Stuff You Should Know - The Baffling Case of the Body On Somerton Beach

Episode Date: September 5, 2017

Since his corpse was found in 1948, wearing a nice suit in summer on an Australian beach, an unidentified man has refused to fade into obscurity, gripping the imagination of sleuths around the world. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and today is a very special day.

We have a special guest producer, Matt. Been a while. Has been a while, man. It's been since like 2014 or something. Yeah, and Matt is one half of stuff they don't want you to know. One third. Oh yeah, that's right, there's three of them.

And we are sort of awkwardly recording two of the same shows they've done. Yeah, so Matt's just sitting there with his arms crossed, shaking his head back and forth. So we're trying not to look at him. How you doing? I'm good except for Matt looking at us like that. What'd you do for the eclipse?

I looked at the eclipse unwisely. From where? From my house. Oh, I'm surprised. I didn't see a full, the full schmo. I figured you guys would be exactly the type to drive two hours to see it. No, you did though, huh?

Yeah. How was it? Well, I don't want to be one of those dudes, but the difference between 99% in full eclipse is all the difference in the world. I saw it put, I can't remember who put it, but they said that the difference between seeing a partial eclipse and a full eclipse

is the difference between kissing a person and marrying a person. Oh, well that's from the legendary eclipse article from the Atlantic from 1982. Oh, okay. Who wrote it? Oh man. I even sent myself the link to read it today

and I haven't read it. This is probably Tina Turner. No. That was at the height of her career. It was written by Annie Dillard. Okay. It's called Total Eclipse and I haven't read it yet, but it's supposed to be just remarkable and that's exactly how she put it.

And it was 1982. I think so. So that would have been a year before Bonnie Tyler came out with Total Eclipse of the Heart. Yeah, it was 1982. Wow. Yeah, I cried and like five other people with us cried. That's cool.

Like spontaneously tears were coming out of my face and I was like, what is happening to my body? Yeah. Did you, I mean, what have you concluded? I don't know man, it was just overwhelming. That's neat. To stare at the corona. And we're going like to probably Texas for the next one.

Like I'm going to every path of totality that I can get to between now and the time that I die. You're an Eclipse head now? I'm a totalitor. Oh, gotcha. Totalitist? Totalitist. Yeah.

And it was, we almost didn't go. Like literally that morning we were debating and I was like, it's two hours away. Let's just get in the car and go. That is very cool. And my daughter saw it. Yeah. Which was weird for her.

Like she knew something was up. Yeah. Even at two years old. Yeah, the sun's gone black. Yeah. And stars came out and crickets chirped and it was just really strange. Yeah, that's neat.

Yeah. It was a very quick two minutes. But I think the one in 2007 is going to have a four and a half minute totality. When is it 2001? Seven years from now. What does it say? Oh, 2024?

Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, Jesus, that's great. Maybe we'll drive to Texas too. Well, I'll drive together. Well, if you won't drive two hours, why are you gonna go to Texas? Oh, hey.

If I ever have a good reason to go to Texas, I'll take it. Well, it's Texas and then, I mean, we may go to Akron because that's where Emily's from. It goes through Akron. Oh, really? Then kind of over to Maine. I see. So on that.

You guys should just follow it in your van. Well, you know, I wondered what, how fast, of course you can't do this, but how fast would you have to travel? The speed of the moon. Stay in the path of totality. The speed of the moon. Which is what?

Like 100 million miles an hour or something like that. I don't know. Listen to our moon episode. It's my new drug, totality. That's neat, man. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that happened to you. Happened on me.

Got all, it got all over me. Yeah. How, okay, you want to talk about this? The eclipse? No. You know, what's funny is that we didn't do a podcast on eclipses. No, I thought about that.

We never have. I know, and it's just, just like us. Moon goes in front of sun, moon goes away from sun. It goes up, it goes down. All right. Yeah, that's just figures. I'm sure we'll end up talking about, like we'll do an episode on,

on like the effect of an eclipse on plants first, and then, you know, some other tangentially related episode, and then maybe after that we'll do how eclipses work. Maybe if we're still around in seven years. There you go. How about that? That's a good idea.

And I've jinxed this before and won't be around, which is an opposite jinx. I was going to say, is that a jinx? Yeah, that's to ensure that we will be around. Gotcha. Smart, thank you. So we're talking today, Chuck, about a pretty unusual mystery.

Are you familiar with this one before? Yeah, I think we covered this in an internet roundup or something. Oh yeah? Yeah, I mean, we definitely talked about it, but I scoured our archives and couldn't find an official show, so. I wonder where it came up.

Because yeah, I mean, we've known about it. You blogged about it, for sure. Yeah. And then it was, a lot of times, you would do one of your best things you've read this week. We would then do an internet roundup piece on that. Oh, okay, that's probably where it came up then. Because you're like, this is so good,

it should be seen by dozens of people. Right, exactly. I want to share it with the 20. Yeah. Yeah, I would probably guess the article that I did the best stuff we've read this week on would have been the body on Somerton Beach, I think is what it was called,

is a Smithsonian article from years and years ago. In fact it was. So yeah, there've been plenty of good articles about it. That one is a good one. There's one from California Sunday magazine called The Lost Man. There's just some good stuff out there if this floats your boat.

It does. But let us set the theme for you, okay? Because this story takes place in Adelaide in South Australia, which is not just a place, it's a state as well. Did you know that? Yeah, I wonder what they call how they pronounce Adelaide there. Probably not like I just said it.

But in Adelaide, South Australia, Adelaide's the capital. It's a, from what I understand, we haven't been there yet, but we probably will maybe next year. Yes. I'm not going to Adelaide though. I don't know, it sounds kind of neat. And creepy. A little weird, right?

But weird in some weird way. So Adelaide is this place that's kind of known as the murder capital of Australia. But it doesn't have necessarily like the highest homicide rate in Australia. It just has a history of kind of weird, gruesome, grisly murders. Yeah, I think if you've had more than two or three

like dismemberment type murders, you're on the map. Sure. And they definitely have. There was a very famous case in the 60s of the Beaumont children who went missing off of a beach called Glenale Beach. I think that's probably how you say it,

which is near Adelaide. And we never heard from again. No trace of one was ever found. Unsolved. We should do an episode on that one too. There was the family. Yeah, so dubbed by the cops in the 70s and 80s. This one's really freaky.

These were supposedly just like regular professional men, presumed men, who had a sort of cabal of torture and murder of young boys. Basically like season one of True Detective, but in real life in Australia. Yeah, with an equally weird ending. Right. Yeah, the sky just opens up.

It's a total eclipse. And that one again, unsolved, right? It was never, I think one person was convicted, but the people that he implicated were never charged or convicted. What about this bodies in the barrel thing? That's all you need to say. There's a string of murders

called the bodies in the barrels murders. It's a lot of pluralization. It is. And then, so the idea that the one we're talking about, which is the death of just one man, a nonviolent death possibly. Yeah. Who was found on a beach almost 70 years ago.

For that to still have Australia and like the world in its grips today, it must be a pretty interesting case. Agreed. And it is. Yeah, so I guess we should go back in time. Getting the old way back machine and travel south to Adelaide, a post war Adelaide.

Yeah. 1948. Look how beautiful it is here. It's hot. I smell shrimp cooking on the Barbie. Yeah. Drinking of fosters. Yeah, it's like a 55 gallon drum of fosters.

And lots of other Australian tropes are happening all around me. Yep, there's a crocodile dundee's over there. Boy, when we tour there, they're going to really get sick of us. Like after the show, the first show, they're going to run us out of town. They say, fine, New Zealand wants us. Yeah, and New Zealand will say, yeah, come on over here.

So Adelaide is, well, it's an interesting place post war. Apparently, though, it was kind of a place where you could go to sort of re, if you want to disappear and rewrite your life, that wasn't a bad place to do it. Right. There was a lot of black marketeering going on. Apparently, it was really hard to get your hands on a car.

So there was like a big black market for cars of all stolenness. All levels of stolenness. Right. Yeah, there was just a certain amount of post war scarcity that was still going on. And there was a lot of espionage going on, too. Right, so the Cold War had just started.

And Australia was in this weird position where there were a lot of Soviet spies running around. There were a lot of Brits and American spies running around. And the British themselves were conducting secret rocket tests in the country. So there was a lot of espionage, a lot of black marketing, and a lot of people who were not who they claimed to be floating around this country.

Running around and floating. Right, so that brings us to a very important date for this story. Tuesday, November 30, 1948, about 7 in the evening, there was a jeweler named John Lyons and his wife. They were taking a little stroll there on Summerton Beach, which I'm sure is lovely. Yep.

And they saw something weird. They were walking toward Glen Elg. So I guess they're connected beaches. Yeah, yeah. And they saw something interesting on the seawall there. They saw a man lying in the sand, but very well dressed in a suit, kind of propped up on the seawall there, as if he were sort of sitting up about 60 feet away in America.

That's 20 yards. In Australia, it is a certain amount of meters. About 20 meters. Oh, OK. Really? Is that how it works? Yeah, it's pretty close to the yard in the meter, very similar. And he was doing something interesting.

So they say, he extended his right arm upward, and then just let it fall back down to the ground. And they thought, that looks like a passed out drunk guy, or maybe a barely awake drunk guy, maybe trying to have a cigarette or something. I mean, it was remarkable in that they made a mental note of it, but they just kept walking and whatever. Sure.

I think his suit being on the beach was probably one of the big deals. Yeah, he was very sharply dressed. Not just wearing a suit on the beach, like the suit he was wearing was pretty nice. Pretty nice, right? And about a half hour later, another couple walked past. And this time, the guy wasn't moving at all.

And apparently, he had a whole swarm of mosquitoes around his face. And the boyfriend says to the girlfriend, that guy must be dead to the world if he's not noticing those mosquitoes. He must just be absolutely wasted. So they were clearly closer. I guess so, if they could see mosquitoes on his face, yeah. For sure.

Because from 20 yards, it's a tough thing to see. I don't know. I've heard of strange mosquitoes are large. So the next morning, it became pretty clear what was going on here. That this was a dead man, the same jeweler, John Lyons. He went for a little morning swim, as you were to do in Australia in the mornings when you're hung over. And he saw a bunch of people crowded around where the guy was.

Right. And it was on. This is a dead dude. Yeah, the dude was in basically the same position. He'd seen him in the night before. That crowd was like, he's dead, crikey. And yeah, so Lyons was like, wow, that was pretty surprising. That's the end of John Lyons.

Yeah, but very important here in that they are the only people who supposedly saw this body move. Right. Super important. Yeah. So within about a few hours, the body is in the morgue at the hospital. And is being examined. And just from the initial examination,

there was a lot of just weirdness that immediately came out. Yeah. Right. So remember, the guys like sitting up against the seawall, his legs are extended out, his feet are crossed. There was a cigarette, depending on who you ask, either a half-burned cigarette, either dangling from his mouth or on the collar of his shirt as if it had fallen from his mouth.

Yeah. And when he was taken into the morgue, the doctor said that he was probably dead by 2 AM. Yeah, and most likely when they did the full autopsy, a man named John Dwyer said he was probably poisoned initially, even though there were no traces of poison, which is a little odd. Right. But the reason he said that is because when they cracked the guy open,

this John Doe, who's widely become known as the Summerton man, his organs were all kinds of messed up. Yeah. He had blood in his stomach, along with his final meal, which was a pasty. Yeah, it's like a hot pocket. Yeah, a delicious hot pocket. Or a hand-pie. Yeah.

That sounds dirty. Hand-pie? Yeah. His spleen was enlarged and engorged with blood. Yeah. That's not a good sign. And firm. His liver was giant and bloody.

Not unusual for Australians. Yeah, it's true. That 55-gallon drum of foster. His pupils were smaller than normal and just, quote, unusual, whatever that means. Right. And then they said that he had a little spittle on the side of his mouth that, you know, like, you know.

I thought that was a pretty tacky thing to note. Yeah. Just leave the guy alone. He's dead. Like, sleepy drool is what I thought. If I'm so pretty that I just have a little bit of spittle coming down my mouth when I'm dead, I'll be more than happy. Oh, you mean if that's the only thing?

Yeah. Yeah, agreed. I mean, come on, give the guy a break. Well, you know, they were doing forensics. Right. Had to note everything. Yeah, so indeed they did. And they kept saying, like, this has got to be poisoning.

Like, his organs are all kinds of messed up. But there was no trace of poisoning. They brought in this guy named Cedric Stanton-Hicks. Yeah, they ate the pasty, the hand pie, and they were like, nothing's wrong. Right. They gave it to Eugene, and he was still standing afterward. Yeah, so it's all good. So Sir Cedric Stanton-Hicks comes in and says, well, let me see this.

And he concluded that it was probably one of two poisons that would have done this kind of damage, resulted in heart failure. We didn't say that. So they concluded he probably died from his heart failure ultimately. But that wouldn't have left a trace. And he did not feel like it was a responsible move on his part to say these things out loud on the record during the coroner's inquest. So he said, so we wrote them down.

Yeah. And the coroner's like, OK, all right, and picked him up and read. And what he read was digitalis and struffanthan. And Sir Cedric said, he said it. I didn't. Right. So my conscience is clear. He goes, oh, gosh, did I say that out loud?

That sounds like something that you'd see in a movie that just added for the drama. But apparently, it really happened. Right. So he read those names. Well, I don't know if he read those names, but at least those names were recorded onto the record. Right. Sir Cedric Stanton-Hicks suspected the struffanthan, although later investigators feel sure it was probably the digitalis.

Right. It sounds like it doesn't matter which one it was, because they were both kind of used, and I think are maybe still used to treat heart disease. Is that true? Yeah. And then you can get them with a prescription from a pharmacy. I don't know if they're still used. Maybe they are, but they definitely were common at the time or obtainable in just about every major city.

Yeah. So they have an idea of maybe what poison it was, but again, it bears pointing out again and again that no one has ever found any direct evidence that the man was poisoned. Right. And to this day, 2017 and beyond, if you're listening to this years from now, Yeah. they still don't know how he died. Yeah, and they may still be looking, because this is one of those,

kind of like the DB Cooper when we did one of those cases where amateur sleuths on the internet are still trying to figure stuff like this out. And unless we come up with some really amazing technologies in the next 10, 20 years or something like that, the time is passing quite quickly on this case and DB Cooper as well, where we may never know, it may remain a mystery forever. Unless we invent time travel, then somebody will go back and figure those out. So the dude who looks a little bit like Harvey Keitel, if you ask me. He does.

Didn't you think so? I mean, look up a picture of this guy. If you're not in your car, you can look him up. There are two very famous photos, I guess, from the autopsy scene, just straight onto his face and then sort of, you know, from the side. With his eyes open. Yeah, he looks like Harvey Keitel. He does.

It looks like a wasted Harvey Keitel. Which is to say he looks like Harvey Keitel. So he's in about his mid 40s. Yeah, I guess a younger Harvey Keitel. Yeah. He's wearing this double breasted suit. I saw that he's wearing a knit pullover with a necktie who, and this sounds like we're being too specific by saying the stripes slanted from left to right.

But we are not. We're not. That will come into play. It will. Just hang on to that nugget. Yeah, put that one in your pipe for later. He had no hat, which was weird for that time. Oh, I hadn't ran across that.

But yeah, I've never seen that there was a hat. Yeah, and they never found a hat. But it would be unusual for a man of late 40s to not have a hat. Yeah, I guess so. Fedora's were huge. I'll bet Panama hats were huge down in Adelaide at the time. Fedora's in Australia were literally huge. They were like sombreros.

Made of tortillas with melted cheese in the middle. Oh, man. Is that a thing? It was on the symptoms. Oh, okay. Nacho hat. What else? He had weird feet?

Yeah, wedge-shaped feet, they said. And his shoes seemed to be molded almost to his feet. The real weird giveaway was his calves. His calves were remarkable. They were bulbous just below the knee. And the guy who performed the autopsy, I think it was Dwyer, said, this is like what? Dancers or people who wear high heels?

This is the kind of calves that they have. He said, look at that. He looks like Lena Horne. Oh, my gosh, it is Lena Horne. Yeah, so that's definitely notable. Lena Horne. The other thing they found out too was a couple of physical traits that he had, which we'll come into play later on.

His ear, his Simba, which is the upper, hollow portion of the ear, not hollow, but caved in, eight then. Yeah, the rolled over part up here? No, like just the upper, you know, hole than the lower part. Oh, gotcha, yeah, yeah. We've already done a show on ears, have we? Nope. Yeah, we should.

The Simba is larger than the cavem, which is a fairly rare thing. So I would guess the cavem is where your ear drum leads to your ear drum? Yeah, that's where you put your finger when you want to. Right. But if you put your finger up over that ridge, that's the Simba? Yeah. So yeah, that would be weird if this one was bigger than that one. Yeah, it's a pretty rare genetic trait, as were his strange teeth.

Yeah, he had something called hypodontia, which is he was missing his lateral incisors, which are the teeth that most people have between their front teeth and their canines. His lateral incisors never developed. So his canines were adjacent to his front teeth. Yeah, and it's, what'd you say, hypodontia? Uh-huh. That can be as common as, like, you'd never get your wisdom teeth, but in this case, those particular teeth, it was pretty rare.

Something like, well, I saw hypodontia, and so that would include not getting wisdom teeth, huh? Well, in any teeth, not developing is hypodontia. I gotcha. Well, I don't know if hypodontia in general or just this type of hypodontia. It was, like, 2% of the population. Yeah, it's specifically for those teeth was pretty rare. Gotcha.

Yeah, 2% is pretty rare. Like, everyone's got those teeth. And people at home are like, why are you saying all this weird stuff? Who cares? Just settle down, everybody. Settle down, because it's all going to come into play. We haven't said anything that will not come back into play. All right, should we take a break?

I think we should. Everybody's getting all riled up. Let's take a break, and then we're going to the details of this. To the detail, for about 15 minutes, what was in his pockets? Yep. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. I'll be there for you, and so will my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay Chuck, so we went over the body. Yeah. Now it's time to go through his personal effects. Yes. It's kind of weird in and of themselves, right? It's all about the details, though, when you're talking about murders and disappearances

and things. Sure. Unsolved after 70 years? Yes. You need to pay attention to the details. What kind of podcast cops would we be if we were just like, yeah, you sort of look like Harvey Keitel and he's in a suit. Deep end.

No good. That sounded like Harvey Keitel. Yeah, it did, didn't it? Yeah. Not bad. That was my Harvey Keitel on the piano. Oh man, what a movie. All right, so in his pockets, he had a pack of juicy fruit.

He had... Was it juicy fruit? Yeah. Oh, nice. Chewing gum. That's good stuff. He had some matches, Bryant and May matches. Okay.

He had, well, he had a lot of tickets in his pocket. He had an unused train ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach. He had a bus ticket from Adelaide to Glenelg, and then he had a ticket, a used ticket that said he had come from, arrived there by bus from the railway station there. Yeah, from the Adelaide railway. Correct. Yeah. He also had a pack of cigarettes that were...

This is weird. Army club? Mm-hmm. The pack of cigarettes was an army club pack, but inside were something called Conceitas, which was a much more expensive brand. So... That makes no sense. Like, that's the opposite of the only thing that could make sense, which is, he just kept

the expensive pack and would put cheap cigarettes in it to look fancy. Right. Unless he didn't want people bumming the expensive ones off of them, so he kept the cheap pack, or the likelier... Only a former smoker would have that anger. Right. The likelier story is that he bummed a bunch of cigarettes off of somebody and put them in his own pack.

All right. Like, hey, man, he's got a smoke or seven. Or seven, yeah. Yeah. Or perhaps they were poisoned and put in that pack. That's another possible explanation, too. So that was like the extent of his personal effects aside from his clothing, right? There was no ID.

He had a couple of combs. Okay. Like hair combs. More to the point. There was no ID. No ID. No wallet. No wallet.

No cash. No cash. Kind of odd. For sure. And his clothes were odd in and of themselves, right? So again, he was wearing a very nice suit. But the maker's labels of all of his clothes have been, from what I understand, carefully snipped away.

Yeah. I saw one explanation for this that made it seem a little less odd, which was back then, apparently, people oftentimes would, because there were nice clothes were not scarce, but you wanted to keep them for yourself. Mm-hmm. So that's the game, a lot of times, on your like suit jackets and things. Sure. And then if you ever went to sell them secondhand, you would flip out those labels.

Oh, I see. So that's one explanation. That's not bad. I don't know if that's a reach or not, but at least something could make sense out of that. Yeah. But the other thing could mean that this person was being dumped and no one wanted them to know who they were.

It's a possibility, too. Or that he didn't want anyone to know who he was. That's another possibility as well. Yeah. A lot of people think that he was trying to cover up his own identity as well. Yeah. His trousers, I think, had a little repair done with orange thread. That will play.

Bear with us. And then that was about it. They took fingerprints of the guy and spread it around to no avail. Spread the fingerprints around. Right. Yeah. They figured out after a little while, and I'm not sure when, but this would have been so December 1st is when he was found, this is like July to us in the Northern Hemisphere,

the beginning of July. Oh, jeez. So it's starting to get hot down there, right? You can only keep a body for so long in the 1940s in summer in Adelaide. Yeah. It's already a hot place to begin with. And the authorities were like, we can't keep this guy above ground any longer. So somebody had the bright idea of making a plaster bust of him.

And they did. And they kept it at the morgue, and then they buried him in a pretty smart way, if you ask me. Yeah, they buried him with this marker. Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton Beach, 1st December, 1948, and he was buried just in really dry ground. So if they ever needed to get in there, they could. And they encased him in concrete as well to really keep him preserved as much as possible.

If he ever needed to be exhumed, right? Correct. So, like I said, they took the set of fingerprints, and they're still looking for this guy. They buried him finally, but they're like, this is driving us insane. Who was this man? What happened to him? So they spread the fingerprints all over Australia. They started to send him around to America, the UK, just English-speaking countries.

Yeah, they also, like kind of before they got rid of the real body, they brought people in, locals, to see if anyone could identify him. I think afterward they probably showed quite a few people the bust, and they were just trying to do anything, and nobody could recognize who this person was. No, I mean, some people saw pictures of the bust, or the death pictures that are famous now in the newspaper, and were like, oh, that kind of looks like Uncle Ted, and then they can't go in and see him, and be like, it's not Uncle Ted. And so, the fact that this is becoming a weird, unsolved mystery already, like just quickly

after the case, started to capture the nation's attention a little bit. And the police, the South Australia state police, were not shy about publicizing stuff as needed, like as they develop breaks in the case, they would tell the newspapers about it, and the newspapers would tell the rest of the country. So it became a pretty big sensation in Australia, so much so that a lot of people are just basically take it for granted that the man was not Australian. That were he Australian, several people would have come forward, because the case had that much exposure nationally.

Yeah, and I'm just guessing here, but I imagine in 1948, this part of Australia probably wasn't, there weren't like millions of people living there. I don't know how small of a town it was, but I don't think it was like some huge city, was it? Well, yeah, Adelaide's the capital of South Australia. Yeah, but is that, how big was that in 1948, you think? There was like, at least 500 people there. I'm gonna say the minimum.

Someone's gonna write in and tell us so. All right, and they're gonna be mad that we didn't know. No. Australians are nice about things, usually. Yeah, they are, aren't they? They are. They're the Canadians of the South. So they decide, the cops decide very smartly, you know what, we're gonna widen this investigation.

We're gonna see if anywhere in town, someone has found something, there are any possessions that this guy might have left behind, since he was just found with what was in his pockets. Surely there's something, and in fact there was. They discovered that there was a suitcase, brown suitcase, in a cloakroom that was left there on November 30th, which was the night before the morning that he was found. The first time he was seen on the beach was November 30th. Big lead. It was, and because he had that ticket that showed he had taken a bus from the Adelaide

Rail Station, that was one of the first places detectives went. And they found this suitcase that had been left there, like you said, on November 30th, and inside, there was some stuff that linked it to the guy. Yeah, I mean it was full of stuff. It was clearly someone who was traveling a lot. There were lots of clothes, shirts, and scarves, and underwear, and pajamas, and handkerchiefs. There were two pairs of scissors, one broken pair, one in a sheath, like a shave kit, screwdriver.

Lots of just normal travel things, razor, razor strap. All the junk you would expect, multiple pairs of scissors is a little weird. Thread. But the thread was the big one. Orange thread? Yeah, barber, not Australian brand, barber thread, which perfectly matched where his trousers were stitched, so it's got to be him, right? That's the thing that really links him with the suitcase.

There was also some stencils for stenciling cargo. Yeah, that was a little weird. And there was a suit jacket that had a, what's called a feather stitch, while stitching. That's the lightest stitch. And they were like, we don't do this in Australia. We don't even have the sewing machine that can do this in Australia yet. Yeah. And Taylor said, this is an American coat.

Yeah, with their feathers. Right. It's a gamma stitch. Right. And then inside some of these clothes was the name Keen, because I told you people wrote on their clothes a lot, it said T-Keen, T-dot-Keen, K-E-A-N-E, or K-E-A-N. And the best cops could figure is they, someone did that to sniff everyone off the case. Right, because they looked around and there was no T-Keen or any Keen that they couldn't

put their fingers on who was missing. Correct. And the tie, years later, like the cops at the time didn't know this. I wonder if they noticed that it was slanting one way or another. I don't know. But they probably just knew it looked weird for some reason they couldn't put their finger on. Yeah.

But at the time in Australia, the tie slanted left to right, and this guy's tie slanted right to left, and that was the style in America. It's like everything's opposite, isn't it so weird? Yeah. Summer's winter and winter's summer. Flush the toilet, goes in a different direction. I think that's an urban legend. No, I think that's true, right?

No, I did something on it. Really? Yeah. I think it's an urban legend. It has to do with the shape of the drain. What? Man. That's what I said.

So looking forward to pooping in Australia. You can still do it. Well, you probably should actually while we're there. I'm going to, but I'm not. The joy is dead. It's gone. Well, just don't watch it flush. You might be better off actually in this way.

I've just been used to my poop turning in such a direction my whole life. I was really ready for something new. All right. I'm sorry. So the tie is opposite. They said this is an American tie, like you said. Yeah. And then they brought in.

And actually we should say those were internet sleuths like within the last 10, 15 years who figured that one out. Yeah. All right. Good for you internet. Mm-hmm. Finally in April, 1949, police brought in a dude, an expert pathologist named John Cleveland, and this was a big deal, apparently the cops in South Australia were not as thorough

as you would think because they didn't even check his little pocket watch pocket, the little pocket inside your pocket. Yeah. Because there was a really key piece of evidence rolled up in there. Yeah. This one broke the case wide open, it seemed like it would. There was a little scrap of paper rolled up very tightly in this pocket and written on it in some pretty fancy type setting where the words Tammum Shude, T-A-M-A-M-S-H-U-D.

And the cop said, what is this? Yeah. First orange thread, now some weirdo words rolled up in this guy's pocket. What is this? And John Cleveland said, you dopes, it's called a lead, you didn't check his pocket in his pocket? Right. He said no.

It would figure out in a little while by a stroke of luck, it seems, that Tammum Shude means it is finished or it is done, or in this case, the end in Persian. Correct. Yeah. Sounds very random and out of left field that anybody would know this, but a reporter working the police beat there, named Frank Kennedy, said, no, I know what that's from. Just from a 12th century book of Persian poetry, it's called Rubayat of Omar Kayam, and that just sounds so out of left field, but in fact, that book had been translated

by an English poet named Edward Fitzgerald, and it was kind of a big deal once it was translated into English. Right. So it wasn't like just so, what I'm looking for, obscure that nobody would know what it was. No, it was extremely popular in the West after that. I think even in America, there's a Peanuts comic strip that makes reference to it even. Well, it was one of those things where people might not know about it, but there are plenty

of people out there who did, and one of the reporters recognized it. So they realized then that they needed to find the copy of the Rubayat that this came from, and they started looking and looking and looking, and they couldn't find it. So the state police did what they had been doing all along, they went to the newspapers, and they said, hey, we found this weird scrap of paper, it says, Tamim Shud, we're told that it comes from the Rubayat. Yeah, and specifically, it's the last words of the Rubayat. Right.

The last words of the last poem, right? And go to it, media, and the media went wild and let everybody know, and it turns out, so this was April when they found the scrap of paper. And in July, they got another break based on finding that scrap. A guy came forward and said, you know what, I found this copy of the Rubayat in the back seat of my car, which had been parked by Somerton Beach. Around the time the man who was found on Somerton Beach was found, and I have no idea who's it is.

It's just been, I put it in my glove compartment, it's been sitting there until I read this article in the newspaper. Yeah, presumably his windows rolled down or his car was unlocked and whoever ripped this thing out, because they did find out that part was ripped out from his book, just tossed it in the back seat of this guy's car. Right. Not very smart if you're trying to cover your tracks. No, but maybe you're not trying to cover your tracks.

Exactly. Right? So they now have the copy of the Rubayat that the scrap of paper that was found in the Somerton man's trousers came from. Yeah, which by all accounts is a one-of-a-kind printing, right? Yeah. Like a one-off. Yes.

And not an edition of hundreds, like a single printing of this one book. Right, but supposedly it's part of an edition. I can't remember which edition it was by this printer, but for years people have been trying to track down a copy from that edition and they couldn't find it. Well, somebody finally found one and they're like, this is not the exact same book that the cops found with the Somerton man, or associated with Somerton man, which is a very odd thing. Totally. So in this book, they get another huge break.

This breaks the case open even further, right? They're like, surely we're going to figure it out now. Yeah, this was huge. They found two local phone numbers. One was a bank phone number, which didn't lead to much of anything. And another one, X3239, belonged to, well, they found a couple of things. They found this number that belonged to a woman, a nurse named Jessica Thompson, who we'll talk about in a minute.

And then they also found, you know how we did our episode on spies, and one of the things sometimes spies would do would have these throwaway pads that they would literally write things on, and you could make an impression such that, you know, it's like the kids trick where you rip that page off and you have what looks like a blank page, but it's the impression of what was written above it. And this little kids will use a pencil to see what it says. But in this case, they used a UV light to see what, by all accounts, is a five line code. Right.

And the code's pretty odd. Yeah. I mean, I think what should read it, it'll sound like gibberish, but if you're into code breaking, you probably already know about this one. Sure. But if not, here we go. All capital letters, line one is W-R-G-O-A-B-A-B-D. Second line, M-L-I-A-O-I, and that was scratched out, interestingly.

Third line, W-T-B-I-M-P-A-N-E-T-P, fourth line, M-L-I-A, again, that's repeated, B-O-A-I-A-Q-C, and finally, I-T-T-M-T-S-A-M-S-T-G-A-B. Go break it. Right. The eagle has landed at midnight. Which they basically said that, go break it, and no one could. No. No one has. Yeah.

A lot of amateur code breakers, because again, they went to the media like you were saying, go break it. And a lot of code breakers tried and failed, and then they contacted the Australian Naval Intelligence Service, and they tried and failed. And either the Naval Intelligence Service or later sleuths concluded that it was, there's too little information to ever break it, that you didn't have a key that you needed to have. And then it may have been as simple as the first letter of a list that he was trying to remember.

Right? Yeah. And finally, they bear a resemblance, frequency-wise, of the first letters of common words in the English language. Yeah. So it's possible that it's a to-do list that the guy was just trying to remember by these groceries, go see this person at this time, that kind of thing. A lot of letters.

It is a lot of letters, and a lot of people say, no, this is obviously a spiked code book. Don't be naive. So the cops, there's the code-breaking thing that they're doing, and then simultaneously they're like, well, maybe we should call this local phone number, and they did. And on the other end, a woman picked up, and it turned out like you said, to be Jessica Thompson. And you want to take another break? I think it's a great place.

We're going to take a break, and we'll get to Jessica Thompson right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We should say coming back from break, we just got compliments from Matt. This is like praise from Caesar on something like this.

Look what happened to Caesar though. Yeah. On your birthday. Matt said, you guys are really doing a great job. And Josh said, tell us that. Go back to sleep. All right. So we promised talk of Jessica Thompson.

This is a really good lead. They called her up. She answered the phone. That's a good first step. In my movie version, at least she answered the phone and went, well, she was a nurse. She was married. Her name was Robin Thompson, Robin a boy though, right? Yeah.

Her son. And her maiden name was Harkness. And this was kept private for a lot of years. Her name was, she asked him to keep it a secret and I read a bunch of accounts, most of which said that, you know, she may have had a few boyfriends here and there, affairs, the paternity of Robin Thompson was called into question more than once. So I think that the general idea was that she was probably just trying to keep this quiet to, so she, you know, in the 1940s wouldn't be outed as a troll.

Right. And then Cobb said, sure, no problem. And actually to this day, the state police have never publicly identified Jessica Thompson as the mystery woman whose phone number was written in the Somerton man's copy of the ruby. Yeah. In fact, in 2013, her family came forward and publicly identified her. And even though the police haven't confirmed it, it's been known for so many years that

that was probably who it was, that again, it's basically taken for granted as a fact of the case that she is that woman. Yeah. Her nickname was Justin, J-E-S-T-Y-N, that's how she inscribed copies of this ruby yacht. Well, and I guess that sort of gives away what happens next. Yeah, the cops are like, okay, okay, we've gone through a lot to get to you, lady. Have you given a copy of this 12th century book of Persian poetry called the Ruby Yacht to anybody?

And she goes, yes, I have. And the cops are like, oh, yes, we're about to figure it out. And they said, who, who have you given it to? And she said a bloke named Alfred Boxall. They said, okay, we'll call you back, and they hung up and ran around looking for Alfred Boxall. Well, yeah, they probably figured, you know, that's Harvey Keitel, and they were unfairly dissapointed to Alfred Boxall when they found out he was alive and well in New South Wales.

And he said, yeah, I got the book right here, she gave them to all her lovers. There was speculation that perhaps they, you know, she gave it to him over drinks one night, that he perhaps had been one of her lovers. Yeah, oh yeah. And I think that's probably absolutely correct. Yeah, because she had inscribed it, like I said, with Justin, and that's how the cops refer to her on their case files. So they went, oh, you're alive, great.

And he said, yeah, but I've got the book, like not all was lost. And it was intact. That's correct. So they said, oh, you've got to be kidding me. This lead, the lead of all leads, I was going to break this case wide open. It's a dead end. Are you kidding me? And one of the officers developed a permanent scar from banging his head slowly against

the wall. That's right. He couldn't be stopped, couldn't be consoled. And so they said, okay, a lady, your phone number was in this thing. So we want you to come down to the morgue and just take a look at this bus we made of the dead guy. And they said, also, is there anything else, anything weird happened to you in like the last year or so?

And she said, well, the only thing I can think of is that my neighbors said to me once when I came home one day that on some man they didn't know it called on my house. And that was it. That's the literally the weirdest thing that's happened to me in the last year knocked on her door. Right. That she didn't know. Her neighbors didn't know.

That happens to me like three times a week. Right. So they bring her in to look at this bus, Detective Sergeant Lionel Lean, and he was one of the two leads. That was not an Australian accent. No, I know. And I don't know what kind of accent it was. It was mid-Atlantic.

But I was not trying to do Australian. And he said that, quote, she was completely taken aback to the point of giving the appearance she was about to faint, end quote. Like she knows who this dude is. Yeah. She's a nurse. She's been looking at a body, but she's a nurse, so she wouldn't be freaked out by any of this.

No. And again, it wasn't even a body. It was a plaster bus. Yeah. Right. But she was like, and they go, did you know him? And she goes, no, no, I didn't just got some heartburn and I have nothing more to say about this.

So don't ever ask me. And she clammed up. Not weird at all. No, not at all. So immediately the cops are like, you know, way more than you're letting on. But apparently they didn't, you know, beat up people that they had in custody to get information out of them. So they let her go and just said, oh, well, I guess we'll never know the answer to this

mystery. Yeah. There's a retired detective named Gary Feltas who is a Gary. I thought Jerry, G E R R Y probably Jerry, you've convinced me. That's funny. We just crossed over to one another side again. So he took up this case later in life and he actually interviewed her in 2007. He said she was evasive under questioning.

Yeah. And like this lady knew something. Yeah. And again, this guy was him. He's a hobbyist amateur sleuth on this case. Love those guys. But he had 40 years experience as a detective and Adelaide. So he knows questioning people.

Have you seen the Netflix documentary series, The Keepers? No. I haven't even heard of it. It is about a cold case murder of a nun in the 1960s, I think. And there are these amateur detectives that have been working on this all these years, these two women in particular, that were students of this nun at school that are just amazing. And just really get appreciation for these people who become obsessed with solving these cases that aren't even like family members or anything, you know?

Is it a like drama or documentary? 10-part documentary series. Oh, wow. I got to see that. Oh, dude. It's one of the most upsetting things I've ever had to sit through. And that's all I'm going to say. Okay.

I've been waiting for this since I finished making of A Murderer. Yeah. It's better, I think. I liked it better. What? Yeah. What? Very disturbing stuff.

Wow. I got to go. Yeah. You got to leave right now. Yeah. So hats off to you, amateur sluice out there, for- Sure. For getting in the way of real police.

No, for doing work that real police, these are cold cases that- Yeah. They're hard pressed to get information anymore, in most cases. No, it's true. So- I was just kidding. Sniffing people off the case, after the cops say, hey. Right.

And I was kind of mad, not to get too derailed by this, that these cold cases just sort of stay cold. Yeah. But then you think like there's, you know, you can't just concentrate on a 40-year-old murder case, and there's so many current things you got to be looking into. Plus it's hard. Yeah, it really is. All right.

So back to Thompson, evasive under questioning. Yeah. Later on, her son, Robert, I'm sorry, Robin, like we said earlier, he started looking into it, got really interested in trying to figure this thing out. Oh, he did. He did. I didn't know that. And he turned out to be a professional dancer.

Yes. With the calves of Lena Horne. Yeah. And the Australian Ballet. Right. And hypodontia in exactly the same way that the Somerton man had. And he had the same ears. Yeah.

So a lot of people, again, there's something that hasn't been proven, but most people take as conclusive fact that Robin Thompson, son of Jessica Thompson, who didn't know the Somerton man, was the son of the Somerton man. Yeah. What I saw was between the ear and the teeth, they put odds for both of those things at about quite a range, between one in 10 million and one in 20 million. Okay. But let's just say it's one in 10 million.

That's still pretty. One in a trillion. At that point, it's the same thing, basically. So eventually another, was it the same amateur sleuth? Not Jerry. Derek Abbott is a different sleuth. There are triples. It's hilarious.

They hate each other. He got involved and said, you know what, I'm going to get Robin in here for a DNA test. Robin's a hymn, but it says here, her. He is a hymn, right? Robin's daughter was the one who took the DNA test, Robin is long dead. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

Oh, no, I think I had it backwards in. I don't think he got involved in trying to figure it out because he's dead. Oh, okay. That's why I was like, I was kind of surprised, but. Gotcha. So he got her daughter to take a DNA test and then trace back the paternal lineage, which would have been possibly the Somerton man, who by all accounts seemed like he was American.

Yeah. He could explain the tie, perhaps the thread, and what else? The fact that no one in Australia could identify him or was willing to identify him. So the only thing left then after that is, okay, well, somebody just dig up the Somerton man. Like he buried him in such a way so we could do this. Right. Well, it turns out in Australia, from what I saw, there are two reasons that a judge

will let you exhume a body. One is to contest a will. There's no will or a state really in question here. Yeah. And then the other one is to identify a lost soldier, a soldier lost at war. Other than that, you're going to, it's an uphill battle, getting a body exhumed. And two different times, Derek Abbott, who actually, as an aside, married Robin Thompson's daughter who took the DNA test at his behest, he petitioned twice to have Somerton man exhumed

and twice he was turned down because obsessive curiosity was not a good enough reason to dig up a body. So he swabbed the inside of her cheek and that was true love. Exactly. So I got to get in there. Over candlelight. All right. So.

He gave her a hand pie. Oh my God. So here are the theories. Well, I'm going to go ahead and start with my favorite theory, which sort of is in here, but not really suicide. I think that perhaps, and I didn't invent this, but of the theories I've read, I like this one. I think that he was an American man who had an affair with Jenny Nurse Thompson, Justin,

and went there, traveled there, found out she was pregnant and was rejected and went down and killed himself by poison and was prepared to do so. Okay. And the other things I've read said that he could, you know, the things that don't add up was like the body was found with no like vomit, which a lot of times happen if you are poisoned. Sure. Even if you're not, one of the last things you do as your life is ending is throw up

usually. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh. It's pretty common. No one ever tells you that. Yeah. At the dinner party, you've never been told that?

No one ever tells you two things in life that you poop when you have a baby. And you poop. And you throw up before you die. And you poop when you die too. And you poop when you die. I think so. I guess that's why Elvis died on the toilet. Yeah.

Very efficient. You wanted to go out with some dignity. Right. Right. Oh, man. So where was I? Oh, so he, the thing I read said that perhaps he went down to the shoreline, drank the poison, threw that, you know, into the water and maybe like vomited and retched there and then kind

of went back up the beach and laid there to die and maybe had one less cigarette. Possible. Or tried to. Very possible. So that's one theory. Another theory is that he died by poison, but that it was murder. Sure. And as this case is becoming more and more publicized, the public came to widely believe

that he was a spy. And that as more details of the case spread out more and more over the decades, this vision of a spy ring emerged with Jessica Thompson as this communist spy master who was posing as a housewife and Somerton man was a spy who worked for her or a rival spy and Alfred Boxall was a spy who worked for her, which would explain why she gave both of them copies of the ruby yacht. And that actually the copies of the ruby yacht were one timepads themselves, which were actually the keys to crack the code.

Unfortunately, the cops in Adelaide through the ruby yacht that was the Somerton man's away in the fifties. Yeah, they got rid of the suitcase in the eighties. Maybe it was both. Maybe he was the spy who loved her. Could have been. But the murder theory is that Alfred Boxall murdered the man or she had him murder him and then they took his body to the seaside.

Alfred Boxall was actually confronted with that in the seventies on TV and he's like that's pretty ridiculous, everybody. Some people are like, we know you were in intelligence at World War Two. It turns out he was like an army engineer or something like that. He wasn't an intelligence. And everyone said that's just what a murderer would say. Right. That's ridiculous on TV.

So the idea that the Somerton man's copy of the ruby yacht was basically a one of a kind, it seems. Definitely lends credence to the idea that it's possible he was a spy. Yeah, and that code for sure. Yeah. So that's another big strong possibility. Here's the thing I saw too in 1959, a third witness came forward, the share never before revealed story that he was on the beach in the wee hours of the morning and saw a man

carrying an unconscious man over his shoulder toward that spot. But it was dark, could not identify anything and nothing ever came of that. Stuff like that. Give me my money for the movie, right? Stuff like that. Maybe either it wasn't him or just, you know, I don't know, you know how people are. Just make something up to get on the news. And then I thought the same thing with the hand raising up.

Maybe that didn't even happen. Well, yeah, that's another thing. What I realized from researching this, Chuck, was that this case has been so muddied with conjecture and false truths that have just spread across the internet that, like, did the lions ever recant their version of seeing him move? If so, then maybe he was dead when he was taken out to the beach. Who knows? Like, you really have to dive in.

But if you want to dive in, this mystery, maybe even more than any others, is just an enormously deep rabbit hole to get sucked into. Because I mean, even if they dug up Somerton and found conclusively that he was Robin Thompson's father, that still doesn't say who he actually was. It doesn't. Or how he died, yeah. And it's just like how this mystery unfolded as the police were investigating it. You can crack the case in one major way and it'll probably lead to a dead end.

There's still always this tantalizing mystery that we may never know. Somerton Man, Tammam Shude. Okay? Good stuff. I just said something in person. If you want to know more about Somerton Man, you should go listen to the Stuff They Don't Want You to Know episode on it. For sure.

Or watch it. I'm not sure if it's video or audio. Maybe both. And you can also check out The Lost Man on California Sunday Magazine and The Body on Somerton Beach on Smithsonian, among many, many other great articles. And since I said many, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this on accents. And I got to say, we got more email on stuttering and accents than I've seen in a long, long

time. For real? I don't know. I think a new accents would be big. Stuttering really hit home with a lot of people, I think. And while there's a stuttering email, too, it's either going to be on the next one or the one that was just released. Okay.

Depending on the order. All right. You may have heard it. There it's upcoming. Hey, guys. Listen to accents. And I wanted to hopefully set the record straight with Chuck's help. My name is Chris, and I'm from New Jersey.

And I've heard Chuck mention a few times that he lived in New Jersey for a bit. First off, where did you live? What brought you here? And why did you leave? I lived in Bernardsville next to Baskinridge, sort of near Morristown, is the biggest town that you might have heard of, and not far from the Bedminster Golf Club or Donald Trump. What brought me there, I lived there after college because it was a free place to live because of a roommate's parents who were out of the country, in Australia, actually.

It's all coming together. They didn't want to sell their house. They said, you guys are done with college. You want to live here for free? Nice. And hang out in New York? We said, sure. And why did I leave?

I left because they came back. That would be weird if I was still living there. Anyway, he might be able to confirm my suspicions. People from New Jersey don't have an accent, but if they do, it's a slight New York accent if any. No, you definitely have an accent. You're insane. In my opinion, many older adults have moved from New York to New Jersey for the suburbs,

seeing many older people meet and talk about the street they grew up on in Brooklyn or the like. I would like to make it clear that no one from New Jersey says New Jersey. That's true. If anything, that is a New York accent, Chuck, can you confirm? I can confirm. I never heard anyone say New Jersey, but I cannot confirm that there's no accent because I definitely have an accent in New Jersey.

In fact, one of the things that I noticed is not so much an accent, but people in New Jersey would say button instead of button, or words that are split in half like that. They would stop, like a hard stop button. You want to talk about it? Sure. Very New Jersey. Okay. And they called everyone kid.

Yeah, I knew that. You ever heard that? Sure. Hey kid, even if they're older than you, I didn't appreciate that. Anyway, I hope Chuck agrees also, I hope he's a fan of Pork Roll and not Taylor Ham. I'm a fan of Taylor Pork Roll, I don't know if that counts. I thought that was the only Pork Roll. Thanks for the endless amounts of entertainment.

I'll be seeing you guys in Brooklyn on the upcoming tour. So Chris Ortado from Highland Park, New Jersey. Nice. I can't wait to see you at the bell house. Thanks, Chris. If you want to get in touch with us like Chris did, you can hang out with me on Twitter at JoshOmClark, you can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the

web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.