For 74 years, the Somerton Man has been Australia's most baffling mystery. Now, we may know his identity.

It was the last evening of spring, 1948, when John Lyons and his wife decided to go for a stroll along Somerton beach in South Australia.

The sun was warm but not uncomfortably so, and the breeze rolled off the ocean as the two talked about things they’d later forget.

It wasn’t long before something caught their eye – mosquitoes circling a man who seemed strangely unperturbed.

They buzzed and bit, and the couple thought it odd that he seemed so unbothered by the insects.

It was John that detoured towards him, noticing that while his body lay flat against the sand, his head was propped up awkwardly against the seawall.

The man, he noticed, didn’t seem homeless, or like he had been the subject of a violent attack. He was a well-dressed and relatively good looking man who appeared middle-aged.

As John approached, thinking he might check for a heartbeat, the man raised his right arm. He was okay, he seemed to indicate.

Perhaps he’d drunk too much, the passersby assumed. And off they went to enjoy an otherwise uneventful evening.

The couple would later realise they were some of the last people to see that man alive. A man, who more than 70 years later, no one would know the name of. 

He would come to be known simply as the Somerton Man, and has since become the subject of one of the most baffling mysteries in human history.

 

Now, 74 years later, it appears that mystery may have just been solved. 

Professor Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide claims he has finally discovered the identity of the lone man. 

After making a breakthrough on Saturday, Professor Abbott has identified the man as Carl "Charles" Webb from Melbourne. 

Webb was an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in 1905, making him 43 when he died. 

He was married to a woman named Dorothy Robertson before they separated in April 1947. 

Professor Abbott says that fact could offer a potential explanation as to why the Melbourne man was in Adelaide. 

"We have evidence that he had separated from his wife, and that she had moved to South Australia, so possibly, he had come to track her down," he told the ABC. 

Professor Abbott, who has been working with American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, identified the man by using hair from a plaster mask made by police in the 1940s to analyse the DNA and build a family tree. 

"By filling out this tree, we managed to find a first cousin three times removed on his mother's side," Abbott told CNN. "It just felt like I climbed and I was at the top of Mount Everest." 

"It's like one of these folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve and we did it," said Fitzpatrick.

South Australia police are yet to verify Abbott's findings.

The breakthrough comes after South Australian police embarked on a renewed quest for answers with the help of modern DNA technology last year.

In May 2021, authorities exhumed the Somerton Man's remains from Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery. 

"The technology available to us now is clearly light years ahead of the techniques available when this body was discovered in the late 1940s," Forensic Science SA’s Assistant Director of Operations, Doctor Anne Coxon, said at the time. 

Body of Somerton Man exhumed https://t.co/G5G8WpUUGO pic.twitter.com/L1igpOoycW

— South Australia Police (@SAPoliceNews) May 18, 2021

While police are yet to confirm the findings, here's everything we know about the Somerton Man. 

No wallet, no clothes tags and a suitcase.

The lone man on the beach had no wallet or identification and all the tags on his clothes had been clipped off.

Inside the pocket of his light brown trousers was a packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a packet of cigarettes, a handkerchief, an American metal comb, a packet of matches, a railway ticket to Henley Beach and a bus ticket to North Glenelg.

It was the link to the railway that led detectives to an abandoned suitcase, belonging to the Somerton Man.

The contents of the suitcase, however, were even more perplexing.

A particular type of thread was found inside, that was not produced in Australia, and was also found in the pocket of the man on the beach.

There were clothes - all in the Somerton Man's size - with the name T. Keane or T. Kean written inside. It lead them nowhere. 

However, Abbott said he's found a link to the name. 

"It turns out that Carl Webb has a brother-in-law called Thomas Keane, who lived just 20 minutes drive away from him in Victoria," he told the ABC.

"So it's not out of the question that these items of clothing he had with T Keane on them were just hand-me-downs from his brother-in-law."

How did he die?

The cause of death has been near impossible to determine.

Clean-shaven and with polished shoes, the man had no bullet or stab wounds, and no blood was found at the scene.

Pathologist, John Matthew Dwyer, noticed that the Somerton Man's pupils were smaller than usual which could point to certain drugs like barbiturates - though this theory was not conclusive. He also had blood in his stomach which suggested to Dwyer some "irritant poison".

Blood and urine samples showed up nothing. Ultimately, the coroner found that the Somerton Man had died of heart failure.

He theorised that there were some poisons that could kill a man without leaving any discernible trace. Had he ended his own life, police wondered? Or was he murdered?

Listen to True Crime Conversations' episode on the Somerton Man. Post continues below.

A note with two words.

During the autopsy, a note was found buried deep within the Somerton Man's frontier pocket. Police had initially missed it.

The note appeared to have been torn from somewhere, and had printed on it the words: Tamám Shud.

The phrase was identified as Persian and could be loosely translated to mean "it is ended". It was also discovered that the phrase had been torn from a rare edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a 12th-century book of Persian poetry.

Next, police wanted to find that book.

The connection to a book of poetry.

It was several months before they located the copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from which the note had been torn.

A gentleman wandered into the police station one day holding the edition he'd found on the floor of his car. The final page had been partly torn out.

He recalled visiting Somerton in December the previous year with his brother-in-law. When he returned to his car, the windows rolled partly down due to the heat, he noticed a discarded book. Assuming it belonged to his brother-in-law, he never concerned himself too much with where it came from.

Police theorised that the book had been tossed there by the Somerton Man as he made his way down to the beach.

 

But new clues began to present themselves. There appeared to be a code in the book - a bizarre assortment of letters - as well as two phone numbers.

The first phone number led nowhere. The second, however, belonged to a nurse.

Her name was Joe.

Did a married nurse know the Somerton Man?

When police came knocking on Joe's front door, they discovered she was living with a partner and her young son.

She vehemently denied knowing who the Somerton Man was and couldn't explain how her phone number ended up in the back of his book.

Interestingly, however, she did know The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam very well. It was some of her favourite poetry.

Prior to burying the Somerton Man, police made the decision to make a cast of his face and body in the hopes he would one day be formally identified. Unconvinced that Joe was telling the truth, they asked that she visit the cast to ensure he wasn't someone she knew.

When Joe saw the cast, witnesses say she nearly fainted. Her disposition changed dramatically, but still, she denied knowing the man before her.

There was nothing more police could do.

The spy theory.

Discovered in the context of post-war Australia, as tensions between the West and the Soviets were rising, a theory quickly emerged that the Somerton Man was a Russian spy.

It would explain the lack of identification, and also the possessions that made it clear he was well travelled. It might also explain the indecipherable code buried in the back of his book.

Two sites close to the discovery of his body were known to be of interest to international spies, the Radium Hill uranium mine and the Woomera Test Range, a military research facility.

The Joe theory.

ABC journalist and host of Radio National podcast The Somerton Man Mystery, Fiona Ellis-Jones, theorises that the key to the case lies with Joe.

On Mamamia's crime podcast True Crime Conversations, Ellis-Jones said she believes Joe did know the Somerton Man, and according to a wealth of evidence explored in the podcast, the son belonging to Joe, also belonged to the Somerton Man.

Was this a love story gone horribly wrong?

Or two spies who could never reveal their true identities?

We might finally have the truth. 

This article was originally published on May 19, 2021, and was updated on July 27, 2022.