In December 1948 , the body of an unknown man was witness deadened on Somerton Beach in Adelaide , Australia . Did he entrust suicide on the beach , maybe because of a broken substance ? Or was he a spy , killed during the class of his work ? He was never identify , and the few clues unearth leave investigators fray their heads . Until now , that is .
ResearchersDerek Abbott , a prof at the University of Adelaide , and American genealogistColleen Fitzpatrick , chairwoman ofIdentifinders International , say they have finally put a name to the so - call Somerton Man , tentatively solving a secret that has stupefy investigator for 73 years .
Thanks to recent procession in engineering that allow for the origin ofDNAfrom rootless hair , Abbott was able to analyze hairs from a death mask of the corpse taken in 1948,according toThe New York Times .
DNA was succesfully pull out from the hair in 2012 and 2018 by the University of Adelaide and , with the helper of a California company , Astrea Forensics , Abbott and Fitzpatrick were eventually able to employ it to begin a material hunting .
UsingGEDmatch , they were able to find a upstage full cousin on the enigma homo ’s paternal side . They then set to work build up a family tree of more than 4,000 people and eventually traced the man through his mother ’s side to discover a live relative and formulate a mates .
Their ending ? The human beings found on the beach on Dec. 1 , 1948,according toThe Guardian , was Carl “ Charles ” Webb , a 43 - year - old electrical engineer from Melbourne .
Of course , there is still the topic of a positive recognition from practice of law enforcement before the case can be formally closed . And , needless to say , a lot of questions still to be answered , such as how he finish up dead on Somerton Beach and , most importantly of all , what caused his death .
Police in South Australia , who exhumed the gentleman’s gentleman ’s body last yr for testing , have not verified the indistinguishability and are not yet ready to give an update on their investigation , harmonize toThe Washington Post .
“ We ’re just saying this is what the DNA tells us , ” Abbott told The New York Times . “ It ’s up to the cops to make the legal determination of who this guy was . ”
A Corpse on the Beach
The deadened manwas foundin a sitting perspective , slumped over , with a cigarette either in or near his mouth . He wear a squeamish courtship and polished shoes , but no lid . Two distich lay claim to have see him as they walk along the beach , and one said he raised his branch and pointed at them . They cogitate he was probably drunk . Another attestor claimed to have seen a human looking down on the consistence .
Upon inspection , the stagnant humankind was found to have strong sura , like those of a dancer or an athlete , and his toes grew together in a way that paint a picture habitual wearing of high heels , or perhaps level shoe , again paint a picture he could have been a dancer . He carry an American combing in his pocket , but no pocketbook .
His autopsy revealed he had a bleeding tummy and a short temper three times the normal size , though his body showed no case of natural last . The coronersuspectedhe’d been poison with some kind of insensible toxin , despite the deficiency of puke or evidence of turmoil that come with a intoxication , though thedeath certificatelisted case of expiry as unknown . perchance the gentleman’s gentleman was killed elsewhere and affect to the beach ?
But authority also did n’t have cogent evidence the man did n’t ingest a toxin himself . So , could it have been a felo-de-se — or was it a homicide ?
Police could not distinguish the body throughfingerprint ID , and though they shared his selective information and image internationally , no one knew who he was . They widen their hunting and found a suitcase that was abandoned at main railway line post in Adelaide , suggest he had come from out of township , but there were no name marker in its capacity , and the type stalled .
But then , police enlisted the help of a pathology expert to re - study the dead human being ’s body and will power , and he found something the initial investigator did n’t . A " orphic scoop " sew into the human beings ’s drawers hold a watch fob , but inside the watch was a tightly rolled up piece of theme . It was a page tear from theRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , a book of twelfth - century poesy . On it were two speech : " tamam shud , " which mean " terminate " or " finished . "
The Quran from which the page was torn was tracked down , and close examination yielded further cue — handwriting impressions of a telephone identification number , another unidentified numeral and what look to be an encrypted subject matter . Could he have been a Cold Warspy ?
The encrypted messageon the tiny piece of newspaper publisher was never crack — somecode breakersthought that the unidentified humans had used some sort of tachygraphy , or that he was simply a brainsick creative thinker . One theory was float out that Jessica Harkness was also a spy ; her daughter said in interviews that she knew Russian , but would never tell her why or when she ’d learned . Maybe both the Somerton Beach man and Alf Boxall had worked for her . Perhaps the Rubaiyat was essential to understanding the computer code , and that ’s why both men had copy .
With the tentative recognition of Carl " Charles " Webb as the physical structure on Somerton Beach , all of this speculation may turn out to have been merely hypothesis , the fanciful imaginings of mass intigued by a mystery man found dead on a beach . One elbow room or another , the verity ca n’t be very far off and , inexorably , the answers to the questions posed by the eubstance on the beach will lento begin to arrive to light .
