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SOMERTON MAN MYSTERY 'SOLVED' AS DNA POINTS TO MAN'S IDENTITY, PROFESSOR CLAIMS

By CNN
8:12pm Jul 26, 2022

WATCH AND READ

THE SOMERTON MAN MYSTERY

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A professor who has dedicated decades to solving one of Australia's most
enduring mysteries claims he has discovered the identity of the Somerton man.
Derek Abbott, from the University of Adelaide, says the body of a man found on
one of the city's beaches in 1948 belonged to Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical
engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905.
South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified
the findings of Abbott, who worked with renowned American genealogist Colleen
Fitzpatrick to identify Webb as the Somerton man.

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turned'
The Somerton Man was found washed up on a South Australian beach in 1948.
(Supplied)
Forensic Science SA declined to comment and referred CNN to SA Police, who said
there were no updates and that police would provide further comment "when
results from the testing are received".
Using DNA sequencing, Abbott says he and Fitzpatrick were able to locate the
final piece of a puzzle that has captivated historians, amateur sleuths, and
conspiracy theorists for more than 70 years.
Last May, South Australia police responded to Abbott's calls to exhume the
Somerton man's body and experts at Forensic Science SA started work to try to
find the best way to analyse his DNA.
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But in the end, Abbott, a professor in the Adelaide University School of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering, claims it was strands of the man's hair
trapped in a plaster "death" mask made by police in the late 1940s that provided
him with what he says is proof of the man's identity.
Dr Derek Abbott says the body of a man found on one of the city's beaches in
1948 belonged to Carl "Charles" Webb. (9News)
Police gave Abbott strands of the hair a decade ago as he continued what had
become a personal quest to solve the Somerton man mystery.
The hair was examined for years by a team of DNA experts at the University of
Adelaide, who provided the DNA information that allowed Abbott and Fitzpatrick
to further narrow the field.
By March, Abbott said he had already established Webb's name through years of
painstaking work with Fitzpatrick to build a complex family tree of around 4000
names that led to Webb, whose date of death had not been recorded.
"By filling out this tree, we managed to find a first cousin three times removed
on his mother's side," said Abbott.
And on July 23, they matched DNA obtained from the hair to DNA tests taken by
Webb's distant relatives.
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Code found scribbled in a book added intrigue to the mystery. (Supplied)
"It's like one of these folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve and we
did it," said Fitzpatrick, who has investigated other cold cases including the
disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937 and the 1948 crash of Northwest Flight
4422.
"It just felt like I climbed and I was at the top of Mount Everest," said Abbott
of the moment they made the apparent DNA match.
While the discovery appears to close the file on the Somerton man mystery, the
apparent confirmation of Webb's name raises many more questions about who he was
— and how he died.
If verified, it also creates more questions about the strange clues around the
case — including the final words of a Persian poem found in his fob pocket and
what appeared to be wartime code scribbled in a book, that for many years
prompted speculation that he was a spy.
Those clues can now be reinterpreted with information from public records, but
the full truth may only emerge with time as word of the man's reported identity
spreads.
There is hope that one of South Australia's most enduring mysteries could be
solved with the unearthing of the so-called Somerton Man. (9News)

WHO WAS THE SOMERTON MAN?

The Somerton man mystery began in the early hours of December 1, 1948, when
beachgoers found a body lying on Somerton beach in Adelaide.
The man was well-built, about 40 to 50 years old, 1.8 metres tall, and had
grey-blue eyes and gingery-brown hair that was greying at the sides.
He wasn't carrying identification, forcing police to look for other clues,
according to an inquest held in the years after his death by investigators keen
to close the case.
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Somerton Man: The Facts (9News)
In his pockets, they found tickets that suggested he had taken the train to
Adelaide Railway Station the day before, and checked in a suitcase in the
station's luggage room.
The suitcase contained clothes with the labels torn off, and police told the
inquest that a tailor thought his coat had US origins.
Despite those clues, the case didn't supply them with a name either, the inquest
heard.
The man's fingerprints and photograph were sent around the world, including to
the United Kingdom, United States, and English-speaking countries in Africa.
A letter dated January 1949, signed by FBI director John Edgar Hoover, confirmed
the US had found no match for his fingerprints in its files, the inquest heard.
Perhaps the most baffling clues came several months after the body was found.
Some hair inadvertently became trapped in the plaster preserving some DNA, while
the rest of his body was buried. (Nine)
A pathologist re-examined his clothing and found a hidden fob pocket containing
a rolled-up piece of paper printed with the words "Tamam Shud", meaning "the
end" or "finished" in Persian.
They are the final words of the poem The Rubaiyat, by 11th century Iranian
polymath Omar Khayyam, and had been torn from a book later handed in to police.
An unnamed man said he found it discarded in his car on November 30, the day
before the Somerton man's death.
The man had no further information, but the book supplied yet more baffling
clues.
Police traced a handwritten phone number on its back cover to a woman who lived
in the nearby Adelaide suburb of Glenelg.
She was reportedly horrified when shown the death mask, though denied she knew
the man.
Near the phone number were scribbled letters that some surmised could be a
secret wartime code, though all attempts to decipher it have failed.
It now appears the truth is potentially more pedestrian.
Somerton Beach in relation to Adelaide. (Nine)

WHO WAS CARL 'CHARLES' WEBB?

According to Abbott, Webb was born on November 16, 1905 in Footscray, a suburb
of Melbourne, Victoria. He was the youngest of six siblings.
Little is known about his early life, Abbott says, but he later married Dorothy
Robertson — known as Doff Webb.
When Webb emerged as the prime person of interest on the family tree, Abbott and
Fitzpatrick set to work, scouring public records for information about him.
They checked electoral rolls, police files and legal documents. Unfortunately,
there were no photos of him to make a visual match.
"The last known record we have of him is in April 1947 when he left Dorothy,"
said Fitzpatrick, founder of Identifinders International, a genealogical
research agency involved in some of America's most high-profile cold cases.
The mystery of the Somerton Man - from 1948 to 2021
View Gallery
"He disappeared and she appeared in court, saying that he had disappeared and
she wanted to divorce," Fitzpatrick said.
They had no known children.
Fitzpatrick and Abbott say Robertson filed for divorce in Melbourne, but 1951
documents revealed she had moved to Bute, South Australia — 144 kilometres
northeast of Adelaide — establishing a link to the neighbouring state, where the
body was found.
"It's possible that he came to this state to try and find her," Abbott
speculated.
"This is just us drawing the dots. We can't say for certain say that this is the
reason he came, but it seems logical."
The information on public record about Webb sheds some light on the mysteries
that have surrounded the case.
They reveal he liked betting on horses, which may explain the "code" found in
the book, said Abbott, who had long speculated that the letters could correspond
to horses' names.
And the "Tamam Shud" poem? Webb liked poetry and even wrote his own, Abbott
said, based on his research.
Somerton Man - questions and theories. (9News)

WHAT EVIDENCE IS THERE?

Back in 1949, when no one came forward to identify the body, it was embalmed and
a plaster cast was made of the man's face, as a physical reminder of who he was.
Some hair inadvertently became trapped in the plaster preserving some DNA, while
the rest of his body was buried.
Decades later, in 1995, Abbott heard about the case and set about trying to
unravel it.
In 2011, SA Police gave Abbott access to 50 hairs found embedded in the Somerton
man's mask, so scientists at the University of Adelaide could attempt to extract
the DNA.
Around 20 people at the university worked on the project over the years, Abbott
said.
CNN has reached out to the University of Adelaide for comment on Abbott's
findings.
In 2012, the university team extracted DNA from the hair showing the Somerton
man's maternal group.
Then several years later they made a "major breakthrough" to refine the
halogroup further to H4a1a1a, Abbott said.
By that time, Abbott and Fitzpatrick had been working for years to re-examine
clues from his body and the suitcase — anything that might shed more light on
the case.
They said they used forensic genealogy to mine DNA databases to build the family
tree that led to Webb, confirmed by the work on the pieces of hair.
Adelaide Cemetery Authority pall bearers carry the body of the exhumed Somerton
man. (9News)
"This is probably one of the older cases that had been solved using this
methodology," said Fitzpatrick.
"This hair is not only 70 years old, but it's been in a plaster cast for 70
years."
Abbott said he had not taken his findings to SA Police, as they were conducting
a "parallel investigation".
"Their protocol is not to talk about a case until their part is done," he said.
"They will most likely approach us (University of Adelaide) after our
announcement. The DNA findings are incontrovertible."
For Fitzpatrick, there are now more questions to answer.
"I'm really very interested in helping solve the mystery of how he died," she
said. "I would like to see the toxicology done. And I would like to find out
what happened to Dorothy."
Abbott says they're convinced they've found their man.
"In anything like this, you can only be 99.999 per cent sure that it's right,"
he said.
"Strange things can happen. There can be a twist.
"Just say, hypothetically, what if this guy had a brother that was adopted out
of birth that we don't know about and it's really his brother?" But he says
that's probably unlikely.
DNA has also definitively put to rest speculation that the Somerton man was the
grandfather of Abbott's wife Rachel Egan, Abbott said.
The couple met when his search for answers led him to her father, Robin Thomson,
who seemed to share some of the same physical attributes.
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View Gallery
Abbott says finding out there was no link was "a great relief".
"It was just the tension of not knowing either way," he said.
"So it's a relief just to know the truth."
Abbott now hopes their findings will be publicly verified, and others will build
on the information to create a fuller picture of the Somerton man — now thought
to be Carl "Charles" Webb — not a spy but a Victorian man who died one day alone
on a beach.
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