Criminal - The Somerton Man

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

In 1948, two horse jockeys were riding on a beach in Australia when they came across a man lying in the sand. There was a partially smoked cigarette resting on his jacket. He was well dressed, with a striped tie and polished shoes. And he was dead. No one could figure out who he was. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. There was a body on the beach.

There were a couple of jockeys training their horses on the beach, as they did in those days. The stables were not far from the beach. So they took out the horses for a morning gallop to get them warmed up for the day. And as they were going down the beach, they passed what they thought was just like a drifter sleeping on the sand. But what was strange is that on the way back,

they saw the same guy there in exactly the same position. And they thought that was suspicious. He hadn't even moved or anything, and it was now around about 6 o'clock in the morning, and, you know, it was light, and there's this guy just lying there. One of the jockeys approached the man, and when the man didn't move,

the jockey picked up one of his feet. And then placed it down again, and, you know, when he lifted that foot, his leg up, it was like stiff as a board, and it was clear the man was dead. This was on Somerton Beach, just south of Adelaide, Australia. It was December 1948.

We're hearing from Professor Derek Abbott. So it just so happens there was a guy by the name of Jack Lyons on the beach. And he took over the situation. He said, oh yeah, I've seen that body last night. Well, I'll call the cops what what did he say about seeing the man the night before so jack klein's uh was having a stroll on the beach the evening before and this was sometime between 6 30 and 7 in the evening and he walked past this body and noticed it because the man was actually alive the man raised his one of his hands i think it was right hand and then

just flopped it down it just flopped down and because of the way it kind of flopped down he just thought oh this is like some drunkard just sleeping it off and didn't think anything of it and just went on his merry way with his wife. When the man was found the next morning, he was lying with his head and shoulders propped against a low seawall and his feet were pointed towards the water. He seemed to be in his 40s. He was clean-shaven and

had neatly trimmed nails. There was a partially smoked cigarette resting on his jacket. He was well-dressed, with a striped tie and polished shoes. There was some sand on his shoes, but not much. So it seems like he had hardly walked on the beach. He had just come to the beach just to lay down. The man's body was brought to the city morgue. The pathologist noted that the man was in good shape. They noticed something unusual about his teeth. He didn't have lateral incisors,

so his upper canine teeth were right next to his two front teeth. He also had notably strong calf muscles. And all of the tags had been cut out of his clothing. An autopsy showed that his spleen was enlarged and his liver was in bad condition. The pathologist guessed that the cause of death was heart failure, but also said that the man's heart looked completely normal. He suspected poison, but couldn't find any trace of poison in the man's system.

And there was no sign of physical violence on his body. He had no disturbance in the sand around him and not a scratch on him, so there were no signs of any struggle. And, you know, if it was some kind of poison that had finished off, they were expecting to see things like maybe an empty bottle in the sand, nothing like that, or signs of some vomit, because you usually see that sort of thing. But nothing like that at all. The other mystery was the man's identity.

A few things had been found in his pockets, including a train ticket, a bus ticket, and a pack of chewing gum, but no wallet. So that's another strange thing, you know, did he have a wallet that had got stolen from him while he was on the beach over the night, or had he lost it, or had he deliberately de-identified himself, who knows? A newspaper reported on the man found on Somerton Beach and said the dead man was someone named E.C. Johnson. But then E.C. Johnson walked into the police headquarters to correct the error. The dead man's fingerprints were taken, but the police couldn't find a match. They distributed a photograph of the man, and dozens of people called in saying they knew him.

Lots of people claimed he was a missing relative. Multiple women thought he could be their missing husband. A few men recognized him as the man who stood guard for them outside their illegal card games. Someone else said he looked like a man they knew who worked at the military weapons testing facility north of Adelaide. A local paper reported that, quote, police are maintaining an almost continuous taxi service to and from the morgue, taking people to see the man's body. People who thought they knew the man changed their minds once they saw him.

He was called the Somerton Man. Investigators would spend decades trying to figure out who he was and what happened to him. People would come up with many theories, that he was a Cold War spy, a former ballet dancer, a victim of a relationship gone bad. It would come to be called one of Australia's strangest and most famous cold cases. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. By January 1949, the Somerton man had been in the city morgue for over a month, and his body still hadn't been claimed. Derek says the police wondered if the man could have been from out of town.

So they're thinking, well, this guy must have come from another state. He's a stranger here. So how would he come he would come by train so they inspected the the luggage room in in the station and asked the guy behind the luggage counter you know have any suitcases been checked in on this date and citing the date before he had died this is like the 30th of november 1948 and lo and behold there was actually a suitcase checked in exactly on that day that no one had claimed since then so all this time had passed and no one had claimed the suitcase, so the police thought, aha, this is likely to be this guy's suitcase.

So they took it back to the police station, opened it up. There were clothes in the suitcase, including a sports coat and a pair of red slippers. There was also a shaving kit, a container of boot polish, and a butter knife that had been filed down to a sharp point. And there were items in that suitcase that had the name Keane on it, spelt K-E-A-N-E. The name T. Keane had been written on a tie, and Keane was printed on a canvas laundry bag. So a canvas laundry bag with a stenciled surname gives the impression of some kind of institution. Like this is like, you know, an army issue bag with the GI's name stenciled on. This is the sort of thing you would do in an army.

The police looked into the name T. Keene, but they couldn't find any reports of anyone with that name missing. Eventually, a well-known pathologist named John Burton Cleland was asked to take a look at the body. Derek Abbott says John Burton Cleland thought of a few things the original investigators hadn't considered. One thing he did was check that the clothes from the suitcase would actually fit the Somerton man. And the way he did that is really clever.

Because if you think about it, how do you get a dead body, you know, with all its weight? And when you put on a shirt and check it's the right size it's it's it's pretty tricky um so what what he did was he found somebody who was about the same size as the Somerton man and he said uh can you put on these clothes please and these were the clothes the dead man was actually found dressed in so he actually made him wear the dead man's clothes and they fit perfectly and then then he made the guy wear the clothes that were in the suitcase and so that's how they checked that they correlated so i thought that was very clever another correlation he found is that there was some thread in the suitcase, a card of thread that had a strange sepia color that was a bit unusual and noted that the same color of thread had been

used to stitch on some buttons on the man's clothing. So there was a correlation there. So they were pretty convinced this was the man's suitcase. And was a correlation there so they were pretty convinced this was the man's suitcase and the fact that was checked in on the correct day and no one had claimed it was a good sign too so he did all that and then when checking the man's trousers that the man had worn he found what's called a little fob pocket and noticed that there was a tiny little piece of rolled-up paper jammed down in the pocket that hadn't been noticed. And he found it quite difficult, tricky to get it out.

It was kind of stuck in there and he actually needed tweezers to pull it out. So he pulled it out and unrolled it and it had the word Tam Shud on it. And that was very strange because he had no idea what that meant. And it wasn't handwritten. It was actually printed. It looked like it had been torn out of a book. So this was published the next day in the local newspapers to see if anyone could come forward and say what this meant. And it was actually a journalist at the time who knew what it meant.

He came forward and said, Oh, yeah, I've seen that before. This is the last words in a book of poetry called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which I've done some historical research on this, and it was actually a very popular book of poetry back in the war years, back in World War II. The poetry in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam dates back to the 12th century. It's attributed to Omar Khayyam, sometimes known as the astronomer-poet

of Persia. In 1859, it was translated into English and became so popular among English speakers that an Omar Khayyam Club was formed. Oscar Wilde called the book a masterpiece of art. In 1909, two English bookbinders were commissioned to rebind a copy of the Rubaiyat and cover it with over a thousand precious and semi-precious stones. They incorporated gold leaf, silver, and ivory. The book was sold to an American buyer for what would be around $70,000 today.

The book sank on the Titanic while being shipped to America. It's never been found. The poetry in the book is about life and death, and the very last two words are, to mom should, a Persian phrase that means, it is ended. The police realized the piece of paper in the Somerton man's

pocket must have been ripped from a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. So they published this in the paper saying, oh, it's the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Has anyone got a copy with the back page torn out? And to their surprise, they got a response.

We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. By the time the police put a notice in the newspaper looking for a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

with the back page ripped out, it had been about eight months since the Somerton man had been found. And so they put this in the paper, not thinking anyone would seriously come forward with the correct book, but lo and behold, there actually um three or four people did hand in rubites of omar cams into police stations and say could this be it and i think they ruled out any copies that were handed in apart from one and one looked like a great match and they they took it to a paper specialist in the city of Adelaide who carefully

looked at the paper under a microscope and saw that the torn out piece of paper that the Somerton man had was of exactly the same texture and weight as the paper in the book and same tone and everything. It was like a perfect match. The book had been turned in by a man who said he'd found it in the back seat of his car on November 30th of the previous year, after parking near Somerton Beach. He said that he thought someone had thrown it through his open car window. And in those days, no one locked their cars.

They parked their cars with their windows open and stuff. So it's plausible it just got chucked in for some reason. Inside the back cover of the book, there were four lines of handwritten capital letters. One row read M-T-B-I-M-P-A-N-E-T-P. The other three rows were just as random. There was a fifth line, but it was crossed out. The police had no idea what the letters meant, but guessed that it could be some sort of code.

Code-breaking experts with the Australian Navy worked on it for weeks and couldn't figure it out. The four lines of letters were published in newspapers, and soon everyone was trying to crack the code. One man thought it concealed the name of a ship, and one woman thought it was a message that the man was tired of life. Another man told reporters that he drank ten pots of tea so he could stay up all night and work on the code. He thought it could be directions to a postal box. No one could come up with anything

very convincing. The police found something else in the book, a few handwritten phone numbers. And one of the phone numbers turned out to be a local bank, and another number, the second phone number down, belonged to a young lady who was about 27 years old and turns out she lived just five minutes walk from where the man was found dead. So you can see what the cops were thinking as soon as they figured that out. They're thinking, hmm, she must know something.

So they knocked on her door and they said to her have you seen this book so uh they actually had the summerton man's copy of the rhubarb of her mankind and she actually said yes i've seen that and they said ah so you know about this man dead on the beach and she said no no I didn't say that I didn't say that what I meant was I've seen a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam before I didn't mean that I've seen your copy you've got and so that she kind of backpedaled a bit there and so uh the police said to her well have you given uh a Aruba Ayatollah Makhayim to any man? And she says, well, actually I did. Back in 1945, I gave a copy to a guy called Alf Boxall.

And so the police thought, hmm, this could be our man. If she's given a copy and he's found dead on the beach. Maybe this is Alf Boxall. So they went off and unfortunately, well, I should say fortunately, not unfortunately, Alf Boxall was alive and well with his copy that she had originally given him. And so that was a complete dead end in the end. But the police had also shown the woman a plaster cast that had been made of the dead man's face and she had a strange reaction.

I interviewed the guy who actually made the plaster bust because it was actually sitting in his office when the police brought her in to see it and he has clear memories of that day when she sitting in his office when the police brought her in to see it. And he has clear memories of that day when she came into his office and the police interviewed her there. And he basically says that she just stared at the ground, refused to look at the bust. And every question the police asked her, she would either just mumble no or don't know. And he said that he was standing right behind her.

And at one point, it looked like she was about to fall over and faint. And he actually held his hand out to catch her. And he pulled his hand back when he realized she was going to stand without falling over. So he didn't need to catch her in the end. But he said that that was very strange that day. And it did seem that she knew something. But if the woman did know something, she didn't tell the police. So the investigation trailed off.

But it kind of came up like a zombie every now and again. You know, there'd be a thing in the press and the police would look into it and, you know, die out again, etc., etc. So it was one of those things. Over the years, even when the investigation wasn't active, people kept talking about the case and came up with all kinds of theories. Some people thought the Somerton man could have been a spy, in part because of the odd letters that looked like a code found in his book, but also because in 1948, the year that he was found, the Cold War had just begun. A high-security military base was built in a remote area north of Adelaide, and it was used for testing missiles, rockets, and atomic bombs. Someone had told the police

they thought they recognized the Somerton Man as a worker from the rocket range. Other people thought it was possible he'd come to spy on it. Some thought that the Somerton man must have been involved in some kind of illegal activity, maybe buying and selling on the black market, and that certain people had an incentive to keep him unidentified. Others thought the woman whose phone number had been found in the Somerton man's book had known a lot more than she let on. Derek Abbott came up with a theory of his own. We'll be right back. Thank you. issues should you ultimately watch out for. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson,

the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me. How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach.

According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings, and it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com.

Derek Abbott didn't really know much about the Somerton Man until 2007, when he came across an article about the case and the possible code found in the back of the rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Derek is a professor in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at the University of Adelaide. He thought trying to figure out the code using statistical tests could be an interesting project for his students. No one had any luck, but Derek couldn't stop thinking about the case.

He decided to try and find the woman whose number had been in the book. The police had never published her name. But there was enough information in the papers that you could work it out. It was quite tricky at the time. It was like a big crossword puzzle. But basically, I knew that she lived very close by, and the newspapers actually said which hospitals she had trained in as a nurse. So I was able to look up old hospital records

and electoral records of the area where she lived and piece it all together and figure out who she was. And I eventually found out her name was Jo Thompson. But Jo Thompson had died about two years earlier. So Derek decided to find out if she had any children. So I found out that she had a son by the name of Robin. And by the time I'd figured out his name and how to contact him, he had died two months before I was about to contact him. So I'd just missed him.

But it turns out he was a ballet dancer and that piqued my interest because in early reports about the summerton man there were reports saying that you know he had very strong calf muscles like that of a ballet dancer and could he have been a dancer so this was a hypothesis and i was thinking hmm that's interesting so because robin was actually a professional ballet dancer, he had danced with the Australian Ballet, with the New Zealand Ballet. And when he was with the Australian Ballet, he toured in the USA in the early 70s. And Rudolf Nureyev was part of that tour as well. And so because he was a good dancer, his photo was in newspapers.

So I was able to dig up old archival photos of him and I found a couple of interesting things I found he had lateral incisors missing in his teeth so his canine teeth in other words were right next to his middle teeth and this is exactly what it says about the summerton man in his uh inquest report and so i was thinking wow this is interesting so i talked to specialists at the university i said is this congenital can this be inherited and they go say yep and i thought whoa and so i'm starting to have this hypothesis that, hmm, could it be that Robin is the son of the Somerton man? And this is why Jo Thompson was behaving all evasively at the time with the police. This could be her real motive behind all that.

Derek Abbott tried to find other potential family members and went to speak with one of Robin's daughters. She didn't know anything. So that was a big dead end. But we decided to get married. So it all happened so fast and furiously. They got married about six months after they met, in 2010. Rachel Egan hadn't grown up knowing members of her biological family. When she was in college, she'd received a letter from a social worker

informing her that she had been adopted. Rachel was able to meet her grandmother, Jo Thompson, before she died, but she never met her grandfather. Derek Abbott knew if there was some way to obtain DNA from the Somerton man's body, he could compare that DNA to Rachel's. And then it struck me that when I looked at this plaster bust of the man that had been moulded directly off his body, that because it was stuck on his body and moulded straight off his body, there was actually hairs stuck in the plaster. The plaster bust was kept in the South Australia Police Museum in Adelaide,

and Derek Abbott got permission to remove some hairs from the bust and test them. And, you know, naysayers at the time were saying, oh, you'll never get any DNA out of this body because the man was embalmed before he was buried. They embalmed him in formaldehyde, and this is going to basically destroy the DNA. But it's not quite true that it completely destroys the DNA. There are now techniques to recover DNA from formaldehyde damage. But it's true it would make it an extremely difficult problem. But as it happened, the DNA in the hair roots wasn't showing any signs of that problem. So it looks like the formaldehyde had missed parts of the man's scalp. And so we were free of it in his hair.

So that was great. And my goal was, you know, to get enough DNA out of this hair so that we could upload it on genealogical websites and try and find this guy's nearest cousins and work out their family trees and from their family trees work out who this guy is. In 2018, Derek Abbott sent in some of the Somerton man's hair for DNA testing at a lab at the University of Adelaide. Derek says the lab found about 16,000 DNA markers, but that wasn't enough. Now, to give you an idea, you know, police DNA tests use something like around 20 of these DNA markers to test if a criminal matches with DNA on a crime scene.

Whereas say something like Ancestry.com is a complete different ballgame. It's because when you're matching a criminal to DNA on a crime scene, it's like a one-to-one match. It's a one-to-one. So he's either matching or he isn't okay whereas if you're just trying to find not do that but you're trying to find your nearest cousins on a dna website though you know 20 markers is not enough you need like anywhere between half a million and two million because you're you're trying to connect with lots of people. It's not a one-to-one match now,

it's a one-to-many, completely different ballgame. Derek started working with forensic genealogy expert Colleen Fitzpatrick and she suggested that he bring some of the hairs to a lab in the US that had newer technology. And it was always my intention to actually fly to America with the hair sample in my suitcase and personally take it to the lab. I was not going to trust sending this hair in the post. But because of COVID, I was not able to, I'm allowed to go on a plane right so i bite the bullet and i actually post it in the end i had this hair with my best hair root saved up all these years you know you know for like it's been about 10 years this hair was sitting in my drawer and it was like the best hair root and i thought i'm gonna get this my best shot and you know the forensic wisdom is you know the best DNA is in the hair root

guess what it was a complete flop it didn't work and I'm I'm absolutely you know desperate now so I thought okay I've got nothing to lose now. So you know what happened next? I then sent them another hair. It wasn't a hair root, but it was five centimeters of hair shaft. And guess what? It came out. We got two million of the markers. Two million.

Isn't that amazing? Derek says they compared the DNA to his wife Rachel, Jo Thompson's granddaughter. It turned out that she was not a match and not the Somerton man's granddaughter. But Derek and Colleen uploaded the DNA results to an Ancestry website, and they were able to identify a distant cousin

of the Somerton Man. Slowly, they put together a family tree of the distant cousin, identifying 4,000 people that could either have a connection to the Somerton Man, or actually be the Somerton Man. And they narrowed the search down to one name, a Carl Webb who went by Charles. Charles was born in 1905, which would mean he would have been in his early 40s in 1948 when the Somerton Man was found. He was from the Australian state of Victoria. Derek says he had a brother-in-law named Thomas Keane,

which could explain why the Somerton man had had clothes with the name T. Keane on them. Other things we found is we found out where, a little bit about his life and his background. His dad was a German immigrant and married an australian lady here by the name of eliza and he was a baker his dad and he had a series of bakeries his last big bakery was in a little town called springvale in the state of Victoria. And we're able to find out that, you know, both Charles and his brother Roy helped out in this bakery. Derek says that Charles Webb's father died in 1939. And after the bakery was sold, Charles Webb took a job at a company that made electric drills.

Charles was married, but he separated from his wife in 1947, and she later filed for divorce. The divorce papers were the last documentation of Charles Webb Derek could find. There wasn't any record of his death, and there wasn't anything that might explain how exactly he died. The police have been conducting their own investigation. In May of 2021, they exhumed the Somerton man's body as part of an effort to identify all unidentified humanains in South Australia. In response to Derek Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick's discovery, in July of 2022, a police spokesperson said in a statement, We are heartened of the recent development in the case and are cautiously optimistic that this may provide a breakthrough.

We look forward to the outcome of further DNA work to confirm the identification, which will ultimately be determined by the coroner. They said their investigation was ongoing. Finding a name is only the beginning of the story, right? It's not the end. And you realize, oh, this is the end of this DNA chapter of the story,

but it's the beginning of the man's story, because we now have to look into his life and find out his history. And that is a whole new area of research. In March of last year, Derek Abbott got in touch with Stuart Webb, a man he believed to be the great-grandson of Charles Webb's brother. In March of last year, Derek Abbott got in touch with Stuart Webb, a man he believed to be the great-grandson of Charles Webb's brother. Stuart started talking with other family members, trying to see if anyone remembered or knew anything about Charles Webb,

or whether or not they'd looked for him. And there were stories in the family about people that had reached out to the police saying, we still don't know where this person is. Can you interrogate it? And it was even as recently as 20 years ago. So this wasn't a missing person who no one had talked about. This is someone who everyone in the family thought had just disappeared. And up to a number of years ago have been still trying to find. Yes, yeah, correct.

Stuart Webb says apparently people in his family even told the police years ago that they thought one of their relatives could be the Somerton man. And so they mentioned three different uncles that could potentially be. And it looks like the police and the correspondents had wrongly assumed it was one of the uncles, not the other. And they said, no, it can't possibly be that guy because he was bald, effectively. So it was kind of a miscommunication.

There were three missing uncles in your family? Yeah. In this case, there were three missing uncles, yeah, on either side. I mean, wartime, there was a lot of people in that time just kind of went missing effectively. So, yeah, it was a miscommunication. What do you think happened to him at the end? It's so hard to tell. Like, anything could have happened. I've heard all sorts of theories from Russian ballet dancers

and Russian spies to time travel was one of the theories I've heard. But I think the most likely outcome may be that he took his own life. But I think it's going to be quite hard to prove that in fact. Last year, Stuart Webb began going through family photos, trying to find Charles. At one point, his aunt gave him a photo album that she'd found in his grandfather's house. And I opened it up, and pretty much on the first page,

I see this family photo. I'm like, oh god he's he's probably in this photo was exactly the right time it looked like a family photo of my entire family I could see my great great grandma in the photo I was like this has to be a clue um and I looked through the rest of the photo album I couldn't see anything conclusive and so I started doing a bit more research and my dad came over the next weekend and we flicked through the photo album again and it's an old photo album

the photos are in all sorts of order like they're not in chronological they're all over the place and two pages were stuck together and we kind of pried them apart and in this the pages that were pried apart is a photo of Charles Webb, the Somerton man, and it's actually labelled Charlie Webb alongside other members of the family.

What did he look like in that photo? Could you describe him? He looks like a really sprightly, fun-loving kind of 20-something year old. He's got he's staying at the back of the photo with his three closest brothers. So my great-grandpa Russell is right next to him. His other brother Roy is beside him. They're all smiling, the whole family is smiling

and having a wonderful time by the look of it he's got his head his hand on his uncle he's got his hand on his head kind of playing a bit of a trick on him in this big family photo and laughing away so it looks like he's having a wonderful time.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Libby Foster, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. Thank you. and we're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection.

Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eden syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Thank you. Take every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM.