The Somerton Man

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0:38Download today. There was a body on the beach. There were a couple of jockeys training their horses on the beach, as they did in those days. The stables were not far from the beach. so they took out the horses for a morning gallop to get them warmed up for the day and as they were going down the beach they passed what they thought was just like a drifter sleeping on the sand but what was strange is that on the way back they saw the same guy there in exactly the same position. And they thought that was suspicious. He hadn't even moved or anything, and it was now around about 6 o 'clock in the morning, and, you know, it was light, and there's this guy just lying there.

1:35One of the jockeys approached the man, and when the man didn't move, the jockey picked up one of his feet. And then placed it down again, and, you know, when he lifted that foot, his leg up, it was like stiff as a board, and it was clear the man was dead. This was on Somerton Beach, just south of Adelaide, Australia. It was December 1948. We're hearing from Professor Derek Abbott. So it just so happens there was a guy by the name of Jack Lyons on the beach and he took over the situation. He said, oh yeah, I've seen that body last night. well, I'll call the cops. What did he say about seeing the man the night before?

2:25So Jack Lyons was having a stroll on the beach the evening before, and this was sometime between 6.30 and 7 in the evening. And he walked past this body and noticed it because the man was actually alive. The man raised one of his hands, I think it was right hand, and then just flopped it down, it just flopped down. And because of the way it kind of flopped down, he just thought, oh, this is like some drunkard just sleeping it off and didn't think anything of it and just went on his merry way with his wife. When the man was found the next morning, he was lying with his head and shoulders propped against a low seawall and his feet were pointed towards the water.

3:17He seemed to be in his forties. He was clean-shaven and in neatly trimmed nails. There was a partially smoked cigarette resting on his jacket. He was well-dressed, with a striped tie and polished shoes. There was some sand on his shoes, but not much. So it seems like he had hardly walked on the beach. He had just come to the beach just to lay down. The man's body was brought to the city morgue. The pathologist noted that the man was in good shape. They noticed something unusual about his teeth. He didn't have lateral incisors, so his upper canine teeth were right next to his two front teeth. He also had notably strong calf muscles, and all of the tags had been cut out of his clothing.

4:10An autopsy showed that his spleen was enlarged and his liver was in bad condition. The pathologist guessed that the cause of death was heart failure, but also said that the man's heart looked completely normal. He suspected poison, but couldn't find any trace of poison in the man's system. And there was no sign of physical violence on his body. he had no disturbance in the sand around him and not a scratch on him so there were no signs of any struggle and you know if it was some kind of poison that had finished off they were expecting to see things like maybe a empty bottle in the sand nothing like that or signs of some vomit because you usually see that sort of thing, but nothing like that at all.

5:07The other mystery was the man's identity. A few things had been found in his pockets, including a train ticket, a bus ticket, and a pack of chewing gum, but no wallet. So that's another strange thing, you know, did he have a wallet that had got stolen from him while he was on the beach over the night, or had he lost it or had he deliberately de-identified himself. Who knows? A newspaper reported on the man found on Somerton Beach and said the dead man was someone named E.C. Johnson. But then E.C. Johnson walked into the police headquarters to correct the error. The dead man's fingerprints were taken, but the police couldn't find a match.

5:54They distributed a photograph of the man, and dozens of people called in saying they knew him. Lots of people claimed he was a missing relative. Multiple women thought he could be their missing husband. A few men recognized him as the man who stood guard for them outside their illegal card games. Someone else said he looked like a man they knew who worked at the military weapons testing facility north of Adelaide. A local paper reported that, quote, Police are maintaining an almost continuous taxi service to and from the morgue, taking people to see the man's body. People who thought they knew the man changed their minds once they saw him.

6:37He was called the Somerton Man. Investigators would spend decades trying to figure out who he was and what happened to him. People would come up with many theories, that he was a Cold War spy, a former ballet dancer, a victim of a relationship gone bad. It would come to be called one of Australia's strangest and most famous cold cases. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

7:17By January 1949, the Somerton man had been in the city morgue for over a month, and his body still hadn't been claimed. Derek says the police wondered if the man could have been from out of town. So they're thinking, well, this guy must have come from another state. He's a stranger here. So how would he come? He would come by train. So they inspected the luggage room in the station and asked the guy behind the luggage counter, you know, have any suitcases been checked in on this date? and citing the date before he had died. This is like the 30th of November, 1948. And lo and behold, there was actually a suitcase checked in exactly on that day that no one had claimed since then.

8:14So all this time had passed and no one had claimed the suitcase. So the police thought, aha, this is likely to be this guy's suitcase. So they took it back to the police station, opened it up, There were clothes in the suitcase, including a sports coat and a pair of red slippers. There was also a shaving kit, a container of boot polish, and a butter knife that had been filed down to a sharp point. And there were items in that suitcase that had the name Keane on it, spelt K-E-A-N-E. The name T. Keene had been written on a tie, and Keene was printed on a canvas laundry bag. So a canvas laundry bag with a stenciled surname gives the impression of some kind of institution, like this is like, you know, an army issue bag with the GI's name stenciled on.

9:13This is the sort of thing you would do in an army. The police looked into the name T. Keene, but they couldn't find any reports of anyone with that name missing. Eventually a well-known pathologist named John Burton Cleland was asked to take a look at the body. Derek Abbott says John Burton Cleland thought of a few things the original investigators hadn't considered. One thing he did was check that the clothes from the suitcase would actually fit the Somerton man. And the way he did that is really clever. Because if you think about it, how do you get a dead body, you know, with all its weight?

9:55And when you put on a shirt and check it's the right size, it's pretty tricky. So what he did was he found somebody who was about the same size as the Somerton man. And he said, can you put on these clothes, please? And these were the clothes the dead man was actually found dressed in. So he actually made him wear the dead man's clothes and they fit perfectly. And then he made the guy wear the clothes that were in the suitcase. And so that's how they checked that they correlated. So I thought that was very clever. Another correlation he found is that there was some thread in the suitcase, a card of thread that had a strange sepia color that was a bit unusual.

10:47and noted that the same color of thread had been used to stitch on some buttons on the man's clothing. So there was a correlation there. So they were pretty convinced this was the man's suitcase. And the fact that it was checked in on the correct day and no one had claimed it was a good sign too. So he did all that. And then when checking the man's trousers that the man had worn, he found what's called a little fob pocket and noticed that there was a tiny little piece of rolled up paper jammed down in the pocket that hadn't been noticed. And he found it quite difficult, tricky to get it out. It was kind of stuck in there and he actually needed tweezers to pull it out.

11:34So he pulled it out and unrolled it and it had the word tamamshud on it and that was very strange because he had no idea what that meant and it wasn't handwritten it was actually printed it looked like it had been torn out of a book so this was published the next day in the local newspapers to see if anyone could come forward and say what this meant and it was actually a journalist at the time who knew what it meant and came forward and said, oh yeah, I've seen that before. This is the last words in a book of poetry called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which I've done some historical research on this, and it was actually a very popular book of poetry back in the war years, back in World War II.

12:30The poetry in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam dates back to the 12th century. It's attributed to Omar Khayyam, sometimes known as the astronomer-poet of Persia. In 1859, it was translated into English, and became so popular among English speakers that an Omar Khayyam club was formed. Oscar Wilde called the book a masterpiece of art. In 1909, two English bookbinders were commissioned to rebind a copy of the Rubaiyat and cover it with over a thousand precious and semi-precious stones. They incorporated gold leaf, silver, and ivory. The book was sold to an American buyer for what would be around$70 ,000 today.

13:21The book sank on the Titanic while being shipped to America. it's never been found. The poetry in the book is about life and death. And the very last two words are, Tammam should, a Persian phrase that means, it is ended. The police realized the piece of paper in the Somerton man's pocket must have been ripped from a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. So they published this in the paper saying, oh, it's the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. has anyone got a copy with the back page torn out? And to their surprise, they got a response.

14:07We'll be right back.

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16:30By the time the police put a notice in the newspaper looking for a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with the back page ripped out, it had been about eight months since the Somerton man had been found. And so they put this in the paper, not thinking anyone would come seriously come forward with the correct book but lo and behold there were actually um three or four people did hand in rubites of omar cams into police stations and say could this be it and i think they ruled out any copies that were handed in apart from one and one looked like a great match and they they took it to a paper specialist in the city of Adelaide, who carefully looked at the paper under a microscope and saw that the torn out piece of paper that the Somerton man had was of exactly the same texture and weight as the paper in the book, and same tone and everything.

17:28It was like a perfect match. The book had been turned in by a man who said he'd found it in the backseat of his car on November 30th of the previous year, after parking near Somerton Beach. He said that he thought someone had thrown it through his open car window. And in those days, no one locked their cars. They parked their cars with their windows open and stuff. So it's plausible it just got chucked in for some reason. Inside the back cover of the book, there were four lines of handwritten capital letters. One row read M-T-B-I-M-P-A-N-E-T-P. The other three rows were just as random. There was a fifth line, but it was crossed out.

18:13The police had no idea what the letters meant, but guessed that it could be some sort of code. Code-breaking experts with the Australian Navy worked on it for weeks and couldn't figure it out. The four lines of letters were published in newspapers, and soon everyone was trying to crack the code. One man thought it concealed the name of a ship, and one woman thought it was a message that the man was tired of life. Another man told reporters that he drank ten pots of tea so he could stay up all night and work on the code. He thought it could be directions to a postal box. No one could come up with anything very convincing.

18:58The police found something else in the book, a few handwritten phone numbers. and one of the phone numbers turned out to be a local bank and another number second phone number down belonged to a young lady who was about 27 years old and turns out she lived just five minutes walk from where the man was found dead so uh you can you can see what the cops were thinking as soon as they figured that out they're thinking hmm she must know something so they knocked on her door and they said to her have you seen this book so uh they actually had the summerton man's copy of the rubai out of ermunkheim and she actually said yes i've seen that and they said ah so you know about this man dead on the beach and she said no no i didn't say that i didn't say that what I meant was I've seen Arubayyat of Omar Khayyam before I didn't mean that I've seen your copy you've got and so that she kind of backpedaled a bit there and so the police said to her well have you given Arubayyat of Omar Khayyam to any man and she says well actually I did back in 1945 I gave a copy to a guy called Alf Boxall and so the police thought hmm this could be our man if she's given a copy and he's found it on the beach maybe this is Alf Boxall so they went off and unfortunately well I should say fortunately not unfortunately Alf Boxall was alive and well with his copy that she had originally given him.

20:49And so that was a complete dead end in the end. But the police had also shown the woman a plaster cast that had been made of the dead man's face. And she had a strange reaction. I interviewed the guy who actually made the plaster bust because it was actually sitting in his office when the police brought her in to see it. and he has clear memories of that day when she came into his office and the police interviewed her there and he basically says that she just stared at the ground refused to look at the bust and every question the police asked her she would either just mumble no or don't know and he said that he was standing right behind her and at one point it looked like she was about to fall over and faint and he actually held his hand out to catch her and he pulled his hand back when he realized she was going to stand without falling over so he didn't need to catch her in the end but he said that that was very strange that day and it did seem that she knew something but if the woman did know something she didn't tell the police So the investigation trailed off, but it kind of came up like a zombie every now and again.

22:16You know, there'd be a thing in the press and the police would look into it and, you know, die out again, etc., etc. So it was one of those things. Over the years, even when the investigation wasn't active, people kept talking about the case and came up with all kinds of theories. Some people thought the Somerton Man could have been a spy, in part because of the odd letters that look like a code found in his book, but also because in 1948, the year that he was found, the Cold War had just begun. A high-security military base was built in a remote area north of Adelaide, and it was used for testing missiles, rockets, and atomic bombs.

23:01Someone had told the police they thought they recognized the Somerton Man as a worker from the rocket range. Other people thought it was possible he'd come to spy on it. Some thought that the Somerton man must have been involved in some kind of illegal activity, maybe buying and selling on the black market, and that certain people had an incentive to keep him unidentified. Others thought the woman whose phone number had been found in the Somerton man's book had known a lot more than she let on. Derek Abbott came up with a theory of his own.

23:42We'll be right back.

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24:31From Academy Award-winning writer-director James L. Brooks, Emma Mackey plays Ella McKay, an idealistic young woman who juggles family and work in a story about the people you love and how to survive them. Featuring an all-star cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Loudon, Kumail Nanjiani, Iowa Debrey, Julie Kaffner, with Albert Brooks and Woody Harrelson. Ella McKay, now playing. Derek Abbott didn't really know much about the Somerton man until 2007. when he came across an article about the case and the possible code found in the back of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Derek is a professor in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at the University of Adelaide.

25:17He thought trying to figure out the code using statistical tests could be an interesting project for his students. No one had any luck, but Derek couldn't stop thinking about the case. He decided to try and find the woman whose number had been in the book. The police had never published her name. But there was enough information in the papers that you could work it out. It was quite tricky at the time. It was like a big crossword puzzle. But basically, I knew that she lived very close by, and the newspapers actually said which hospitals she had trained in as a nurse. So I was able to look up old hospital records and electoral records of the area where she lived and piece it all together and figure out who she was.

26:05And I eventually found out her name was Jo Thompson. But Jo Thompson had died about two years earlier. So Derek decided to find out if she had any children. So I found out that she had a son by the name of Robin. and by the time I'd figured out his name and how to contact him, he had died two months before I was about to contact him, so I'd just missed him. But it turns out he was a ballet dancer and that piqued my interest because in early reports about the Somerton Man, there were reports saying that, you know, he had very strong calf muscles like that of a ballet dancer and could he have been a dancer?

26:49so this was a hypothesis and I was thinking hmm that's interesting so because Robin was actually a professional ballet dancer he had danced with the Australian ballet with the New Zealand ballet and when he was with the Australian ballet he toured at the USA in the early 70s and Rudolf Nurev was part of that tour as well and so because he was a good dancer his photo was in newspapers so I was able to dig up old archival photos of him and I found a couple of interesting things. I found he had lateral incisors missing in his teeth so his canine teeth in other words were right next to his middle teeth and this is exactly what it says about the Somerton man in his inquest report and so I was thinking wow this is interesting so I talked to specialists at the university, I said, is this congenital?

27:49Can this be inherited? And they go say, yep. And I thought, whoa. And so I'm starting to have this hypothesis that, hmm, could it be that Robin is the son of the Somerton Man and this is why Jo Thompson was behaving all evasively at the time with the police? This could be her real motive behind all that. Derek Abbott tried to find other potential family members and went to speak with one of Robin's daughters. She didn't know anything. So that was a big dead end. But we decided to get married.

28:33So it all happened so fast and furiously. They got married about six months after they met in 2010. Rachel Egan hadn't grown up knowing members of her biological family. When she was in college, she'd received a letter from a social worker informing her that she had been adopted. Rachel was able to meet her grandmother, Joe Thompson, before she died, but she never met her grandfather. Derek Abbott knew if there was some way to obtain DNA from the Somerton man's body, he could compare that DNA to Rachel's. And then it struck me that when I looked at this plaster bust of the man that had been moulded directly off his body, that because it was stuck on his body and moulded straight off his body, there was actually hairs stuck in the plaster.

29:29The plaster bust was kept in the South Australia Police Museum in Adelaide. And Derek Abbott got permission to remove some hairs from the bust and test them. And, you know, naysayers at the time were saying, oh, you'll never get any DNA out of this body because the man was embalmed before he was buried. They embalmed him in formaldehyde, and this is going to basically destroy the DNA. But it's not quite true that it completely destroys the DNA. There are now techniques to recover DNA from formaldehyde damage. but it's true it would make it an extremely difficult problem but as it happened um the the dna in the hair roots wasn't showing any signs of that problem so it looks like the formaldehyde had missed parts of the man's scalp and so we were free of it in his hair so that was great and my goal was you know to get enough dna out of this hair so that we could upload it on genealogical websites and try and find this guy's nearest cousins and work out their family trees and from their family trees work out who this guy is.

30:45In 2018, Derek Abbott sent in some of the Somerton man's hair for DNA testing at a lab at the University of Adelaide. Derek says the lab found about 16 ,000 DNA markers, but that wasn't enough. Now to give you an idea you know police DNA tests use something like around 20 of these DNA markers to test if a criminal matches with DNA on a crime scene whereas say something like Ancestry.com is a complete different ballgame. It's because when you're matching a criminal to DNA on a crime scene, it's like a one-to-one match. It's a one-to-one. So he's either matching or he isn't. Okay. Whereas if you're just trying to find, not do that, but you're trying to find your nearest cousins on a DNA website, you know, 20 markers is not enough.

31:50You need like anywhere between half a million and two million because you're trying to connect with lots of people. It's not a one-to-one match now, it's a one-to-many. Completely different ballgame. Derek started working with forensic genealogy expert Colleen Fitzpatrick. And she suggested that he bring some of the hairs to a lab in the U.S. that had newer technology. And it was always my intention to actually fly to America with the hair sample in my suitcase. and personally take it to the lab. I was not going to trust sending this hair in the post. But because of COVID, I was not allowed to go on a plane, right?

32:36So I bite the bullet and I actually post it in the end. I had this hair with my best hair route saved up all these years. you know for like it's been about 10 years this hair was sitting in my drawer and it was like the best hair route and i thought i'm going to give this my best shot and you know the forensic wisdom is you know the best dna is in the hair route guess what it was a complete flop it didn't work and i'm i'm absolutely you know desperate now so i thought okay i've got nothing to lose now So you know what happened next? I then sent them another hair. It wasn't a hair root, but it was five centimeters of hair shaft.