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The Somerton Man: Australia's Strangest Cold Case | History for Sleep · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good evening and welcome back to Sleepless History.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to spend a while on a beach in South Australia in the last weeks of the year, 1948.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is early summer there.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The evenings are warm and long.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tide comes in quietly against a stone sea wall.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a few hundred people are taking the evening air, along a stretch of sand, called Summit and Beach, just south of a seaside suburb named Glenelg.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: On one of those evenings, a man sat down against the sea wall with his back to the stone.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stretched his legs out in front of
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: crossed his ankles and did not get up again.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had no wallet.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had no papers.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every label had been cut out of his clothing.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody ever came forward to claim him.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for the better part of 74 years, nobody could say with any certainty who he was.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became known simply as the summerton man, and a small scrap of printed paper found rolled up in a hidden pocket of his trousers gave the case the name it has carried ever since.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two words in Persian, meaning finished, or ended, Tamam, shoot.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a story about very ordinary things, about train tickets and bus tickets, about
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: about a card of orange waxed thread about a comb and a packet of chewing gum.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is about the patience of a coroner and the patience of a pathologist and the patience later of a professor who spent more than 20 years of his life on a question nobody had asked him to answer.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are no ghosts in it.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no chase and no confession.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a great deal of careful, unhurried, slightly tedious work, which is exactly the kind of thing we like around here.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are enjoying these long, slow walks through history, it does help a great deal if you leave a comment or follow the show wherever you happen to be listening.
• 2:13
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• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine,
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early access, add free listening and your favorite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there.
• 2:51
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• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to thank each and every one of you for your
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's go down to the water.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, The Morning on Summit and Beach.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Glenelg, in 1948, was the seaside suburb of Adelaide.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's sat about 11 kilometers, or roughly seven miles south west of the city center.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a tram ran the whole way, straight down a wide road to the jetty and the sea.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Adelaide itself was a quiet, orderly, sunlit city of about 400,000 people.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had been founded as a free colony without convicts.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it had a reputation, fair or unfair for churches, for wide streets laid out on a grid and for minding its own business.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Australia had come through the second world war with rather less drama than the eastern states.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rationing was still in force on some goods.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Clothing in particular was still scarce and still expensive.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a good suit was a thing a man held on to for years and repaired rather than replaced.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That small economic detail is going to matter later.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let it settle somewhere in the back of your mind.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 30th of November, 1948 was a Tuesday.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was warm.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Along the Esplanade,
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The road that runs behind the beach, there were houses and guest houses and directly opposite a particular stretch of sand, a home for children with disabilities, which the newspapers of the day called the crippled children's home.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: That building and the sea wall in front of it became the landmark by which the whole case would be measured and about seven o'clock that evening.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: a couple walking along the Esplanade, noticed a man lying on the sand, near the steps that came down from the road.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: With his head and shoulders propped up against the sea wall, they saw him extend his right arm upward and then let it fall.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They assumed he was drunk or tired or simply enjoying the last of the light and they walked on.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That kind of assumption
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: About half an hour later, another couple sat down on a bench not far away and noticed the same man in the same position.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They watched him on and off for perhaps half an hour, mosquitoes were out.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They remarked to each other that it was odd he did not swat at them.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them later said that they had joked that he might be dead and then dismissed the thought.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because people do not simply lie down and die against a sea wall on a pleasant Tuesday evening in front of an entire promenade of witnesses.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They left.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The light went.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tide came in and went out again.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: At about half past six the following morning, the first of December, a man named John Bain Lyons, a jeweler who lived nearby, came down for an early swim.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He saw the same figure in the same position, legs out, ankles crossed, head against the wall.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he noticed two men with a horse nearby who were also looking at the figure and calling out to him without any reply.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lions walked over, the man was dead and he had been dead for some hours.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: his head was slumped against the stone.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: His left arm lay out on the sand, and resting on the right collar of his coat, unsmoked at the end, but burned down at the other, was a half-finished cigarette that had apparently gone out where it lay.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police arrived a little after seven o'clock.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: What they found was, at first glance, entirely unremarkable, which is precisely
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: why it became so remarkable.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The man was about 40 to 45 years old.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was about five feet 11 inches tall, which is around 180 centimeters.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was in excellent physical condition with a strong athletic build.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had gray and hazel eyes and fair to ginger hair going gray at the temples, brushed back.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was clean-shaven.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: His fingernails were clean and well-kept
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: His hands were the hands of somebody who did skilled, careful work or no physical work at all.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was dressed well and for the season slightly too warmly.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wore a white shirt with a red, white and blue striped time.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brown trousers, a brown knitted pullover, socks and polished brown shoes, and over all of it, a fashionable, double-breasted jacket in a European cut, gray and brown.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The shoes were the thing that caught the eye of the first detectives.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were very clean, they had been polished.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They did not look like the shoes of a man who had spent a long day wandering a beach or sleeping
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: walking the length of a city.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They looked like the shoes of a man who had stepped out of a hotel room an hour earlier.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not wearing a hat.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1948, in a city like Adelaide, a man dressed like that would normally have been wearing a hat.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not an iron law, but it was close enough to one that the detectives noticed its absence immediately and never quite stopped noticing it.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in his pockets, there was nothing that could identify him.
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: No wallet, no money at all, not a single coin.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: No driver's license, no ration card, no letters, no photographs, no keys.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: What he did have was a small collection of the most ordinary objects imaginable, and I am going to list them slowly because they are the entire foundation of everything that follows.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had a used bus ticket from the city of Adelaide out to Glenelg.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had an unused second-class rail ticket from the city to a different beach suburb,
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: of a type made in the United States and not commonly sold in Australia at the time.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had a quarter full packet of juicy fruit chewing gum.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had a packet of army club cigarettes which contained seven cigarettes of a different and more expensive brand, Kensitas, and he had a box of Bryant and May matches about half full.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was all.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two tickets, a cone, some gum,
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: a cigarette packet with the wrong cigarette's inside it, and some matches, and then there was the other thing.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing that turned a sad, quiet, unexplained death into a 70-year question.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the police examined his clothing, they found that every single label, every maker's tag, every laundry mark had been carefully removed, not torn off in a hurry, cut out.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In one case, a small square of fabric had been neatly excised from the lining, a man had sat down on a beach in a good suit with clean shoes and no hat and no money and no name and somewhere along the line, either he or somebody else had taken the trouble to make sure that nobody would ever be able to trace his clothes.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter two, the body that refused to speak.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body was taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and then to the city mortuary and there the ordinary machinery of a sudden death began to turn.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: That machinery, in 1948, was slower and less powerful than it is now, but it was not primitive.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Adelaide had good pathologists.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had a police force with a fingerprint bureau and connections to police forces across the world.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it had, in this case, a great deal of time, because nothing else about this man was going to move quickly.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first autopsy was performed on the second of December by a pathologist named John Matthew Dwyer.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, the work was reviewed by Sir John Burton-Cleeland.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: an emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide, a man in his 70s who had spent a lifetime looking at difficult bodies and who approached this one with the unhurried thoroughness of somebody who had nothing left to prove what they found was strange in a very specific way, externally the man was in remarkably good order, there were no wounds, no bruises,
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: No marks of a struggle, no punctures, there was a small amount of sand in his hair and in his clothing, consistent with lying on a beach, and essentially nothing else out of place.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Internally, it was a different picture.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The spleen was enormously enlarged.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: about three times the size it should have been.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The liver was descended and thick with congested blood.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stomach was deeply congested and contained blood mixed with food.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were small hemorrhages in the kidneys and in the liver.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lining of the stomach showed the kind of irritation
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: that happens when something aggressive has passed through it.
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the stomach itself was the remains of a pasty, a small baked pastry filled with meat and vegetables, of the sort sold in any bakery or railway refreshment room in Australia at the time.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had been eaten, they estimated, three to four hours before death.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Dwyer's conclusion was direct.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not believe this was a natural death.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pattern of damage he thought was consistent with poisoning and specifically with a poison that acted on the heart and on the blood vessels.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Professor Kleyland went further and suspected a member of a family of substances known as cardiac glycosides, which come from plants such as the Fox Glove and the African Arrow Poison Plant.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two substances in particular came up repeatedly in discussion.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: One was Digitalis, derived from Foxcloth, used medically in small doses to treat heart conditions and lethal in larger ones.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other was Strophanthin, a far more obscure compound, which was of interest precisely because it was rare.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: because it acted quickly, and because it was known to break down in the body, in ways that could make it extraordinarily difficult to detect after death.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the samples went to a government analyst named Robert James Cowan, and Mr Cowan ran every test he had.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found nothing.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tested for the common poisons of the era.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ones that turned
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found no arsenic, no cyanide, no strict nine, no falium, no barbiturates, no alcohol.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was thorough, and he was honest, and his report essentially said that he could not detect any poison in the body, while also making it clear that the absence of a detected poison was not the same thing as the absence of a poison
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some compounds simply could not be found with the chemistry available in 1948, particularly if they were present in small quantities and particularly.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: if several hours had passed, and so the case arrived at its first dead end, and it was a very peculiar one.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three medical witnesses all agreed that the death was not natural, none of them could say what it caused it.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: While that was going on, the police were doing the more mundane work of trying to put a name to the face.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: His fingerprints were taken and circulated.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: First across Australia, then to Britain, to the United States, to New Zealand, to South Africa, to every police force that would receive them.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing came back.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: His dental records were chartered and circulated in the same way.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing came back.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was, in the entire English-speaking world, apparently no record of this man's teeth,
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: then there were the physical peculiarities and these are worth dwelling on because they should have made him easy to find and instead made him only more mysterious.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: His calf muscles were unusually high and unusually well-developed in a pattern that the examining doctors associated with two groups of people.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: One was dancers, particularly ballet dancers, who spend years rising onto the
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other was people who habitually wore high-healed or elevated boots, which in that era could include certain kinds of riders or certain kinds of manual workers.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: His toes were wedge-shaped, pressed together, in a way that suggested years of narrow-pointed footwear.
• 17:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: His ears had an anatomical quirk.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In most people, the lower hollow of the outer ear called the caveum is larger than the upper hollow called the Simba.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this man, it was the other way round.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That arrangement occurs in only a small percentage of the population, somewhere in the region of one or two people in every hundred.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: and his teeth had another rare feature.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was missing both of his upper lateral incisors, the teeth immediately either side of the two front teeth, and he had been missing them since birth.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: the K90th had drifted in beside the front teeth to fill the space.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: This condition, called hypodontia, is also uncommon.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Put those three things together and you have a man with a distinctive walk, distinctive ears and a distinctive smile.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He should have been recognized by somebody.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The body was kept and kept and kept.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because nobody claimed him and because the police kept hoping he was embarmed on the 10th of December, 10 days after he was found.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: which was itself unusual, and in barmed body could be preserved for viewing, and viewing was the only tool they had left.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And people came, over the following months, dozens of people came to look at the face of the dead man.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: and each one of them came with a private hope or a private dread.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: A woman thought he might be a missing relative.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man thought he might be a former workmate.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somebody suggested he was a missing
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnson walked into a police station very much alive to explain that he was not.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several people identified him with total confidence and were then shown to be mistaken.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point the police believed they had him as a missing stable hand, and that too came to nothing.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The figure most often quoted is that around eight separate people offered positive
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and every single one of them was wrong.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The inquest opened in June of 1949, under the city coroner Thomas Erskine Cleeland.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It heard from the doctors from the analyst, from the detectives, from the people who had seen the man on the beach, and at the end of it.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: the coroner was unable to do very much at all.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could not name the deceased.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could not state the cause of death.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said that there was no indication of violence, and that he was compelled to the finding that death had resulted from poison.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that he could not say, whether it had been administered by the man himself or by somebody else.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter 3, the Brown suit case.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: For six weeks, the police had a body and no belongings.
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in the middle of January 1949, somebody finally asked the obvious question, which is the question that solves most cases and had simply not been asked yet.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: If a well-dressed man arrives in a city with clean shoes and no luggage, where is his luggage?
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 14th of January, detectives went to the cloakroom at Adelaide Railway Station.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The large stone station in the middle of the city were a traveller could pay a few pens to leave a bag behind the counter for the day.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They asked whether anything had been deposited around the end of November and never collected.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: a brown suitcase, checked in some time after 11 o'clock in the morning on the 30th of November, the day before the body was found.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody had come back for it.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The suitcase had had its own label removed.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The clerk who had taken it in had no memory of the man who handed it over, which is entirely understandable, since he took in hundreds of bags a week
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: had no reason to remember any of them.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am going to go through the content slowly, because the inventory of that suitcase.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: is one of the strangest and most quietly frustrating lists in the history of criminal investigation.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything in it is completely ordinary.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing in it points anywhere.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside, there was a red checked dressing gown, a pair of red felt slippers in a size 7.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: four pairs of underpants, a pair of pajamas, shaving equipment, including a razor and a shaving brush and a stick of shaving soap, a light brown pair of trousers with dry sand still in the cuffs, a pair of pajama trousers.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hankachiefs, a laundry bag, a tin of brown-boot polish, a coat, shirts, ties, socks, a scarf, then the order items, an electrician screwdriver, a small pair of scissors of the kind used for cutting stencils with the edges sharpened.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: A table knife that had been cut down and shaped into a short sharp instrument with the handle wrapped, a stenciling brush of the type used by third offices on merchant ships to stencil markings onto cargo and a card of orange waxed thread.
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That last item was the single most interesting thing in the case up to that point.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it is the sort of thing that only matters if somebody is paying attention.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thread was an unusual type.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not available for sale in Australia.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when detectives compared it to the repair on a pocket lining in the trousers, the dead man was wearing on the beach.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They found the same orange wax thread in the same unusual shade, holding that repair together.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: That single spool of thread is the reason the suitcase and the body are linked at all.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Without it, the brown case in the cloakroom would have been just another unclamed bag.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The clothing in the suitcase had also had its labels removed with three exceptions.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and this is where the case takes on the quality of a puzzle that is almost taunting you.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: On a tie, there was a name tag reading T-Kee.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: On a laundry bag, there was a name, Kee.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on a singlet, there was the name Kee, without the final letter E. Three names left in place, when every other identifying mark in the man's possession had been carefully cut away.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police spread the name across Australia and then across the world and searched for any missing man named Keen or Keen.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no such man missing anywhere in any English-speaking country.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Detectives eventually reached a conclusion that seems obvious in hindsight and was remarkably clear headed at the time.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whoever removed the labels had deliberately left the Keen tags alone because the
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: it was not his name.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was probably the name of a previous owner of secondhand clothing.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in 1948, with clothing still expensive and still scarce, secondhand clothing and hand me downs from relatives were entirely normal.
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hold on to that thought as well.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will come back at the very end of this story in a way that is quietly satisfying.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tools produced a flurry of theorizing that went nowhere.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stenciling brush and the sharp and scissors suggested a merchant seamen since ships officers used exactly that equipment to mark cargo.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But merchant shipping records turned up nothing.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: the sharpened table knife suggested to some mines, a weapon, and to other mines, simply a man who had improvised a tool, as people constantly did in the 1940s.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The clothes themselves were examined by a man who knew about such things.
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he pointed out that certain features of the stitching in cut, particularly the way a coat had been machine-finished, were consistent with American manufacturer, or at least with a garment made in the American style.
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That fitted with the aluminium cone, which was also American.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: it did not fit with anything else.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it raised the possibility that the man had spent time in the United States, which nobody was ever able to confirm.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the middle of 1949,
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police had exhausted every ordinary path.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had a body they could not name.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: A cause of death they could not prove.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A suitcase full of objects that told them nothing.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a name on a tie that belonged to somebody else.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before they buried him, they did one last thing.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it turned out to be the most important decision anybody made in the entire case.
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1949, a taxidermist and museum preparator named Paul Lawson was brought in to make a plaster cast of the dead man's head and shoulders.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lawson worked in the mortuary for several days, taking impressions in plaster of the face, the ears, the neck, the upper chest.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was meticulous.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, by every account, a careful modest craftsman who simply wanted to do the job properly.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was a plaster bust, an accurate three-dimensional record of a man's face.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: At a time when photographs of the deceased were often poor and always flat.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the plaster, without anybody intending it or noticing it, a few strands of the man's hair were caught and held.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would sit in that plaster, undisturbed in a museum's store room for more than 60 years.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 14th of June, 1949,
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Summaton man was buried at West Terrace Cemetery in Adelaide.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The burial was paid for by public subscription and by a private arrangement, and it was properly done.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was buried in a sealed plot, in case he ever needed to be exhumed.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: A headstone was later placed over him.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It read, here lies the unknown man who was found at Summaton Beach, first of December
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Flowers appeared on that grave, left by somebody who never identified themselves, nobody ever established who left them, or why.
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tamam should.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now we come to the part of the story that made the summit and man famous, and it begins as so much of this case does, with somebody looking at a piece of clothing one more time.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the spring of 1949, several months after the death, Professor Kleyland went back through the dead man's clothes yet again.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not expecting to find anything.
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was doing the thing that good investigators do, which is to repeat a search that has already been done, on the grounds that the previous search might have been done by a person who was tired, sewn into the waistband of the brown trousers, was a fob pocket.
• 29:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A fob pocket is a small narrow pocket, sometimes called a watch pocket.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: tucked inside the waistband and easy to overlook because it is not much bigger than two fingers.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside it, rolled tightly, was a scrap of paper about two inches across.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unrolled, it carried two printed words in a distinctive typeface.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tamam should.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The words are Persian.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They mean, roughly, it is ended or it is finished.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they are the last two words of a famous book.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The book is the rubyat of Omar Kayam.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Omar Kayam was a Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet, who lived in the 11th and 12th centuries, and who is remembered in the West, almost entirely, for a collection of four line verses about wine, mortality, and the pointlessness of worrying about things you cannot control.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: an English writer named Edward Fitzgerald produced a loose translation of these verses, and it became over the following decades, one of the most widely owned books of poetry in the English-speaking world.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers carried it, students quoted it.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was printed in a thousand editions, from expensive leather-bound presentation copies to small, cheap pocket volumes, and its tone, gentle, fatalistic, faintly melancholy, made it enormously popular with people who had lived through two world wars.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the last verse, in almost every edition, are the two Persian words printed as a sort of closing flourish.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tamam shoot.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the police now knew that somebody had torn those two words out of a copy of the Rubayat, rolled the scrap up and tucked it into a hidden pocket.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The paper stock was unusual of better quality than most editions used and the police put out a public appeal asking anyone who owned a copy of the Rubayat with the last words missing to come forward.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: For months, nothing.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, at the end of July 1949, a man walked into the police station with a book.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a local Glenelg man, a chemist by trade, whose identity was kept out of the papers at the time and who was later publicly named as Ronald Francis.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: His story was mundane in exactly the way that real stories are.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some months earlier, around the end of November 1948, he had been
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: with the window of his car down.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: At some point, he, or his brother-in-law, had noticed a small book lying in the back of the car and assumed that one of them had put it there.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody claimed it.
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It got shoved into the glove box and forgotten.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, months later, hearing the police appeal, he went and looked at it.
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a copy of the Rubayat, published by the firm of Whitcom and tombs in New Zealand.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The final page was torn.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The missing piece matched the scrap from the fob pocket exactly.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: along the tear line and in the paper fibers, and on the back of the book, there was something else.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somebody had written on a sheet of paper resting on the back cover, hard enough to leave faint indentations in the cover itself.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the police examined it under angled light and chemical treatment, they could make out three things.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first was a telephone number.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second was another number.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: partly obscured and never satisfactorily read, which some believed to be a second telephone number that had been crossed out, and the third was five lines of capital letters.
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second line had a line struck through it, as though whoever wrote it had made a mistake and started again.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And indeed, the second line and the fourth line begin identically with the letters M, L, I, A.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is the kind of thing that happens when somebody is copying something and loses their place.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The police called it a code and the newspapers called it a code and the name has stuck ever since, though whether it is a code at all is still an open question.
• 34:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lines were sent to Navy cryptographers in 1949.
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were looked at again by intelligent services over the following decades.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In more recent years, they were examined by the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization, and by a group of academics and enthusiasts at the University of Adelaide, and by more amateur code breakers than anybody has ever counted.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The conclusions have been consistent and disappointing.
• 34:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are only about 50 letters, which is nowhere near enough material to break a cipher by statistical methods.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The letter frequencies do not match ordinary English text, which suggests it is not a simple substitution.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They do, however.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: bear some resemblance to the frequencies you get from the first letters of the words in an English sentence.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That has led to the most widely held theory, which is that the lines are not a cipher at all, but a nomonic and a crostic.
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: a private shorthand in which each letter stands for the first letter of a word that only the right and you.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: If that is right, then the lines are unbreakable in principle, not difficult, unbreakable.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no amount of computing power.
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: that will recover a sentence from its initials.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you do not already have some idea what the sentence was about.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the telephone number.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was, in 1949, an unlisted number.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: When police traced it, it led to a house on Mosley Street in Glenelg.
• 36:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: No more than 400 meters, about a quarter of a mile.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the spot on the beach where the man had been found.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The number belonged to a young woman, a former nurse whose name was Jessica Ellen Harkness and who at that time was going by the name Thompson, the police who had a strong instinct for discretion in an era when an unmarried woman's reputation was a fragile thing.
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: agreed not to publish her name, and they kept that promise.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: For nearly 60 years, in books and articles and documentaries, she was known only by a nickname, Justin.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was not publicly identified until long after her death.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: She told the police a story that was both helpful and entirely unhelpful.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the war, while working as a nurse and Sydney, she had given a copy of the Rubeiat of Omar Kayam to a young army lieutenant named Alfred Boxel, whom she had met at a hotel.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: She had inscribed it with a verse.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This immediately became for the detectives, the most promising lead in the entire case.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: because it's suggested that the dead man might be Boxal.
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they found Boxal, he was alive, he was living in Sydney, working in a maintenance depot, entirely unaware that he had been the subject of a national search.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he still had his copy of the rubyat, complete, with the inscription in it and the last page firmly attached.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a different addition.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not the book from the car.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: That lead closed as neatly and as unhelpfully as every other lead in the case.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there was one more thing.
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it is the detail that has fueled more speculation than anything else in this story.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the detectives took the woman to see the plaster bust that Paul Lorson had made, Lorson himself was present, and so was detective sergeant Lionel Leane.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both men later said that her reaction was extreme.
• 38:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: She went pale.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: She looked in Lawson's words, as though she was about to faint and had to be steady.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: She looked away and could not look back, and then she said that she did not know him.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: She maintained that for the rest of her life.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: She asked that her name never be made public and the police honoured that.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: She married, raised children, and died in 2007, without ever having said anything more on the record.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her daughter, Kate Thompson, spoke publicly some years later and said that her mother had told her she knew who the man was, but that the identity was known to a level higher than the police force.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: She also said, her mother had been able to speak Russian and had never explained where or why she had learned it.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: That single interview, more than anything else, is what turned the summerton man into a cold war story.
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the cold war story is genuinely tempting.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: 1948 was the year of the Berlin blockade.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the year in which the Western Intelligence Services first understood the scale of Soviet penetration of allied communications.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in South Australia, about 500 kilometers north west of Adelaide.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: a vast rocket testing range was being established at Wumerar, run jointly with the British, and it was one of the most sensitive military projects in the country.
• 39:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea of a foreign agent moving through Adelaide, carrying a one-time cipher in the back of a book of Persian poetry, and dying of an undetectable poison is irresistible.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has been written about a hundred times.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: it must be said, entirely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no document, no intercept, no defectors testimony, no archival trace anywhere in Australian, British, American, or Soviet records connecting this man to any intelligent service.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The theory rests on atmosphere, on coincidence of geography, and on one woman's frightened face in a mortuary in 1949.
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter 5, a name at last.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: For 50 years, not much happened.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case sat in the files occasionally revived by a newspaper feature or a television segment.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plaster busts sat in the police museum.
• 40:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The suitcase and its contents were
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: at some point in the 1980s destroyed, because storage space is finite, and nobody thought a 40-year-old unsolved death needed a brown suitcase taking up a shelf.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two people, more than any others, kept the case alive.
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first was a south Australian detective named Gerald Feltus, generally known as Jerry.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He took over the file in the 1990s as a cold case, worked
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and continued after his retirement.
• 41:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was the one who finally identified the woman from Mosley Street, and the one who, out of respect for her family, continued to call her Jestin in the book he published in 2010.
• 41:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Feltus was not a romantic about the case.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: His view, broadly, was that the man was probably a rather sad individual who had come to
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that most of the mystery came from the ordinary chaos of a world in which record-keeping was imperfect and people fell through the gaps.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second was a professor at the University of Adelaide named Derek Abbott.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was an electrical and biomedical engineer, originally from Britain, and he first read about the case in a magazine in a laundromat.
• 42:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became, by his own cheerful admission, obsessed.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He put his students to work on the letters.
• 42:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: He measured ears, he compared teeth, and he developed a theory that the young woman from Mosley Street had known the man because she had had a child by him.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: pointing to her son, Robin Thompson, who was born in 1947, and who had both the unusual ear structure and the missing lateral incisors.
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robin Thompson as it happens.
• 42:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: became a professional dancer with the Australian ballet, which fitted rather neatly with those high, well-developed calf muscles on the man on the beach.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Abbott's search for Robin Thompson's descendants led him to a woman named Rachel Egan, who had been adopted as a child and raised in New Zealand.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and who had no idea of any of it.
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They met.
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: They became engaged the following day and later married and had children.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Abbott has been very good humored about the obvious joke which is that he married into the case.
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: What Abbott really wanted was permission to exume the body and for years he could not get it.
• 43:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Applications were made and refused.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The state's position was reasonably enough that exhumation is a serious matter and should not be done to satisfy curiosity.
• 43:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But something else was available and it had been sitting in plain sight since 1949.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plaster bust.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The hares caught in the plaster when Paul Lorson made his cast.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2011,
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Abbott was given access to those hairs.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were rootless, which in earlier decades would have made them almost useless, because the richest genetic material in a hair sits in the root, but techniques had changed.
• 44:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2018, a team at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide succeeded in recovering the complete mitochondrial genome from that hair.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: mitochondrial genetic material passes down the direct maternal line, mother to child, essentially unchanged.
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It told them that the man's maternal ancestry was European, and it placed him in a particular maternal lineage.
• 44:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not enough to name him, but it was proof.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: that useful genetic material could still be pulled out of a 70-year-old lump of plaster.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 2021, after decades of argument, South Australia police finally exhumed the grave at West Harry's cemetery.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The coffin was lifted, and the remains were taken away for forensic analysis by the state's own scientists.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, Abbott had joined forces with an American forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick, who specialised in exactly this sort of problem.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 2022, the hair had yielded a broader genetic profile, covering the whole genome, rather than just the maternal line.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that profile could be uploaded to public genealogy databases where ordinary people had deposited their own results while researching their family trees.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The method is called forensic genetic genealogy and it works in a way that is almost boringly logical.
• 46:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: You do not look for the person.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You look for their cousins.
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The profile came back with a match to a distant relative.
• 46:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: A first cousin, three times removed on the maternal side.
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: From that thread,
• 46:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fitzpatrick and Abbott built outward, named by name, certificate by certificate, until they had a family tree containing around 4,000 people.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then they narrowed it.
• 46:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They needed a man of roughly the right age, of the right ancestry, on both his mothers and his father's side, who had disappeared from the records around 1948, and for whom no death was ever registered.
• 46:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: They found
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 26th of July, 2022, Derrick Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that the Summerton man was in their assessment, a man named Carl Webb, who had gone by Charles.
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born on the 16th of November 1905, in footscree, an industrial suburb in the west of Melbourne in the state of Victoria.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was the youngest of six children.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: the son of Richard August Webb and Eliza Amelia Grace.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was an electrical engineer and an instrument maker, which is to say a man who worked with his hands at small, precise, delicate tasks.
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man, in other words, with clean fingernails and no calluses, he wrote poetry.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, by family accounts, something of a loner.
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He liked to bet on horse races.
• 47:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He married a woman named Dorothy Jean Robertson, known as Doth, the marriage failed.
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: She left him, and at some point in the late 1940s, she moved to South Australia.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He disappeared from the record in Melbourne in about 1947.
• 48:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1951, she divorced him on the grounds of desertion, which is to say she went to court and swore that her husband had gone away and could not be found.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three years after a man of about his age had died on a beach, a short distance from where she was living.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there is the detail that ties the whole thing back to a tie and a laundry bag.
• 48:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Car Webb's sister, Frida, was married to a man named Thomas Keene, T. Keene.
• 48:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name left on the clothing when every other label had been cut away, not a code, not an alias.
• 48:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just the name of a brother-in-law who's old shirts and ties had been passed down to a man who could not afford new ones in a country still rationing cloth.
• 48:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The horse racing habit
• 48:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: offered a possible answer to the letters as well.
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: If a man who bet on horses was keeping notes in the back of a book, then five lines of capital letters might be the initials of horses in a racecard, or of a system of bets.
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a theory, not a solution, but it has the great virtue of being the sort of thing a real person actually does with the back cover of a book and one popular theory did not survive.
• 49:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The broader genetic profile did not support any relationship between car web and Robin Thompson or his descendants.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The matching ears and the matching teeth, those two striking rareties that had convinced so many people for so long appear to have been coincidents.
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two uncommon traits happening to land in two unrelated people is exactly as unlikely as it sounds, and it happened anyway.
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a useful lesson about how easy it is to build a story out of a resemblance.
• 49:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So where does this leave us?
• 49:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, on the sand.
• 50:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It leaves us in an odd and rather human place.
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Derek Abbott has said publicly that he is 99.99% sure of the identification.
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Independent researchers have found photographs.
• 50:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the web family albums of a man who looks very much like the face in the plaster, labelled simply as Charlie, web surviving relatives, great nieces and great nephews who had never heard of him, have spoken about the strange feeling of acquiring a lost family member in their 80s and their 40s and their 20s.
• 50:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, as of the middle of this year, the identification is still not official.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Australia police completed their own forensic work on the exhumed remains some years ago.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The final step is a report to the state coroner and a formal coronial finding and that step has not yet been taken.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has been expected, imminently, for several years running.
• 51:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reasons for the delay have never been publicly explained.
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The grave at West Terrace Cemetery is empty now.
• 51:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The headstone that read, here lies the unknown man, has been removed.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until the coroner makes a finding, the remains cannot be formally returned to the family, and the family cannot decide whether to re-belly him there in Adelaide or take him home to Melbourne.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, for the moment, a man who almost certainly has a name is lying in a forensic facility.
• 51:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: 78 years after he sat down against a sea wall, waiting for a piece of paper to be signed.
• 51:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even if that paper is signed tomorrow, it will not tell us the things we most want to know.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will not tell us why he came to Adelaide, though we can guess.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will not tell us whether he found the woman he may have been looking for, or whether he stood outside a house on Mosley Street and lost his nerve.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will not tell us what he ate that pasty wall, or what he thought about on the tram out to the beach, or whether he took something deliberately, or whether his heart simply failed on a warm evening in front of a promenade full of strangers who assumed he was asleep.
• 52:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will not tell us why he cut the labels out of his clothes.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though, if you have ever known somebody who decided to disappear, you may find you can imagine it well enough.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: What we are left with is smaller and quieter than the legend.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: not a spy, not a cipher, a middle-aged instrument maker from Melbourne who liked poetry and horses, whose marriage had ended, who was wearing his brother-in-law's old tie, and who tore the last two words out of a book of Persian verse and put them in his pocket.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tamam should, it is ended.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this hour with me.
• 53:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are still awake, you can let your eyes close now.
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing else to follow.
• 53:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tide is going out on Summit and Beach.
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The light on the Esplanade is going off one lamp at a time.
• 53:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well.
• 53:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will find another quiet corner of history next time.