In July 2022, a University of Adelaide team announced that the Somerton Man — found dead against a seawall on an Adelaide beach on 1 December 1948, with every manufacturer's label cut out of his clothes — was Carl "Charles" Webb, born in Footscray, Melbourne, on 16 November 1905, an electrical engineer and instrument maker. The identification came from DNA in hairs caught in the plaster of a cast made of his face in 1949. It answered the question that had defeated two hemispheres for seventy-four years, and almost nothing else.
The short version
- A well-dressed man, found dead on Somerton Beach in 1948 with no wallet, no hat, and every clothing label removed.
- Cause of death never determined. The autopsy pointed to poison; no poison was ever identified.
- A scrap reading Tamám Shud was sewn into a hidden pocket, torn from a rare Rubaiyat that turned up in a stranger's parked car — with a phone number and five lines of pencilled capitals in the back.
- Genetic genealogy produced a name in 2022. The code, the cause of death and the cut labels remain unexplained.
The body on the beach
A jeweller named John Lyons and his wife saw a man in a suit lying on the sand near the seawall at Glenelg on the evening of 30 November 1948. He raised his right arm and let it fall. They took him for drunk or half asleep and walked on. At half past six the next morning Lyons came back for a swim and found him in the same position: legs extended, feet crossed, an unsmoked cigarette on his collar.
He was around forty-five and athletic — the pathologist noted the pronounced calf muscles of a dancer or a runner. He wore a suit, a knitted pullover, a clean shirt and tie, and shoes polished to a remarkable shine. He carried no hat, in an era when every man wore one, and no identification of any kind. His pockets held a rail ticket, a bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum, matches, and a packet of Army Club cigarettes containing cigarettes of a different, more expensive brand. Every manufacturer's label on his clothing had been cut away — not worn off, but removed with a blade or scissors.
Dr John Dwyer's autopsy found a healthy man with no wounds and no sign of violence, and internal organs in crisis: intense congestion, blood pooled in the stomach, a distended liver, and a spleen roughly three times normal size. In Dwyer's stated opinion death was not natural and everything pointed to poison. The government analyst tested for every common poison of the day and found nothing. At the 1949 inquest one expert suggested a rare cardiac poison of the digitalis family that could kill and then vanish from the tissues; it remained a suggestion. The cause of death was never determined, and still has not been.
In January 1949 police found his suitcase, checked into the Adelaide railway cloakroom the morning before he was found. Inside were clothes with the labels cut away again; items marked "T. Keane", a name traced through shipping registries and missing persons lists on three continents and found to belong to nobody missing anywhere; and a card of waxed orange thread not sold in Australia, matching the thread used to repair a pocket on the trousers he died in.
Tamám Shud
In April 1949 the pathologist John Cleland re-examined the clothing and found what four months of searching had missed: a small fob pocket sewn inside the waistband of the trousers, and inside it a scrap of paper torn from a printed page. Two words in an ornate typeface: Tamám Shud. Persian; the closing words of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It is finished.
Police appealed publicly for a Rubaiyat with a missing final page. A local man, whose identity was suppressed then and has stayed suppressed, came forward: around the time of the death a copy had appeared in the back seat of his unlocked car, parked a few hundred metres from the beach. Its final page was torn, and microscopic comparison matched the tear and the paper to the scrap from the waistband. It was a rare printing that police struggled to find another copy of anywhere.
In the back of that book, in faint pencil, was a telephone number belonging to a young nurse living on Moseley Street, Glenelg, about four hundred metres from where the body was found. Police protected her under the name "Jestyn"; the record now gives her real name, Jessica Thomson. Interviewed in 1949, she denied knowing the dead man. She said that during the war in Sydney she had given a copy of the same poem to an army lieutenant named Alf Boxall — and police then found Boxall alive in Sydney, his inscribed copy intact, final page and all.
Detectives brought Thomson to see the plaster cast of the dead man's face. Paul Lawson, the taxidermist who made the cast, described her reaction in interviews for the rest of his long life: completely taken aback, looking at the floor, unwilling to look at the face again, close to fainting. Then she said she did not know him, and the police of 1949 took a respectable married woman at her word.
Two later claims sit on that. Researchers have noted that photographs of Thomson's son, born in July 1947, appear to show two uncommon traits — a distinctive ear structure and a dental anomaly — that the Somerton Man's autopsy photographs and cast appear to share. That is analysis of photographs, not genetics. Separately, Thomson's daughter said on Australian television in 2013 that her mother had admitted late in life that she did know the dead man's identity, and that it was known to a level higher than the police force.
The code nobody has read
Under the phone number, in the same faint pencil, were five lines of capital letters — around forty to fifty of them, the second line struck through as if it were a false start. In 1949 they went to Australian naval intelligence, whose verdict to the inquest was that the symbols were too few to break with certainty, that the letter frequencies behaved neither like a substitution cipher nor like random scribble, and that they might be the initial letters of words.
Two lines begin with the same four letters, and the crossed-out second line reads like a false start on the fourth — the behaviour of someone composing rather than copying. The lines have since been attacked by military cryptographers, by seventy years of amateur codebreakers, and by University of Adelaide teams running statistical analysis against every language and cipher family they could model. The modern verdict matches the 1949 one: consistent with the initials of English words, not solvable without knowing the words.
Adelaide in 1948 was the gateway to the Woomera rocket range, and 1948 was the year Australian security failures pushed the country toward founding ASIO. Students of the case also point to a 1945 death in a Sydney park, where a man named George Marshall was found poisoned with an open copy of the Rubaiyat beside him. Label that as what it is: context and hypothesis. Marshall's death was ruled a suicide, no link to Somerton has ever been documented, and no evidence has ever surfaced that the Somerton Man was an agent of any service. The espionage reading writes itself, which is a reason to be careful of it.
The name, and what it moved
Derek Abbott, a professor of engineering at the University of Adelaide, worked the case from the 2000s onward. When the taxidermist cast the dead man's face in 1949, strands of hair were caught in the plaster, and Abbott obtained some. Working with the American forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, his team extracted enough DNA to place the unknown man in a family tree built outward from distant matches — roughly four thousand names — narrowed until it closed on a Melbourne family of six children and the one sibling for whom every record stops in the late 1940s.
Carl Webb married Dorothy "Doff" Robertson in 1941. The marriage failed, and by 1947 he had left Melbourne and vanished from every record researchers have found: no death certificate, no further address. In the early 1950s Dorothy filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, saying she did not know where he was — and by then she had moved to South Australia, to a town north of Adelaide. If the identification is right, the man on Somerton Beach had one documented reason to be in that state.
Family recollections gathered since describe a private man who wrote poetry, including dark verses about death, and who liked betting on horses. That last detail produced a new theory about the five lines: initials of horses' names, or of bets. The researchers offer it only as speculation, and nobody has matched the letters to a race card of 1948.
What we can and can't say
Documented. The discovery of the body on 1 December 1948; the removed clothing labels; the autopsy findings and the analyst's failure to identify any poison; the open finding on cause of death; the suitcase and its contents; the hidden fob pocket and the Tamám Shud scrap; the matching Rubaiyat with the torn final page; the phone number and the five lines of letters; the codebreaking assessments of 1949 and since; and the 2022 genetic genealogy identification of Carl Webb.
Disputed or not formally settled. South Australia Police exhumed the body themselves in 2021 for an official DNA effort and did not immediately confirm the university's identification, which stands as serious research awaiting the full formal stamp. We are not going to call the case officially closed while that remains true. The ear and dental traits shared with Thomson's son were assessed from photographs rather than genetics: researchers' analysis, not established fact. The account of Thomson's reaction to the cast comes from one witness recalling it over many years, and her daughter's 2013 statement is a family recollection, not a document.
Not established at all. That the Somerton Man was a spy: no evidence of any kind has ever surfaced. That the 1945 Marshall death is connected: no link has been documented. That the code has been solved: it has not. That the horse-racing reading of the letters is correct: it is speculation, offered as such by the people who proposed it.
Still open after the name. The identification told us who died. It did not tell us what killed him. It did not read the code. It did not explain why a heartbroken engineer would unpick every label from his clothing and carry no papers. And it did not explain the nurse: on the record she remained a stranger to him, yet her phone number was in his book, she reacted to the cast of his face the way Lawson described, and her family says she knew.
Sources
- South Australia Police cold-case records, including the 2021 exhumation.
- Coroner T. E. Cleland, 1949 inquest transcript and expert testimony.
- Contemporaneous reporting in The Advertiser and The News, Adelaide, 1948–49.
- Abbott and Fitzpatrick forensic genealogy identification of Carl "Charles" Webb, announced July 2022, and the subsequent published genealogy.
- University of Adelaide statistical analyses of the code page.
- Paul Lawson, recorded interviews on the plaster cast and the 1949 identification session.
- Victorian public records: the Webb–Robertson marriage (1941) and divorce filings (early 1950s).
About the author
Motech researches and produces long-form video on technology and the unexplained for an audience of more than 270,000 subscribers. Corrections and tips: info@richardelhaj.media