Somerton Man
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. On November 30th, 1948, a couple walked along Australia's Somerton Beach. On their walk, they noticed a well-dressed man wearing a suit lying in the sand.

The next day, the couple returned to the beach and the man was still there. But this time, the man in the suit wasn't moving. He was dead. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 172, The Mysterious Identity of the Somerton Man.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now, let's get to this week's episode. Most murder investigations are usually pretty straightforward. The husband did it, the wife did it, and the motive is obvious. In many murder cases, the victim knows their killer.

In fact, according to the latest crime figures put out by the FBI, more than 54% of murder victims are killed by someone they know. 24% are killed by someone in their very own family. These statistics make it fair to say that murder is relatively simple. The crimes fit a pattern, and the motive is clear. But these are the types of murder cases that most people forget about.

People might read about a murder near them because it made front page news. But after a few days, most people forget about the story and move on with their lives. But that only happens when a murder fits perfectly into a statistic. But not all death investigations are that easy to solve or easy to forget. Over the years, hundreds, if not thousands of death investigations have captured the world's attention.

Maybe the victim or killer was a high-profile celebrity. Maybe the case has turned cold and no one knows who did it. Or maybe no one knows who did it or who the victim is. Not only are these types of cases difficult to solve, but they are also cases most people can't stop thinking about. The intrigue of solving the mystery can be intoxicating.

On November 30th, 1948, John Bain Lyons and his wife walked along Australia's Somerton Beach, a seaside resort in Melbourne, Victoria. Walking along the beach, they noticed a well-dressed man wearing a suit lying in the sand. His head was propped up on a sandbank almost like a makeshift pillow, and his legs were stretched out in front of him with his feet crossed.

As John and his wife got closer to the man, they thought they saw him raise one of his hands to his face and put it back down. He almost looked like he was raising a cigarette to his mouth. But besides that one slight movement, the couple didn't see the man budge. About half an hour later, the couple returned to the same spot on the beach and saw the man still lying in the sand. He was still wearing his suit, his head propped up on the sandbank.

but this time he wasn't moving. It almost looked like he was asleep. They knew this was strange. What person falls asleep on the beach wearing a suit? But what were they going to do? So the couple decided to walk away again. It wasn't until the following day that the couple realized the man lying on the beach in his suit wasn't sleeping. He was dead.

On December 1st, 1948, around 6.30 a.m., the police were called to the Somerton Beach. Other beachgoers who had gone down to the water for an early morning swim were startled to find a man dressed in a suit dead on the beach. It was the same man John and his wife had seen the day before.

When the cops got to the beach, they found the man lying in the sand right across from the crippled children's home on the corner of Bickford Terrace and Esplande. He was dressed in a full suit and lying in the sand. He had an unlit cigarette on the right corner of his shirt and his feet were crossed. It almost looked like he might have died while smoking and a cigarette fell on his shirt.

If you didn't know he was dead, you might just look at him and assume that he was asleep. The man was incredibly well-dressed for someone found lying dead on the beach. He wore boxer shorts, a men's singlet, a white t-shirt, and a thin red tie. He wore light brown pants, a brown sweater, and a brown double-breasted jacket. On his feet, he was wearing a pair of nice and recently polished dress shoes.

and one of his pants pockets had been repaired with an unusual type of orange thread. Investigators first needed to determine this man's identity. Before they could solve the how and the why, they needed the who. But figuring out who this man was didn't come easy. He didn't have any identification on him. Inside of his pockets, he carried an unused second-class rail ticket to Henley Beach,

an American-made hair comb, a packet of juicy fruit gum, an Army Club cigarette packet with seven different cigarettes from seven different brands, and a half-empty box of matches. But there was nothing inside this man's pockets that said who he was. And strangely, all the labels from inside of his clothes were cut out.

He was anywhere from 40 to 50 years old. He had an athletic body type and was in pretty good shape. Another thing that stood out to the investigators was that nothing seemed off about him. Besides being dead and lying on the beach in his suit,

He had no visible injuries on his body, so they had no idea how he died. He wasn't shot or stabbed, at least not that they could tell. He just looked like he might have died sometime in his sleep. That's how peaceful he looked. About two hours after the beachgoers called the police, the man's body was sent to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy.

they needed to solve two really big puzzles. One, figure out who this person was, and number two, figure out how he died. Investigators uploaded his fingerprints to Australia's National Fingerprint Database to try and figure out who he was, but no matches were found. His prints were then submitted to the United States, where they were compared to American prints, but nothing matched there either.

Authorities then turned their search to missing person reports. Surely this man had someone out there looking for him. Maybe a friend, a family member, someone out there had to have reported this man missing by now. But nope, no one matching his description was ever reported missing.

The Australian authorities might not have been able to get his identity from the autopsy, but they did learn some key details about him. Number one, the medical examiner noted that his pupils were a lot smaller than any other guy his size, and he also thought that the pupils were oddly shaped.

Number two, the man also had an unusual amount of blood in his stomach, which suggested to the medical examiner that he might have ingested some type of poison. But when samples of his blood were tested, no traceable amounts of poison were found. So the blood in the stomach was a little bit of a mystery. It didn't necessarily rule out poison. It simply meant that no traceable amounts were detected in his bloodstream.

According to Dr. John Matthew Dwyer, the attending pathologist who assisted in the autopsy, he suspected that there were at least two poisons that could lead to stomach bleeding, but both of these poisons are completely undetectable in blood tests. They are digitalis and strophathine, two very lethal poisons that really don't leave a trace.

Both would in fact cause the amount of bleeding found in the man's stomach. But again, they would be completely untraceable. This was simply Dr. Dwyer's theory because he had really no other explanation for the amount of blood in the man's stomach. So he knew that at least two poisons out there could cause the bleeding, but they don't leave a trace. They could also explain his sudden death. But again,

How did the poison, if there was any poison, end up in the man's body? Besides the blood, the pathologist also recovered the man's last meal before his death, a pastry. According to the autopsy, he had likely eaten it just about three to four hours before his death.

This led authorities to wonder if the pastry was used to administer the poison. But again, that's only a theory because nothing showed up in the blood tests. The third thing that stuck out to the medical examiner was the size of the man's spleen. His spleen was about three times larger than your average spleen. It was also a lot firmer to the touch than it should be for someone his size or his age.

But the most remarkable insight from the mystery man didn't come from inside his body. It came from the man's feet. His toes were almost completely mangled. There's no other way to describe it. It almost looked like his feet had been cramped into a pair of shoes that were way too small for years.

Or they almost looked like maybe he liked to wear high-heeled or pointed shoes. This one very random detail discovered in the autopsy led the authorities to make their first guess at who this man was. Maybe he was a dancer.

The autopsy didn't shed much light on how he died. He wasn't shot, he wasn't stabbed, and he didn't have any visible injuries to his body. The only thing the medical examiner could determine was a timeline. Based on the body's rigor mortis and lividity, the examiner theorized that he had likely died no earlier than 2 o'clock a.m. on the day his body was discovered.

Based on the evidence, it was unlikely the body had been moved after he died. In other words, he died in the exact location on the beach where he was discovered, and most likely the same place where the couple spotted him the night before. Although the medical examiner couldn't determine a cause of death, he figured the most likely scenario was heart failure. Maybe this man had a heart attack while lying on the beach.

Remember, the first couple who saw the man there said that they thought they saw him lift his arm to his face to smoke a cigarette. And they just assumed maybe it was a drunk guy lying on the beach in his suit. Well, this couple wasn't the only one who saw him. Another couple said they saw him on the beach sometime between 7.30 and 8 o'clock p.m.,

But according to them, they didn't see him moving. They said that he looked like he was asleep when they saw him. And like the other couple, they assumed it was just a drunk guy who had passed out for the night. So they walked away instead of approaching him and seeing if he needed any help. However, they did say they thought it was strange the man wasn't reacting to the mosquitoes.

According to the couple, mosquitoes attacked them the entire time that they were walking along on the beach that night. So they thought it was a little bit weird that the man, although even if he was drunk and asleep, he didn't seem very bothered by the mosquitoes. He never once lifted his arm to swap them away.

But again, their best guess was he was drunk and maybe he was just in such a deep sleep that not even the worst of the worst mosquitoes could bother him. But was this the same man? Although the eyewitnesses described seeing a similar looking man in the area the night before, the authorities really couldn't be too sure whether it was the same man or not.

Yes, he physically resembled the mystery man, but could it be possible it was someone else? And the dead man turned up the following day? The medical examiner could only speculate about how he died without any other forensic explanation. Since he had no injuries, they had nothing else to base the cause of death on.

Although a significant amount of blood was found in his stomach, suggesting a possible poisoning, they didn't find any traces of it in his blood system. So heart attack became the likely cause of death, although heart attack was never considered the official cause. It was simply a theory. Now, 10 days after the autopsy, the man's body was embalmed on December 10th, 1948.

No one had come forward claiming to know him, and all efforts to identify him through fingerprints and circulating his photograph all failed. Within days of his discovery, he became known simply as the Somerton Man. By January 11th, the South Australian authorities had exhausted almost every lead trying to identify this man.

The investigation was right on the edge of turning cold when they finally received a promising tip. They got word that an abandoned suitcase had been recovered at the Adelaide Railway Station. According to the station workers, the abandoned suitcase had been at the station for weeks.

And they were just about to throw it away, but before they did, they decided to call the authorities instead. Maybe it belonged to someone missing. And sure enough, the employees were right. The suitcase belonged to the Somerton man.

According to the railway station employees, the Brown suitcase was left there sometime after 11 o'clock a.m. on November 30th. But after that, no one came back to pick it up, and it had been sitting at the station for weeks. The first interesting thing that investigators noticed about the suitcase was that almost everything inside of it had the labels cut, just like the Somerton man's clothes.

Now, only three items in the suitcase didn't have the labels cut. And what's interesting about these three items was that they were all labeled either T. Keene or Keene. And Keene was spelt two different ways. One version was K-E-A-N-E and the other was K-E-A-N without the E.

But nothing about the name Keene or T. Keene led to any promising tips. That's because that name was compared to every English-speaking country's database of missing persons. And no one within these missing persons report had the last name Keene, either with the E on the end or without the E. No one with that name was ever reported missing.

So this led some people to wonder if the word keen on three of the labels was simply used to throw off investigators about who this man was. Now, besides the missing labels, the authorities found other bizarre things inside the suitcase. Number one, they found a unique reel of orange thread.

The reason why this thread was so unusual was because that the particular brand wasn't sold anywhere in Australia. And the orange string or the orange thread was also later determined to be the same kind of orange thread used to repair one of the pant pockets.

Other items found inside the suitcase were a red checkered dressing gown, a size 7 pair of red slippers, four pairs of underwear, pajamas, a shaving kit, a light brown pair of pants, a screwdriver, a table knife, a pair of scissors, and a stenciling brush. Nothing inside the suitcase contained the man's identity. It was almost like he was very careful not to leave anything behind that had his name on it.

The police decided to bring in another expert, John Cleland, a pathologist professor, to take a second look at the man's body as well as his personal items. Because his body was embalmed, John Cleland was able to examine it, looking for any clues the original pathologist may have missed. And by April, he found something, a clue even more baffling than anything else.

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All the previous investigators, as well as the pathologist, had missed it. Inside the secret pocket was a tightly wrapped piece of paper with two words on it. It read, which is a Persian phrase for it is ended or it's finished. The words had been torn from a rare New Zealand edition of a 12th century work of poetry.

Although several editions of this particular poetry book had been printed over the years, most of the editions had different fonts in them. And the font used on the paper inside the secret pocket was very distinct. This particular font had only been used for a few copies of the book ever.

Now at face value, the meaning behind the words to mom should seemed to be significant. It is finished or it's finished. This clue seemed to suggest that maybe his death was a suicide. The term it's finished might be referencing to the fact that his life was finished. Was he planning on committing suicide? Did he leave the note behind maybe as a final farewell?

A suicide theory could explain a lot of mysteries surrounding the case. For example, it could explain why no one reported him missing. It could also explain why the labels were removed from his clothing. Maybe he didn't want anyone to discover who he was or find out that he killed himself, and the list goes on. But like many other aspects of this case, this was only a theory.

After discovering the paper tucked inside of the secret pocket, the police searched for a copy of the specific poetry book that matched the distinct font from the Taman Shud paper, but they couldn't find it anywhere. That is, until a man came to the police station with a copy of it in his hand. When the police flipped through the book, they were excited to find out that the last page had been torn out.

This was the same page that contained the words to mom should. But when the police questioned the man who just so happened to show up with it at the police station, he said that he knew nothing about the poems or the Somerton man. He claimed that about one year earlier in December, he had driven with his brother-in-law to a spot about 100 yards away from the Somerton beach.

When they got back to their car that day, his brother-in-law noticed a copy of the book just lying there on the floor of the car. But both men just assumed the book belonged to the other. But in fact...

It didn't belong to either one of them. They had no idea how this random 12th century book of poems turned up inside the car that day, only about 100 yards away from the beach at the same time the Somerton man's body was discovered. Inside of the book, the police found two unlisted phone numbers and faint lines of code on some of the pages.

When they called the first phone number, it was a dead end, but not the second number. It belonged to a woman named Jessica Thompson, a nurse who lived near Summerton Beach. At first, Jessica Thompson was reluctant to speak with the police, but after a little convincing that she wasn't in any type of trouble, they only wanted to find out more about the book, she agreed to talk.

She said she had given the book to a man named Alfred Boxall. He was a friend of hers, and the book was a gift. For the first time in months, the police finally had a good tip, and they wondered if this Alfred Boxall guy could be the Somerton man. It all seemed to add up. He received a copy of the book from a friend, Jessica Thompson, who was a

The last page of the same book was ripped out containing the weird note and the message was found inside the secret pocket inside the Somerton man's pants. So the Somerton man had to be Alfred Boxall. But there was one big problem. Alfred Boxall was still alive, so he couldn't be the Somerton man. The police turned their attention back to the book and

Not only did it have two unlisted phone numbers inside, but it also had a strange secret code written on the back of it. The police suspect that it was the Somerton man who wrote the code. Under a UV light, the Australian investigators made out a strange jumble of letters that read W, or maybe M,

R-G-O-A-B-A-B-D-W-T-P-I-M-B-A-N-E-T-P. Under that was a second line of letters that read in all caps M-L-I-A-B-O space A-I-A-I-Q-C.

Then finally, underneath that, there was a third line with the letters, again, all in caps, I-T-T-M-T-S-A-M-S-T-G-A-B. At face value, the random order of letters didn't seem to mean anything. They just looked like three lines of randomly written letters, all in caps. And the second line even looked like whoever wrote it tried to cross it out.

but authorities were convinced that the Somerton man wrote the code before ripping out the page with Tamam's shed on it and putting it inside his secret pocket. Over the next several months, South Australian investigators tried to crack the code. They were determined to figure out what it meant, hoping that it would eventually lead them to the man's identity. But no one had any luck because

The code was sent to every available agency and nobody could crack it. Not even the Naval Intelligence Agency in Australia. And this agency had some of the best code breakers in the entire world. They had come to the conclusion that the code was unbreakable in a public statement that is a little bit hard to read, but I'm going to read it exactly how it was published. But this is what they had to say about it. Quote,

From the manner in which the lines have been represented as being set out in the original, it is evident that at the end of each line indicates a break in sense. There is an insufficient number of letters for definite conclusions to be based on analysis.

but the indications together with the acceptance of the above breaks and sense indicate in so far as can be seen that the letters do not constitute any kind of simple code the frequency of the occurrence of letters whilst inconclusive corresponds more favorably with the table of frequencies of initial letters of words in english than with any other table

Accordingly, a reasonable explanation would be that the lines are the initial letters of words of a verse of poetry or such like, end quote.

The police even published the code in local newspapers, basically asking anyone with a little extra time on their hands to try and solve it. But again, nothing really turned up. The letters didn't really seem to mean anything to anyone. And it only seemed to deepen the mystery behind the Somerton man's true identity because no one could break the code.

Once all of the leads dried up, the police had no choice but to bury the man. And on June 14th, 1949, he was buried without a name to put on his tombstone. It seemed inevitable that he would forever be known only as the mystery man found lying on Somerton Beach in his suit. And the mystery surrounding his death would never be solved.

Years and years later, as the internet gained popularity, there was a renewed interest in the case. With the internet came the creation of internet sleuths, or anyone who uses the internet to search for more information about a particular person or event. Sometimes we call them keyboard detectives. Now, as the internet became more popular, people became more interested in trying to figure out who the Somerton Man was.

There was just something about this case that drew people in. For some people, it was the man's identity. Anytime someone dies and is buried without a name, we want answers. We want to know who these people are and have the chance to notify their loved ones. For other people, the mystery surrounding his death intrigued them. Why was he out there on the Somerton Beach that night in a suit? Why were the labels cut from all the clothes?

Why did he leave the suitcase at the station? And what did everything that was found inside of it actually mean? Then finally, the note. What did the note inside the secret pocket mean? Was this really a suicide like the note seemed to suggest? Was he the one behind the unbreakable code found at the back of the book?

For many, many people, including determined internet sleuths, there were just so many unanswered questions, and they were determined to get answers. But the creation of the internet didn't solve much. In fact, it only led to more questions. The web caused people to go down many different rabbit holes in the case. For many, many years, there were numerous possible theories about who the Somerton Man was and what the note meant.

But no one could say for sure. They were all simply theories thrown around on the internet and message boards. One of the theories out there was that he might be a spy. Here's how the theory goes. Over the years, people thought the man could be a Russian spy. At the time of his death, the Second World War had recently ended, and Russia was quickly rising to become one of the world's superpowers. So maybe the man was a Russian spy.

That could also explain why the labels had been ripped out of his clothes and why he didn't carry any identification. It could also explain why he wore a suit and wrote the uncrackable code. Maybe the code had something to do with his work as a Russian spy. Some people think this Russian spy theory made sense and answered many questions.

But not everyone was on board with this so-called spy theory. No one ever found any solid evidence proving that he was a spy from any country, let alone Russia. Another popular theory was the man might be H.C. Reynolds. In 2011, a woman turned over an ID card for H.C. Reynolds to the police.

The woman said she found the ID card while going through her dead father's belongings, and she thought the man on the ID card, H.C. Reynolds, looked exactly like the Somerton man. The ID card was issued by the U.S. Department of Labor on February 28, 1918, to a man who identified himself only as H.C. Reynolds.

The card listed the man's nationality as British and his age at 19 at the time the card was issued. Now, just because the card listed him as British didn't rule out the possibility that he might have been from Australia, because back then, many Australian Commonwealth citizens were officially part of the British Empire.

So the card was turned over to an expert biological anthropologist for comparison. And according to this anthropologist, the two men shared a lot of physical similarities, including the shapes of their ears and a similar mole on their cheeks. Based on those physical features, she believed the Somerton man was the same person on the ID card, H.C. Reynolds. But not everyone was convinced.

Besides some similar physical characteristics, there was no cold hard evidence linking this ID card to the Somerton man. The only H.C. Reynolds the police identified was a man named Horace Charles Reynolds with a 1900 birth date.

Some people wondered if this Horace Charles Reynolds could be the guy. But the police tracked down his family in 2010, and after interviewing him, they determined he likely wasn't the Somerton man. Horace Charles Reynolds, a.k.a. H.C. Reynolds, the man in the ID card, died in May 1953, a few years after the Somerton man's body was discovered.

Although countless people from all over the world attempted to solve the mystery surrounding the Somerton Man, one person remained relentless. And that was a University of Adelaide professor, Derek Abbott. In March 2009, Professor Derek Abbott began his quest to identify the man. When his first attempt to crack the code failed, he turned to DNA.

He thought his best guess at figuring out who this man was was going to be through DNA. But there was one big problem with that. They didn't have any type of DNA testing back in the late 1940s. Professor Derek Abbott decided to return to the original pile of evidence and see if there was anything in there that might contain the man's DNA without having to exhume his body. And that's when he found something interesting.

He discovered that the police back in 1948 made what is called a plaster death mask of his face during the autopsy. Basically, a death mask is a mask that helps preserve what someone looks like after they die. They can be made out of anything from wax to plaster.

Any type of material can be used as long as it easily forms around the face and dries while holding its shape. The only important aspect is that the mask is made sometimes shortly after death because it helps to preserve all of the individual's features exactly how they appeared when they died. In most cultures, making death masks is considered an ancient tradition.

Sometimes people do them to create facial sculptures later on. These sculptures can be used as mementos or to create facial reconstructions. Others do it for spiritual reasons, like the Egyptians who used to make death masks to help the person's soul recognize their own body after death and return to it. When it came to the summer man's case, the summer man's case,

The police made a death mask to create a facial reconstruction, which later on was going to be used to help identify him. Unfortunately, that idea in itself actually failed because even the mask wasn't enough to identify him. But when they created the death mask, they unintentionally preserved some of the man's DNA. And here's how that happened.

When the authorities created the mask out of plaster, they accidentally pulled a few strands of the man's hair, and the hair got stuck in the plaster mold. So when Professor Abbott learned about the mask, he began studying it to see if there was a chance at retrieving DNA. That's when he discovered the strands of hair.

Although it had been decades since the mask was made, Abbott hoped the hair still contained testable amounts of DNA. And if it did, he hoped the DNA could be used to help finally identify him. By October 2011, there was even more interest in the case. It had been over 60 years and we were no closer to discovering the identity of this mystery man.

People practically begged the South Australian police, as well as the attorney general, to exhume the body to see if DNA testing could be done. In the late 1940s, there was no such thing as advanced DNA testing. So by 2011, people were urging the police and attorney general to do some type of DNA testing on the body to maybe see if that would work.

But the attorney general refused. He said to exhume the body, there needed to be, quote, public interest reasons that go well beyond public curiosity or broad scientific interest, end quote.

In other words, the attorney general said that they wouldn't exhume the body solely because everyone's been fascinated by this case for over six decades. There had to be something other than public curiosity to bring this man's body out of his grave for DNA testing.

By the end of 2017, Professor Derek Abbott announced that he and his team had finally found, quote, three excellent hairs at the right development stage for extracting DNA, end quote. He finally retrieved the hair from the man's death mask. But performing the appropriate DNA testing could potentially take up a year to complete.

So as soon as Abbott got the hair, he submitted it to the Australian Center for Ancient DNA Testing at the University of Adelaide to get the ball rolling. Once they received the hair, all Abbott and his team could do was wait for the results.

While Abbott waited for the DNA testing on the hair to be done, other people didn't give up on the case either. They didn't stop hounding the South Australian authorities to exhume the Somerton man's body. They felt everyone had the right to solve this case over the last 60 years, and all of these people deserve to know who this man was. And by 2019, the public finally got what they wanted.

After years and years of public pressure, South Australian Attorney General Vicki Chapman finally agreed to have the man exhumed in October 2019. However, she only agreed to do so for advanced DNA testing to be done to see if they could produce an identification. But if no DNA match was found, he would be buried again, and this time for good.

They exhumed the body on May 19th, 2021. And when his body was brought back to the medical examiner's office, everyone was really surprised at how well the body was preserved. It had been over 70 years. So everyone was relieved that there was at least something left of the body that could be tested for DNA.

But before the police could get very far with their testing, someone else stepped forward to identify the Somerton man, Derek Abbott. On July 26, 2022, Professor Derek Abbott and his team announced that they had identified him. According to Abbott, the Somerton man was Carl Charles Webb.

After he and his team tested the strands of hair from the death mask, they partnered with a renowned U.S. forensic expert, Colleen Fitzpatrick, a woman who has spent almost her entire career working to solve cold cases and specializes in forensic genealogy.

Once Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick had the DNA from the strands of hair, they built an extensive family tree from the man's DNA using results uploaded to GEDmatch, a large DNA database. The family tree included 4,000 potential relatives of the Somerton man. Through investigative genetic genealogy, they narrowed down the list to one man, Carl Webb.

To make sure he was their guy, they compared his DNA to two distant cousins, one from the paternal side of his family and one from the maternal side, and both came back as relatives of the mystery man. According to Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick, after all these decades, DNA has confirmed the Somerton man was Carl Webb.

But this finding hasn't been confirmed by the South Australian authorities. They have yet to recognize the Somerton man as Carl Webb publicly. Not much is known about him, but according to Abbott, Carl Webb was born in 1905 in a suburb of Melbourne. He grew up to become an electrical engineer and instrument maker. He was the youngest of six siblings and married Dorothy Robertson, known as Doff Webb.

She was likely the reason why Carl Webb found himself in South Australia. According to Abbott, the couple separated in September 1946, and she reportedly moved to South Australia. Abbott believes he had possibly gone down there to track her down when he died. But the mystery surrounding Carl Webb's death, a.k.a. the Somerton Man, still remains a mystery.

Professor Abbott and his team can only speculate about what he was doing in that part of Australia at the time of his death, and his exact cause of death remains controversial. Some people believe he was murdered, possibly poisoned. Others, including Abbott, point towards suicide. They believe his substantial history of mental health issues led to suicide, and he may have poisoned himself on the beach that day.

Although the complete picture of what happened to the Somerton Man has yet to be painted, some questions have been answered. Professor Derek Abbott and forensic expert Colleen Fitzpatrick agree that he's finally been identified as Carl Webb through investigative forensic genetic genealogy.

but the circumstances surrounding his strange death remains unknown. Everyone, including Fitzpatrick and Abbott, still have so many questions. Like, what was he doing there on the beach that day dressed in a suit? What did the mysterious note mean found inside the secret pocket? Why were all the tags removed from his clothes? Why did he abandon his suitcase at the railway station?

What happened to him and why did he die? And finally, will the police ever officially recognize him as Carl Webb? Forensic genetic genealogy may have identified him, but there is still so much mystery behind the Somerton man that not even forensics can explain.

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