74 Years Since the Somerton Man: Solved or Unresolved? | Part 1
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For an ad-free listening experience, visit patreon.com slash crimehub. Sign up for a 7-day free trial and gain access to all my episodes completely ad-free. That's patreon.com slash crimehub. Now let's dive into the story. In 2019, more than 400,000 souls were ripped from our earthly realm. Not by disease nor natural disaster, but by the hands of others.

Murder, dear listeners, is as much a blight on the history of mankind as it is a certainty. Most bodies are found riddled with forensic crumbs to follow, and most motives are clear. It was a love triangle, a petty argument turned deadly, or a sick sexual fantasy played out by a predator. Likewise, most mysteries are easily solved. The husband did it, or the cashier did. Most of these stories have a beginning and an end.

a conclusion that comes with bittersweet closure. However, today's tale is not like most. This is the story of the Somerton Man. In December of 1948, a body was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. It was an ostensibly simple case until it wasn't. The story of the Somerton Man became a mystery that baffled the world for more than seven decades.

There is no motive nor official cause of death and, until very recently, no identifiable victim. Some even argue that there was no murder to begin with. It's true that, even today, we cannot be certain what killed the man, who caused his death, why, or whether he was even a victim of foul play in the first place. What we do know for sure is that, where uncertainty lingers, theories and speculation thrive.

The mystery of the Somerton Man has been somewhat of a legend over the decades. As his story was told and retold, he has taken on many forms. He was a suicidal poet, a former ballet dancer, a smuggler, a spurned paramour struck down by his rival, and even a Soviet spy of the Cold War era. The truth, however, is seemingly more mundane. Or is it? Part One: The Body on Somerton Beach

At 7:00 PM on November 30th, 1948, John Bain Lyons and his wife decided to take a leisurely stroll. It was an expectedly balmy evening, and the couple was eager to spend it walking the seaside esplanade of Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide. As it so happens, they were met with more than a breathtaking vista. As the Lyons strolled toward Glenelg, a neighboring coastal suburb, they noticed something on the beach below.

a smartly dressed man was lounging on the sand, his head resting against the seawall under the esplanade. The man was still, his legs outstretched and his feet crossed, presumably sleeping off a few bevies. Then he moved. The couple watched as he lifted his right arm before letting it fall back to the sand limply. John assumed that the man, in his drunkenness, was simply struggling to smoke a cigarette. Perhaps he was, though.

as you'll soon see, alcohol had nothing to do with it. Half an hour later, the street lamps of the esplanade were lit, illuminating the man lolling on the sand below. There he lay, his left arm splayed out beside him, undisturbed and in the very same position as earlier, piquing the interest of another couple passing by. Curious, they peered down at the immaculately dressed man, who seemed entirely out of place.

The couple noted that his clothing was completely unsuited for the beach, and they were right. The man was wearing a fashionable gray and brown double-breasted jacket, complete with a pair of dress shoes polished to a mirror shine. Like the lions, the couple assumed that he was simply drunk. Unlike the lions, however, they saw no movement. The man's face was obscured by a swarm of mosquitoes, yet he remained motionless.

"He must be dead to the world not to notice them." The boyfriend laughed. He was joking, of course, but his comment was eerily on the mark, a fact that only became known the following morning. At 6:30 a.m. on December 1st, John Lyons emerged from the surf of Somerton Beach after his morning swim. As he waded towards the shore, he noticed that a crowd had formed beneath the esplanade where he had seen the drunk the night before.

John walked over to investigate and was confronted by an unsettling sight. A man was slumped against the seawall, his legs outstretched and his feet crossed. Though John hadn't seen the drunk's face, he was sure that this was the same man. It was as if he had been frozen in time, aside from a few inescapable details, that is. Resting on the man's lapel was a half-smoked cigarette. It looked like it had fallen from his mouth.

which was slack and slightly agape. His eyelids were similarly limp, barely covering his blank stare, and his face unnaturally pallid. It was glaringly obvious that the man wasn't dead to the world. He was simply dead. The police arrived at the scene moments later and, after a quick inspection of the corpse, they concluded that the man must have died in his sleep. His body bore no marks of violence nor obvious signs of disease, and its positioning was natural.

It seemed that it would be a straightforward case, but it wasn't their job to draw conclusions about the dead. That was best left to the coroner. Instead, the officers rifled through the man's pockets, searching for clues about his identity. They found nothing of the sort. The man carried no wallet, no cash, and, strangely, no ID. That said, his pockets certainly weren't empty.

officers found a used bus ticket from Adelaide to Glenelg and an unused second-class train ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach, another seaside suburb. The man also had a few personal items on him, including two American-made combs, a pack of chewing gum, a box of matches, and an Army Club cigarette packet.

Interestingly, the latter contained seven cigarettes of another, more expensive brand called Cancidas. As far as the police could tell, no crime had been committed. They were confident that the cause of death would be determined and the man's identity confirmed. That all changed when the body arrived at the Royal Adelaide Hospital three hours later. Part Two: The Somerton Man

Professor John Cleland, one of the pathologists who examined the dead man, noted that he was just over five feet tall with gray eyes and fair, ginger-colored hair that was graying at the temples. He was around 40 to 45 years old and of Britisher appearance. Other than that, his identity remained a mystery, and the Somerton Man was born. The examiners pressed on, certain that a thorough inspection of the corpse would yield invaluable clues.

They reported that the Somerton man's stylish suit was of American tailoring and noted that a tear in one trouser pocket had been neatly stitched up with a unique type of orange thread. Oddly, there were no labels on his clothing. They had all been carefully snipped off. That's not all. Though World War II had ended three years earlier, wartime rationing lingered on. Clothing was hard to come by and name tags were a precious standard practice.

Yet, all of the name tags on the Somerton man's clothes had been intentionally removed. With little else to go off, the examiners honed in on his physique, hoping to find distinctive features that told his story.

Professor Cleland reported that he was in top physical condition, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist but, strangely, his hands and nails bore no signs of training or manual labor. The same, however, could not be said for his legs. The Somerton man's calf muscles were high and incredibly pronounced, unlike any the examiners had seen before. They were the legs of an athlete, or were they?

According to Professor Cleland, it all came down to the man's toes, which he described as distinctly wedged-shaped. This, coupled with his high, well-defined calf muscles, was reminiscent of a ballet dancer or someone who was in the habit of wearing pointed, high-heeled shoes. Though interesting, to say the least, the examiner's findings resulted in more questions than answers. The police, on the other hand, were far more optimistic.

Investigators were confident that the lack of evidence was the answer. The Somerton man had shaved, donned what looked to be his Sunday best, and pulled out all the stops to conceal his identity. This led the police to believe that he didn't want to be found. He wanted to be forgotten. They were sure it had been a suicide. And perhaps they were right. Even today, many argue that the Somerton man died by his own hand.

But one can't ignore a pivotal piece of evidence that was revealed in his official autopsy the following day. Though it didn't conclusively rule out suicide, it certainly made it unlikely. What if it wasn't the Somerton man who had painstakingly removed all traces of his identity, but someone else? And what if that someone wanted him dead? Dr. John Bennett, another pathologist on the case, sought to answer those questions.

Whilst conducting the autopsy, he estimated the time of death to be around 2:00 a.m. on the morning of December 1st. The suspected cause of death, however, was far more sinister. According to Dr. Bennett, the Somerton man had been poisoned. The pathologist found that the corpse's spleen was strikingly enlarged, about three times its normal size, in fact.

The liver was distended with congested blood, along with the pharynx, both kidneys, and parts of the brain. His colleague, Dr. John Dwyer, found large quantities of blood in the Somerton man's stomach and the remnants of his last meal, an unpoisoned pastry thought to have been eaten a few hours before his death.

The pathologists were certain that internal bleeding of that type and magnitude pointed to poisoning, as did the spittle that had escaped the side of the man's mouth. It seemed that he was unable to swallow it as his body shut down and succumbed to heart failure. With that in mind, the man's odd behavior at the beach began to make sense.

Onlookers had gawked at the suited man slumped against the seawall. His right arm reaching and falling as life left his body. They brushed him off as a drunk, oblivious to the lethal dose of a deadly substance silently and slowly taking effect. In all likelihood, they had borne witness to the Somerton man's last convulsion, a final contraction of his muscles before they stopped moving forever. Part three, pick your poison.

The Somerton man's death was not quick, nor was it natural. And both Dr. Bennett and Dr. Dwyer were convinced that poison was the culprit. However, finding evidence to support this proved to be impossible. The man's blood and organs were tested repeatedly for the presence of a poison or foreign substance, but to their utter disbelief, no trace of either was found.

The pathologist had done everything in their power to figure out who the Somerton man was and how he had met his fate. Now, it was up to State Coroner Thomas Cleland to settle the matter. After assessing the corpse himself, he came to the very same conclusions as his colleagues. However, with no trace of poison in the man's system, no conclusive cause of death could be determined. This left Coroner Cleland with a serious dilemma on his hands.

As state coroner, it was his responsibility to officially identify the dead and determine what killed them. Yet, at that stage, he could do neither. In the days following the perplexing discovery, Coroner Cleland held an inquest into the unexplained death of the unknown man. Early on in his investigations, he found that the man's dental records couldn't be matched to any known individual.

With no other evidence that could identify the corpse, Coroner Cleland concentrated on the inexplicable cause of death. He made it clear from the outset that he believed the Somerton man had been intentionally poisoned. He also made it clear that he couldn't say whether the substance was administered by the man himself or someone else. That said, there were two gaping holes in his theory. There was no poisonous substance in the man's system and no evidence of vomiting

The latter physiological reaction was almost always present in poisoning cases, but according to the coroner, its absence proved little. In fact, it told an entirely different story. Cleland told the court that the body might have been dumped at the beach after the Somerton man had already succumbed to the poison elsewhere.

That would explain why there was no vomit at the scene. He added that none of the witnesses could positively identify the corpse as the suited man from the night before. The couples had never gotten a good look at his face, meaning it was possible that they were two different men. Even so, Coroner Cleland stressed that it was purely speculation.

every single witness was adamant that the corpse and suited man were one in the same, insisting that both were slumped in the identical position and spot. That said, whether speculation or not, it was a promising theory, but it still didn't explain the frustratingly bare toxicology report.

Cleland very nearly lost all hope of ever solving that piece of the puzzle, until Sir Cedric Hicks, a prominent professor of physiology and pharmacology, took the stand. The professor reluctantly revealed that, although rare, there are poisons in this world that are extremely toxic in small doses and completely undetectable, even if they were suspected in the first place.

He believed that one such poison had killed the Somerton Man, one that decomposed soon after his death. Leaving no trace behind, Professor Hicks told the court that, to his knowledge, there were only two poisons capable of this. But he refused to utter their names aloud in open court. They were far too deadly and, at the time, far too accessible. Any ordinary person could buy them from a chemist without the need for a prescription or a reason for the purchase.

Instead, the professor scribbled the names of the two prime suspects on a scrap of paper and handed the note to Coroner Cleland. "Digitalis and Strophanthin," it read. Hicks strongly suspected the latter, a rare cardiac glycoside, or heart stimulant. It's derived from the seeds of various Strophanthus species, a genus of flowering plants native to Africa and Asia.

where tribes once used it to poison their arrows. That said, the Somerton man was thought to have died seven hours after he was last seen moving. According to Hicks, a massive dose of either poison could have killed him in that time without being detected in post-mortem tests. However, though the absence of vomiting wasn't unheard of, the professor conceded that he couldn't draw any decisive conclusions without it.

The inquest into the Somerton man's death was ultimately adjourned until June of 1949, and the police were left more baffled than ever. Determined, investigators took fingerprints from the corpse and distributed them to every law enforcement agency in Australia. When no matches were made, the prints were circulated throughout the Western world. Still, nothing.

With domestic and international fugitives ruled out, the police leaned on the citizens of Adelaide. Those who thought they knew the Somerton Man after seeing his picture in the papers were welcomed into the mortuary. Along with the desperate relatives of missing persons, none recognized the corpse. By January of 1949, the South Australian police were at a dead end.

They had exhausted almost every lead they had and were no closer to cracking the case of the Somerton Man. Then, they found the suitcase. Part 4. Pandora's Box On January 14th, staff members of the Adelaide Railway Station notified the police about a brown suitcase. It had been checked into the cloakroom just after 11 a.m. on November 30th, 1949, and promptly abandoned.

Eight hours later, the Somerton man was seen alive and slumped against the seawall carrying a used bus ticket from Adelaide to Glenelg. Finally, a fresh lead.

Station employees had no recollection of the suitcases owner and its contents turned out to be just as mundane as the contents of the Somerton man's pockets. However, the possessions found within proved that the case had belonged to him. First, it was a reel of unique orange waxed thread, the very same used to repair the man's trouser pocket. The thread was barber branded and couldn't be bought in Australia.

Then, it was the painstaking care that had been taken to erase any trace of the owner's identity. Just like the Somerton man's clothing, the suitcase had no stickers and the label had been intentionally torn off, as had all the tags on the clothes found within. There were three exceptions though. Investigators found a tie marked with the name T. Keane, spelled K-E-A-N-E.

They also found a laundry bag and vest marked Kean, spelled, or perhaps misspelled, K-E-A-N. Finally, a name. Optimistic about what seemed like a promising discovery, investigators scoured every single missing person's record in the English-speaking world, but once again, their search proved fruitless. No T. Kean had been reported missing. It was a conundrum, one that led investigators to suspect they were being played.

In an interview with an Adelaide newspaper, a police official declared that someone must have purposefully left the name tags on to confuse them, knowing that the Somerton man wasn't T. Keene. Exasperated, investigators turned to the remaining items inside the suitcase, which proved to be anything but illuminating.

These included pajamas, underpants, size seven slippers, shaving instruments, a dinner knife that was cut down and sharpened, an electrician's screwdriver, and a pair of brown trousers with sand in the cuffs. Aside from the strange absence of spare socks and perhaps what seemed to be a homemade knife, it was all unremarkable. The remainder of the Somerton man's possessions were slightly more revealing, though just as useless in the end.

Investigators found a coat with elaborate American stitch work. Interestingly, it hadn't been imported, leading them to believe that the Somerton man had either traveled America at some stage or bought it from someone else who had.

This theory was supported by the man's stencil kit, which was similar to those used by 3rd officers for marking cargo on merchant ships. Of course, when investigators initiated a nationwide search of shipping and immigration records, no leads surfaced. Investigators eventually abandoned that endeavor in favor of piecing together a timeline for the day the Somerton Man was first seen.

Using incoming train records, they surmised that he must have taken an overnight train to Adelaide from either Melbourne, Sydney, or Port Augusta. After arriving on the morning of November 30th, 1948, he bought a ticket for the 10:50 a.m. train to Henley Beach, but for reasons unknown, he never boarded.

Instead, the Somerton man checked his suitcase into the station cloakroom and caught the city bus to Glenelg, which was about a 26-minute walk from Somerton Beach. Were these the movements of a man on the run? Or the indecisive decisions of someone preparing to end it all? Who knows? Whatever the case, the Somerton man's shoes were spotless. In June of 1949, the inquest into his unexplained death was resumed.

and Thomas Cleland re-examined his corpse and possessions. The coroner noted that the man's dress shoes were newly polished and unusually pristine for someone who had apparently been traipsing around Adelaide's coastal suburbs all day. It simply didn't make sense, but it did support Cleland's previous theory. Perhaps the Somerton man had been poisoned somewhere nearby and left to die on the beach.

The coroner was convinced that the man didn't commit suicide. Ironically, however, it was his own reexamination that seemed to prove otherwise. Around the same time, Cleland made one final discovery, the most mysterious of them all. He found a small pocket sewn into the waistband of the Somerton man's trousers. It resembled those made to hold pocket watches, but what the coroner found inside had nothing to do with keeping time.

There, hidden and tightly rolled, was a tiny scrap of paper. On it, two words had been printed in elaborate script. "To Mom, Shud," it read. Part 5. It is ended. Each new break in the Somerton Man case proved to be more obscure than the last, but none more than the seemingly inconspicuous scrap of paper. The police were utterly dumbfounded by the discovery.

As luck would have it, however, help was nearby. A police reporter for the Adelaide Advertiser recognized Tamam Shud and immediately called in with an invaluable tip.

He urged investigators to get their hands on a 900-year-old Persian book of poetry, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Edward Fitzgerald's 1859 translation had become a beloved must-have in Australia during the war years for Khayyam's romanticism of life and mortality.

"To Mom Should" were the last words printed on the final page of almost every English edition ever published. A befittingly poetic conclusion, considering the phrase roughly translates to "It is ended." Kayam's once unsung masterpiece was both a rejection of religion and a passionate ode to hedonism. The 12th century poet and mathematician romanticized the transiency of human existence, and his ancient message was clear.

There is no life after death, and the latter is inevitable. So one should savor every morsel of life and embrace the end when it comes. With that in mind, it's no wonder fallen soldiers were found with tattered copies in their pockets. But why were Kayam's final words found tucked away in that of the Somerton Man?

As far as the police were concerned, the discovery suggested that he had committed suicide. Still, despite their suspicions, they resolved to search for his copy of the Rubaiyat. Investigators hoped that it held the truth about his identity, perhaps an inscription or even better, a name. Of course, it would never be that easy.

Though several editions of Fitzgerald's translation existed, investigators couldn't track down a single one that matched the decorative script found on the Somerton Man's scrap of paper. After inquiring with several libraries, publishers, and bookstores, they were told that it had likely been torn from a rare New Zealand edition. However, the revelation had no relevance to the Somerton Man's identity, and his body had begun to decompose.

With no leads to investigate, nor reasons to delay his burial any longer, the police were forced to finally put the man to rest. They never gave up on him though. Determined to preserve one of their only pieces of evidence, investigators had his corpse embalmed and a plaster cast bust made. On June 14th, 1949, the Somerton man was buried and sealed under concrete, ready to be exhumed if necessary, and never truly at peace.

Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton Beach, his epitaph read. Investigators were understandably disheartened after the Somerton man's burial. Desperate for answers, they made a public appeal for the missing Rubiat and unexpectedly it worked. On July 23rd, an unidentified Glenelg local walked into the Adelaide police station. He had a 1941 edition of Edward Fitzgerald's translation in hand.

An eerie story to tell. Just days after the Somerton Man was discovered, he found the book on the floor of his car, which he kept unlocked and parked a few hundred yards from Somerton Beach. Initially, the man believed that it belonged to his brother-in-law, so he stashed it in his glove compartment and promptly forgot about it.

Then, he saw the police's appeal in the papers. The man immediately flipped through the mysterious rubyot and, to his disbelief, he found that a piece of the final page had been torn out. Investigators sent the book for microscopic testing and, sure enough, his story checked out. The scrap of paper hidden within the Somerton man's watch pocket was torn from that exact edition.

It had been published by Whitcomb and Tombs in Christ Church, New Zealand. And it contained far more than Persian poetry.

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