The Enduring Mystery of the Somerton Man, One of Australia's Most Puzzling Cold Cases

Mike Dash; Updated by Meilan Solly

Around 7 p.m. on the warm evening of November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. As the pair walked toward the suburb of Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed individual—soon to be known as the Somerton Man—lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. He was lolling about 60 feet away from them, legs outstretched and feet crossed. The man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground, perhaps in a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette.

Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position. Looking down on him from above, they could see he was dressed in a suit, with new shoes polished to a mirror shine—odd clothing for the beach. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. “He must [be] dead to the world in not noticing them,” the boyfriend joked.

It wasn’t until the next morning that it became obvious the man wasn’t dead to the world so much as actually dead. Shortly after 6:30 a.m. on December 1, Lyons returned from a swim to find several people clustered at the seawall where he’d seen the man the previous evening. Walking over, he saw a figure slumped in much the same position, head resting on the seawall, feet crossed. Now, though, the body on Somerton Beach was cold. No marks of violence were readily visible. A half-smoked cigarette was lying on the man’s collar, as though it had fallen from his mouth.

Police photos of the Somerton Man's corpse Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As investigators tried to piece together the events surrounding the Somerton Man’s death, they encountered obstacle after obstacle, from the deceased’s lack of identification to the meaning of a mysterious message found in his pocket. Over the decades, the case generated ample speculation, with observers suggesting the man might have been a spurned lover who ingested poison to end his own life, a ballet dancer (he had unusually well-developed calf muscles) or perhaps even a Soviet spy.

Then, in 2022, researchers announced that they’d identified the mystery man as Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne who went by Charles. The identification, based on a DNA analysis of hairs caught in the Somerton Man’s death mask, made international headlines—but not everyone was convinced. Though a South Australia Police spokesperson said the department was “cautiously optimistic that this may provide a breakthrough,” authorities have yet to verify the result by analyzing DNA extracted from the Somerton Man’s remains, which were exhumed for that purpose in 2021.

In the absence of official confirmation, here’s everything you need to know about the Somerton Man and the investigation into his death.

Examining the Somerton Man’s remains

The Somerton Man’s body reached the Royal Adelaide Hospital three hours after its discovery. Medical professionals placed the time of death no earlier than 2 a.m., noting the likely cause as heart failure and speculating that poison may have played a part in his demise. The contents of his pockets were relatively unassuming: tickets from Adelaide to the beach, a pack of chewing gum, some matches, two combs and a pack of Army Club cigarettes containing cigarettes from a more expensive brand called Kensitas. Oddly, the man died with no wallet, cash or identification on hand. None of his clothes bore any name tags—indeed, in all but one case, the maker’s label had been carefully snipped away. A pocket had been neatly repaired with an unusual variety of orange thread.

By the time a full autopsy was carried out on December 2, the police had already exhausted their best leads regarding the dead man’s identity, and the results of the postmortem did little to enlighten them. It revealed that the corpse’s pupils were “smaller” than normal and “unusual,” that a dribble of spittle had run down the side of the man’s mouth as he lay on the sand, 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.

Plaster cast of the Somerton Man's face State Records of South Australia

In the man’s stomach, pathologist John Dwyer found the remains of his last meal, a pasty, and a further quantity of blood. That too suggested poisoning, though nothing indicated that the poison had been in the food. Now, the dead man’s peculiar behavior on the beach—slumping in a suit, raising and dropping his right arm—seemed less like drunkenness than it did a lethal dose of something taking slow effect. But repeated tests on both blood and organs by an expert chemist failed to reveal the faintest trace of poison. “I was astounded that he found nothing,” Dwyer admitted at the 1949 inquest into the man’s death. In fact, no cause of death was ever found.

The body displayed other peculiarities. 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. One expert who gave evidence at the inquest noted:

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

Perhaps, another expert witness hazarded, the dead man had been a ballet dancer?

All this left the Adelaide coroner, Thomas Cleland, with a real puzzle on his hands. The only practical solution, the eminent pharmacologist Cedric Stanton Hicks testified, 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 Hicks would not say their names out loud in open court. Instead, he passed the coroner a scrap of paper on which he had written the names of two possible candidates: digitalis and strophanthin. Hicks suspected strophanthin, a rare glycoside derived from the seeds of African plants that was historically used to poison arrows.

More baffled now than ever, the police continued their investigation. A full set of fingerprints was taken and circulated first in Australia and then throughout the English-speaking world. No one could identify them. People from all over Adelaide were escorted to the mortuary in the hope they could give the corpse a name. Some thought they knew the man from photos published in the newspapers; others were the distraught relatives of missing persons. Though several tentatively identified the body, authorities quickly managed to rule these proposed individuals out.

The mysteries of the Somerton Man’s belongings

By early January 1949, the South Australia Police had looked into and dismissed pretty much every lead they had. The investigation was now widened in an attempt to locate any abandoned personal possessions, including luggage, that might suggest 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 January 14, staff at the main railway station in Adelaide presented detectives with a brown suitcase that had been deposited in the cloakroom there on November 30.

Police examine clothing found in a suitcase linked to the Somerton Man. Adelaide *News* via National Library of Australia

The workers could remember nothing about the owner, and the suitcase’s contents weren’t much more revealing. The luggage contained a reel of orange thread identical to that used to repair the dead man’s pocket, but painstaking care had been applied to remove practically every trace of the owner’s identity. The case bore no stickers or markings, and a label had been torn off from one side. The tags were missing from all but three items, which bore the names “Keane,” “Kean” and “T. Keane.” Unable to find any missing persons by that name, the police concluded that someone had “purposely left them on, knowing that the dead man’s name was not ‘Keane’ or ‘Kean,’” the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial reported.

The suitcase’s remaining contents were equally inscrutable. They included a stencil kit similar to the kind used by a third officer responsible for stenciling cargo on merchant ships, a table knife with the handle cut down and a coat crafted with an unfamiliar feather stitch. A tailor identified the stitchwork as American in origin, suggesting the coat, and perhaps its wearer, had traveled abroad during World War II. But searches of shipping and immigration records from across the country again produced no likely leads.

The police brought in another expert, John Cleland, an emeritus pathologist at the University of Adelaide, to re-examine the corpse and the dead man’s possessions. In April, four months after the body’s discovery, Cleland’s search produced a final piece of evidence—one that would prove to be the most baffling of all. Cleland spotted 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 fob watch. Inside, tightly rolled up, was a tiny scrap of paper, which, when opened up, was found to contain two words, typeset in an elaborate printed script: “tamam 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 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This work, written in the 12th century, became popular in Australia during the war years due to a much-loved translation by the English writer Edward FitzGerald. It existed in numerous editions, but the usual police inquiries to libraries, publishers and bookshops failed to find one that matched the fancy type used in the Somerton Man’s version. At least it was possible, however, to say that the words “tamam 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—unsurprising given that the phrase means “finished” or “it is ended.”

The tamam shud fragment found on the Somerton Man's body — The *tamam shud* fragment found on the Somerton Man's body News Ltd / Newspix / Getty Images

Taken at face value, this new clue pointed toward suicide as the man’s cause of death; indeed, the South Australia Police never elevated their “missing person” inquiries into a full-blown murder investigation. Still, the tamam shud discovery brought authorities no closer to identifying the dead man, and in the meantime, his body had begun to decompose. Arrangements were made for a burial, but the police—conscious that they were disposing of one of the few pieces of evidence available—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. Over the next several decades, flowers were placed on the grave at odd intervals, but no one could ascertain who had left them there or why.

Tamam shud and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Eight months into the investigation, the search for the right Rubaiyat finally yielded results. On July 23, 1949, a Glenelg man known by the pseudonym Ronald Francis walked into the Adelaide Detective Office with a copy of the book and a strange story. In early December 1948, just after the discovery of the Somerton Man’s body, he had gone for a drive with his brother-in-law in a car usually kept parked near Somerton Beach. Francis recalled seeing a copy of the Rubaiyat lying on the floor by the rear seats. He’d thought it belonged to his brother-in-law, but when he followed up, the man said he’d simply found it on the floor of the unlocked car. After taking a closer look, Francis realized that part of the final page had been torn out.

When Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane examined the book, he found that it perfectly matched the scrap of paper tucked into the Somerton Man’s pocket. Almost immediately, he discovered a telephone number penciled on the rear cover; using a magnifying glass, he dimly made out the faint impression of some letters written in capitals underneath. Here, at last, was a solid clue to go on.

The phone number was unlisted, but authorities linked it to a young nursing student who lived near Somerton Beach. Originally known by the pseudonyms Jestyn and Teresa Johnson (née Powell), she has since been identified publicly as Jessica Ellen Thomson (née Harkness), also nicknamed “Jo.” Reluctantly, it seemed (perhaps because she was living with the man who would later become her husband), the nurse admitted that she had indeed presented a copy of the Rubaiyat to a man she had known during the war. She gave the detectives his name: Alfred Boxall.

Copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam — The missing text in this copy of the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* perfectly aligned with the tamam shud fragment found in the Somerton Man's pocket. News Ltd / Newspix / Getty Images

The police felt confident they had solved the mystery. Boxall was surely the unidentified Somerton Man. Within days, they traced his home to Maroubra, New South Wales.

There was just one problem: Boxall turned out to still be alive, and he still owned the copy of the Rubaiyat given to him by “Jestyn,” as she signed her name in a personalized inscription. The book was completely intact, meaning the scrap of paper hidden in the dead man’s pocket must have come from somewhere else.

Interviewed again, Thomson recalled that at some point in the previous year—she could not be certain of the date—neighbors told her that an unknown man had called and asked after her while she was away from home. When confronted with the cast of the dead man’s face, she seemed “completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint,” wrote retired detective G.M. Feltus in The Unknown Man: A Suspicious Death at Somerton Beach. Thomson seemed to recognize the man, yet she firmly denied that he was someone she knew.

The Somerton Man code

That left the faint impression Leane had noticed in the Glenelg Rubaiyat. Examined under ultraviolet light, five lines of jumbled letters appeared, 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. The message seemed to be some sort of code.

Breaking a code from only a small fragment of text is exceedingly difficult, but the police did their best. They sent the message to Naval Intelligence, home to the finest cipher experts in Australia, and allowed it to be published in the press. This produced a frenzy of amateur code-breaking, almost all of it worthless, and a message from Naval Intelligence 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.

… A reasonable explanation would be that the lines are the initial letters of words of a verse of poetry or such like.

And there, for all intents and purposes, the mystery rested for decades. As the South Australia coroner wrote in a 1958 report on the final results of his investigation, “I am unable to say who the deceased was. … I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death.”

The supposedly coded message found in the back of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam — The supposedly coded message found in the back of a copy of the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Theories surrounding the Somerton Man

Theories about the Somerton Man’s identity and the circumstances of his death abound. Some posit that he was a black market smuggler, a sailor or a displaced refugee. Others look to Thomson, speculating that the Somerton Man was the father of her son Robin, who was born in 1947, exhibited striking physical similarities to the deceased and went on to become a professional ballet dancer. “It is my opinion that the nurse knew the identity of the unknown man,” wrote Feltus in his book.

Derek Abbott, the University of Adelaide researcher who identified the Somerton Man as Webb in 2022, initially subscribed to this theory. While attempting to track down Robin, Abbott learned that the dancer had recently died, leading him to search for Robin’s daughter, Rachel Egan, instead. In an unlikely turn of events, Abbott and Egan fell in love and are now married; as Egan joked to the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) in 2019, “People have said that possibly Derek married me for my DNA. And I think there is some truth to that.” (If the 2022 analysis is correct, then Egan has no genetic ties to the Somerton Man after all.)

At the other end of the spectrum, another popular theory draws on the coded message, the lack of identification and the possibility of poison as a cause of death to argue that the dead man was a spy. “A lot of people were hanging their hats on the fact that it was a good line to look at, simply because of what was termed a ‘code,’” Feltus told the ABC in 2022. “From there, the spy theory started to develop because no one could work out … these lines of letters. [That was] the climate in that time—1948 was at the end of the Second World War, and Russia was coming to the fore.”

A July 1949 newspaper article about the Somerton Man Sydney *Truth* via National Library of Australia

Is Carl Webb the Somerton Man?

If the DNA analyzed by Abbott and forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick does in fact belong to the Somerton Man, then these theories are likely all flawed. To link the genetic material to a specific individual, Abbott and Fitzpatrick combed through DNA databases and built out a family tree of more than 4,000 people. Webb, an engineer born in 1905, emerged as the most likely match.

“In all this soup and ocean of DNA cousins, we were able to connect one of them to Carl’s father and one of them to Carl’s mother,” Fitzpatrick told the New York Times in 2022. “You really kind of narrow it down so much it could be any one of Carl’s siblings—but Carl is the one with no documented death.”

Webb was the sixth child of a German immigrant who ran a bakery in the Australian state of Victoria. He married Dorothy Jean Robertson, a 21-year-old podiatrist, in 1941, when he was 35 years old and working as an instrument maker. They lived together in South Yarra, a suburb of Melbourne, but their union was not a happy one. In March 1946, Robertson later recalled, she found her husband “lying in a wet bed, gazing into space,” the apparent victim of an overdose of ether. After Robertson nursed Webb back to health, he grew violent, assaulting her both physically and verbally. That September, Robertson fled their shared home, eventually relocating to Bute, 89 miles northwest of Adelaide. She filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion in 1951.

FOUND! Photo of a young Charles Webb (aka The Somerton Man) next to my AI assisted reconstruction. Based mostly on a post-autopsy photo, but also a plaster cast and an earlier artistic interpretation.

How did I do? pic.twitter.com/5fi6FWHWZW
— Dan Voshart (@dvoshart) December 15, 2022

“It’s possible that [Webb] came to [South Australia] to try and find her,” Abbott told CNN in 2022. “This is just us drawing the dots. We can’t say for certain say that this is the reason he came, but it seems logical.”

The DNA analysis has given a potential name to the Somerton Man, but many mysteries remain. How and why did he end up on Somerton Beach? Did he die by suicide or of natural causes? Was he the victim of foul play? And why did his belongings contain so many odd items?

Robertson’s divorce papers hold at least a few likely answers. “[Webb] has written many poems, most of them on the subject of death, which he claims to be his greatest desire,” Robertson said. She described her husband as a moody, violent man with few friends. He had a penchant for horse racing, prompting Abbott to theorize that the supposedly coded message was, in truth, simply the “first names of horses he was betting on … or something pedestrian along those lines.” Webb also had a nephew named John Keane, who may be the “Keane” or “Kean” identified on the Somerton Man’s few tagged pieces of clothing.

Abbott and Fitzpatrick announced their findings in July 2022, just over a year after South Australia Police exhumed the Somerton Man’s body in hopes of extracting viable DNA. As Anne Coxon, assistant director of operations for Forensic Science SA, told the ABC in May 2021, “Our focus is going to be on making sure we extract—or have the best possible chance of extracting—the best DNA profile. We will do it as quickly as possible, at the same time [as] treating the individual with the dignity and respect he deserves.”

Though the police released a statement acknowledging the Webb identification, a spokesperson emphasized that the department was “still actively investigating the ‘Somerton Man’ coronial matter. … We look forward to the outcome of further DNA work to confirm the identification, which will ultimately be determined by coroner.”

Nearly three years later, state authorities have provided no updates on the investigation. But that hasn’t stopped online sleuths from looking into Webb’s past for themselves. As for the proposed Somerton Man’s surviving family, Cristy Webb, a great-great-niece of Webb, told the ABC that the news was bittersweet. “It was happiness, it was joy,” Cristy said in November 2022. “But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member. This was a person. He wasn’t just a media hit for a little while and an unsolved mystery. He was our family.”

The Enduring Mystery of the Somerton Man, One of Australia’s Most Puzzling Cold Cases