuss it with police as she was dating another man at the time of the death who would eventually become her husband. 

 

If you really want to get crazy with the cheese whiz so to speak, there are small groups of people that really are looking at the fringe theories. If you look into the far corners of reddit and other similar sites you'll find the usual theories of time travel and extraterrestrial origins. Those folks are definitely in the small minority but they are out there and most likely started by Mr. Moody. 

 

Ok so where does all the craziness leave us? Well… We don't know. The Somerton man's body was exhumed earlier this year and we haven't been able to find any updates on any sort of DNA analysis, because as we know, these things tend to take some time. In articles as recent as July of this year they are still waiting on results. Part of the problem is that getting quality DNA samples from that old and degraded of a body can sometimes be difficult. So, while there are many theories on who the man was and the circumstances around his death no one knows for sure who he was and what happened. The one person who seemed to have at least some sort of knowledge of the man passed away without ever revealing her secrets. The other difficult thing is that every time a question seems to be answered it only opens up even more questions. Is the code really a code? Was the man a spy? Was the nurse a spy? Was anyone a spy? Was chainsaw involved? Where was he in 1948? As the old tootsie pop commercial used to say… the world may never know! 

Best horror movies of 1948

 

https://www.pickthemovie.com/best-horror-movies-of-1948