Somerton Park is a beach suburb south of Adelaide. On the evening of November 30, 1948 a couple walking along the seafront noticed a man slumped against the sea wall near the steps below the Crippled Children’s Home; they assumed he was drunk. At about 6:30 the next morning the same man was found in the same place, dead. A doctor pronounced death at 9:40 a.m. and estimated it had occurred around two o’clock.
What happened
He was in his forties, fit, neatly dressed in a suit and tie, with a half-smoked cigarette resting on his collar. His pockets held bus and rail tickets, chewing gum, cigarettes and matches, but no wallet, no money and no identification, and the maker’s labels had been removed from his clothes. The Advertiser’s first report suggested a name, which proved to belong to a living man, the first of many false leads. A post-mortem on December 2 by the pathologist John Dwyer concluded that the death could not have been natural and suggested a barbiturate or similar drug, but the chemist who tested for common poisons found nothing. A plaster cast of the head and shoulders was made, the body was embalmed, and the police circulated the man’s description around Australia and overseas without result. He was buried in West Terrace cemetery on June 14, 1949, and the inquest that opened three days later was adjourned without finding either a name or a cause of death.
Two discoveries kept the case alive. On January 14, 1949 staff at Adelaide railway station found an unclaimed brown suitcase checked in on November 30; it contained clothes, most with their labels removed, and items that police linked to the dead man. Then in June 1949, re-examining the clothes, the pathologist Sir John Cleland found a tightly rolled scrap of paper in a small fob pocket sewn into the waistband. The two printed words, “Tamám Shud,” are Persian for “it is ended”; the scrap had been ripped out of the last page of a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. On July 22 a local man handed in the book itself, saying it had been left in his car near the beach. The torn page matched. Penciled inside the back cover were a telephone number and five lines of capital letters, one of them struck through, which police and later naval code-breakers were unable to make sense of.
The telephone number belonged to a nurse living a few hundred meters from where the body was found. She told police she had given a copy of the Rubaiyat to an army officer during the war, and when shown the plaster cast she reacted strongly but said she did not know the dead man. She asked that her name be kept out of the press, and for decades she was known only as Jestyn.
The investigation
The case drifted for fifty years as a cold file and a national puzzle, acquiring layers of speculation: that the man was a Soviet or Western agent at the start of the Cold War, that the letters were a one-time-pad message, that he had been killed with digitalis or another drug that left no trace, and that the nurse’s son was his. From 2009 Derek Abbott, an engineering professor at the University of Adelaide, pursued the case with students, working on the code and on obtaining DNA. The body was exhumed on May 19, 2021 for forensic analysis. On July 26, 2022 Abbott and the American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that DNA from hairs trapped in the 1949 plaster cast, matched through a public genealogy database and a family tree of some four thousand people, identified the man as Carl “Charles” Webb, a Melbourne electrical engineer who made instruments, born in the suburb of Footscray on November 16, 1905. Webb had no death record, had separated from his wife, and she had later moved to South Australia, which might explain his presence in Adelaide.
The explanations
If the identification holds, the espionage theory loses its foundation: Webb was a Melbourne tradesman with a failed marriage, not a foreign operative. It does not explain how he died. Dwyer’s suspicion of poison was never confirmed, the capsules or drug were never found, and the forensic work on the exhumed remains had not been published when this was written. The letters in the book remain unread; some analysts who have examined them think they are the initials of words, possibly a private memorandum, rather than a cipher.
Where it stands
South Australia Police and Forensic Science SA said in 2022 that they could not yet confirm Abbott’s result and were cautiously optimistic about reaching a definitive answer for the family. Until they do, the Somerton Man is probably Carl Webb and officially still unknown. The spy story is unproven, the poisoning is unproven, and the code is unsolved.