Who Was the Somerton Man? The Case Is Half Solved

Vol. I · Entry 15 · Deaths Without Explanation

In 2022 the Somerton Man was identified by genetic genealogy as Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905. South Australia Police have not formally confirmed the identification. We now know who he was. We still do not know what killed him, and the code found with him has never been broken.

For most of a century this was the case with no answer at all. Then half of it opened.

What was found on the beach

On the morning of 1 December 1948 a man was found dead against the seawall at Somerton Park, propped in a position several witnesses had noticed the previous evening and assumed was a sleeper or a drunk.

He was well dressed and freshly shaved. He carried no wallet, no papers, no identification of any kind. The labels had been cut out of his clothes. He had a comb, chewing gum, cigarettes, matches and a used bus ticket. No hat, in a year when a man in a suit wore one.

The autopsy found his organs deeply congested and blood in the stomach, a picture consistent with poisoning. No poison was identified, then or since. The coroner, Thomas Cleland, recorded that he could not determine the cause of death and did not believe the death was natural. That finding has never been revised.

Tamám Shud

Months later, a pathologist re-examining the clothing found a tightly rolled scrap of paper sewn into a hidden fob pocket in the trousers. Printed on it were two words: Tamám Shud. It is Persian, and it is the last line of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It means: it is ended.

Police appealed for the book it had been torn from. A man came forward: he had found a copy of the Rubaiyat thrown into the back of his unlocked car, parked near the beach, around the time of the death. The torn page matched.

Two things were in that book.

Faintly indented in the back, about fifty capital letters in five lines, with one line struck through. They have been examined by Australian naval intelligence, by cryptographers, and by a long procession of amateurs. They have never been read. The sample is too short for statistical attack, and the letter frequencies do not behave like English plaintext under any simple cipher. The current consensus is that they are most likely a mnemonic or the initial letters of remembered words — possibly not a cipher at all, and possibly meaningless to anyone but the man who wrote them.

Also in the book: a telephone number. It belonged to a young nurse, Jessica Thomson, who lived a few hundred metres from where the body was found. She told police she did not recognise the dead man. She maintained that for the rest of her life. Her daughter later said she believed her mother had known exactly who he was.

How he was named

The body was exhumed in 2021. Working from hair recovered from the 1948 plaster death mask, Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide and the American forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick built a DNA profile and traced it through public genealogy databases to a match.

Carl Webb. Born 1905 in Footscray, Melbourne. An instrument maker and electrical engineer. He had separated from his wife, Dorothy, who had moved to South Australia. He had no known connection to espionage, and nothing in his life explains a man dying on a beach with his labels cut out.

South Australia Police have their own testing underway and have not formally confirmed the identification. The genealogical case is strong. The official one is open.

Where the record goes silent

The cause of death. Seventy-eight years on, the coroner's finding stands unchanged. A poison that leaves that pattern of organ congestion and no trace was proposed in 1949 — digitalis, or a related glycoside — but it was never demonstrated, and the tissue samples are long gone.

The code. Still unread. If it is a mnemonic, it may never be readable by anyone.

Jessica Thomson. Whatever she knew, she took with her. Nothing in the identification of Carl Webb explains why his number was her number, or hers his.

A name is not a solution. It narrows the question from who was this to why did this man, with those two words in his pocket, end up dead on that beach — and the file that would answer it was never written.

Sources

• Inquest into the death of an unknown man, Coroner Thomas Cleland, South Australia, 1949, and the associated autopsy findings.
• South Australia Police case file, Somerton Park, from 1948.
• Abbott, D. and Fitzpatrick, C., identification by genetic genealogy announced July 2022, University of Adelaide.
• Exhumation and forensic examination, Attorney-General's Department of South Australia, 2021.
• FitzGerald, E., trans., Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam — the closing line of the work.