A professor who has spent decades solving one of Australia’s most enduring mysteries claims to have discovered the identity of the Somerton Man. Derek Abbott of 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 Australian Police and South Australian Forensic Science have not verified the findings of Abbott, who worked with renowned American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick to identify Webb as the Somerton man.
The Somerton man was found washed up on a beach in South Australia in 1948. (Supplied)
Forensic Science SA declined to comment and referred CNN to SA Police, who said there were no updates and police would make further comment “when test results are received”.
By sequencing the DNA, Abbott says he and Fitzpatrick were able to locate the final piece of a puzzle that has captivated historians, amateur detectives and conspiracy theorists for more than 70 years.
Last May, South Australian police responded to Abbott’s calls to exhume the Somerton man’s body and experts from Forensic Science SA began work to try and find the best way to analyze his DNA
But in the end Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide’s School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, says it was strands of the man’s hair caught in a plaster “death” mask made by police in the late 1940s who provided him with what he says. it is a 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. (9 News)
A decade ago, Abbott was given strands of hair by police as he continued what had become a personal quest to solve the mystery of the Somerton man.
The hair was examined for years by a team of DNA experts at the University of Adelaide, which provided the DNA information that allowed Abbott and Fitzpatrick to further narrow the field.
In March, Abbott said he had already established the Webb name through years of painstaking work with Fitzpatrick to build a complex family tree of some 4,000 names that led to Webb, whose date of death is not known. ‘had registered.
“By filling in this tree, we were able to find a first cousin three times removed on his mother’s side,” Abbott said.
And on July 23, they matched the DNA obtained from the hair to DNA tests done by Webb’s distant relatives.
The code found scrawled in a book added intrigue to the mystery. (Supplied)
“It’s like one of those folklore mysteries that everybody wants to solve, and we did,” said Fitzpatrick, who has investigated other cold cases, including the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart and the crash of Northern Flight 4422 -west in 1948.
“I felt like I’d climbed and was at the top of Everest,” Abbott said 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 raises more questions about the strange clues surrounding the case, including the last words of a Persian poem found in his pocket and what appeared to be a war code written in a book, which for many years causing speculation that he was a spy.
These clues can now be reinterpreted with information from public records, but the full truth can only emerge over time as the man’s identity is revealed.
There is hope that one of South Australia’s most enduring mysteries may be solved with the discovery of the so-called Somerton Man. (9 News)
Who was the man from Somerton?
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 of good build, 40 to 50 years old, 1.8 meters tall, with blue-grey eyes and pale brown hair with graying on the sides.
He was not carrying identification, prompting police to look for other leads, according to an investigation conducted in the years after his death by investigators interested in filing the case.
Somerton Man: The facts (9News)
In his pockets, they found tickets suggesting he had caught the train at Adelaide Railway Station the day before and checked a suitcase into the station’s luggage room.
The suitcase contained clothing with the tags ripped off, and police told the inquest that a tailor thought his coat was American in origin.
Despite those leads, the case did not provide a name for them either, the inquest heard.
A letter dated January 1949, signed by FBI Director John Edgar Hoover, confirmed that the US had not found a match to his fingerprints in its files, according to the investigation.
Perhaps the most puzzling clues came months after the body was found.
Some hairs were inadvertently trapped in the plaster preserving some DNA, while the rest of her body was buried. (new)
A pathologist re-examined his clothes and found a hidden pocket containing a rolled-up piece of paper printed with the words “Tamam Shud,” which means “the end” or “finish” in Persian.
They are the last words of the poem The Rubaiyat, by the 11th-century Iranian polymath Omar Khayyam, which had been torn from a book that was later handed over to the police.
An unnamed man said he found it discarded in his car on November 30, the day before the Somerton man died.
The man had no further information, but the book provided more puzzling clues.
Police traced a handwritten phone number on the back cover to a woman who lived in the nearby Adelaide suburb of Glenelg.
He was reportedly horrified when shown the death mask, although he denied knowing the man.
Near the phone number were scribbled letters that some assumed might be a secret wartime code, though all attempts to decipher it have failed.
Now it seems the truth is potentially more pedestrian.
Somerton Beach in relation to Adelaide. (new)
Who was Carl ‘Charles’ Webb?
According to Abbott, Webb was born on 16 November 1905 in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria. He was the youngest of six siblings.
Little is known of his early life, Abbott says, but he later married Dorothy Robertson, known as Doff Webb.
When Webb emerged as the main person of interest in the family tree, Abbott and Fitzpatrick went 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 April 1947, when he left Dorothy,” said Fitzpatrick, founder of Identinders International, a genealogical research agency involved in some of the most high-profile cold cases in ‘America.
The Somerton Man Mystery – 1948 to 2021
“He disappeared and she showed up in court, saying he had disappeared and she wanted a divorce,” Fitzpatrick said.
They had no known children.
Fitzpatrick and Abbott say Robertson filed for divorce in Melbourne, but documents from 1951 revealed he had moved to Bute, South Australia, 144 kilometers north-east of Adelaide, establishing a link with the neighboring state, where the body was found.
“It’s possible he came to this state to try to find her,” Abbott speculated.
“That’s us drawing the dots. We can’t say for sure that’s why he came, but it seems logical.”
Information in the public record about Webb sheds some light on the mysteries that have surrounded the case.
They reveal he liked to bet on horses, which could explain the “code” found in the book, said Abbott, who had long speculated that the letters might correspond to the horses’ names.
And the poem “Tamam Shud”? Webb enjoyed poetry and even wrote his own, Abbott said, based on his research.
Somerton Man – questions and theories. (9 News)
In 1949, when no one came forward to identify the body, it was embalmed and a plaster cast of the man’s face was made, as a physical reminder of who he was.
Some hairs were inadvertently trapped in the plaster preserving some DNA, while the rest of her body was buried.
Decades later, in 1995, Abbott heard about the case and devoted himself to 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 try to extract DNA.
About 20 people from the university worked on the project over the years, Abbott said.
CNN has contacted the University of Adelaide for comment on Abbott’s findings.
In 2012, the university team extracted DNA from hair that showed the Somerton man’s maternal group.
Then, several years later, they made a “huge breakthrough” in refining the halo group even further in H4a1a1a, Abbott said.
By then, Abbott and Fitzpatrick had been working for years to reexamine the clues on her 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 work on the hair pieces.
Adelaide Cemetery Authority pallbearers carry the exhumed Somerton man’s body. (9 News)
“This is probably one of the oldest cases that had been solved using this methodology,” Fitzpatrick said.
“Not only is this hair 70 years old, it’s been in plaster for 70 years.”
Abbott said he had not taken his findings to SA Police as they were conducting a “parallel investigation”.
“Its protocol is not to talk about a case until you’ve done your part,” he said.
“They will probably 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, really interested in helping solve the mystery of how she died,” he said. “I’d like to see the toxicology done. And I’d like to know what happened to Dorothy.”
Abbott says they’re convinced they’ve found their man.
“In anything like this, you can only be 99.999 percent sure it’s right,” he said.
“Strange things can happen. There can be a twist.
“Just say, . . .