Remains of mystery Somerton man exhumed 70 years after his death

On 1 December, 1948, the man’s body was found on Somerton Beach in South Australia with the circumstances of his death remaining an open police investigation.

The Somerton man was first found by passers-by who noticed him slumped against a seawall.

The cause of death remains unknown and many theories have been advanced over his identity, ranging from a jilted lover to a Cold War spy.

An initial police investigation and coronial inquest left the matter unresolved, with the case particularly mystifying because of a number of items found with the body.

They included a suitcase, items of clothing with the tags removed, incoherent writing believed to be a code, the poetry book The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a torn scrap of paper with the Persian words “Tamam Shud”, meaning it is finished.

The remains will be taken to Forensic Science SA as experts attempt to build a DNA profile.

There'a definite need for a transcript, IMHO:

Transcript
0:08 I had no idea about the Somerton Man case.
0:10 I'd never heard of it.
0:12 It hadn't entered my life in any way, I was just living my life.
0:15 I had no idea that I held some kind of secret to solving this case or could aid in the effort
0:22 to try and trace this back to a person.
0:28 I knew that they would get the name one day, I knew that technology would catch up, but
0:32 I did know that even though you've got a name, you're not going to really understand
0:38 who the man was.
0:41 It's fantastic to see that this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name, he
0:50 now has a family.
0:52 He now has a place.
0:53 We'd love to find out, you know, what was he doing there.
0:58 How did he die and why did he die?
1:02 Was it natural?
1:03 Was it suicide?
1:05 Anything was possible, and in this case, I think that the most unexpected ending has
1:12 happened and that is in itself another twist.
1:18 I think there are some questions there that may never be solved, and the mystery will
1:25 live on.
1:28 MY NAME IS CHARLES On the first of December in 1948 the body
1:43 was found by two trainee jockeys early in the morning that were out on the beach exercising
1:48 horses.
1:49 We went over to see if he was alright.
1:53 And we got fairly close to him and couldn't see him breathing and he was dead.
2:01 A number of people did come and view the body but were unable to identify him.
2:11 One of the intriguing things about the case is that all the clothes the man was wearing
2:16 had the labels removed off them.
2:18 So, this is what made some people think, 'Oh maybe this guy is a spy.'.
2:25 We are seeing that there was a tie with the name 'T Keane' on it.
2:30 It was strange that nobody came forward to identify the body, which led to suggestions
2:35 that he was from overseas, possibly from Europe, possibly from America.
2:39 The doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination said the stomach was deeply congested
2:43 with blood and in his opinion, death had been caused by heart failure due to poisoning.
2:50 The Somerton Man had a really unique body.
2:52 He was very well built, he was athletic, but he had these calf muscles that were really
2:57 distinct, kind of like he was a ballet dancer.
3:01 I think the biggest technical problem was the fact that he was thawing out, because
3:05 he was, apart from being embalmed, he was deep frozen.
3:09 The police knew that they wouldn't be able to keep his body forever and that it would
3:13 soon start to deteriorate.
3:15 So they called in a taxidermist who made a plaster cast of his face.
3:20 A group of locals paid for his headstone and his plot.
3:24 And his headstone reads, "Here lies the unknown man".
3:29 A couple of months later they found a tiny scrolled up piece of paper in the man's
3:34 fob pocket.
3:36 When they unrolled it, it said "Tamam Shud."
3:39 It was a mystery as to what this actually meant.
3:43 It was a newspaper reporter who was well-read, and said it came from the ending of a book
3:51 called The Rubaiyat written by Omar Khayyam.
3:55 And it meant :the end", or "the finish".
3:59 And this brought forward the theory that perhaps he had committed suicide.
4:07 A man came forward to say that he had found a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and
4:14 it did have the last page torn out.
4:18 He handed it into police, he said it had been thrown into the back seat of his car six months
4:23 earlier.
4:25 So, on the back of the book were some strange letters that the police couldn't make any
4:30 sense of, and a phone number belonging to a young 27-year-old woman, who happened to
4:36 live only five minutes' walk away from where the man was found dead.
4:43 The police paid the young nurse a visit, but she was very reluctant to talk to them.
4:51 After that incident, basically they were stumped, there were no other leads.
4:56 And it basically hit a brick wall, the whole case.
5:01 Everyone working on the case or had an interest in the case always thought that something
5:06 would come up tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
5:11 Podcast excerpt: Hello and welcome to the Somerton Man and today I wanted to look at
5:16 the Somerton man – one of the most mysterious cold cases of all time.
5:20 Over the decades, interest in this case has just continued to grow and grow to the point
5:26 it's actually considered one of Australia's greatest unsolved mysteries.
5:30 There are blog sites that have been set up from all over the world with amateur sleuths
5:36 trying to work out who the guy is, why he was on Somerton beach and exactly how he died.
5:46 I teach electronic engineering at Adelaide Uni.
5:50 I just happened to be sitting in a laundrette watching my washing going around, and there
5:55 was a stack of magazines beside me, and I picked one up and it was an article about
5:59 the top 10 unsolved mysteries in Australia.
6:03 And the second one was the Somerton Man case.
6:06 The great thing about the maths we do is it's not the pie-in-the-sky maths, it's the type
6:11 of maths that has great practical value…
6:15 And so I thought, 'Hey this would make a great project for my students'.
6:19 And so I started building up a lot of history and background on the case.
6:24 And I think that just sucked me in beccause I just got fascinated by it
6:29 Professor Abbott has been investigating this case for so many years now and it's completely
6:34 consumed his whole being.
6:35 He's become known as one of the world leading experts on the case.
6:40 So in trying to solve the case, it seemed to me the key was to find the young woman,
6:46 Jo Thompson, that lived five minutes from where he died, with the hypothesis that she
6:54 had been in a relationship with the Somerton Man.
6:57 Unfortunately, she had died two years earlier, so I found out.
7:04 That was a little frustrating because I was hoping that she would have some information
7:09 about who this man was, and perhaps after so many years she would be prepared to say
7:15 who it was, but I ended up contacting her grand-daughter, Rachel.
7:23 The first time I heard about the Somerton Man was a letter that arrived, and it was
7:29 sent by Professor Derek Abbott.
7:32 It said, "I believe that you may have a link to someone involved in this case."
7:39 I developed a hypothesis that the Somerton Man and Jo Thompson knew each other.
7:46 They had a child, Robin Thompson, and if this is the case then his daughter Rachel is the
7:53 granddaughter of the Somerton Man.
7:56 But his hypothesis seemed to be way too crazy.
7:59 Too fanciful.
8:01 It was like something that could have been made up in some fictional novel.
8:14 So I went to Brisbane to meet Rachel, and we went out to dinner in a French restaurant,
8:20 and talked about the case.
8:23 He was also after my DNA.
8:25 It's probably the first request I've had for a man to do that.
8:29 By then however, I was captivated by the case, and I wanted answers, so I was a willing victim.
8:39 So the relationship moved pretty quickly.
8:44 Yeah, there was some sort of spark there.
8:51 Something just magically drew us together.
8:53 By the following day we had decided we were going to get married.
8:58 It all happened remarkably fast.
9:01 So Derek and I got married in 2010 and we now have three beautiful children together.
9:15 People would say that I had married her for her DNA, and we would laugh about it, so that
9:21 is funny.
9:23 Derek has essentially spent 24/7 researching the Somerton Man case.
9:30 He, if it's possible, became even more passionate about the whole case.
9:36 So in 2015 we started work on extracting DNA from hairs that were found in the plaster
9:45 cast of the Somerton Man, hoping this would be a way to identify him, even though these
9:52 hairs are 70 years old.
9:56 But we were only able to extract 2 per cent of the amount of DNA that we really need to
10:04 form an identification.
10:05 There's an imperative to now go ahead and do an exhumation.
10:10 We need it in much higher concentration levels, which we could do with the Somerton man's
10:16 teeth or his ear bone, for example.
10:20 Now the man's body will be exhumed by police with hopes modern DNA technology will be able
10:24 to solve one of the state's most enduring cold cases.
10:28 The Somerton Man is not just a curiosity or a mystery to be solved.
10:34 It's somebody's father, son, perhaps grandfather, uncle, brother.
10:38 So when the state government announced that the exhumation was going ahead I think for
10:42 some other people, they would see that as a cue for retirement.
10:46 But not Derek.
10:47 I think that increased his motivation to continue at even faster pace.
10:52 I'm reasonably confident there will be enough DNA come out of this that we'll get an identification.
11:00 He thought initially that he would be allowed to participate, but that wasn't to be.
11:07 After the exhumation, everything went silent.
11:10 The police kept very tight-lipped about their processes and Derek got a little restless
11:15 and he went back to his three hairs that he'd extracted in 2017 and started working again.
11:21 He was driven to find out who the man was.
11:26 The professor definitely wanted to be first over the finishing line of cracking the case.
11:35 So I'd been communicating with Colleen Fitzpatrick, who is the world expert in forensic genealogy
11:44 from America and like me, she was totally fascinated by the Somerton Man case I asked
11:50 her if she would assist.
11:52 So here's a closeup of the bust and can you see all these little hairs?
11:58 Yes.
11:59 That's the Somerton Man's hair.
12:01 So Colleen's expertise and she's a pioneer in this, is getting DNA, and from that DNA
12:10 finding distant cousins.
12:12 There are millions of people today who voluntarily put their DNA on these family tree-type DNA
12:20 sites.
12:22 Ever wanted to explore your family tree, learn more about your ancestry or identify your
12:28 ethnic background.
12:29 First take a DNA test and download your results as a DNA data file.
12:35 far as unidentified human remains, violent crimes, in other words, forensic cases, it's
12:40 really been a game-changer, the first new tool really in about 30 years in human identification.
12:47 It's very powerful and it's been very successful.
12:53 Around this time, DNA technology began to improve significantly.
12:58 Derek joined forces with Colleen, and they began to get some results.
13:02 Right off the bat, it's sort of like a miracle happened, we passed the first test.
13:06 We got the good data out of the 75-year-old hair.
13:09 Great!
13:10 Two million DNA markers fell out.
13:13 And it was at that point we knew that was more than enough to identify the Somerton
13:18 Man.
13:19 It was in a good shape to upload to those genealogy data bases for the next step, the
13:26 next genealogy step.
13:29 So when we first uploaded the Somerton Man's DNA onto a genealogical website, the very
13:36 top match we got was a gentleman in Victoria by the name of Jack Hargreaves, whose DNA
13:43 was already there on the system.
13:45 So, blue shows the area of significant matching, and this is huge here on chromosome 22.
13:52 And so what we did is we built out Jack Hargreaves family tree.
13:56 And at one stage we had as many as 4,000 people on the tree, so which one is it?
14:04 It felt like I was working on a big Sudoku puzzle, moving all these relatives around
14:09 until I got it.
14:10 We looked for people with no date of death on that tree.
14:15 There was one that stood out, because A: he was male, B: had roughly the right age range,
14:24 and C was very closely connected to the Keane family, and as we know, the Somerton Man had
14:30 the name Keane on his tie.
14:33 When I saw the name Keane, that's when my hair caught fire.
14:36 That's when I really knew we were on the offensive.
14:39 We were going to get it because that wasn't a coincidence.
14:43 And so this turned out to be a chap called Charles Webb, who had no date of death details.
14:50 Yeah, so he was born Carl Webb but he only went by the name Charles Webb.
14:54 It seemed this chap had just gone off the radar after 1947.
15:00 This could be our man, but we had no evidence, it was just a guy on a tree with no date of
15:06 death.
15:07 And we set out to either prove or eliminate him as being the Somerton Man
15:15 And to prove it, what we had to do was see who his mother was, then tunnel down the family
15:20 tree just on the mother's side only, and find somebody alive today.
15:24 And see if that DNA matches or not.
15:27 And that turned out to be somebody in Victoria by the name of Antero.
15:30 I got a call from Professor Abbott, who wanted to know if I could help do some research and
15:38 do DNA test.
15:39 I hadn't even heard of the story before.
15:42 And it was like, 'Hang on a minute, is this a scam?'.
15:45 It's not every day you get someone out of the blue calling you up and wanting to help
15:50 with some unidentified body or wants your DNA.
15:54 But did some research, made sure he was who he said he was.
15:57 So I volunteered to do that and did the test, sent it away.
16:02 I've always been interested in family history, but had no idea that there was a missing person
16:09 there.
16:10 So when Antero's DNA came through and it was a match to the Somerton Man, it was at
16:16 this point we knew that Charles Webb was the Somerton Man and we'd finally cracked it.
16:24 So there was a great feeling of elation, dampened by being totally exhausted at this stage.
16:34 I was taken aback but was excited as well.
16:36 There's a great, great discovery.
16:38 You know, I'd played my little part in working out that great mystery, it was satisfying.
16:45 There's Charles there.
16:47 So, he's my first cousin, three times removed.
16:50 And his mother, which is Eliza Emelia Morris, her older sister is my great-great grandmother.
16:58 And there's me down the bottom.
17:00 So Colleen and I decided right at that point, this was the time to make an announcement
17:09 people have been hanging on for 70 years to know the answers, I didn't see any reason
17:13 to delay.
17:14 I just wanted to get it out there.
17:16 They were determined, to quote Derek, to beat the cops.
17:20 And they were a bit concerned of how the news would be received as well.
17:25 The police gave no deadlines on when we could expect a result.
17:29 There was just nothing, no news.
17:31 Now an Adelaide researcher claims to have made a major breakthrough, uncovering the
17:35 identity of the infamous Somerton Man found on a beach.
17:39 Now a man who has dedicated his adult life to investigating the case thinks DNA has provided
17:45 the answer.
17:46 It's been a marathon working on this, over the last year particularly.
17:50 It was mind-blowing.
17:52 It was, 'Wow, we've actually got a name.'
17:54 And it was a surreal moment.
17:56 It took a long while to sink in that it's not the Somerton Man's story now, but the
18:01 Charles Webb story.
18:02 I'm not sure we'll ever be absolutely certain, because what we would do in a forensic context
18:08 normally is take a deceased DNA and compare that directly with something we know belong
18:13 to them a toothbrush, a hairbrush, etcetera, DNA from that item.
18:17 We haven't got that here.
18:19 As a secondary measure, we could compare the deceased DNA to a very close family member,
18:23 you know, parents, children.
18:25 Again, we don't have that.
18:26 So my concern is that we may never be able to categorically say that we know this person's
18:32 identity.
18:33 I'm not going to say I believe it until such time as the police results and the forensic
18:40 results that were done at the autopsy come back and actually confirm it, which I think
18:49 they possibly will.
18:51 Police who exhumed the Somerton Man's remains last year are cautiously optimistic the finding
18:56 is in fact a breakthrough.
18:58 I am 100 per cent convinced that we have the right guy.
19:03 Charles Webb is the Somerton Man.
19:05 PROFESSOR DEREK ABBOTT, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY: It turns out he wasn't a spy, he wasn't
19:10 a ballet dancer.
19:13 And all those crazy theories on the internet all came to nothing.
19:19 So this is Rachel's DNA compared with the Somerton Man.
19:24 Down at the bottom it says 'no shared DNA segments found.'
19:27 So, that was a flop.
19:35 So we're totally able to eliminate that hypothesis that Rachel is the granddaughter
19:42 of the Somerton Man.
19:44 The hypothesis turned out to be wrong.
19:49 So, when Derek said that Mr Somerton wasn't my grandfather, as a joke I said to him, 'How
19:56 long before you serve the divorce papers on me?'
19:58 Because the media had made a comment some years back Derek only married me for my DNA.
20:04 So it's probably somewhere around here.
20:09 We told the children that Mr S as I've always called the Somerton Man was called Charles
20:15 Webb and that he's not related to us.
20:18 But the Somerton Man will always form part of our family and our narrative.
20:23 It's the reason that we met, Derek and I. It brought us together.
20:28 It's been like a journey for us, together, I guess.
20:31 Derek: George, I guess the mystery's not over is it?
20:34 We don't know much abut Charles Webb, why he was here.
20:35 And then not wanting to just rest there, we also then were able to find other living descendants.
20:43 So one of the people I contacted was Stuart Webb.
20:47 I'd never heard of the Somerton Man case I think Derek Abbott found me because I'd
20:53 done some family tree research of my own, because my grandmother was very into the family
20:58 tree or genealogy.
21:03 It certainly seemed very strange to be part of this larger mystery.
21:07 I'm kind of a regular guy, I go to work.
21:11 When Derek Abbott asked me to do a DNA test, I wasn't really crazy about the idea.
21:16 I wanted to think about it a little bit further, so I put it out to my family.
21:19 If anybody else would be prepared to do the DNA test?
21:22 And I put my hand up straight away and said, 'yeah, I'll have a crack'…
21:29 And everything from that point just seems to have steamrolled and rolled on and on and
21:34 it's getting bigger and bigger as we keep going.
21:37 So I've got a result for you.
21:39 Yes.
21:40 Are you ready for this?
21:44 Drumroll…So you are a great, great niece of Charles Webb
21:51 So I got my DNA results and…it was happiness, it was joy.
21:57 But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member
22:03 You are 396 centimorgans, so you're right in the middle of the range, right?
22:11 Awesome.
22:12 This was a person, he wasn't just a media hit for a little while and unsolved mystery.
22:19 He was our family He was born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria
22:28 but it seems that he grew up in Springvale, in the family bakery and became an electrical
22:36 instrument maker.
22:37 He was one of six siblings.
22:40 It's reported in the newspapers at the time that he played community football and so this
22:45 could explain his good calves and good physique generally.
22:49 And there's so much more we don't know.
22:52 Here's a family photo album from pa with all the mystery inside.
22:57 Check it out…
22:58 I started to look back through the family history and that particular wing I've been
23:03 able to find the first photo of Charles when he was alive, to my knowledge.
23:09 Nana's actually written on this photo and named all the people.
23:13 So you've got grandma, grandpa, Charlie who's the Somerton Man, and Roy.
23:18 So you can actually see them quite distinctly.
23:20 It's amazing.
23:23 Yeah.
23:24 What a find.
23:27 There's also a larger family gathering with all of the Webb family as it was back then.
23:33 A fantastic family day, they're all smiling, Charles in particular is playing some kind
23:39 of prank on who we think is Gerald Keane.
23:41 I wonder where that was?
23:43 I don't know.
23:44 It looks to be somewhere rural; it looks like they're having fun.
23:48 So when I first saw that, I thought, wow, this is fantastic.
23:52 This is a real breakthrough.
23:54 And this photo is basically taken 20 years before he died.
24:00 So we're seeing him considerably younger than the autopsy photo we're used to looking
24:06 at.
24:07 It's quite incredible when you look at these photos and this guy obviously went missing,
24:13 and nobody really came forward.
24:16 The fact that Charles Webb wasn't reported missing, I find that sad in itself.
24:23 And for no-one to reach out and find out where he was or what had happened, it's quite
24:31 heartbreaking So Uncle Harry, growing up, was there any
24:35 discussion?
24:36 Did you hear anything about one of the relatives going missing?
24:39 No, no, no.
24:41 There's no recollection of that.
24:43 Why didn't any of the siblings try and find out where he went?
24:46 Did they know that he'd gone to Adelaide and never came back?
24:50 Or did he just go off and no-one knew where, where he was?
24:54 In the end when we look at the whole situation of the Somerton Man, it does appear to be
25:02 a sad story.
25:05 In the period leading up to his death, his father died, his mum died.
25:08 His brother Roy, who he seems to be close with, died.
25:12 He split up with his wife as well.
25:15 Charles was married to Dorothy Robertson in, I think, 1941.
25:20 They didn't have a very easy marriage…
25:24 Our information comes from Dorothy's divorce decree filed several years later.
25:31 Dorothy described Charles as violent, threatening, moody.
25:34 Not at all a happy person.
25:36 He didn't have any friends and he would be in bed by 7pm.
25:40 Turns out that Charles loved to write poetry and his favourite subject that he would write
25:45 about was death.
25:48 This is interesting, because we know that just before Charles died, he'd discarded
25:53 a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is poetry about death.
25:59 It all fits together.
26:02 One day she came home and the whole house smelled like ether.
26:07 She found him soaking wet in bed, and he said he had swallowed 50 phenobarbital tablets.
26:13 This very much sounds like Charles was attempting suicide.
26:17 This story turns out that it's not some wild spy drama.
26:21 It's really a sad, tragic domestic situation.
26:28 Eventually he moved out in April of 1947, and we don't know what happened after that.
26:37 And we find him dead on a beach in 1948 in Adelaide.
26:43 So what has he been doing in that intervening year?
26:46 Who knows.
26:47 And why Adelaide, why did he pick Adelaide?
26:52 I think Charles Webb was very broken mentally.
26:55 Something had happened in his life, and he wanted just to anaesthetise himself.
27:02 It does seem to me that some form of suicide does seem to be likely, which is what the
27:08 police always suspected all along, right from the beginning
27:12 I think there's no doubt that he committed suicide.
27:14 If he planned it all, he certainly planned it in a way that it would leave a great, confusing
27:22 issue behind, which would bamboozle people for years.
27:28 Imagine, this guy has been sitting there for 70 odd years, no-one knew who he was.
27:33 You're related to one of the great mysteries of Australia and indeed the world.
27:40 I was a bit excited to find out all I could about the Somerton Man, now that I knew who
27:45 it was and my small piece in the puzzle.
27:47 I'm sure that they'll find a few more answers to those missing questions.
27:50 But maybe eventually down the track, probably be a few unanswered questions that we just
27:56 have to live with.
27:58 The person that could supply all these answers that we all would like to know is dead.
28:03 He's taking it to the grave.
28:05 In the end, there was no fairytale ending, but it's been really heart-warming to learn
28:13 that the family that may not have missed him when he went missing and when he died, are
28:19 now reclaiming him.
28:20 It's really the start of the mystery, not the end.
28:27 He died alone.
28:28 He'd been buried for a long time in a cemetery without a name.
28:33 Whether he's buried again at Somerton or whether the family has other ideas, it's
28:41 just really nice that he's got a name.
28:59 So, in the playroom, we have two portraits.
29:02 One is my grandmother, Jo Thomson and the other one is what Charles Webb may have looked
29:11 like.
29:12 I do find them quite disturbing.
29:14 And now that I know that I'm not related, I would very much like to move those paintings
29:18 on and rehome them.
29:20 I would quite like to donate them to a charity.
29:25 I would like to get rid of those paintings.
29:26 South Australia police says further DNA work is required to positively identify the Somerton
29:27 Man and that the matter "will ultimately be determined by the Coroner".

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