So Supernatural - THE UNKNOWN: The Somerton Man

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

In 1948, an unknown man was found dead of mysterious causes on an Australian beach. 72 years later, investigators are still unable to say who he was or why he died, despite an abundance of intriguing theories.  

In the United States, 4,400 people die nameless every year. 4,400. And that's just in the U.S. The worldwide number is much larger. Sometimes it takes a few months or years. But more often than not, identities fall into place. Fingerprints match. Dental records are found. Friends and loved ones come forward.

But every once in a while, this doesn't happen. There are no prints, no records, no trace of a life lived. The body of one man in Australia who's become known as the Somerton Man has gone unidentified for over 60 years. To this day, no one knows who he is or how he died. The only clue left behind was a small piece of paper in his pocket with a Persian phrase, Tamam'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're looking at the mystery of the Somerton Man. The case that we're about to discuss is one of the most famous unsolved cases in Australia, if not the world. No matter how close you think you get to solving it,

whatever theory you come up with, it just falls apart. Nothing adds up. To search for an answer, we're going to take this case apart, comb through every theory, and turn over the evidence because Somerton Man deserved to be known by a name. It's November 30th, 1948, a beautiful summer night in Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide,

South Australia. Just after seven o'clock, John Lyons and his wife are taking a walk on the beach when something catches their eye. It's a middle-aged man, and he's in a suit and tie, laying on the sand with his legs crossed at the ankles. His head and shoulders are propped up against the seawall behind him. All in all, it doesn't look super comfortable, but he seems content to stare out at the water, oblivious to everything around him. The man lifts his right arm once to the sky and lets it drop to his side. John figures, well, he's probably drunk, and he kind of jokes to his wife that he should call the police, but they don't. This wouldn't be the first time someone went to the beach to sleep it off.

The next morning, John's walking up the beach after taking a swim. He sees two men on horseback peering at something on the ground. It's the man that he saw the night before, except now he's dead. John calls the police. A man named Constable John Moss shows up, and the first thing he does is look for an ID, but the man has none on him. No wallet, no money, nothing. Now, this isn't so strange in 1948. People were moving to Australia in droves after World War II, looking to start over or to become anonymous for a while. Constable Moss is more puzzled by the cause of death. There's not a mark on the body, and there's no sign of sickness. But the man looks no older than 45. The odds that he just died of natural causes are low.

Something doesn't add up here. A quick inventory of the man's property yields nothing. There's a half-smoked cigarette on his collar and another one underneath his head. Inside his pockets are a couple of combs, an unused train ticket to another beach, a box of matches, and a pack of cigarettes. But the brand inside is different than what it says on the box. The man seems to have taken good care of his appearance. A small hole in his pocket has been repaired with a waxed orange thread.

His shoes are also meticulously polished, but the tags on all of his clothing have all been ripped out. Since fabric was rationed during the war, tons of people bought their clothes second hand and cut off the tags with the previous owner's name. So I mean, this could mean nothing. Or it could mean that the tags were removed to hide the man's identity. As far as cause of death, Moss figures that this guy must have been poisoned. It's the only thing that makes sense, but there's no evidence of it, no sign that he took anything or threw anything away. Moss brings the body to the mortuary, and from there,

things start to get a little weird. Pathologist John Dwyer does the autopsy. He notices that on the outside, the unknown man is in great shape. His waist is narrow, almost tapered. His arms seem strong. His hands are soft with nicely manicured nails, and he has no scars, no sign of manual labor. But inside, he is a mess. He died of heart failure, but it looks like his heart was perfectly healthy up until the moment it stopped beating. His spleen is three times the normal size, and his stomach and liver are full of blood. The spleen is most likely the sign of a pre-existing illness, but the bloody stomach and liver, that's a sign of poison. Dwyer removes all of the organs and turns them in for testing.

The chemist Robert Cohen tests them for all the usual suspects, cyanides, barbiturates, carbolic acid, but everything comes back negative. There's no trace of anything that could have killed him. Dwyer is stunned. There had to have been some poison. The man's heart was paralyzed, and it couldn't have happened all by itself. But with no evidence, Dwyer has to leave the cause of death blank. Now, he also notices a few other odd things. They don't have

any direct bearings on how he died, but since they know so little about him, no details are too small to ignore. The man has very athletic legs, His calves are muscular and pronounced, and his feet look like he spent a lot of time in pointed or high-heeled shoes. He's also missing certain teeth, most importantly his lateral incisors. They don't seem to have been removed. They were just never there in the first place. Also, the hollow in the upper part of his ear is larger than the bottom hollow, which is the opposite of how it is for most people. Now, the police don't really know what to do with this information. They don't even know what they're investigating at this point. They assume it was a suicide by poison,

since there's no real sign of foul play. But as for identifying the man, any and all leads are drying up fast. By Saturday, December 4th, they've sent his fingerprints along to the Central Fingerprint Bureau in Sydney because they didn't find any match in the Adelaide Bureau. Then they publish the man's picture in the newspaper. They get a ton of responses. People are writing in. They're convinced that the man is their missing husband or brother or son. But when they come in and view the body, they change their mind every time. No, they don't actually know who he is. The Central Fingerprint Bureau comes up with nothing as far as the man's prints,

so the police send them to Scotland Yard, then the FBI, and law enforcement from every other English-speaking country. But there's no match. They search military records. Nothing. By early January, two detectives are put on the case, Lionel and Len. They figure this man must have had a suitcase with him at some point

since they've determined that he didn't live in Adelaide. If they can track down that suitcase, they might find something useful. They do a sweep of every hotel, every bus depot, every cloakroom in Adelaide. After three days, on January 14th, they find a suitcase. Somebody checked it into the cloakroom of an Adelaide railway station on Tuesday, November 30th. That's the day before the Somerton man was found.

And it's unlocked. However, the contents really don't offer any answers. There's a scarf, slippers, a robe, a few pairs of shoes, two pairs of underwear, some striped ties. And this is actually moderately interesting because the stripes slant from left to right, which, believe it or not, was only done on ties made in America at the time. Now, a few of the items, particularly a laundry bag, a tie, and a vest, have the name Keene on them. This seems like it should have been a big lead, but they figure that the name Keene probably doesn't belong to him. Remember, all the tags had been cut off of his clothes that he was wearing, so they assumed that he was buying everything

secondhand. Or, more ominously, whoever had removed all those tags had left these intact as a red herring for investigators. Apart from the name, nothing really gives a clue to his identity. All the clothes are unremarkable and reasonably priced, nothing too expensive, nothing too cheap. It's almost as if everything in the case was chosen for one reason, to escape notice. If that was the Somerton man's intention, I mean, it worked. Nobody at the train station remembers seeing him, neither does the bus driver who brought him to Somerton.

After that, the investigation stalls. Months go by. In April, the head coroner finally steps in and asks an expert pathologist to reexamine the body. His name is John Burton Cleland. Cleland has done 7,000 autopsies at this point, so he's about as much of an expert as they can get. He takes a look at the corpse, which is still in the morgue, and he finds a few more interesting details. There are two blades of barley grass on the man's shoe. He sees that the shoe doesn't have a manufacturer's name,

which implies that they were custom made. Then, as he's examining the man's trousers, he notices something. A tiny pocket sewn into the waist of his pants. And there's something inside of it. But the pocket is so small, Cleland has to use tweezers to get it out. It turns out to be a folded up piece of paper with two words printed in fancy type. Tamam should. Those two words are from a very popular book called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. When I say popular, it's sort of understating it. Written in the 12th century by a Persian philosopher, The Rubaiyat is a long poem that tells the reader to seize the day and live life for the moment.

The first English translation appeared in 1859. From there, its appeal grew and grew. In the 1940s, it became the go-to gift for lovers separated by war. But the last two words of the book are a bit somber. To mom should means it is finished. The paper appears to be torn out of a copy of the book, so police start looking for a copy of the same edition that has a page missing. They ask librarians and booksellers all over Australia and New Zealand, but none of them have an edition that matches this one's font. At this point, it's early June, six months since the body was found. The corpse has been embalmed and then kind of topped off with more fluid several

times, but by now it's really starting to fall apart. They're going to have to bury this unnamed man. But first, police go to a taxidermist and ask him to make a plaster cast of the man's head and shoulders. They think it might be helpful in identifying him down the road. When Somerton Mann is buried on June 14th of 1949, the cost is taken care of by a group of locals from the pub across the street from the mortuary. They've become attached to the corpse, who they call Jerry. But with the funeral, there's no sense of closure. The body is in the ground, but the official inquest is just starting. The head coroner, Thomas Cleland, is in charge of determining how Somerton Mann died.

He has his work cut out for him. Everyone who examined the body agrees that poison was the most likely culprit, but nobody can say for sure that he took any or which one he took. Almost every commonly used poison would have been detectable. Also, poison would have probably caused convulsions or vomiting, and there was no sign that any of these happened with the Somerton man. Then a pharmacology expert takes the stand. He knows about a poison everyone else has overlooked. It's deadly, it can escape the body undetected,

and it can mimic a heart attack. When we come back, we'll learn more about this theory. Now let's get back to the story. During the inquest for the Somerton man's death, a pharmacology expert suggests two poisons that could have killed him, digitalis and strophanthin. Both are derived from plants and both are used to treat heart problems. But in high doses, they can cause cardiac arrest,

and they leave the body quickly, making them hard to trace. Interestingly, one of these same poisons figured into another high-profile death the same year. The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the U.S., Harry Dexter White, died of what seemed to be a heart attack in August 1948. He died just days after he was accused of being a Soviet spy. Those accusations would eventually be proven true, and it would be proven that White's death was actually from an overdose of digitalis. So a new theory starts to develop. What if this wasn't a suicide? What if the Somerton man was a spy? Unfortunately, these questions wouldn't be answered. After three days, on June 21, 1949, the inquest ends.

They still can't say who the man is, how he died, or even where he actually died. All they can say is that his death was unnatural. It's been six months since they discovered the body, and the detectives are about to give up hope. The only lead they have left is the missing copy of the Rubaiyat. Since April, they've been trying to track down an addition that matches the Somerton man's with no luck. So they try one final approach. They ask members of the public to come forward if they find a copy of the Rubaiyat with a page missing. Sure enough, on July 22nd, 1949, a man walks into their office with a copy. It has the same

distinctive typeface, and the last page has been torn out. Forensic experts do a test, and sure enough, it is the exact same book. The man says that he found the book in his car months earlier, around the time the Somerton man died. He has no idea how it got in there, but he remembers that his car was parked on a busy shopping street about a 20-minute walk from where the body was found. Police examine the book and notice there's some faint marks on the back inside cover. They look like impressions made by a pen or pencil,

as if someone had used the book as a solid surface to write on a sheet of paper. The marks are too faint to read, so they put the book under ultraviolet light. What they see blows them away. Someone has scribbled down four lines of letters. They aren't actual words. They look kind of like a code. And underneath these lines are two phone numbers. One is for a local bank, and the other, they learn,

is for a young woman who lives about five minutes from where the body was found. Her name is Jo Thompson. She's 27 years old, and she trained as a nurse in World War II. She has a three-year-old son and claims to be married to a man named Prosper Thompson, though police learned that they weren't actually married until a few years after this. A police officer named Errol Canney goes to interview her.

He shows her a copy of the Rubia and asks if she's seen it before. And she says yes. But when the conversation turns to the Somerton man, she gets a little cagey. She says she hasn't seen that particular copy before, just the book in general. Kani asks her if she's ever given a copy of it to anyone. She says yes to a man named Alf Boxall, who she met while she was training to be a nurse in 1945. She gifted him a copy at the Clifton Gardens Hotel in Sydney right before he shipped out for war, but she hasn't seen him since then. When they ask her whether or not Alf is the man they found at the beach, she says she

can't be sure. The police get the feeling that she's not telling them the full story, so they take her to look at the plaster bust of the Somerton man. They want to see her reaction. And her reaction is practically a dead giveaway. She sees the bust, then looks straight down to the floor. She looks so unwell that the taxidermist thinks she might actually faint. Again, she denies knowing the man. When they ask her if the man is Alf Boxall, she says she doesn't know. It's obvious that she knows more than she's letting on. After all, her phone number was written on the man's book and she lives five minutes from where the body was found. But I mean, that's hardly enough evidence to arrest her. If she doesn't want to cooperate,

their hands are tied. Joe asked the police not to keep a permanent record of her name and not to publish her identity. As a young mother, she doesn't want to be linked to the case. And the police agree. Her identity is kept a secret for the rest of her life. So instead, they focus on Alf Boxall, hoping that he might be a match for the Somerton man. But of course, they're wrong. Alf Boxall is still alive and well, living in Sydney. And he still has the copy of the rubyette Joe gave him. So it looks like she was telling the truth after all. Or at least the truth about that. But police aren't that upset by the red herring.

They may not have ID'd the Somerton man, but they did learn one interesting fact about Alf Boxall. He was in intelligence during the war. They'd already begun to wonder if the Somerton Man was a spy. Now, here's another man, and another reader of the Rubaiyat, and another friend of Joe Thompson, who may have been a spy too. That's one big coincidence. When the detectives go back to Adelaide, they're almost certain that the letters on the back of the cover of the book are some kind of cipher. They send it to Naval Intelligence in Melbourne, and they also publish the letters in the paper to see if anyone in the public may be able to break it. But after analyzing the letters,

Naval Intelligence gets back to them. It isn't a code at all. None of the letters are repeated often enough to create a pattern. Their best guess is that the letters are a kind of acrostic. An acrostic is a poem where certain letters in each line spell out a word or a phrase. Like if you were to write a bunch of things on a piece of paper and then the first letter of each line spelled out the message. But as far as I can tell, they didn't find any kind of specific message. So the detectives just say, okay, and this is where the official investigation ends. No follow-up, no new theories, they just give up. There is a second inquest in 1958, but it appears to mostly be a formality. No new witnesses are called and no new findings are made.

For some reason, Joe and Alf Voxall aren't even brought up at all. For the next 40 years or so, the case just languishes. By then, the most popular theory is that the Somerton man was a Russian or British spy. There is some evidence to support this. There's the nondescript nature of the man's clothes and belongings, the effort he made to stay anonymous. I mean, the rare type of poison that he may have died from, which another spy was poisoned with that same year. There's also the fact that there was a British nuclear test site 300 miles north of Adelaide. One theory is that the Somerton man was in Australia to visit that test

site. Someone maybe noticed him and considered him dangerous, so he was given poison and placed on the beach right after it began to take effect. If he were a spy, it would also explain the missteps and the bizarre lack of follow-up by the police, and it might explain why they eventually destroyed evidence, like the copy of the torn Rubaiyat and the man's suitcase. But several things about this story don't add up. Why was the book, with the codes and the phone numbers etched into the cover, just tossed into a parked car? Why was his suitcase left at the train station unlocked?

Why was he allowed to die in such a public place? It all seems too careless for a planned execution. But there doesn't seem to be an alternative explanation either. As the years pass, Adelaide develops something of a reputation for strange deaths. In 1966, three children disappear at Glenelg Beach, which is just a few minutes' walk from Somerton Beach. There's a string of unsolved murders of young men in the 70s and 80s. And there's another set of serial killings

in the early 2000s that go unsolved. By the end of the century, Adelaide is called the murder capital of Australia. It's around this time that two men decide to look into the Somerton Man case for themselves. One is an electrical engineering professor. The other, a retired homicide detective. Both of them feel that this case hinges on one person who's long been ignored,

Joe Thompson's son, who shares some striking similarities with the Somerton Man. We'll dig more into this when we get back. Let's get back to the story. After nearly six decades, the mystery of the Somerton Man had gone ice cold. But in 2007, Derek Abbott began to peek into the case. He wasn't a professional investigator. He was actually a professor of electrical engineering at Adelaide University. But there was something about the case that wouldn't stop nagging at him. Abbott's entry point was the Cold War spy theory. He'd heard the rumor that the

Rubaiyat was actually a codebook for spies. So he got on Facebook and started asking around. Was it possible that anyone else had died suspiciously with a copy of the Rubaiyat. And it turns out there was. Also in the 1940s and also in Australia. In 1943, a man named George Marshall was found dead of a barbiturate overdose in a Sydney park. A copy of the Rubaiyat lay beside him. Here's the kicker. The park happened to be across the street from the Clifton Gardens Hotel. That's the same place where Joe Thompson gave a copy of the Rubaiyat to Alf Boxall just two years later. Because of these odd coincidences, Abbott began to turn his focus on this mysterious nurse. But of course, he didn't actually know who he was looking for. He didn't even know her name was Jo. The Adelaide police had made good

on their promise to not reveal her identity. While Abbott was doing his search in 2006 or 2007, a retired detective named Jerry Feltus was trying to track the nurse down as well. It wasn't easy. All he had was the phone number written on the back cover of the book. He got a hold of a 1947 phone book and went through it listing by listing until he came across the number he was looking for, Joe Thompson. He interviewed her twice when she was 79 years old. Each time she refused to say whether she knew the Somerton man and each time Feltus felt that she was hiding something. Now, by the time Derek Abbott found out about the nurse's identity a few years later, Joe Thompson had already passed away. But he still learned what he could about Joe's life. He spoke to her friends, and it helped him develop

a timeline. He learned that her son Robin, the baby that she had out of wedlock, had also recently died in 2009. And something else. Robin had been a ballet dancer. Joe had actually signed him up for lessons as a little boy. Now, this wasn't exactly common in the early 1950s, but Joe Thompson may have believed that her son would have a natural talent. Remember the Somerton Man's autopsy report? High calf muscles, the tapered waist, the feet that looked as if they'd worn pointed shoes? Somerton Man might have been a dancer, and here was Joe Thompson's son with the same talent. There were also physical similarities. Like Somerton Man, Robin Thompson had no lateral incisors, and the upper hollow of his ear was bigger than the bottom hollow. Abbott believed Robin Thompson was Somerton Man's son, which meant that Joe Thompson and Somerton Man had at one time enjoyed a secret affair.

But in 1948, she was living with another man, Prosper Thompson, which may have led Somerton Man, her old lover, to take his life. In this theory, the Somerton Man may have met Jo in Sydney when she was training as a nurse. They may have fallen in love, then they were separated and she found out that she was pregnant. She needed someone to take care of her and the baby, and the Somerton man may not be a realistic prospect anymore. So she moves to Somerton with Prosper Thompson. But the Somerton man finds out where she lives and comes to see her. He checks his bag at the train station because he doesn't want to look desperate. He goes to her house. They maybe argue. He leaves distraught and decides to end his life. He could have brought a copy of the Rubaiyat with him,

which we know Joe loved, and then he rips out the words to Mom Should to keep his resolve, then tosses the book into an open window of a car. He takes the poison before he gets to the beach, throws away his wallet and ID, and then he lies down on the shore and dies. Abbott doesn't think the man died from poison, but from positional asphyxiation. This would happen from his head being propped against the seawall. He still wasn't sure

if this theory about Robin being the Somerton man's son was correct though, so he wrote to Robin's ex-wife Roma and sent her a photo of the Somerton man. He asked her if she'd known any dancers who looked like him. Roma responded that yes, she did. Robin Thompson, the man that she married. In 2010, Abbott went to visit Roma in Brisbane. When he got there, he met her and Robin's daughter, Rachel. Roma introduced Abbott to Rachel and the two went out for dinner. Then, that same night, Abbott proposed, and Rachel accepted. And can we just say this might be taking this commitment to the investigation a bit too far? Nevertheless, the two are now married with three children, and Abbott is more invested than ever in finding out

the true identity of Somerton Man. Now, of course, modern DNA testing could end this mystery once and for all, but that means exhuming the body, which is a costly and complicated process. By 2019, the Attorney General of South Australia finally granted conditional approval for an exhumation, provided Abbott can come up with the money himself, which is about 20 grand in total. So far, the money hasn't materialized, but Abbott doesn't up with the money himself, which is about 20 grand in total. So far, the money hasn't materialized, but Abbott doesn't seem too worried. In the meantime, the case of the Somerton man remains unsolved. In 2013, Joe's daughter Kate told the Australian version of 60 Minutes that she believed her mother was a Russian spy. She said that her mother had a dark side and that she told her daughter

she knew who the Somerton man was, but would never tell. She also hinted that the truth was known, but only by those higher than the police force. So who is right? Was it an act of murder committed by one spy upon another? Or was it simply a case of unrequited love? Perhaps the answer is both.

Joe Thompson and the Somerton Man may have both been spies and lived lives most of us can't relate to. But what ultimately killed him may have been something all too familiar. Heartbreak. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.