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Somerton Man: The Tamam Shud Mystery

In the news today, though hardly the 'bombshell' the headline announces it to be, really just a small addendum to the story:

Bombshell claim on Somerton man mystery: ‘I saw his dead body’
A man has come forward for the first time, claiming to have seen the Somerton Man’s dead body on the beach more than 70 years ago when he was just a child.

Rural Victorian resident Rodger Todd has been sharing the incredible tale with family and close friends for decades, but has never gone public.
That was, until a friend of the 84-year-old dobbed him into the media.
In his first ever interview, the Poolaijelo resident told NCA NewsWire he had been walking along Somerton beach before dawn about 7am on December 1, 1948 with his terrier called Dandy when he made the discovery.
Mr Todd, who was only 11 at the time, said he spotted the man on the sand, slumped up against the fixed stone wall with his head perched on his chest and thought he was sleeping.
He said he walked within about 50m of the man when he realised Dandy had run off towards the person he believed was sleeping and urinated on him.
“I was a bit embarrassed about it at the time, but there was not a soul around,” Mr Todd said.
“I thought it was a bit strange because it would have woken him up, so I went over to him, looking very closely to see if he was breathing.
“The closer I got, the more I realised he wasn’t breathing.”
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https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/r...y/news-story/a78b959a0f922adc0d993d351a516c8d
 
The dog's behavior made me laugh, but I didn't think a :hahazebs: would be very appropriate, considering.
Still . . . dogs. :)
 
This case was recently shown as part of "History's greatest mysteries". I'd forgotten how compelling it is. Theres something I might have missed as I was tending to something else which watching it: was it ever proven that the case left at the luggage office at the station belonged to the Somerton man?
 
DrPaulLee said:
This case was recently shown as part of "History's greatest mysteries". I'd forgotten how compelling it is. Theres something I might have missed as I was tending to something else which watching it: was it ever proven that the case left at the luggage office at the station belonged to the Somerton man?
Click to expand...

As I recall, the sole(?) compelling reason for connecting the unclaimed suitcase with the deceased man was correlation of small sewing-related items. A set (card; spool; whatever) of distinctive thread was found in the suitcase - an item not believed to be available in the region. It was determined to be identical with the thread used to make sewing repairs on clothing found in the suitcase and a pocket in the trousers worn by the deceased man.

The Wikipedia article only mentions thread ...
Also in the suitcase was a thread card of Barbour brand orange waxed thread of "an unusual type" not available in Australia—it was the same as that used to repair the lining in a pocket of the trousers the dead man was wearing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case

Here's how the evidence connecting the suitcase to the corpse was described in the local Adelaide newspaper article of 18 January 1949 to which the Wikipedia article points as a source:
Definite Clue In Somerton Mystery ...

Det-Sgt. R. L. Leane, who, with Detective L. Brown and Plainclothes Constable D. Bartlett, is engaged on the case, said yesterday that he was satisfied beyond doubt that the clothing in the suitcase belonged to the man found dead at Somerton on December 1.

He had concluded this after closely examining a card of brown cotton found in the suit case. Of an unusual type, it was identical with the cotton used to repair the lining of a pocket in the dead man's trousers, and to sew buttons on a pair of trousers found in the suitcase. ...

Another piece of evidence connecting the suitcase with the dead man was the discovery in the case of a small brown button identical with buttons on the dead man's trousers. ...
Click to expand...
SOURCE: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/43800320

No, I don't know why the Wikipedia version doesn't exactly match the details in the 1949 newspaper article.
 
There have been no updates on the forensic examination of Man's remains for almost a year. It's ridiculous. If it's a funding issue, hopefully our new state government can salvage the project. With all the local interest over the exhumation you'd think there'd be a public prompt or two keeping their ear to the ground, but there seems to be zero activity. I don't get it.
 
The Somerton Man Blog

https://tomsbytwo.com/2022/05/12/dna-the-last-secret-of-the-somerton-man-mystery/

DNA – THE LAST SECRET OF THE SOMERTON MAN MYSTERY.​

by peterbowes on May 12, 2022
This case is one of secrets upon secrets: names suppressed, names withheld for generations, police investigation inexplicably delayed, crucial evidence ignored, evidence tampered with, evidence withheld from public scrutiny, crucial fingerprinting not done, police investigation hampered, witnesses not called to give evidence, evidence as a whole not officially secured for over two months, witnesses suspected of being rehearsed, crucial evidence not acted upon, suspected false evidence submitted, inquest closed despite compelling new evidence, witnesses not interviewed in a timely manner, failure to enquire aircraft passenger arrivals of a passenger Keane prior to body being found, false images distributed to the press, failure of police to door-knock nearby Somerton Beach residences after body found, contradictory depositions submitted, false reporting allowed, incomplete analysis of evidence, contradictory depositions not questioned, early loss of crucial evidence and inadequate official reasons given for same, incomplete investigation of poisons as means of death, contradictory legal rulings, key witness not followed up for second interview, key witness not asked whereabouts prior to body being found, key witness’ de facto husband not questioned, his whereabouts immediately prior the body being found not known – and all of this in the middle of one of Australia’s best kept political secrets, the employment of dozens of Nazis in an Adelaide suburb within months of the end of WW2.*
The exhumation of the Somerton Man’s body was completed almost twelve months ago and an investigation into his DNA commenced almost immediately but no results have been made public.
Given the above perhaps they never will be.






https://tomsbytwo.com/2022/03/05/coroner-clelands-revision-and-then-some/​

Updates 1 & 2 … Is the Somerton Man’s identity and occupation still too politically harmful to be made known?​

by peterbowes on March 5, 2022
* A couple of dozen Nazi technicians and scientists were being paid and accommodated in and around Adelaide after being secretly shipped over from Germany only months after the war ended to work on weapons and rocket development at Salisbury, one of whom is suspected (by the writer) to have been the Somerton Man. A man who was found on autopsy to be suffering from multiple serious medical conditions, nine in fact, some of which may have contributed to his death and others more than probably needing regular nursing care.
 
I thought it was looking likely that there were no links to spying with the Somerton Man?
 
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/aust...-mystery-solved-claim-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
Somerton man mystery 'solved' as DNA points to man's identity, professor claims

By Hilary Whiteman, CNN

Updated 5:46 AM ET, Tue July 26, 2022

Brisbane, Australia (CNN)A professor who has dedicated decades to solving one of Australia's most enduring mysteries claims he has discovered the identity of the Somerton man.

Derek Abbott, from the University of Adelaide, says the body of a man found on one of the city's beaches in 1948 belonged to Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905.

South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified the findings of Abbott, who worked with renowned American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick to identify Webb as the Somerton man.

Forensic Science SA declined to comment and referred CNN to SA Police, who said there were no updates and that police would provide further comment "when results from the testing are received."

Using DNA sequencing, Abbott says he and Fitzpatrick were able to locate the final piece of a puzzle that has captivated historians, amateur sleuths, and conspiracy theorists for more than 70 years.

Last May, South Australia police responded to Abbott's calls to exhume the Somerton man's body and experts at Forensic Science SA started work to try to find the best way to analyze his DNA.

But in the end, Abbott, a professor in the Adelaide University School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, claims it was strands of the man's hair trapped in a plaster "death" mask made by police in the late 1940s that provided him with what he says is proof of the man's identity.

Police gave Abbott strands of the hair a decade ago as he continued what had become a personal quest to solve the Somerton man mystery. The hair was examined for years by a team of DNA experts at the University of Adelaide, who provided the DNA information that allowed Abbott and Fitzpatrick to further narrow the field.

By March, Abbott said he had already established Webb's name through years of painstaking work with Fitzpatrick to build a complex family tree of around 4,000 names that led to Webb, whose date of death had not been recorded.

"By filling out this tree, we managed to find a first cousin three times removed on his mother's side," said Abbott. And on July 23, they matched DNA obtained from the hair to DNA tests taken by Webb's distant relatives.

"It's like one of these folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve and we did it," said Fitzpatrick, who has investigated other cold cases including the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937 and the 1948 crash of Northwest Flight 4422.

"It just felt like I climbed and I was at the top of Mount Everest," said Abbott of the moment they made the apparent DNA match.

While the discovery appears to close the file on the Somerton man mystery, the apparent confirmation of Webb's name raises many more questions about who he was -- and how he died.

If verified, it also creates more questions about the strange clues around the case -- including the final words of a Persian poem found in his fob pocket and what appeared to be wartime code scribbled in a book, that for many years prompted speculation that he was a spy.

Those clues can now be reinterpreted with information from public records, but the full truth may only emerge with time as word of the man's reported identity spreads.

Who was the Somerton man?

The Somerton man mystery began in the early hours of December 1, 1948, when beachgoers found a body lying on Somerton beach in Adelaide. The man was well-built, about 40 to 50 years old, 5 feet, 11 inches (1.8 meters) tall, and had gray-blue eyes and gingery-brown hair that was graying at the sides.

He wasn't carrying identification, forcing police to look for other clues, according to an inquest held in the years after his death by investigators keen to close the case.

In his pockets, they found tickets that suggested he had taken the train to Adelaide Railway Station the day before, and checked in a suitcase in the station's luggage room. The suitcase contained clothes with the labels torn off, and police told the inquest that a tailor thought his coat had US origins. Despite those clues, the case didn't supply them with a name either, the inquest heard.

The man's fingerprints and photograph were sent around the world, including to the United Kingdom, United States, and English-speaking countries in Africa. A letter dated January 1949, signed by FBI director John Edgar Hoover, confirmed the US had found no match for his fingerprints in its files, the inquest heard.

Perhaps the most baffling clues came several months after the body was found. A pathologist re-examined his clothing and found a hidden fob pocket containing a rolled-up piece of paper printed with the words "Tamam Shud," meaning "the end" or "finished" in Persian.

They are the final words of the poem "The Rubaiyat," by 11th century Iranian polymath Omar Khayyam, and had been torn from a book later handed in to police. An unnamed man said he found it discarded in his car on November 30, the day before the Somerton man's death. The man had no further information, but the book supplied yet more baffling clues.

Police traced a handwritten phone number on its back cover to a woman who lived in the nearby Adelaide suburb of Glenelg. She was reportedly horrified when shown the death mask, though denied she knew the man. Near the phone number were scribbled letters that some surmised could be a secret wartime code, though all attempts to decipher it have failed.

It now appears the truth is potentially more pedestrian.

Who was Carl 'Charles' Webb?

According to Abbott, Webb was born on November 16, 1905 in Footscray, a suburb of Victoria's state capital Melbourne. He was the youngest of six siblings.

Little is known about his early life, Abbott says, but he later married Dorothy Robertson -- known as Doff Webb.

When Webb emerged as the prime person of interest on the family tree, Abbott and Fitzpatrick set to work, scouring public records for information about him. They checked electoral rolls, police files and legal documents. Unfortunately, there were no photos of him to make a visual match.

"The last known record we have of him is in April 1947 when he left Dorothy," said Fitzpatrick, founder of Identifinders International, a genealogical research agency involved in some of America's most high-profile cold cases.

"He disappeared and she appeared in court, saying that he had disappeared and she wanted to divorce," Fitzpatrick said. They had no known children.

Fitzpatrick and Abbott say Robertson filed for divorce in Melbourne, but 1951 documents revealed she had moved to Bute, South Australia -- 144 kilometers (89 miles) northeast of Adelaide -- establishing a link to the neighboring state, where the body was found.

"It's possible that he came to this state to try and find her," Abbott speculated. "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 information on public record about Webb sheds some light on the mysteries that have surrounded the case. They reveal he liked betting on horses, which may explain the "code" found in the book, said Abbott, who had long speculated that the letters could correspond to horses' names.

And the "Tamam Shud" poem? Webb liked poetry and even wrote his own, Abbott said, based on his research.

What evidence is there?

Back in 1949, when no one came forward to identify the body, it was embalmed and a plaster cast was made of the man's face, as a physical reminder of who he was. Some hair inadvertently became trapped in the plaster preserving some DNA, while the rest of his body was buried.

Decades later, in 1995, Abbott heard about the case and set about trying to unravel it.

In 2011, SA Police gave Abbott access to 50 hairs found embedded in the Somerton man's mask, so scientists at the University of Adelaide could attempt to extract the DNA. Around 20 people at the university worked on the project over the years, Abbott said.

CNN has reached out to the University of Adelaide for comment on Abbott's findings.

In 2012, the university team extracted DNA from the hair showing the Somerton Man's maternal group. Then several years later they made a "major breakthrough" to refine the halogroup further to H4a1a1a, Abbott said.

By that time, Abbott and Fitzpatrick had been working for years to re-examine clues from his body and the suitcase -- anything that might shed more light on the case.

They said they used forensic genealogy to mine DNA databases to build the family tree that led to Webb, confirmed by the work on the pieces of hair.

"This is probably one of the older cases that had been solved using this methodology," said Fitzpatrick. "This hair is not only 70 years old, but it's been in a plaster cast for 70 years."

Abbott said he had not taken his findings to SA Police, as they were conducting a "parallel investigation."

"Their protocol is not to talk about a case until their part is done," he said. "They will most likely approach us (University of Adelaide) after our announcement. The DNA findings are incontrovertible. "

For Fitzpatrick, there are now more questions to answer.

"I'm really very interested in helping solve the mystery of how he died," she said. "I would like to see the toxicology done. And I would like to find out what happened to Dorothy."

Abbott says they're convinced they've found their man. "In anything like this, you can only be 99.999% sure that it's right," he said. "Strange things can happen. There can be a twist."

"Just say, hypothetically, what if this guy had a brother that was adopted out of birth that we don't know about and it's really his brother?" But he says that's probably unlikely.

DNA has also definitively put to rest speculation that the Somerton man was the grandfather of Abbott's wife Rachel Egan, Abbott said. The couple met when his search for answers led him to her father, Robin Thomson, who seemed to share some of the same physical attributes. Abbott says finding out there was no link was "a great relief."

"It was just the tension of not knowing either way," he said. "So it's a relief just to know the truth."

Abbott now hopes their findings will be publicly verified, and others will build on the information to create a fuller picture of the Somerton man -- now thought to be Carl "Charles" Webb -- not a spy but a Victorian man who died one day alone on a beach.
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A recent article in the UK Daily Telegraph, scanned as I'm unable to find it on their website. you may need to open it in a new window:-
 

Attachments

  • Daily Telegraph 28.07.2022.jpg
    Daily Telegraph 28.07.2022.jpg
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FelixAntonius said:
A recent article in the UK Daily Telegraph, scanned as I'm unable to find it on their website. you may need to open it in a new window:-
Click to expand...
UK Daily Telegraph still has a paywall. It hasn't yet occurred to them that if they want more readers...
 

Somerton man mystery 'solved' as DNA points to man's identity, professor claims.​


A professor who has dedicated decades to solving one of Australia's most enduring mysteries claims he has discovered the identity of the Somerton man.
Derek Abbott, from the University of Adelaide, says the body of a man found on one of the city's beaches in 1948 belonged to Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905.
South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified the findings of Abbott, who worked with renowned American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick to identify Webb as the Somerton man.

Forensic Science SA declined to comment and referred CNN to SA Police, who said there were no updates and that police would provide further comment "when results from the testing are received".
Using DNA sequencing, Abbott says he and Fitzpatrick were able to locate the final piece of a puzzle that has captivated historians, amateur sleuths, and conspiracy theorists for more than 70 years.
Last May, South Australia police responded to Abbott's calls to exhume the Somerton man's body and experts at Forensic Science SA started work to try to find the best way to analyse his DNA.

But in the end, Abbott, a professor in the Adelaide University School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, claims it was strands of the man's hair trapped in a plaster "death" mask made by police in the late 1940s that provided him with what he says is proof of the man's identity.

Police gave Abbott strands of the hair a decade ago as he continued what had become a personal quest to solve the Somerton man mystery.
The hair was examined for years by a team of DNA experts at the University of Adelaide, who provided the DNA information that allowed Abbott and Fitzpatrick to further narrow the field.
By March, Abbott said he had already established Webb's name through years of painstaking work with Fitzpatrick to build a complex family tree of around 4000 names that led to Webb, whose date of death had not been recorded.
"By filling out this tree, we managed to find a first cousin three times removed on his mother's side," said Abbott.
And on July 23, they matched DNA obtained from the hair to DNA tests taken by Webb's distant relatives.

"It's like one of these folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve and we did it," said Fitzpatrick, who has investigated other cold cases including the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937 and the 1948 crash of Northwest Flight 4422.
"It just felt like I climbed and I was at the top of Mount Everest," said Abbott of the moment they made the apparent DNA match.
While the discovery appears to close the file on the Somerton man mystery, the apparent confirmation of Webb's name raises many more questions about who he was — and how he died.
If verified, it also creates more questions about the strange clues around the case — including the final words of a Persian poem found in his fob pocket and what appeared to be wartime code scribbled in a book, that for many years prompted speculation that he was a spy.
Those clues can now be reinterpreted with information from public records, but the full truth may only emerge with time as word of the man's reported identity spreads.

Source: https://www.9news.com.au/world/some...from the University,born in Melbourne in 1905.
 
FelixAntonius said:

Somerton man mystery 'solved' as DNA points to man's identity, professor claims.​


A professor who has dedicated decades to solving one of Australia's most enduring mysteries claims he has discovered the identity of the Somerton man.
Derek Abbott, from the University of Adelaide, says the body of a man found on one of the city's beaches in 1948 belonged to Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905.
South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified the findings of Abbott, who worked with renowned American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick to identify Webb as the Somerton man.

Forensic Science SA declined to comment and referred CNN to SA Police, who said there were no updates and that police would provide further comment "when results from the testing are received".
Using DNA sequencing, Abbott says he and Fitzpatrick were able to locate the final piece of a puzzle that has captivated historians, amateur sleuths, and conspiracy theorists for more than 70 years.
Last May, South Australia police responded to Abbott's calls to exhume the Somerton man's body and experts at Forensic Science SA started work to try to find the best way to analyse his DNA.

But in the end, Abbott, a professor in the Adelaide University School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, claims it was strands of the man's hair trapped in a plaster "death" mask made by police in the late 1940s that provided him with what he says is proof of the man's identity.

Police gave Abbott strands of the hair a decade ago as he continued what had become a personal quest to solve the Somerton man mystery.
The hair was examined for years by a team of DNA experts at the University of Adelaide, who provided the DNA information that allowed Abbott and Fitzpatrick to further narrow the field.
By March, Abbott said he had already established Webb's name through years of painstaking work with Fitzpatrick to build a complex family tree of around 4000 names that led to Webb, whose date of death had not been recorded.
"By filling out this tree, we managed to find a first cousin three times removed on his mother's side," said Abbott.
And on July 23, they matched DNA obtained from the hair to DNA tests taken by Webb's distant relatives.

"It's like one of these folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve and we did it," said Fitzpatrick, who has investigated other cold cases including the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937 and the 1948 crash of Northwest Flight 4422.
"It just felt like I climbed and I was at the top of Mount Everest," said Abbott of the moment they made the apparent DNA match.
While the discovery appears to close the file on the Somerton man mystery, the apparent confirmation of Webb's name raises many more questions about who he was — and how he died.
If verified, it also creates more questions about the strange clues around the case — including the final words of a Persian poem found in his fob pocket and what appeared to be wartime code scribbled in a book, that for many years prompted speculation that he was a spy.
Those clues can now be reinterpreted with information from public records, but the full truth may only emerge with time as word of the man's reported identity spreads.

Source: https://www.9news.com.au/world/somerton-man-mystery-solved-as-dna-points-to-mans-identity-professor-claims/7b56072a-4e86-42ff-a096-2d01c402a1f9#:~:text=Breakthrough in one of Australia's greatest mysteries&text=Derek Abbott, from the University,born in Melbourne in 1905.
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This is very good - still it might be a false positive, like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the "Woman Without a Face", was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The six murders among these included that of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, in Heilbronn, Germany on 25 April 2007.

The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In late March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no "phantom criminal", and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made.[1]
 
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