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".
Intestering story, Thanks.
70 years later and they come up with an elaborate story about a depressed, divorced guy that committed suicide.
Boy - whatever spy stuff he was doing must have been huge to attempt to bury it even now. /sarcasm
Conspiracy theories are REALLY hard to kill!