Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get help on mental health and suicide, visit spotify.com/resources. Who is the Somerton Man? For over 70 years, Australians have been captivated by that very question.
Speculations have ranged from a man on a trip to see an ex-lover, to a smuggler, even a Cold War spy. But thanks to a dogged amateur researcher with an unexpected love story, the mystery that once seemed unsolvable may finally have an answer. But it hasn't put the conspiracy theories to rest.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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- Bocas del Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Before we get into the story, amongst the many sources we used, we found reporting from Smithsonian Magazine and ABC Australia extremely helpful to our research. On November 30th, 1948, at around 7 p.m., a couple went for an evening walk along the beach at Somerton Park, just outside of Adelaide, Australia. As they took in the soft lapping of the waves...
They noticed a man in a neat brown suit propped up against the seawall that separated the sand from the promenade above. His body sat just to the left of a staircase, as if he'd made his way down and collapsed in the first spot he could find. He was about 20 yards away from the couple, so they didn't get a good look at his face.
As they passed, the man raised up his arm like he was waving or reaching out for something. Then his arm dropped to his side, exhausted by the effort. A cloud of mosquitoes hummed around him. The couple laughed, assuming he was drunk. They let him be and continued on their walk. The next morning, two jockeys were on an early morning horseback ride along the beach when they came across the same man lying in the sand.
They were about to keep riding until they realized that something was off. The color had completely left his face. His mouth hung open, his body was rigid, and his eyes stared vacantly ahead. When they dismounted to get a closer look, their fears were confirmed. The man was dead. Authorities arrived and transported the body to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
The examining doctor determined that he likely died around 2 that morning. At first glance, the man seemed like an average Joe. Mid-40s, 5'11", gray eyes, reddish-brown hair. He looked professional and put together with clean, trimmed fingernails and a smooth, shaven face. On a closer look, two things stood out to one of the medical examiners. The man had particularly pronounced calf muscles and
And 16 of his teeth were missing. The contents of the man's pockets revealed little about his identity. The coroner didn't find a wallet or an ID, but he did have travel tickets. One unused ticket stub from Adelaide to Henley Beach, which was a nearby town, and a bus ticket stub from Adelaide to Somerton.
The man's clothing only deepened the mystery. At the time, it was common for people to have their names or initials on the labels of their clothes. That way they could identify them at the laundry or dry cleaners. And the tags were usually sewn on all four sides. But all the labels of the man's suit were removed. Someone had apparently gone through the trouble of carefully cutting out each one.
And there was one more thing of note: his pant pockets had a tear that was restitched using an orange-colored thread. The coroner tried to determine the cause of death. At first, he suspected poison. He ran a series of toxicology tests, but they came back negative. There was no poison. At least, none the coroner could detect.
Stranger still, there were no signs that the man had vomited or experienced any convulsions before he died, both of which would have been typical of poisoning. In the end, the coroner could not find a cause of death. But he did know one thing: whatever killed the Somerton Man was not natural and not an accident. But before police could determine who killed the Somerton Man,
They needed to figure out who he was. They published his photo in Australian newspapers, assuming that sooner or later someone would come forward to claim him as a relative. Intrigued by the mystery, throngs of people visited the morgue to view his face. And time after time, people came out of the woodwork claiming to know the Somerton Man. But none of the leads went anywhere.
So, about a month after they discovered his body, investigators turned their attention to the man's possessions. Or, lack thereof. He had travel tickets, but strangely, no luggage. So the police put out a notice for abandoned property at nearby hotels and railway stations. They checked dry cleaners, bus stations, and lost property offices. Anywhere someone might drop off a bag.
Then, on January 14th, 1949, just three days after putting out the call, they found something. Someone had left a dark brown suitcase at the Adelaide train station. According to the luggage ticket, it was checked in at around 11:00 AM on November 30th, the same day people spotted the Somerton Man lying on the beach. When they opened it,
Investigators found a random assortment of items, including handkerchiefs, scissors, a knife, and toiletries for shaving. But it was a spool of thread that caught their attention. It was an unusual brand not sold in Australia. And it was orange, the exact same color and hue that had been used to mend the Somerton man's trouser pocket.
This suggested the suitcase did, in fact, belong to the Somerton Man. And another very specific item possibly provided insight into his occupation: a stencil brush used on ships to put names on cargo. When police looked into the brush, they found it would have been used by a third officer in the Navy. But officials also found a seemingly contradictory clue in the luggage: drafting pencils.
like the kind that would be used by an engineer. There were also a number of clothing items in the suitcase, including shirts, underpants, and a coat. They appeared to be the exact size and style worn by the Somerton Man, all of which had the tags removed, except for three. There was a tie with a name written on the label in ink,
Though difficult to decipher, it looked like it read T. Keane, K-E-A-N-E. Finally, the police had a possible name for the Somerton man. Investigators searched for anyone who might have gone by T. Keane. They checked records in other English-speaking countries, including the United States, where the man's coat came from.
Yet somehow, there weren't any records of a missing person by that name anywhere. Whoever the man was, he clearly wanted his identity to remain a secret. By April of 1949, the police were at a loss. It had been nearly five months since they'd found the body and they were no closer to answers.
So they turned to a professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide named John Cleland. Professor Cleland gave the evidence another look over. While going through the Somerton man's clothing, he noticed something the police had missed. There was a hidden pocket in the man's trousers. It contained a rolled up scrap of paper.
When Professor Cleland unfurled it, he found two words inside. To Mom Should. The paper looked like it had been torn from the page of a book. The words were printed, not written, in a bold, curving font, and the back of the page was blank. Fortunately, one police reporter recognized the phrase.
The words were in Persian, and they were from the famous 12th century poet Omar Khayyam. Khayyam's most renowned work was a book of verses called the Rubaiyat.
The collection's themes were mostly about enjoying the good things in life while they lasted. Drinking wine, making love, and not fretting over the hereafter. An English translation of Kayyam's work became very popular during the early 20th century, especially during World War II. But even in the English version of the book, the last words, to mom should, were left in their original language. They translated to...
It is finished. With that, investigators considered that the Somerton man had left this one clue behind to let authorities know that he died by suicide. Or maybe he'd spent his last hours musing over the poetic meaning of existence. But nothing could be proven, and police couldn't just keep the man's body in the morgue forever. By then, over six months had passed since he died. It was time for a burial.
First, though, investigators set to work preserving the one solid clue they had, the Somerton man's face. They had him embalmed, then made a plaster cast of his head and shoulders. On June 14th, 1949, the Somerton man was laid to rest in a cemetery in Adelaide. He was interred under a concrete vault, just in case police ever needed to exhume him later. His tombstone read,
Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton Beach. The Somerton man was buried, but authorities still didn't know who he was. All they had were the cryptic words of a Persian poet torn out of a book. So, they decided to track down the text. Police called every library in the Adelaide area. They asked reference librarians to check if their copies of the Rubaiyat had any pages torn out.
If the scrap was from a printing that was one of a kind, investigators would have to somehow track down the exact book that page came from, which seemed all but impossible. Until someone dropped it in their laps. In July 1949, a man walked into the Adelaide police station and presented investigators with a copy of the Rubaiyat.
He'd found the book in his car months earlier, around the time the Somerton Man died. But it wasn't his. He didn't think much of it until police published the mysterious scrap in the newspapers. He had no idea how it got in there, but remembered on the day the Somerton Man was found, he left his car unlocked on Moseley Street, just above Somerton Beach.
Flipping to the last page, he showed them that the text's final words to Mom Should were torn out. The tear perfectly matched the scrap from the Somerton man's pocket. It was the book officials had been looking for.
Investigators inspected the book for further clues. On the back cover, written in pencil, almost too light to make out, was a telephone number. The phone line belonged to a young nurse who lived near Somerton Beach, only about a five-minute walk from where the man was discovered. At first, the woman was known only by a pseudonym, Jestyn. Police suspected she may have been an old flame, and from the moment they started talking to her,
It seemed like she had something to hide. When the police showed Jestyn the plaster cast of the Somerton Man's face, she seemed stunned. The chief inspector thought she might faint, but then she composed herself. She told police she didn't know who the Somerton Man was, and she refused to look at the cast any further. Still, there was the lingering question of how her phone number got into the Somerton Man's copy of the Rubaiyat.
Police pressed her on it until she confessed. Justin said that during World War II, she worked at a hospital in Sydney. There, she met an Australian army officer named Alfred Boxall. She didn't elaborate on the nature of their relationship, but admitted she'd given him a copy of the Rubaiyat. Police thought they had their man, but when they dug into Boxall themselves, they quickly learned he wasn't the Somerton man.
Boxall was alive. Not only that, but he still had the copy of the Rubaiyat that Justin gave him. It was a totally different edition from the Somerton Man's and its back page was intact. It had Justin's name signed on the front page, along with a handwritten line of poetry. With little to go on, police returned to the pencil inscription on the Somerton Man's book.
There weren't just phone numbers. There were letters written below them. Investigators could barely make out what they said, but when they placed the text under an ultraviolet light to enhance the contrast, they were able to transcribe the message. It was five rows of capital letters, seemingly random, with some of the letters crossed out. The police were baffled at first. Then it dawned on them. It was a code.
Police sent the Rubaiyat to Australia's Naval Intelligence, who'd been responsible for deciphering messages during the war. They were the most elite team of decoders in the country. Investigators needed all the minds they could get. After so many false leads, surely this would be the breakthrough they'd been hoping for. So in addition to giving the code to the Navy, they appealed to the public.
They published the cryptic message in newspapers. But the code stumped even the experts at Naval Intelligence. It seemed impossible that so many people could be working on the mystery and there was no progress. And yet, that's what happened. Time and again, the Somerton case presented investigators with juicy clues and somehow none of them bore fruit.
In 1958, ten years after the Somerton Man was found, police ended their official investigation. The case remained open, but they no longer actively pursued new leads. But that was just the end of the official investigation. As we've seen many times on this show, a combination of an unsolved death and a mysterious code is the perfect recipe for conspiracy theories.
In the 1940s, Australia was no stranger to espionage. It was part of the British Commonwealth and fought on the Allied side during World War II. Australia's intelligence agencies regularly intercepted cabled messages from enemy nations, which, according to historian John Blaxland, played a key role in ending the conflict.
After the armistice in 1945, though, the world rearranged itself along new ideological lines: capitalism versus communism. The next war wasn't going to be fought on the battlefield. It would be won by scientists and engineers, each racing to build the best military technology, and each side hoping to keep the other side from pushing the nuclear red button first. A big part of that job
was making sure no secrets were stolen. In order to stay ahead of the Soviets, the US government established a counterintelligence program called the Venona Project. Its goal was to decode messages sent between the USSR and its network of agents around the world. And it reached all the way to the Australian outback.
Thanks to the Venona Project, Australian agents uncovered a so-called nest of spies embedded around the country. It turned out that the Australian Communist Party, which had been banned in 1940, was still operating underground. After some of its members gained access to classified documents, they funneled them back to the Soviet Union.
With that revelation, it was crucial for Australia to keep a tight lid on national intelligence. In 1949, one year after the Somerton Man turned up dead, Australia formed the Security Intelligence Organization. They are equivalent to the FBI. Even in Australia, the Cold War ushered in a new era of paranoia, where anyone might be a spy.
As far as the Somerton Man is concerned, there were details about the case that suggested he wasn't just some anonymous person. He made a concerted effort to hide his identity. If you recall, all of the clothing found on the Somerton Man and in his suitcase had the labels removed. Only a few items in his suitcase had a name left on them, Keen, but that turned out to be a dead end.
It's like the man wanted to throw the police off his scent. In addition, the man's nationality was impossible to place. Some investigators thought he was British based on the way his hair was styled.
But others believed he may have been American, or at least traveled to the United States at some point since his coat was made there. Its stitching indicated it was manufactured in the U.S. and unlikely to have been imported by a retailer, especially because it was individually tailored. That means the Somerton man either got it in the U.S. or bought it secondhand.
It's important to note that even the average person could travel intercontinentally at the time. It's very possible the Somerton man had vacationed or visited family in America prior to his death. A coat from America didn't necessarily prove he was a spy. But that wasn't the only thing that suggested he had a foreign identity. There was also the unusual orange thread used to mend his pants, which were a brand that wasn't sold in Australia.
So he seemed to travel a lot. Which makes it seem like the Somerton Man was this international man of mystery. If that's the case, it's hard to imagine what he was doing in Adelaide, a remote city all the way on Australia's southern coast. But the answer may lie about 300 miles north, at an air force complex called Woomera.
Woomera, a joint base between Australia and the United Kingdom, is the largest land-based test range in the Western world. It covers 47,000 square miles of flat, dry land, roughly the same size as the state of Pennsylvania. The base was established in 1947, one year before the Somerton Man was found.
The facilities were highly secretive, since some of Britain's most sensitive military projects were conducted at Woomera. And maybe the reason they needed all that land was simple: that they were testing missiles, rockets, and atomic bombs. If that's true, then South Australia likely would have been a hotbed for espionage activity. It's possible that the Somerton Man was an Australian spy who knew too much.
Maybe he grew loyal to the Soviets and had to be neutralized. Or perhaps he was a Soviet who wanted to defect but was killed before he could. That also brings us back to the mysterious way he died. At the inquest, medical experts noted that there wasn't any poison in the man's system, at least not one they could detect.
One explanation was that he was given, or consumed, something that broke down immediately, so fast that it left no trace 24 hours after his death. Another option was that he'd injected a substance rather than taking it orally. That might have caused it to decompose rapidly in the liver, but experts couldn't find any signs of a needle puncture, and the condition of the man's liver didn't support that theory either.
The coroner eventually consulted a professor of physiology and pharmacology at the University of Adelaide named Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks. Hicks only knew of two groups of substances that fit the description. Both were very rare and extremely dangerous. In fact, at the inquest, Hicks refused to say the names of the poisons out loud. He didn't want the public to know about them.
Instead, he wrote them down on a piece of paper and gave it to the coroner. The main drug he suspected was called strophanthin, which some indigenous tribes in West Africa historically used to make poison arrows. It only took a small dose to kill someone, and it wasn't detectable with the usual chemical tests. But there was another possibility, and that had to do with the cigarettes found in the Somerton man's pocket.
The packaging was for a brand called Army Club, but the cigarettes inside were a different type called Kensitus. It's unclear why he would have a different brand of cigarettes inside his pack unless that's how he was poisoned. When the Somerton Man was discovered on the beach, he had a cigarette resting on his collar.
almost like it had fallen out of his mouth mid-smoke. It's possible that someone switched out his cigarettes and replaced them with ones containing an untraceable poison. It wouldn't be the only time spies considered using smokes to assassinate someone. In the United States, the CIA thought about killing communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro by poisoning his cigars.
But what did all of this have to do with Justin and the Rubaiyat? Well, in 2014, a former British detective named Gordon Kramer made a discovery that he believed answered that very question. Looking closely at the code found in the Somerton man's pocket, he realized that there was some odd markings in between the letters. Maybe the secret to unlocking the code wasn't about what the letters stood for,
It was what was inside them, because within the letters, Kramer found micro-writing. Micro-writing is when smaller letters are hidden inside of bigger ones. Once Kramer recognized the message within a message, he was able to deduce some very interesting things. The micro-writing contained the text, Venom X4621.
According to Kramer, that's a reference to the de Havilland Venom, a British fighter jet that was developed in the late 1940s. He believes the plane may have undergone testing at the Womera base. Kramer also claimed he found micro-writing in Boxall's copy of the Rubaiyat, the one Justin gave him with a handwritten note inside.
He couldn't read what it said, but he claimed it proved the existence of some kind of spy ring involving all three of them. And as for Boxall, some digging into his records revealed that during World War II, he rose rapidly through the ranks of a special operations unit known as the North Australian Observer Unit. But when questioned by ABC journalist Stuart Littlemore,
Boxall was tight-lipped about the nature of his military service, and it's still unclear why Justin gave him the Rubaiyat. Maybe it wasn't a coincidence that the Somerton Man turned up with the same book and a code inscribed in it several years later. Maybe Justin was a spy. In 2013, Justin's adult daughter Kate told 60 Minutes Australia her mother could speak Russian.
but Justin never revealed where she learned it. Apparently, Justin also admitted to Kate that she'd lied to the police about the Somerton man. Justin knew full well who he was, but she wasn't going to reveal any more than that, not even to her own daughter. Justin did intimate that the matter went higher than the jurisdiction of the police, much higher. After this revelation,
Many wondered if Justin was involved in some kind of counter-espionage program for the Australian government. Maybe she helped protect national secrets by passing on intel to the military, and the Rubaiyat was the key. But if even the top codebreakers in the world couldn't read the cipher, who could? Derek Abbott first came across the story of the Somerton Man in a magazine article in 1995. He was intrigued.
But his job as an electrical engineering professor at Adelaide University demanded his time, so he didn't pursue the story beyond that article. But that changed in 2007, when Derek came across the story again and learned the strange code found in the Somerton man's pocket had yet to be cracked. The code-breaking crew was able to rule out over 20 different kinds of World War II ciphers,
But after six years, the investigation came to a standstill. Undeterred, Derek turned his investigative attention to a different mystery. Who was Justin? For decades, the mysterious nurse was kept out of the limelight. Her real name was redacted from police files to protect her from the publicity. Because of her initial reaction to the plaster cast,
Derek thought she may hold the answer to the Somerton man's identity. He tracked down Jerry Feltus, an Adelaide detective who held possession of the original piece of paper where Justin's number was written, found in the Somerton man's pocket. Thanks to Feltus and the phone number, Derek uncovered Justin's real name. Jessica Thompson, who went by Joe.
Unfortunately, he didn't get to ask her any questions. She passed away earlier that year before Derek learned her name. Still, Derek felt maybe he could learn more from her family history, so he dug deeper. He found that in the late 1940s, Jo was unmarried, but she'd supposedly been dating a local man named Prosper Thompson. In 1947, about a year and a half before the Somerton man's death,
Joe gave birth to a son, Robin Thompson. Joe said that Prosper was the boy's father and eventually the couple married. But many have speculated whether Joe was hiding something, especially given her evasive behavior when police questioned her about the Somerton Man. Joe appeared to know exactly who the Somerton Man was, so maybe she was also lying about who really fathered her child.
That brought Derek to a new theory: the Somerton Man was Robin's father. By this time, Robin Thompson had also passed away. But Derek was able to track down a few photos and soon found that Robin possessed some rather unique features.
Earlier we mentioned the Somerton Man was missing a total of 16 teeth, including two of his incisors. Derek discovered this was due to a genetic disorder called hypodontia. Then there was the matter of his ears. The Somerton Man's upper ear hollow was larger than his lower ear hollow. These features may not sound too out of the ordinary,
until you learn that less than 2% of the population have either of those traits. And sure enough, Robin shared both. To make the case even more compelling, Robin had been a professional dancer and performed with the Australian Ballet Company. Experts at the Somerton Man's inquest noted he had unusually high calf muscles and wedge toes that suggested he too had been a ballet dancer.
Robin eventually had a daughter with another dancer in his troupe named Roma, although they put the baby up for adoption. The child's name was Rachel Egan. She was, potentially, the Somerton man's granddaughter. Rachel grew up not knowing she'd been adopted, but she'd always had an affinity for theater and dance, particularly ballet.
When Rachel was in university, a social worker contacted her and told her that not only had she been adopted as a baby, but her biological mother now wanted to connect. Rachel jumped at the chance and soon moved to Brisbane to be closer to Roma. With this revelation, Rachel was able to piece together her life story and finally discovered why she may have been so drawn to ballet.
She learned that when she was conceived, her father Robin had just secured a spot with a Royal New Zealand ballet company and Roma moved from Australia to join him. The young couple wasn't quite prepared to care for a child, so they put Rachel up for adoption. Just as Rachel was beginning to understand her biological family, there was another shock.
Derek Abbott wrote her a letter to say she may play a part in one of the most enduring mysteries in Australian history. Derek told Rachel his theory. The Somerton man was her grandfather. If they could get a DNA sample from his body and compare it to hers, they might be able to confirm his identity once and for all. Though she was dubious, Rachel agreed to meet Derek at a restaurant in Brisbane.
At first, she found the professor odd. He took a keen interest in her ears and teeth. She joked to Australian Story that it was the first time a man had ever been after her DNA. Despite the peculiarities of the situation, Rachel found herself captivated by both the Somerton Man mystery and Derek Abbott. The day after their meeting, Derek and Rachel decided to get married. Their wedding was in 2010,
And they went on to have three children. Derek's love story was complete, but now he needed to find out if his own children are descendants of the Somerton Man. The most logical path forward was to have the Somerton Man exhumed to extract DNA from the bones. Derek petitioned multiple times to recover the Somerton Man's remains. Repeatedly, the request was denied.
However, in 2015, Derek discovered another way to prove his theory. He found some of the Somerton Man's hairs still embedded in the plaster cast made back in the 1940s. He gave the hairs to a laboratory at the University of Adelaide, hoping that there was enough genetic material to test against Rachel's DNA. However, the results were inconclusive.
and scientists couldn't create a complete DNA sequence from the limited sample. As far as Derek was concerned, things had stalled on the genetics front. But in 2021, Derek's hope was renewed when the Australian government finally exhumed the Somerton Man after all. The decision was part of a national program launched by the South Australia Police to put names to unidentified remains.
But exhuming the body of Australia's most famous John Doe was no simple task. On May 18th, a whole crew with heavy machinery pulled up to Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery. First, they had to remove the concrete vault that covered his coffin. Then they had to be careful not to damage the wooden casket or the body inside. All told, it took almost 12 hours to get the Somerton man out of the ground.
After this process was complete, scientists faced a new challenge: getting the man's DNA. It wouldn't be as simple as swabbing the inside of his cheek. He'd been dead for over 70 years, which meant most of his organic matter had deteriorated. What made it even more difficult was the fact that he'd been embalmed. Embalming replaces the body's natural fluids with preservative chemicals, like formaldehyde.
It helps make the body last longer, which is what police were hoping for in the 1940s, but unfortunately it also degrades the DNA. It's possible that there may not be enough DNA left in the Somerton Man to get a viable sample, and because the process is so complex, there's no telling when South Australian police will have results. Derek Abbott, however, didn't want to wait around. He aspired to be the first to identify the Somerton Man.
By 2022, he'd been researching the case for 15 years and he wasn't afraid to throw a Hail Mary.
Derek reached out to Colleen Fitzpatrick, a former NASA employee turned pioneer in forensic science. In 2017, Fitzgerald co-founded the DNA Doe Project to identify John and Jane Does using forensic genetic genealogy, a field of science that has exploded in recent years due to its role in solving high-profile cold cases.
The practice involves an investigator uploading DNA from a suspect to open source DNA platforms such as GEDmatch, which are often used by members of the public to trace their heritage. Colleen suggested Derek send a hair sample to Astraea Forensics, an American DNA lab that specializes in recovering genetic material from even the most degraded samples.
Derek had one hair sample from the Somerton Man's Plaster cast that still had its root attached. He'd kept it safe for ten years, waiting for the right moment to play that card. He shipped his precious hair sample off to Estrella and waited. The results came back. No dice. It felt like the end of the road for the investigation.
At the time, it was believed that only a hair sample with its root still attached could produce enough DNA for identification. But Derek decided to push the boundaries of forensic science. He sent Estrella a hair sample without a root, and it came back with more than enough genetic material to make an identification. Derek and Colleen uploaded the DNA to GEDmatch and got to work building out the Somerton Man's family tree.
As they put together the pieces of the puzzle, Derek and Colleen noticed one name that fit all of their criteria. He was male, would have been in his 40s in 1948, and did not have a death date listed in the system. And then came the stinger. The man's brother-in-law was named Thomas Keene, as in T. Keene, the name found on pieces of the Somerton man's clothing. It couldn't be a coincidence.
Derek and Colleen tracked down nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles. They collected DNA from living descendants, and on July 22nd, 2022, they got a match. A few days later, Derek made an announcement more than 70 years in the making. The Somerton man's name was Carl Charles Webb, an electrical engineer who'd been born in November 1905 in Melbourne.
He attended college at Swinburne University of Technology and worked in a factory that made electric hand drills. In 1941, Webb married a woman named Dorothy Robertson. The marriage wasn't a happy one. Later, in Dorothy's divorce decree, she described her husband as violent, lonely, and moody. One day, she returned home to find he had attempted suicide.
In April 1947, Webb left his and Dorothy's home, and there's been no trace of him since. Dorothy filed divorce papers in 1951, claiming she'd been deserted. DNA evidence seems like it would be undeniable, but now, nearly two years later, the South Australia Police Department has yet to conclude their own testing or verify the identification.
And though Derek hoped his announcement would have put the conspiracy theories to bed, the lack of confirmation leaves the door open for speculation. Longtime Somerton Man researcher Gordon Kramer says it's certainly plausible the Somerton Man is Carl Webb, but he believes a more certain answer lies in the bones the police department exhumed in 2021, specifically the skull.
According to Kramer's research, Paul Lawson, the man who created the plaster bust way back in 1949, believed the Somerton Man's skull was tampered with, or perhaps even replaced. If the Somerton Man was indeed Carl Webb, well, Kramer says that doesn't rule out the spy theory. It's possible Webb might have been part of a network of spies who used the Rubaiyat to trade secrets.
The world may still not have 100% conclusive answers in the mystery of the Somerton Man, but for Derek Abbott, he was able to solve his own puzzle. The DNA testing ruled out his wife, Rachel, as bearing any relation to the Somerton Man. And for the Webb family, it feels like a piece of their family has returned. Stuart and Christy Webb are the great-great-grandnephew and grandniece of Carl Webb.
Before being approached by Derek Abbott to do DNA tests, they'd never heard his name, but had heard rumors of a missing family member. After testing confirmed their heritage, Stewart and Christy dug up old family albums. There, they found photos of Carl smiling amongst family members and posing with his football team. Christy told ABC Australia, "...this was a person."
He wasn't just a media hit for a little while and an unsolved mystery. He was our family. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. If you or someone you know is feeling hopeless or struggling emotionally, visit spotify.com slash resources for help. Amongst the many sources we used, we found reporting from Smithsonian Magazine and ABC Australia extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember...
The truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Kirsten Liu and Chelsea Wood, researched by Bradley Klein and Chelsea Wood, edited by Lori Gottlieb and Mackenzie Moore, fact-checked by Anya Barely and Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.
Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted.
It's an initiative that Hills has supported since 2002. And since then, the Food, Shelter and Love program has helped more than 14 million pets find new homes, changing their life forever so they can change yours. Science did that. Learn more at hillspet.com slash podcast.