The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years.

Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning kind of guy? The list keeps on growing.

But why so many theories?

John Does & Jane Does

In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man.

Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (socially-distanced, mask-wearing) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)

Oh, and despite Wired’s nice story about the unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless”, I haven’t so far seen a torrent of theories speculating that he was an Anglo-American Douglas Adams fan obsessed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Or a gold prospector. Or a car thief. Or whatever.

“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?

Life & Death

Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death:

  • [S]mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years?
  • The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhaps months?
  • Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal.” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking.
  • The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa. There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes);
  • The heart, if anything, was contracted […] I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed.
  • There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down [sic] the right cheek.
  • The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck.” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to his death.
  • His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person or persons unknown.

But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpful conclusion.

And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. Something bad had happened, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh?

(Human) Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.)

To my eyes, though, it seems that Human Nature abhors a vacuum far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations.

In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: no smoking gun.

Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s mise-en-scene may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatrics of violence.

And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the absence of explicit forensic theatre. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.

Evidence of Absence

But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death.

Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right?

So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense.

Similarly, calling him “The Unknown Man” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck).

It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there.

Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was very much known.

The Missing Thread

In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectory sticks.

And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe.

In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces the right way up.

But even if – mirabile dictu – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side?

Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.

120 thoughts on “The Glut of Somerton Men…

  1. Bumpkin on November 17, 2020 at 4:05 am said:

    I’d settle for a name. Would you?

  2. Bumpkin: I’d indeed be very happy for a definite name (particularly if it isn’t the one we have already). I’m just flagging that there may well be less to find than we would like.

  3. Tamara Bunke on November 17, 2020 at 8:02 am said:

    A name would surely be just the first domino? There’d be a history attached to it. Perhaps some living relatives, etc.

    Anyway, I’m glad you finally mention the Isdal Woman. I believe there are some here among us who have an interest in her. And there is of course a ‘cipher’ aspect in her case, too: her handwritten note that suggests (at first glance) locations and dates.

    Like our friend Mr. Keane, she seems to have blown into town at an intriguing time of weapons tests, so the spy conspiracy brigade are all over the case. Can’t be long before they find some tiny writing.

    Perhaps you have some thoughts?

  4. john sanders on November 17, 2020 at 8:26 am said:

    Nick: I can’t see too much to complain about, in fact you’ve managed to cleverly avoid contensious issues that might lead to division amongst the accepted SM hierarchy; even to the extent of saying little if anything likely to bring on the usual flurry of abuse and disagreement. Even by slipping in your cleverly concocted body substitution ploy involving a late evening delivery from a safe house would find favour with punters having nothing to back-up their own pliagarised initiatives eg. re-Pete’s striped duds, no matches conundrum and another’s imported hit team mit clean-up crew occupying the vacant Nunn house opposite. PS: Such a pity you chose to inset a circa 1970 pic of the boulder strewn embankment for decorative appeal as opposed to the Advertiser original with its concrete sea wall, child proof stairset with lover’s seat and a panoramic shot of the beach, Alvington House and the roadway above X marks the spot.

  5. john sanders on November 17, 2020 at 9:11 am said:

    Bumpkin: It would have been nice to have had some more input on my recent posts re your former nemisis John Rau’s reluctance to issue an exhumation order based on legal opinion. Do you have something to add regarding possibikity of an ulterior motive amounting to a conflict of interest on his part eg. his close Keane (paternal grandmother) family links, or his having once lived close to an address of SM interest and more. Better to let’s all know by what other means we might niw pursue your main objective!

  6. D.N. O'Donovan on November 17, 2020 at 10:40 am said:

    I wonder what a modern forensic pathologist would make of the medical description? Rigidity not related to rigor mortis etc.etc.
    Have any of the recent writers included modern medical evaluations of that description?

  7. John Sanders: I was a bit bored of the same old picture of the beach, and thought I’d wheel out a different one, keep everyone on their toes etc. 🙂

  8. milongal on November 17, 2020 at 10:03 pm said:

    The intrigue in SM (as opposed to other cases – although as others have mentioned, I think the Isdal woman does attract a lot of intrigue too, and perhaps we could add the Bogle-Chandler case and half a dozen others too) is the total inconsistencies (some of which you highlight in your article).
    The TS (And subsequent code) also attracts interest – because it suddenly makes people read that this is something other than a “mundane death”. At the time it attracted some attention largely as police sought to identify the body, and the subsequent discovery of the “code” re-invigorated the interest as suddenly people embraced this as somehow linked to espionage – or some equally romantic thought.

    The interest seems to go in waves – there seems to have been very little between Littlemore’s storry about Ruffles’ theories and Abbott engaging his Engineering underlings with their mathematical attempts to break the code (in between which Feltus was obviously looking into things, although his book obviously appeared a little later). And it’s somewhere through the Abbott stuff that Cramer got wind of it and seems to have aggressively marketed his ideas through the media which has kept the interest flowing. In the last lustrum or 2 years interest seems to have particularly exploded – and I think this is sort of a “perfect storm” between the release of Feltus’ book, the vigour of Abbott’s attempts to organise an exhumation, and some of Cramer’s claims reaching wider audiences (and selling intrigue beyond all else). I know PB reads here too, so I’ll add that his book may well have contributed too – certainly his research for it has given us some interesting avenues to look at we might not otherwise have thought of.

    I agree the suicide scenario make no sense (why hide a slip intending to finalise your departure and – presumably – indicate it was intentional). That said, every other scenario anyone comes up with doesn’t make sense either – because there is simply too much conflicting evidence. One of the few things we can confidently say is that there seems to have been evidence that has been added or removed (or both). Naturally, it doesn’t help that a lot of our view is based on newspaper articles. This, coupled with a tendency to read too much into the wording (both in articles and any other records we can find) means that we come up with fanciful explanations for otherwise normal occurrences. Add into that seemingly inconsistent descriptions and it’s not too hard to fit any narrative you want to some version of the “facts”. And of course (as I think I flagged often in the past) confirmation bias helps us to pick the versions that best suit our pet theory (and happily dismiss the other
    I often think about Abbott’s “list of things we know about Somerton Man” and “list of things often misreported about Somerton Man”. I think the former is too long, and perhaps the latter is too short.
    We know a body was found on Somerton Beach on 1 Dec 1948. We know what he was wearing and what he had on his person (to some degree – I understand different sources have slightly different interpretations of his belongings). But every little bit of evidence beyond that becomes more blurry. The “code page” isn’t definitively linked to the slip; the suitcase isn’t definitively linked to SM. SM wasn’t definitively in Adelaide Railway Station on the morning of the 30 Nov, and wasn’t necessarily transiting from interstate if he was…. usw.

    Some of it we can have more confidence on than others, but very little of it we can say with any certainty. Perhaps that lack of certainty gives all of us the opportunity to be “experts” on our own tale, and so much as we’re intrigued by the story we’re also playing Sherlock Holmes (at least in our own mind). Increasingly I realise that were very unlikely to ever satisfactorily resolve it. I think (despite what we might say) very few of us would stop if we had a name. We’d then speculate on his personal life; on who he upset enough to end up on the beach; on why he ended up at Somerton Beach; etc. We love a mystery, and we’ll happily create a mystery out of the slightest unresolved issue – and once we resolve it, we’ll find another mystery (often related on some detail to it). Or we decide that our solution to the mystery might be wrong and decide an a better, deeper conspiracy…..it will go on forever (but that ain’t gonna stop us)

  9. milongal on November 17, 2020 at 10:18 pm said:

    @JS: It’s hard to get past the body substitution (but there’s very little time because of the tides). If you have an old pair of shoes, polish them up nicely and then put saltwater on them. They don’t stay shiny. I know the “…cold and damp” that someone (Moss?) mentions has previously had me agreeing he must have been on the beach at high tide, but I’m struggling to get past the shoes (unless someone put them on after the high tide. I also think with the tide peaking at 4:30AM (from memory), by 6:30 (or even 8AM when the body was removed) I’d expect it to be a bit wetter than “damp” (although I’ll accept a 20C overnight coupled with a warm morning maybe works to that end – and in fact in such weather then only dampness would be from the sea – Adelaide is not a humid place (in fact I know many a QLDer who argue Adelaide’s sometimes extreme heat is bearable because it’s a dry heat (unlike the humidity they get in QLD with somewhat cooler maxima) – although that said, I don’t know how many of them have actually been in Adelaide during a heatwave when sometimes the overnight temperature doesn’t drop below 30C).

  10. Tamara Bunke on November 17, 2020 at 11:15 pm said:

    “Cold and damp” to me is pretty meaningless. Objectively how cold? How damp? I read it as “cold and damp by human body standards”. Which is exactly what you’d expect of a corpse. No need for it to have been immersed.

    Same with the polished shoes. How polished? Can someone really objectively judge by ‘degree of polishedness’ how far or how long someone may have walked in a pair of shoes? And if I recall correctly, no one made a big deal of any supposed incongruity between location and condition of footwear at the time.

    I agree with milongal (BTW: “usw”? Klingt eher nach deutsch als australisch?): seizing on these tidbits feels like confirmation bias. Same with the trousers and matches. All unsubstantiated.

  11. Nick,

    Not a fair comparison yet with “Mostly Harmless”, as that sorta just happened, and on the Appalacian trail, a far less remote place than mid 20th century Australia it would seem to me. One thing about MH (and saving you guys a click) is that he had a fascination for the uber geeky game “Screeps”, a line programmable object game similar to Origins Tank game “Omega” that he scibbled in a journal. Was this is interest conducted in a vacuum? People who are strong researchers of MH, should try to make sure that known info is better preserved NOW (than I have there are gripes about SM’s stuff is) for future researchers. Interesting stuff though sir.

  12. john sanders on November 18, 2020 at 3:54 am said:

    D. N. O’Donovan: With respect, I can find no mention of the pathologist saying anything remotely resembling your assigned attribution, namely that the SM’s “Rigidity was not related to rigor mortis etc. etc.” What the man did mention in his inquest testimony is that ‘the post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck’ Of course one might well excuse a refrigerated body for being a little on the stiff or rigid side, though I’m pretty sure that is not quite what Dr. Dwyer was on about.

  13. Byron Deveson on November 18, 2020 at 9:40 am said:

    Diane, See Wkipedia.
    “n 1994 John Harber Phillips, Chief Justice of Victoria and Chairman of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, reviewed the case to determine the cause of death and concluded that “There seems little doubt it was digitalis.”[60] Phillips supported his conclusion by pointing out that the organs were engorged, consistent with digitalis, the lack of evidence of natural disease and “the absence of anything seen macroscopically which could account for the death”
    Phillips, J.H. “So When That Angel of the Darker Drink”, Criminal Law Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, April 1994, p. 110.

  14. The lack of success in determining the identity and cause of death of the Somerton Man had led authorities to call it an “unparalleled mystery” and believe that the cause of death might never be known.

  15. Byron: thanks very much for that, perfect. 🙂

  16. Matt: Somerton Beach wasn’t remote at all – the man’s body was found first thing in the morning on what was a fairly busy beach, with people going along it from early morning to mid-evening.

    I’ve read up on Screeps, which you clearly need to be a bit programmery (dare I say nerdy) to enjoy. Presumably people have trawled r/screeps looking for HHGTG-obsessed users who stopped posting around April 2017?

  17. Tamara Bunke: as John Sanders pointed out, I tried to steer clear of the trousers and matches in the post, preferring to rely as directly on the inquest text as possible.

    Raymond Lionel Leane said of the shoes (p.22): “They are practically new, and very clean. They look as though they had been polished that morning, or later.”

    My argument was less about the shininess of his shoes than about how someone writhing on the beach with stomach pain could make such small forensic contact with his environment.

  18. Leonid: yes, that was a nice quote from 11 April 1949 – https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/36361680 🙂

  19. Tamara Bunke on November 18, 2020 at 6:30 pm said:

    Nick, two issues occur to me. Firstly, is the inquest text sufficiently detailed in this regard to suggest that SM did NOT writhe around? For example, I don’t recall any mention of an incongruity between his physical state (and the state of the scene) and his putative cause of death. If there had been, you’d think Cleland et al would have used it to strengthen their comment about “difficulties disappearing” if death had occurred elsewhere. As it is, they didn’t take up the opportunity. Makes me think that – to them – nothing really looked out of place?

    Secondly, approaching this another way, is there anything to suggest that the cause of death would have inevitably caused any writhing around at all? The man’s internal bleeding and “congestion” are likely to have been long-standing issues. He’s functioned perfectly reasonably with them up to the point of death. Why start writhing now? I remember the quote from the cyclist who found “Neil Dovestone” on the track on Saddleworth Moor in 2015. He said “Neil” looked just like he was taking a nap at the side of the path.

    Neil, later identified as David Lytton, had self-administered strychnine. Which by all accounts isn’t a pretty way to go.

    As a post script to this: it took a year or more to identify Neil, despite these being living relatives who had known about the case. It came down to police legwork in the end. Eventually his name was found on a flight list from Pakistan.

    The one thing no one (incl. family) could understand is “why Saddleworth”. He had no known connection with the place. Until someone came forward this year with the simple theory that, as a tube driver in the 1980s, David would have seen a then prominent poster campaign featuring the location at which he chose to end his life. Perhaps not a lesson for SM? But may apply to Peter Bergmann.

  20. Nick,

    It seems to me that getting to Austrailia in any fashion is more difficult than getting to spot “x” on the Appalacian Trail in the US. The thing I was trying to stress that I failed miserably at was, is just because people haven’t concocted far out theories yet, does not mean they will not. You can take some comfort in the fact that there is no cipher element in it, that I am aware of at least, so you can tell people with justification that it is outside your zone of interest if is too much. Going over it myself the other night, it seems people inferred from there experiences with him, they “might” have a handle on who he was. The jury is still out on the genealogical data, though. I wonder if the existance of the (excellent) Wired article means that is not going so well.

  21. Matt: the Wired article just says that some DNA info is planned to be released next month, so not too long to wait, I guess.

  22. Matt: there were only 174 posts to r/screeps before May 2017, and it shouldn’t take long to rule out nearly all of the posters there. Might try that later…

  23. Tamara Bunke: have you read through the 1949 inquest? A pdf is on Derek Abbott’s primary evidence page, and he’s also put up an HTML version.

  24. Tamara Bunke on November 18, 2020 at 8:48 pm said:

    Nick, yes I have read it. And in the 49 inquest, Hicks and Cleland are quite clear that there is no reason to suspect any “trauma of convulsive death throes”. Hicks clarifies that any expected convulsions (if they occur at all) can be minor movements such as the “raised arm” witnesses at around 7pm.

    The problem I have with your theory of “forensic contact” with the place of death is that you’re applying 21st century forensic awareness to a mid 20th century investigation. The absence of a forensically useful description of the crime scene does not mean there was an absence of forensic evidence.

    And as to your thoughts on the lonely beach death making “no sense” at all: look again at the David Lytton / Neil Dovestone case. The sense is there somewhere, it’s just not evident.

  25. Tamara Bunke: well… if you rely on the actual evidence in the inquest rather than on inferences drawn by different witnesses, I think there is plenty of forensic meat to dine upon.

  26. milongal on November 18, 2020 at 10:12 pm said:

    @Tamara: Cold I get compared to a warm living body. Damp, I struggle with – especially on a warm, dry night. My point re the shoes is that leather shoes that have had saltwater would not be “polished” or even “clean”. They go a murky/scuffed tecture very quickly (mind you, as you point out, it’s one of those details that seems to have become prominent a lot later). That said, given what we know of the tide, and the lack of vomit (and other forensics) around the body, I’m not uncomfortable with the idea that if the body was there through the night, it had at some point been partially submerged (and I think the reports that it “…had not been in the water” might be better interpreted as “….had not washed ashore” – but of course that’s me being hypocritical and brinign in my own confirmation biases).

    Incidentally, the mention of remoteness reminds me (I’ve probably mentioned this before)….if you’re looking for a nice place to go quietly while watching your last sunset the beach North of Glenelg (closer to where the St Leonards bus would have terminated – and note even the South of the mouth of the Patawalonga would have been a lot less busier than it is today (most of that development is VERY recent) would be far quieter. In fact, extrapolating that a little further, if SM was indeed an out-of-towner, why has he decided to go to Glenelg (Adelaide’s best known and probably busiest beach)? You might argue he also had the Henley ticket – but once again you’re talking about one of Adelaide’s busiest beaches (at the time perhaps Semaphore might have been busier), but there’s large tracts of other beach easily accessible (with nearby public transport) that would be equally remote. I understand when you’re at the railway station you’re not going to ask a ticket clerk “where’s a nice beach to die?”, but I would imagine you could have a discussion about wanting to go to a beach that “isn’t necessarily very busy” (and I would think Largs and Semaphore South/Tennyson would fir the bill and (I’d have to double check) would have been reachable by public transport (Largs is on the Outer Harbor Line, but Tennyson might only have become easily reachable as West Lakes was developed in the mid 1970s). In fact, back then a lot of the area North of Largs (where Mangnoson went missing) would have been largely vacant, so a train to Outer Harbor (and any of the stops beyond Largs that existed (I think all of them except North Haven were already built – although while North Haven wasn’t there, there was “Yerlo” between Osborne and Outer Harbor (not sure if in the same location where North Haven is today)). All of those stations are an easy walk to a beach which back then would have been a lot less busy than Glenelg (and North of Fort Largs have a long track through the dunes that takes you well away from the road too).

  27. john sanders on November 18, 2020 at 11:40 pm said:

    Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out th truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they here…some old Greek philosopher

    Fundoshis were a slit sided skimoy breech cloth used by P.O.W.s in the Nippon death camps during WW2 which would ensure full leg tanning up to the croch; This being the most unusual condition described by pathologist Dwyer who suggested his subject could only have aquired it by continual use of bathers? over time. More interesting to me were his thoughts as to when such a ‘sunburning’ effect might have occurred, stressing that it could not have been during the previous year ’48 but likely the summer before and possibly even earlier than that

    Take for example 2/21btn (104 LAD) digger Lcpl. Charlie McDougall, who was taken prisoner in early ’42 on Ambon (Gull Force), then sent off to Hainan to spend the war labouring for the Japs his usual attire comprised of a pair of ‘jap-happys’ and army shirt in hot sun drenched conditions for most oart. Being one of the few to survive the three year ordeal, his subsequent means of repatriation are somewhat uncertain (at this stage), though he was known to have been aboard the HMAS Glenelg in September ’45 and we understand it arrived in Adelaide with it’s motley bunch of, by then well nourished former tanned walking skeletons around new years day 1946.
    NB: Chas was selected amongst about three hundred survivors due to being the only one listed amongst 1000+ without full personal details vis DOB, NOK, locality etc., so take note that I make no suggestion as to his being Somerton Man.

  28. I don’t know about you folks, but in my experience, if a man was to lie down on soft sand wearing shoes it wouldn’t take much movement to have said sand introduced inside his shoes in uncomfortable quantities .. and according to Strapps, the man he was watching was moving his legs around some.
    Mention was made of sand being found in the cuffs of his trousers, but they were the duds found in his suitcase

  29. john sanders on November 19, 2020 at 3:36 am said:

    Truth is, no one knows anything about SM apart from some idea of his physical attributes and the clothes he wore, and yet we’ve all had a crack at getting inside the poor fellows head, confidently second guessing every move he made from the time he decided on Adelaide as a destination, up until he breathed his last on a warm Tuesday eveneng, be it Somerton Beach or elsewhere, depending on one’s sense of imigination. These more or less self serving presumptions all started with the first press releases in 1948, continuing through generally baseless S.A. Police assumtions and in 1949 the Coroner’s summing up of so-called presumptive facts; Later we had the Littlemore Inside Sory mind reading excercise, then the wishy washy old detective’s own re-construction narative of his Unknown Man’s likely train of thought…What foolishness, what damned self assertive audacity and at the end of the day, a likely load of Baltic nesamone all round..I’ll own my share for whatever it’s worth.

  30. john sanders on November 19, 2020 at 6:26 am said:

    Tamara: The crime? scene, as you will by now be familiar had you taken my advice, was seemingly composed of a flat belt of non descript stable looking beach sand as the original press photo depicts rather nicely. According to our first offender Jack Lyons, the man was lying on the beach, partially supported by a flat seawall, alongside which stood a set of special purpose stairs. In the beach surrounds there is little to note, apart from some small piles of debris near the wall, derived we can assume from an accumullation of tidal flotsum positioned with help of wind and wave action over sand constantly moving when so affected. So we have a comrade lying there in state over a full king tide period at least. So when constable Moss arrived at seven in the morning, golly gosh everthing looking so spic & span with nary a sign of disturbance, vis. no mess or debris around the body, no horse shit or signs of hoof pawing to be seen, no hat or false teeth, matches or vomit etc. Only natural since the big high of 4.50am was by then on the way out and taking with it any signs of junk or earlier sand disturbance…..By the way comrade, you might care to note some changes in Lyons two later versions which were done without any professional coaching vis. “Both hands shot straight up then dropped..death spasms” and “…same position except that in the morning he was flat out on the sand” , statement of which was supported by hoop Neil Day in 2018.

  31. Tamara Bunke on November 19, 2020 at 6:42 am said:

    Nick, it’s highly selective meat you’re dining on, isn’t it? For example, the report only mentions sand in relation to the corpse’s hair and – IIRC – the turn-ups on some trousers (I’m not even sure if they were the trousers he was wearing, striped or otherwise).

    It seems reasonable to assume that, even if the body had lain on the beach for only moments, there would be evidence of sand adhering to his jacket, trousers, etc. Yet sand is not mentioned descriptively (nor remarked upon analytically) in this context at all – either as presence or absence.

    That is to say: the description (the meat) is coloured by the forensic awareness and standards of the time and is necessarily selective. Doesn’t it present an unreliable basis for any conclusion?

  32. john sanders on November 19, 2020 at 8:47 am said:

    Re-Peteb: For information of those who might not be yet familiar with your habit of taking most things conveniently and extremely out of context, the dieing man that Strapps WASN’T watching to any degree at didn’t budge. The witness DIDN’T say that SM ‘was moving his legs around some’ by any stretch. He had merely formed the opinion that, based on positiing at his first glimpse upon arrival and his last at 8pm. with benefit of (absent) street lighting, the position of the legs appeared to have changed. Girlfriend Olive didn’t think so from memory.

    I tend to agree with you about having no sand in his shoes, but only if the sand had been of a type Bondi beach bums are mostly familiar with. In saying that it reminds me of the lividity conundrum for Tom Cleland. Obviously not a beach sunbather or he would have surely known that a body lying on it’s back on the beach, stands a better than fair chance of experiencing the heavier head and shoulders sink down into the ever shifting sand base irrespective of wave influence…I think his distant cousin John Cleland knew the trick but didn’t speak up for some unknown reason.

  33. Stefano Guidoni on November 19, 2020 at 6:59 pm said:

    I can’t see many resemblances with David Lytton’s case. David Lytton looked like someone who was having a rest, but only at a first glance, since “it was bitterly cold and the rain was torrential” (quote from the BBC News special article), he was just lying on the ground in a grassy patch, he “was not wearing anything approaching the right clothing for the walk or the weather”. The Somerton Man on the contrary was found in a studied position, with his feet crossed, his back against a wall and a half smoked cigarette in his mouth: the only apparent strangeness was the absence of a hat, that is strange, but not strikingly exceptional. There are many other substantial differences, like the fact that Lytton clearly killed himself with strychnine, which was found in a medicine container, while the Somerton Man left no hint about what killed him (if he took some poison, they found no signs about how he ingested said poison).

    What is intriguing about the Somerton Man is the fact that all the many intricacies of the case (the missing labels of his clothes, the piece of paper torn from a rare book, etc.) seem to be studied, while, for example, the intricacies of the David Lytton’s case are the result of improvisation and chance. The case of the Somerton Man is a challenge, not a simple riddle.

  34. Tamara Bunke on November 19, 2020 at 8:24 pm said:

    Anyway, while we’re amusing ourselves with these trifling matters, over at GCHQ (Gordon Cramer Headquarters), ‘Turing’ Cramer has got his bombes out and is hand-cranking micro-written cipher text in the privacy of his outback Bletchley Park.

    Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s churning out Dzerzhinsky Square’s crown jewels, including Indonesian forenames and Romanian aircraft registrations.

    I wonder if any of our crypto-boffins would take a peek under the Enigma’s lid and report back on his working out?

  35. Tamara Bunke: really? Honestly? You haven’t worked that all out for yourself?

    It’s not hard.

  36. Tamara Bunke on November 19, 2020 at 9:03 pm said:

    Being a technologist d’un certain age, I adhere to the maxim of GI/GO. So I’m dismissive of GCHQ’s enterprise on that premise alone. While that’s sufficient for a dilettante like myself, I just wondered if someone with more methodological nous would like to comment beyond that cursory, a priori dismissal. Just in case there are others less cynical abroad.

  37. Tamara Bunke: if you’re looking for the GI part of your equation, here’s my 2017 post that lays out how it works:

    https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/02/26/somerton-man-two-new-rubaiyat-scans

  38. Tamara Bunke on November 19, 2020 at 9:28 pm said:

    I remember it well, Nick.

  39. milongal on November 19, 2020 at 9:52 pm said:

    @Pete – not sure the sand is necessarily soft (although the picture of the spot appears to disagree with me – I’ve long wondered when that shot was taken….on the same day? some time later? stock pic of Alvington?). Much of the beach South of about Grange (or certainly Henley) can see the water up to the rocks (not sure too much about South of Brighton), so they tend to have damp/compressed sand rather than the drier fine dunes you see through Semaphore, Largs and Taperoo (you also get more seaweed further North I think). But I still agree the lack of sand in his shoes is quite odd….

    @Tamara – when you mentioned GCHQ you piqued my interest…..only to spoil it by pointing out what your version stands for (although that did make me laugh). I wrote a crude Enigma-like simulator once…sort of (it was based on my understanding of the Enigma machines at the time, which may not have been entirely correct). I think most here agree that even the claim that micro-writing could have been inadvertenly transfered from a sheet of paper in the book to the texta marks of the police seems a bit of a stretch. My bigger issue is the same as my issue with many things – it just doesn’t make sense. Why have seemingly random (and you have to say somewhat attention grabbing if not suspicious) letters on a page simoply to hide mirocode in them? Isn’t the point of microcode to appear in something otherwise innoccuous and beyond suspicion? So it could have been in the TS itself, or in the remainder of the rubaiyat almost anywhere (or in writing you add yourself that doesn’t look out of place – perhaps a message to whoever owns the book (that’s not to say I believe there’s micro writing in Boxall’s quote of v70 either – but hidden in that sort of message would seem far more covert) ….So we are asked to simultaneously accept that this microwriting was supposed to not attract attention, even though it’s put into random letters that immediately attract attention. Further, we are asked to believe that this technique which must have been readable in 1948 has so far not yielded anything meaningful with 2020 technology (might be wrong, but despite the claims of how “simple it is for anyone to replicate these results” I’ve not heard anyone that has (although that might be for want of trying).
    And without meaning to get too personal, the source doesn’t help. This is the same person who insisted SM looked like Fedosimov; then realised the person he thought was Fedosimov was Novikov and suddenly decided he really looked more like the real Fedosimov. Then asked us to believe that despitge the difficulty of tracing even one Fedosimov 2 of them must have existed about the same age in similar Governme nt roles (and both married to Vera Sergeyevna). Perhaps realising how ridiculous this sounded, the story shifted to Fedosimov being a an alias that may have been reused by multiple “anonymous” agents (again, despite the fact we could find trace of exactly 1 (or 2 if you entertain the idea that the NY Fedosimov is NOT the one who was later (including through the SM years) assigned to the UK and Libya. And then appeared at IAEA conferences (still with Vera in tow) into the mid-late 1960s (at which point he disappears and my maths would put the Fedosimov of the 1940s at about public service retirement age (with a small caveat that I don’t know anything about Russian public Service).
    And we haven’t even spoken about Danetta which (started mildly interesting but) quickly descended into all sorts of extraordinary ideas (that mainly demonstrated a lack of understanding of the tool that was used to analyse the code). I forget which site it is, but it presents a number of results to common ways of looking at things (initials, every 2nd word etc) and we some how mashed all the results of these together and were surprised that they sort of related to each other (I forget the details, but it seemed at the time a low point for the site). Then we demonstrated that choosing letters carefully from other passages of text (from memory one in the Rubaiyat, and one from a psalm) we could make Danetta appear everywhere. Of course, it was pointed out that we wad made up some random way of selecting numbers (compared to his random way which was to basically find all the letters as initials and then try to justify them all having a number from 1 to 7 based on their location on the line (but this wasn’t even in the correct order…..so the D might have come from the 6th word on line 3 reading backwards, while the A was the 3rd word on the 8th line reading forewards). Even those among us unfamiliar with cryptography would appreciate that when you make up your own rules you can do all sorts of things – especially when E,T,A are the 3 most common letters in the English language, N is 6th and D is in the top 10 (this is based on ETAOINSHRDLU – some people have the ordering a little different). Granted, that order changes if we limit ourselves to initials (I know I said before we did, but I’m doubting that a little now).
    So others who disagree with me can go chase whatever fanciful tales others might propose, but for mine that’s a rabbit hole I don’t see any value going down. So if something meaningful is found at some stage then maybe I’ll revisit. Perhaps if some satisfactory explanation can be made for the big “code” writing that the microcode appears in (sorry, double-bluff does not make sense – at all. If you’re spies you’re trying to hide things from people who probably know your methods to some degree. Anything that looks even remotely suspicious (like a whole bunch of WRGOABABD) is going to be so heavily scrutinised that you’re not hiding anything in there. What will happen when the enemy can’t decrypt the random? They will keep analysing.).
    Short Version: Yeah, Nah.

    NB: I just found there’s a steam user called Carl Juna 1 who comes up when you google WRGOABAD. It seems their BIO is a (semi-redacted, and slightly incorrect) of the SM “code”.

  40. Tamara Bunke: honestly, it is that simple, whatever GI Joe likes to noisily claim.

  41. milongal on November 19, 2020 at 9:58 pm said:

    sorry – that Danetta paragraph (maybe the whole post) is even more bumbling than usual (and uses the “we” voice at one point to describe the site, and in the following sentence me….).
    It also makes the mistake of talking about Boxall’s writing. I meant the Jestyn’s of course.

  42. john sanders on November 19, 2020 at 11:17 pm said:

    re-Pete: James Tyson was the name on a union ticket found in a dead man’s pocket, all that there was to identify an unknown drover found drowned in a billabong of the Darling river near the town of Bourke in the early days of settlement. This well known yarn is of course the first of many contained within a book of short stories by the great Henry Lawson and there are many SM elements to it including a hastily arranged funeral in which the Salvation Army officiates. There was realisation by the respectful town folk that only a set of initials J.T. and an added RC were clear on the union ticket, the full monicker made up merely to give the poor bloke a name to accord with Catholic funeral rites. In a final note for his readers, the narrator admits to having known the man’s name but to mention it would take something away from the importance of his union theme…So to cut a long story short MATE, one of the titles you’re wanting to identify on Alf Boxall’s book shelf, is a volume of Henry Lawson’s short stories entitled ‘While the Billy Boils’, another being by an unknown author John ??, entitled ‘Long River’, which is presumably about a well loved mostly dry river bed called the Darling which runs through the town of Bourke in far western N.S.W…., as per the yarn.

  43. john sanders on November 20, 2020 at 2:50 am said:

    HAMLEY BRIDGE…was the old S.A. railway works and gauge switch town known for its dirt poor Irish Keane clan and the empiracle Duffields either side of the tracks.
    HENLEY BEACH…was once renowned for it long ocean pier, motor rail terminus and unfathomable Thomson of Main/Marlborough St. Adelaide ad connections.
    HARLEY BURCH…was the US born ring leader of an Australia wide flim flam and standover operation. He was Prospers mentor and best man at his wedding.
    HARRY BELLAFONTE…was of a much better likeness with Somerton Man than Pavel Fedosimov, whatsmore they were the same shade from the crotch down…
    Is there a case to be made or rested as a consequence of these stark similarities.

  44. milongal on November 20, 2020 at 3:08 am said:

    regarding the sand…..
    SAPOL facebook page has a picture of the beach a little further South (they’ve labelled it Brighton/Seacliff). You can see the sand is a harder damp texture all the way to the rocks.

    http://facebook.com/SouthAustraliaPolice/photos/a.147239112020106/3565433253533991/

    Even this one of Henley Beach shows very little soft dry sand
    http://abc.net.au/news/2020-11-20/police-issue-handful-of-fines-on-first-day-of-sa-lockdown/12901282?fbclid=IwAR01f-bls8lMBkk5VTs6h6piKfpRRvXNCKhxOPv6HttKABLSIJKpy4ziD4w

    For those not in Australia, Adelaide has gone to hard lockdown after a sudden cluster of Covid (which it’s emerging today may have been an overreaction because one of the people traced lied about their activities)

  45. john sanders on November 20, 2020 at 3:10 am said:

    …..Duffields were dynastic as well as impirical…many thanks to Flash Gordon.

  46. Tamara Bunke on November 20, 2020 at 8:45 am said:

    Milongal, thanks for your extensive and thorough cryptobabble-debunker post above: that’s it in a nutshell. It’s a large shell, by necessity. With the emphasis on “nut”.

  47. This story has some similarities with that of Buster Crabb, a Royal Navy frogman and MI6 diver who vanished during a reconnaissance mission around the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, a Soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1956. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Crabb

  48. Tamara Bunke on November 21, 2020 at 9:24 pm said:

    Hi Fred – interesting point. Where do you see particular similarities? And what conclusions could you draw from them?

    Crabb’s body was mutilated beyond identification… and Tim Binding’s rather excellent fictional account of Crabb’s life (‘Man Overboard’) takes advantage of that very fact to deliver a startling denouement.

  49. D.N. O'Donovan on November 25, 2020 at 10:24 am said:

    Bryon – thanks so much for responding to my question, especially since it was informed but nothing but a vague curiosity.

    Apart from one archive excursion on Nick’s behalf, I’ve read nothing about the SM except what Nick has published here.
    Very kind of you.

  50. john sanders on November 25, 2020 at 11:00 am said:

    FRED: Drawing the Crabbs is a bit of a buster if you want to know the truth. The lads over yonder @My Name and @Byron Deveson need to know the guts on the ’47 phone book of which Feltus gives us a brief gander in the ‘Dancing with the Dead’ doco of 10/19 at ABC Aunty channel. Interesting to me is that only six J. Thomsons are listed with only the one J.E. which of course is our sister Jo. With the population of Adelaide at the time being up around 400 hundred thousand I thought we might have had more, though everything seems to be in order.

  51. milongal on November 25, 2020 at 9:40 pm said:

    That’s interesting JS – S&M (1948) has 7 J Thomson (J, JA, JC, JM, JM, JN, JS ) – and doesn’t seem to have her or Prosper (but we already knew that). It also has 3 Mrs J ThomPson, 1 Miss J ThomPson and too many J ThomPsons for me to count).
    But I know we are cautious about S&M

  52. Byron Deveson on November 25, 2020 at 10:35 pm said:

    JS, so it was the 1947 Adelaide telephone book? And Jessie was listed as “Sister JE Thomson”? That is a major change in the “narrative”. So Jessie was living in Adelaide, at the Moseley Street address? Phone numbers weren’t transportable in the 1940s, even the 1960s, unless you were well connected (sorry, unintentional). Only crooks and SP bookies, or people who could bribe PMG technicians could transport a phone number.

  53. If Keane knew Jessica as Harkness in 1946, assuming he was the father of Robin, how did he find her in another city where she was known as Thomson a year later?
    … and thanks for the phone number heads up, Sanders.

  54. john sanders on November 26, 2020 at 3:36 am said:

    Bearing in mind that there was a severe shortage of Thomson organized crime family contenders in our Glenelg of the 1940s according to published 1947 phone listings, it is nevertheless refreshing to note a few more elligible suspects in the corresponding suburban residency/ownership? data recorded by S & Mc. One such address which I recall well is the Methodist Church cnr. Bath & James streets which was found to have been in occupation of Sisters J & E Thomson in 47/48 which, as can be seen on the Glenelg map, is handily located just three hundred metres or so from 90a Moberley St., an address associated with Sister J E Thomson and her future husband Prosper (George) in 1947/48.

  55. Tamara Bunke on November 26, 2020 at 9:23 am said:

    Pete, are you assuming that Jess and Keane were not in contact over the course of the intervening period?

    If so, on what basis?

  56. john sanders on November 26, 2020 at 11:45 am said:

    For peace of mind, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to check with the FBI data bank to to confirm they still maintain the initial SM fingerprint reading and resultant search request of 1948, submitted by Sydney CIB at behest of Sapol. They must have in their supplementary records millions from post war European countries including civilian ID card thumb prints that would have been separate to those in indices kept for their own partials, SOC singles and full print criminal case comparisons.

  57. john sanders on November 26, 2020 at 12:30 pm said:

    Peteb: Perhaps as of July ’47, and by then a single unsupported mother, Jessica filed a paternity application against Keane the alleged father, who then as a consequence would have obtained the plaintiff’s return of service particulars, which of course he was lawfully entitled to as respondent. That would work.

  58. Tamara … because she bolted, first to Vicco then to SA, changing her name in the process. John Sanders .. why would she raise a PA, presumably in the name of Harkness, then do the runner as per above ?

  59. john sanders on November 26, 2020 at 10:53 pm said:

    Peteb: Jo may have had fears that SM would harm her and her unborn child. Giving him her post natal Glenelg address in the PA was used as a set up for the ambush. I am assured from a most knowledgable informant that the Thomsons moved to 104 Partridge Street after their Perth Knot tieing event and birth of Kate, details of which I might be prepared to expand upon in due course.

  60. There is one big obstacle to the murder theory, and that is the extraordinary risks taken with the body. Generally you’d think the most pressing concern after a murder is to dispose of the body without leaving traces or being seen. Almost anything is better than driving to a beach at night and dragging a body to a public beach and playing around to pose it. The risks are insane. All this activity in the dark where it’s hard to check for dropped items, or a witness out walking.
    If it was a murder then it was highly unusual.

  61. Tamara Bunke on November 27, 2020 at 9:02 am said:

    Simon, yes – this is the total elephant in the room that unfortunately also feeds into some of the wilder conspiracy theories around spies and stuff (“it’s a warning to others”). Very much the Smiley’s People school of in medias res opening chapters. But of course, in the novel, the victim (Vladimir, a Balt dissident emigré – which ties in nicely with some thoughts @Milongal has just shared) was plugged and left in situ. Because the right people will know they’ve been warned regardless.

    I’m guessing that a criminologist or criminal psychologist could probably shed some real insight on body deposition, posing, etc. that would swiftly curtail some of the flights of fancy we witness around this case.

    You do wonder* why the SM ecosystem seems reluctant to draw in expertise sometimes.

    *) no you don’t.

  62. john sanders on November 27, 2020 at 11:06 am said:

    Simon: I think you’ll find that nobody want’s to talk about the alternatives these days; of which of course there are only two (related) and that’s precisely what the smart money was on with the police and judiciary in 1948/49.

  63. Stefano Guidoni on November 28, 2020 at 3:52 pm said:

    Simon: it is a problem of conditional probability. If someone handled the body, it is very probable that it was a murder, because, as you pointed out, it is a risk playing with corpses and a few people besides a killer would take that risk. So, what are the probabilities that someone tampered with the scene before the official discovery of the body at 6:30 am? Well, the SM was clean, shaved, tidy, had quite expensive clothes, a couple of recently bought tickets in his pocket, a lunch in his stomach and… no wallet and, most surprisingly, no money. That is quite exceptional and begs for a good explanation. The most simple explanation is that someone took his wallet after his death and before the corpse was found, that is someone searched the body, but gently, because the cigarette was lying on his collar, his clothes were not in disarray etc. As stupid as it sounds, I want to point out that if he died naturally or committed suicide, he could not have lost his wallet, unless someone else disposed of the corpse, but that someone else would have taken a big risk disposing of a corpse he/she did not kill.

  64. john sanders on November 29, 2020 at 5:13 am said:

    We mustn’t ever forget that our body was found dead in the open with no signs of foul play in evidence and who before expiring seemed to have had knowingly exposed himself to post mortem pilferage. This might have taken the form of an early morning bather, a pair of local hoops out excercising their steeds, a beach scavenger down on his luck perhaps, or any other opportunistic passer by. Even a first attender plod may have been tempted to forego his sworn duties, seeing no reason to deny himself a few unwanted shillings or a note or two and a decent set of cuff links for the sake of civil propriety…

    I recall making past mention on another CM thread apropos Polish immigrant Nick Wojnicz, a Risdon Zinc company employee who had died alone in his hut of natural causes and was believed to have funds enough for a funeral in his possession. Polish workmates saw the local constable enter the one room shanty purportedly to take a mandatory death house inventory, remaining for about ten minutes or so unaccompanied. The lads were later surprised to learn that no money or other redeemable goods were found amongst their friend’s few meagre possessions NB.Taswegians oft refer to their police as ‘the filth’, perhaps for jolly good reasons. it seems.

  65. milongal on November 29, 2020 at 10:42 pm said:

    The missing wallet does seem most likely pinched, but presumably it was in another pocket to the rest of his stuff (otherwise that’s some careful pilfering to have left all of that in tact (none of it accidentally spread to the beach). That sort of suggests there might have been sufficient light by that time (not only to notice the body, and the wallet, but to get to the pockets without leaving too much a trace). I think many moons ago Džons suggested that it was the jockeys – and certainly they or Lyons seem the most plausible – they were the first on the scene that morning after light, and it sounds as the beach might have been too busy for someone to had done it the night before (if we have daylight as a criteria) – of course that assumes the body was there already. That said, the latest suggestion not to exclude the coppers is reasonable too – they have the advantage of potentially being able to do stuff when people aren’t looking (or even going through things in plain sight without anyone noticing what is going on)

  66. john sanders on November 30, 2020 at 6:32 am said:

    ……., and in a bit of dramatic breaking news, seems there was a fire at the Strapps Woodlands Park home Xmas eve 1947 with extensive damage sustained to William Reginald’s two autos, with recently demobilised son Kenneth Gordon, having both of his motor bikes trashed and mum’s Speedwell pushbike likewise beyond repair. Fire was believed caused by bags of lime (for body disposals) ignited due to water exposure.)…One fine family’s not so Merry Xmas.

  67. Tamara Bunke on November 30, 2020 at 8:14 pm said:

    @all … @Anna… could be? Could we ask the seller to provide some images of the ROK? What do we need? The colophon? The Tamam page?

  68. milongal on November 30, 2020 at 9:18 pm said:

    From memory it was a 1st edition, with no publishers mark/watermark on the back page (at least that’s what everyone seemed to say…..I’ve always thought the picture of the booklet with the ripped page has a fairly clear mark shining through).

    Maybe have a look at this post from 2016:
    https://ciphermysteries.com/2016/06/21/the-search-for-the-somerton-mans-rubaiyat

  69. john sanders on December 1, 2020 at 11:00 pm said:

    milongaI: Frankly I can’t see any publishing mark coming through, but if the Freeman ROK edition was of composite make up comprising a backing and a separate glued page for the text, then that wouldn’t work. I’ve always been confused as to why there were so many variation in the Courage & Friendship varieties marketed in the 40s and I think this points to knock offs.

  70. Stefano Guidoni on December 2, 2020 at 8:46 pm said:

    @all – first edition (1851), as it is the only one which ends with the words TAMAM SHUD (second, third and fifth editions ends with just TAMAM). There are some deluxe reprints which include the first edition alongside some later edition.

    About the wallet and the chance of murder: as I said it is a matter of conditional probability. If the scene was pristine, the case for a murder would be very dim, since a murder requires some interaction with the scene that a suicide or a natural death do not. So, the fact that the scene appears to be contaminated raises the chance for a murder, that is clear.

    A pilferage as an explanation for the missing wallet is a silver bullet only if you believe that it must not have been a murder. Because, really, there were some extraordinary circumstances, if that was a common theft, e.g.: the surprisingly tidy and clean scene, the fact that the thief took the whole wallet, the fact that the thief left the cigarettes.
    About the first point, I already noted that the thief must have been extremely gentle, since the cigarette was not shaken from the collar of the coat. Some of you said that the theft happened during daylight, so that the petty criminal found the right pocket without searching. However that is easier said than done, since there are not many pockets where a man usually keeps his wallet: the internal left pocket of the coat or the right back pocket of the trousers. They are both problematic. The back pocket for obvious reasons. The left internal pocket is problematic because the thief was most probably right-handed and so he (assuming he was a man) had to use his less dexterous hand or to open the coat or both (and maybe even after rigor mortis kicked in). The SM was a tidy guy and, probably, right handed so I doubt that he could have used other pockets for his wallet.
    About the second point, a thief would care only about the money (and secondarily about useful stuff like a watch or cigarettes): the ID card, the ration card, the driver licence, even the wallet would have been a problem to him. If a policeman finds that you have two wallets, he could get suspicious, you know. A real thief would have taken just the money or would have thrown away the chaff as soon as possible. Our putative thief took the wallet and either did not throw away the dangerous stuff or he was so good at disposing of that stuff that nobody recovered it. However you put it, it is a bit strange.
    Moreover, the thief left the good quality cigarettes of the SM. Well, maybe he did not smoke, even though in 1945 72% of adult males were smokers in Australia, or did not have time to search and the cigarettes were in a different pocket than the wallet.
    In the end, I think that there are not easy explanations to what happened.

  71. milongal on December 3, 2020 at 9:56 pm said:

    @Stefano – like so many things with SM, any simple explanation is problematic, andy complex explanation even more so…..

    Perhaps there was a coat (with wallet) somewhere (possibly even left somewhere obvious and gone missing. I’ve often said the tickets bug me in a similar vein. A common assumption is he arrived into Adelaide by train that morning, yet despite not keeping a ticket from that train he has kept both a bus a train ticket from subsequent activities (and that’s without pointing out that it’s difficult to explain both of them appearing to have been used). So we assume either the inbound train ticket was discarded (I find this unlikely – he’s kept the useless Henley ticket, but gotten rid of a ticket for a train he presumably had to hold onto until he arrived) or it was in the missing wallet (possibly more likely, but still seems odd that the Henley ticket would simply be thrust into his pocket if he went to the effort of storing the longer journey in his wallet – although I suppose we could make a case that that’s because of the abruptness of his plan changing from Henley to Glenelg).
    Some days it’s hard not to lean toward the idea that everything on him was planted

    @JS I’ll seeif I can find a link to the triangle – I’ve definitely seen a version where it’s quite obvious, but on the ones I’m finding now I might just be imagining it….

  72. john sanders on December 4, 2020 at 2:50 am said:

    Stefano: I don’t wish to be picky but novices will need to know that Fitzgerald’s first edition was actually 1859; As for the rest, you have obviously put some effort into your ideas on the unlikely crime scene choice for murder or suicide, preservation thereof to aid investigation &c. Of course we have the very real possibility that the body was interferred with by a pickpocket or even a skarlarking youths who would dare to show bravado in front of fellow miscreans. An amateurish all over frisking of the pockets for goodies, if such occurred would likely leave clothing mussed up and undesired pocket contents strewn about which was not the case, eg. smokes, tickets, combs and gum. The body was found to be sans some other effects that one might expect had it been left alone, such a hat, belt and accoutrements in the form of watch (wrist or fob) rings or even cuff links that y’man should have worn with the type of shirt he was wearing. Crikies so many unanswered questions and no way of getting such answers without original MO records. Even worries about SM not retaining his incoming train ticket would disappear had it been known that he was covered by government travel warrant e.g., a released ward of the state or even a serviceman on transfer or furlough.

  73. john sanders on December 4, 2020 at 11:04 am said:

    Milongal: I’ve seen the black triangle with ‘A /W&T//Art Production ala Paris/In The/ The Spring on Sue d’Nihn’s knock off copy at Cramer’s highjacked Anemptyglass site.

  74. Going back to the risks of disposing of the body, I agree with Stefano’s comment about conditional probability. The risky disposal of the body presents a problem for the murder theory, but all theories have problems right now. So I didn’t mean to say it’s a decisive thing, just pointed out that the murder idea would need to be pursuasive in other areas.

  75. Tamara Bunke on December 5, 2020 at 6:36 pm said:

    Simon, Stefano, Sanders, Milongal, others – having re-read this comments thread (conditional probability, forensic contact, pilfered wallet, David Lytton, king tide), how about this:

    The man’s name is Keane. He committed suicide by ingesting digitalis prior to 4.50am, 1 December 1948, before an opportunist thief relieved him of his wallet (if he had not disposed of it earlier, in keeping with his wish to quietly). The high tide that morning altered the crime scene, including by washing away any evidence, e.g. a container, of the medicine he had taken and (for Pete’s benefit) any matches he may have used to light his last cigarette.

  76. Tamara Bunke: you’d also need to include a funky explanation for the lividity, like Derek Abbott does. And the missing hat. And the missing socks.

    I’m pretty sure that the tide was really high that night – high enough to really soak him through. Which I don’t believe anyone at the time said was the case. Perhaps you can correct me on this.

  77. Nick Pelling: I’m pretty sure if the tide was high enough to soak him through, his shoes would have been the first to suffer immersion, which would have substantially diminished their lustre.

  78. Tamara Bunke on December 5, 2020 at 9:11 pm said:

    Nick: I can’t recall any specific mention of tide in the reports. Certainly not in association with the crime scene itself. But then again, the record does not suggest any of the investigating authorities thought the scene was in any problematic. That’s a much more recent phenomenon.

    Remind us about the socks: we know there were no spares listed in the suitcase contents. So, he had no spare socks… doesn’t have to be unusual.

    Was he not wearing any when found?

  79. Tamara Bunke on December 5, 2020 at 9:21 pm said:

    Pete: good point. But: a high tide would not have to “soak him through”, as Nick describes it. And there was no mention of immersion in the reporting.

    But, if he was lying on his back and the water only “lapped at him” to a depth of a few centimeters, then only the very back (at the heel) of his shoes might have had contact with it. However, the motion of these ‘waves’ may have been enough to wash away any small pieces of evidence, such as a container for poison.

  80. john sanders on December 5, 2020 at 10:41 pm said:

    TamarA: Have a close look at the shoes in the colour snap, especially around the eyes and flaps. There is signs of glue parting indicative of probable earlier water saturation. By the way the metal shoe eyes are a dead give away to cheap quality as opposed to ‘bespoke 204’ that traditionally put SM on higher social standing,, than deserving. PS: In Greenwood’s list there ar four pair of socks, as for Nick’s problems with lividity, my explanation for it is reasonable enough, only obstinance has prevented discussion so I’ll let it pass.

  81. john sanders on December 5, 2020 at 11:43 pm said:

    From day one there has been much taken for granted about SM’s shoes having maintained their mirror shine despite the conditions likely encountered during the course of his last twenty four hours. This would seem to include the long distance covered to arrive at his final destination including contact with sand and sea, which might not have been so detrimental to their shine if that had been the case. Kiwi polish’s claims of keeping lustre against weather and environment are well known due to secret weather and grime resistant waxes being in it’s formula and note the company is still out there to back it’s reputation. We don’t actually know how far the dead man walked on the day though of course we will continue to debate this mute point along with the effects of incoming and outgoing tides on everything from lividity, damage to the crime scene, washing away of hats, matches and the effects of salt water on leather which, as pointed out might not be so dire due to water resistant properties in the polish.

  82. Stefano Guidoni on December 7, 2020 at 11:38 am said:

    Even one centimetre of water would have soaked almost everything, his socks, his trousers, his coat, his underpants… the interior of his brown leather shoes. To dry clothes off, you need sunshine or wind, but the SM was sitting on them: the back of his clothes should have been soaked with water and coated with damp sand when they found him.
    Moreover I suspect that waves strong enough to wash away a tin container (for the lethal drug) would have moved around enough grains of sand to fill his shoes. Well, probably even waves not strong enough to move a tin container would have moved enough sand to fill his shoes.

  83. john sanders on December 7, 2020 at 12:41 pm said:

    Stefano: At around 7.00am when Constable Moss searched him, he found the deceased to be ‘cold stiff and damp’ according to his later testimony. It was stated by another witness at the inquest, probably J. B.Cleland, that there was sand in the shoe welts, not enough to fill them but to be fair, that came from an examination of the death apparel after the fact. I’m in agreement re likely ripple effect following the early morning king (spring) tide which we have debated here and there with no resolution to date.

  84. Tamara Bunke: I covered this a little back in 2013. On 1st December 1948 in Somerton Beach, the high tide (9ft) was at 4.34am, which was 8 feet higher than at low tide. The sun rose at 4.56am, and the moon rose at 4.51am (it was a New Moon, hence a very high tide).
    https://ciphermysteries.com/2013/11/12/somerton-man-last-24-hours

  85. Tamara Bunke: yes, the Somerton Man was indeed found wearing socks. The problem is that even though his suitcase had clothes for several days, it (apparently) had no spare socks. Which, if he was planning on spending his time in Adelaide walking around beaches in the blazing sunshine, was arguably a tad odd.

    Of course, we can’t rule out the possibility that he might have habitually washed his (only pair of) socks in the sink every evening. But where’s the fun in that?

  86. milongal on December 7, 2020 at 10:31 pm said:

    Somewhere I had a rant about “unseasonably warm”, and pointed out that while 30 Nov wouldn’t have been unseasonably warm by Adelaide standards, Dec 1 was a warm day, and it appears that the overnight temp probably didn’t drop below 20C (which is warm, but probably not unseasonable in the context).
    So I suppose the question is whether 20C (I can’t remember the exact number (19.7 is in my head for some reason)) overnight, possibly with mild breezes (I’d have to double check) would be sufficient to leave a body “cold and damp” (as opposed to “a touch on the soggy side” in about 2 hours (I suppose we could push it toward 3 hrs as the evidence is from the Moss rather than Lyon or the Jockeys).
    Remember, in Adelaide, the beach face WEST, and there are sand dunes (and buildings) on the foreshore, so if the sun appears over the Eastern horizon at 4:56am (I’m not sure what the official definition of “sunrise” is), a body against the seawall might still have been in shadow at 6:30am (given he’s right up against the rocks, I could imagine that still being shaded as late as 10AM). Granted once the sun is up it’s starting to warm, but I guess the point is he wouldn’t have been in direct sunlight at any time – so air temperature and movement would be all that would dry him out.

    All of that said (and we’ve danced around this several times I think), I would expect the shoes (and the rest of his clothing) to have salt stains once they dried out if they had been in sea water – and from the pictures we’ve got, they don’t appear to.

    I find it hard to resolve him not having gotten wet if he was on the beach before high tide, but equally I’m not entirely comfortable with the state of his clothes if he had been there – but there’s a very short window for him to be dumped there after the tide has retreated enough (to the point it’d almost implicate the jockeys – which I think at one stage JS might have floated as a possibility). Not sure whether it’s easy to load a body inconspicuously on a horse (like they do in Westerns)…..

    If he was planning to wander around beaches, wouldn’t he take his suitcase to Glenelg, with the intention of staying somewhere nearby?
    What if all the station stuff appears to work so neatly only because one or more of the people involved fudged their evidence to suit the narrative (I don’t even think it has to be sinister – an analyst is asked to demonstrate something in court with a particular end goal, so they make the demonstration fit what they’ve been told to prove, eg:
    1) What if the Henley Ticket was sold on 29/11 (or any other day), but the ticket clerk in looking into figures he’s made a mistake. He explains the process that makes it possible to resolve the ticket to a particular day, and insists the ticket was definitely bought on the 30th (which inadvertently causes a skew to within the duration of his shift that day (ie before 6 and 12 – or whatever it was).
    2) What sort of records does the bus conductor keep of trips? Is it possible he’s muddled up with a different trip – or even a different day?
    3) What if the luggae was dropped at a later time? How much of the timeframes given around the luggage are borne by the assumption it happened before the 11:15 bus for St Leonards left? (If they had the records, looking up ticket tags with sequences before and after this one might have given some more detail).

    Standard rambling digression:
    Something about the train I had previously dismissed (dismisse dit multiple times for different unrelated reasons) occured to me. It revolves around Jetty Road Grange. In the past, I’d made the point that he’d caught a train to Henely, not Grange, so the Jetty Rd was a total coinky-dink. But that was in a modern-day mindset (where there’s a Grange train). The train ticket (AFAIK) is not stop-specific, so the thought he remembered “Jetty Road”, “Starts with G” and goes to ticket clerk asking about it. The ticket clerk (who deals with trains, not the entire metro network) thinks of Grange, and sells a Henley ticket. Somehow SM figures out his mistake and gets the bus toward Glenelg. Subsequently, the clerk doesn’t recall selling the ticket – because although it was sold for the Henley Line, he remembers it as a ticket to Grange (and the detectives seem quite focused on Henley in their inquiries so he assumes they couldn’t be talking about the Gent looking for Jetty Rd).

  87. john sanders on December 7, 2020 at 10:51 pm said:

    Nick: You are right as usual, no fun at all. Especially so if your pair of socks are thick knitted wool like SM’s and expect them to be dry by morning

  88. Rick A. Roberts on December 8, 2020 at 7:05 am said:

    If I remember correctly, the Somerton Man had no water in his lungs when he was found.

  89. john sanders on December 8, 2020 at 11:55 am said:

    I’m thinking that most folks familiar with the description given for Somerton Man is fairly well accepted as being well and truly written in stone by now, accept possibly for the hair colouring which differed somewhat in early press releases by reporters going by what was given to them by police or others who may not even have seen the body. The height for instance of 5’11 has remained the same since day one, which for 1948 would suggest a man a deal taller than the average of around 5′ 8″. We are not to know how the original height was calculated, or indeed if it was accurately done by measuring or merely a guesstimate by someone like constable Moss for instance.

    Most would, I’m sure agree that the two most knowledgable authorities on the body’s physical attributes in it’s death state and also without any doubt, the most impressive of all the inquest witnesses, were a pair of highly qualified pathologists in the form of Drs. John Dwyer and Prof. John Cleland. Both would have had the good fortune of seeing him close up at different stages of his lengthy time lying in state at West Terrace mortuary. Dwyer, who did the autopsy on 2/12/48, in his opinion, had his subject as being of ‘tallish’ stature and left it at that which could mean between 5′ 9″ and say 6′ 00ft; whereas Cleland could only come up with a non committal ‘to be advised’ which seems almost is if he were not satisfied with
    5′ 11″ at all.

  90. john sanders on December 8, 2020 at 1:08 pm said:

    Rick A. Roberts: Yes. No water in the lungs, so we can take it from that that he was not subject ro complete imersion whilst alive which we assume was never in doubt. That not withstanding there was sand in the hair which is deserving of some consideration, bearing in mind that there was little if any onshore wind that evening. Most people seem to be happy that the body’s position was as described, that is to say raised of the beach proper with legs on the sand pointed seawards, with the upper body raised and supported by the seawall. Two eyewitnesses in the form of Jack Lyons and Neil Day dispute this and I’m more impressed by both their naysaying as opposed to all the conveniently acceptable hypbole only works if the late on the scene Moss version applies. So to be realistic, if Somerton Man was found ‘flat out on the sand looking skywards’, having sand in his hair then that is easy to account for.

  91. john sanders on December 8, 2020 at 1:19 pm said:

    PS: The age old mystery surrounding lividity to the upper back and neck ceases to become such a mystery at all if the man had being lying belly up on beach when tidal undertow was shifting sand beneath him before dawn.

  92. Tamara Bunke on December 8, 2020 at 1:58 pm said:

    A thought:

    When American GIs arrived in the UK in the early 40s, they were – by all accounts – physically imposing specimens, revealing the effects of a richer diet of proteins etc.

    I’m not familiar with the standard of the Australian diet at the time, but if Sanders is correct about the average height of 5’8″, then that might suggest it was similar (in quality) to the British.

    I wonder, therefore, if SM’s height and athletic build are further indicators that he was American.

    Though the lamentable condition of his teeth is perhaps surprising for an American?

  93. milongal on December 8, 2020 at 10:56 pm said:

    @JS: Have you got the Thomson brothers handy somewhere? Could any of them have had initials R.J.C? I remember them having sort of interesting middle names and/or aliases…..I think there was a Rolls Burrowes Thomson……but that doesn’t seem to help.

    NB: If there’s someone more distantly related (but still with surname Thomson) that might be interesting too
    NB2: This very loosley relates to an old (about 2018) conversation here in response to the post that he might have been an Odd Fellow – if anyone wants to revisit the stuff we trudged through there….

    Basically I have an R.J.C. Thomson a few doors up from W.G. Duffield’s home that I want to dismiss as pure coincidence

  94. john sanders on December 9, 2020 at 12:11 am said:

    Tamara: Not sure whece you arrived at your figures re average heights, but my low level research suggests the average Yanqui, Tommy and for that matter your tall bronzed Anzac was fairly close at 5’7″ to under 5’9″. Quite a deal taller that say their Soviet comrades and soon to be vanquished, blond haired blue eyed Arians at around 5′ 6″. Body mass and corresponding build derived from higher ptotene diets like steak & eggs would have tipped scales for the GI’s as opposed to typical kippers on toast for the Brits, tripe & peas for diggers, (fsh’n chps for Kiwis) and borshe & bulgar for Boris, must surely have had baring on weight and stature. accordingly, though statistics are a little hazey.

    You’re therefore probably spot on with SM’s Yanqui origins, stuff the teeth he lost them as a POW, and don’t forget Ugo Pozza’s feather stitched coat from Brooks Bros USA, the Wrigley juicy fruit gum from White Plains NY and the non Bradford PA fake Zippo lighter.

  95. Another thought: it has been expressed before how difficult it must have been for SM to maintain such a solid, well-fed physique without having the use of so many of his teeth, remembering that Cleland (?) had the view that what teeth remained in his mouth showed no abrasive signs of supporting a cumbersome set of false teeth.

  96. john sanders on December 9, 2020 at 7:06 am said:

    Anyhow, we don’t have to worry about all those dietry variables to have a good crack at where the man from Somerton Beach came from originally, certainly not Sydney or Melbourne, for we can expand on that with simple genetics sequencing kindly supplied through most and unselfish efforts of Peteb’s close and informed expert and retired scientist Byron Deveson. Without having to tackle the ever changing mathematical equasions relative to DNA footprints in the sands of time and so forth, it can be now shown with absolute certainty that the sample hairs removed from Paul Lawson’s bust by Prof. Derek Abbott years ago, is 97 percent Caucasian. The facts indicate that ancestors of Mr. 97 percent, left a cold North Atlantic region (Balkans?) before the last ice age travelling slowly but surely towards the promised land of Virginia on the east coast of the Americas where they settled. In time and after a little harmless gene play with the very last of the Mohicans they called themselves the Jeffersons and the world bacame their oyster of opportunity. That’s how I see it in a nutshell, much the same as old mate Keith Mangnoson, only trouble being that his man who came in from the cold was Carl Thomson and not Thomas Jefferson aka. T. Keane; what a bummer!….

  97. john sanders on December 9, 2020 at 8:25 am said:

    Peteb: From acting Det. Sgt. R. L. Leane in his Sworn statement ” There was no evidence that he had worn a denture”. The absence of anything coming close to your fanciful description including no ‘abrasive signs’ that you give for Clelend?, or any of the other deponents, point to one of two things which are perhaps best left unsaid. PS: I still maintain a solid well-fed physique for a man with less teeth than SM and I find pies and pasties succumb to good healthy gum mashing that never clog up me dentures.

  98. john sanders on December 9, 2020 at 11:13 am said:

    milongal: There were five brothers Thomson; Adrian Ernest, Prosper McTaggart, Rollo Burrows, Gaston Charmers and Quentin in that order, all of them apart from Rollo who was killed in England ’43, dieing in the mid 90s I think…As for R.J.C. Thomson, I don’t recall him or any conversation connecting him to any W. G. Duffield. A Robert James Cunningham Thomson bn. S.A. circa. 1900 worked in a Melbourne munitions factory as a teen and died Adelaide 1953. There were two W. G. Duffields, William Geoffrey 1916/2005 & Walter Geoffrey 1879 who seem to have been part of the big land holding clan from Duffield/Hamley Bridge who were Druids.

  99. john sanders on December 9, 2020 at 11:53 am said:

    Peteb: Question is, which be the biggest frustration, Cramer’s paredoic chimera for his nonexistant micro code or your similar delemma with frigging matches that for all we know were inadvertently overlooked by investigating police. Neither fantasy is likely to assist with modus operandi discovery or identification of Somerton Man.

  100. John Sanders; page 14 … inquest papers, an addendum by Prof Cleland to John Matthew Dwyer’s deposition. The use of the word ‘abrasive’ is my interpretation.

  101. john sanders on December 9, 2020 at 1:07 pm said:

    Peteb: I therefore rest my case.

  102. An inquisitive mind might ask what would be the benefit of planting a box of matches amongst the evidence.
    Similarly, he/ she might ask if Strapps’ insistence on including in his deposition a description the particular type of clothing being worn by the man he was watching was because the policeman who was recoding his statement tried to talk him out of it. I ‘should’ say.
    Then he\she might take another look at the witness account of seeing a man carrying a man along the foreshore on the night of the 30th … after that they may wish to consider the lividity question once more. Then they may ask themselves why would Harkness answer every question put to her by Det. Canney then refuse to answer every question put to her when viewing the bust.
    Discussion on the case can be progressed …

  103. john sanders on December 10, 2020 at 4:29 am said:

    I can’t see that there would appear to be any realistic links, nafarious or otherwise wortwhile pursuing with your 29 & 47 Barnes St. Magill neighbours Robert James Cunningham Thomson and Walter Graham Duffield?, both of whom were nearing their respective use by dates in 1948. Of course the William Graham Duffield bn. 1916 with nine mile sniper credentials in Libya and Moratai could well be your gun toter but it’s a tenuous toss up in any case for mine.

  104. john sanders on December 10, 2020 at 5:54 am said:

    Peteb: You’re no doubt unfamiliar in the tactful art of taking witness statements. The deponent in this case, an ex naval rating familiar with authority, did not ‘insist’ that his ‘I shd say’ remark re striped pants be included in the manner you yourself insist. In fact the officer taking Strapp’s statement a day or so before the hearing was likely just going through a routine task of tieing in the cooperative young chaps observations with those of his female companion. Slight variations of two opinions can be expected, even preferred in some cases, so long as neither contradicts the other so seriously as to raise doubts or effect the weight of other issues needing deliberation…I might add that the habit of puting words in folk’s mouths that they didn’t say and second guessing their thoughts to suit one’s own whims does not, in my opinion improve chances of having the final word..

  105. John Sanders: you talk about raising doubts but conveniently forget the doubts now raised given Leane’s deposition contradicted Moss’ and Strapps’ contradicted the coroner’s findings.
    And you seem to be having a problem differentiating between objectivity and subjectivity.
    In addition, I am no stranger to the due processes of giving a formal statement and making sure the typewritten result was precisely what I wanted it to be. Otherwise I would not have signed it.

  106. john sanders on December 10, 2020 at 10:56 am said:

    The fine folk from Catharactacus obviously aren’t raised on vegemite, finest gift to children for growing replenishable brain cells..In case soviet leaning Boris and his pinko comrades haven’t caught on, Jessica Thomson’s part in the case must have been seen as gift from the heavens for Sapol who were needing a lucky break in order to put an end to their delemma. The ex Sydney? nurse’s just-in-the-nick-of time deliverance culminated in the tieing up of all the loose ends needed to close the case, taking a mere two days to accomplish. The Boxall factor was cinsudered a plus, requiring interstate help which became in itself a means to an end for the nasty ROK deal and diverting attention away from Adelaide, thus allowing for a peacful closure to the whole sorry affair.

  107. milongal on December 10, 2020 at 8:38 pm said:

    Thanks John – was hoping to get a car connexion.

    The problem with the witness who saw a man being carried that night is that he appeared much later (possibly 1958?).

    Can’t help but wonder if he was so certain that it was that night, why did he wait a decade to come forward? And if he was uncomfortable coming forward in 1948 or 1949 (or 1950, 51, 52…..) what changed in 1958 that suddenly he could come forward? Either he wasn’t certain he saw what he claims, or he wasn’t certain it was that night, or (going a little bit conspiratorial) he was closely enough related to the case that he thought something had changed by that time (e.g. a signifcant player had disappeared from the picture).

    I’m ok with the concept of a body switch (or similar – there’s a possibility of coincidence – that someone was in roughly the same location the night before), but I wouldn’t be basing that too much on the witness who saw a body being carried unless we can satisfactorily explain why he took 10 years to come forward.

  108. Tamara Bunke on December 10, 2020 at 11:05 pm said:

    @milongal @sanders IIRC there’s some doubt as to where that sighting was made. The witness stated it was about level with “the dugouts”. But no one seems to be able to place their location.

    We don’t, therefore, even know if this supposed sighting was anywhere near the crime scene.

  109. Milongal: Feltus interviewed him and found him credible .. and when it comes to having to face a cop asking questions I’d say GF would be as tough as they come. His record in the homicide division is worth reading. He is a very hard man.

  110. milongal on December 10, 2020 at 11:48 pm said:

    @Tamara I thought somebody was “…heading in the direction of the dugouts” (I can’t remember if that was the witness, or the OP (As I was going to St Ives…”).

    We’ve speculated a lot about what the dugouts were and you’re right, nobody really seems to know. I’ve always assumed they were Brighton side of where the body was found
    I do remember finding an old amusement parlour down Glenelg way called “Dave’s Dinkum Dugouts” (or similar) – it was burnt down some time before the SM story, but I think I’d hypothesised that if it had been sufficiently popular a local might still refer to it (for 80/90s kids the Beachouse will still be Magic Mountain, and Timezone in Hindley St was always Downtown (there was more than one Timezone on Hindley St, of course, but those who undestand will know).

  111. milongal on December 11, 2020 at 12:00 am said:

    How old was this bloke, and when did Feltus interview him – While he was still a copper, or while researching the book? Assuming it’s the latter (which might be an unfair assumption), it would’ve been somewhere after the turn of the century (I’ll say 2008) – 60 years after the fact….would’ve been getting quite old by then, you’d think – by which point I’d imagine it’s quite hard to gauge someone’s credibility (because our memory quite naturally morphs facts over times – literally neurons get rerouted to remember more important things).
    If it was around 1978, we’re still tallking 30 years after the fact (so any memory drift between 1948 and 1959 has only been reinforced in your mind since coming forward).
    I’ve lost my copy of the book (which is embarassing, because it’s digital), but did GF explicitly say they were a credible witness, or is that inferred by the fact it was included in the book?

  112. milongal: as you know, Dave’s Dinkum Dugout (on Brighton Esplanade) burned down in 1927:
    https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/129241217
    There’s also a comment here from last May by, let me see, “milongal”:
    http://ciphermysteries.com/misc-stuff#comment-405503
    Personally I’m a little more convinced by Alfred Henry Bellman living in a dugout in 1943, again noted by a certain “milongal”:
    http://ciphermysteries.com/misc-stuff#comment-405504

  113. milongal on December 11, 2020 at 12:07 am said:

    @NP: lol – you know sometimes I read that and think “I never said that”

  114. john sanders on December 11, 2020 at 2:24 am said:

    Peteb: How do you rate your Feltus thoughts and assertions. Would you call them subjective, objective or based merely on heresay . Giving us a little sample of his work in homicide might give us an idea of just how tough and competent he was. That won’t likely help much with credibility issues for those that aren’t convinced by your brown nosing claptrap.

  115. john sanders on December 11, 2020 at 2:48 am said:

    Neil Day the jockey boy impressed me with his recollections of Somerton Beach and environs. Seems Peteb has a surplus of Adelaide talent on his team that could tap into the old hoop’s wealth of local knowledge as to where in hell the caves and dugouts were located. Can’t see how it’s gonna help identify our man or send any bad guys to Yalatla for the term of their naturals….though.

  116. milongal .. allow me to refresh your memory.

    Taken from A Final Twist.

    “On 5 December 1959 Detective Don O’Doherty received information from a businessman ….. etc”

    “He (the businessman) can vividly remember the incident he reported (this is when GF interviewed him in about 2008) and recalls it was definitely on the evening prior to the body being reported in the newspaper”

    “The next day (December1st 1948 ) the two sisters (both were with him at the time) discussed the incident with him and they thought the police should be advised.”

    “They did not advise police because they believed the police would have already been advised by others.”

    “He (the businessman) later married and after reading various stories about the Somerton Body he thought it may be of interest to the police so he decided to advise them.”

    I’ll stick up a pic of the relevant pages from GF’s book over my way in a day or two …

  117. john sanders on December 11, 2020 at 6:32 am said:

    It seems a few of Tbt’s best and brightest SM recruits totally misinterpreted the blind freddy clue that would seem to confirm Prosper Thomson having indeed been abscent from the scene during the days leading up to and a day or two after December 1st 1948. He didn’t re visit Auckland known to him as a second home to the Burch family crime syndicate, of which he was part pre war. it’s unlikely that Sydney or places further afield were intended, for his own people had moved north to the central coast an besides time was of the essencr. All that’s left really would be Melbourne, for the Holden unveiling and/or suburban Mentone to show off the ‘Toddler’ Robin to adoring grand parents. Or closer to home, Port Lincoln and even Broken Hill were towns familiar to him in his various shonky business ventures. Of course the deal being that the fake ads were posted to cover an intended period of abscence from Adelaide, one he did not wish to be public knowledge. No harm done to include addresses with phone numbers making for a stronger alibi, if down the track he’s needing proof that, “No officer, couldn’t have been moi, I was home at 90a Moseley you see”. A similarly devious lost ad scam in re a gold Tudor watch was put out about that time too.

  118. john sanders on December 11, 2020 at 1:35 pm said:

    Peteb: Time was, back at the start of his novel, when Gerry had finished giving his readers a short history lesson on WW2, he gave us those immortal words TORO TORO TORO; which may well have been his misplaced introduction to what then followed. So you can look up all you like; you’re only likely to see foggy foggy dew.

  119. Actually I think it’s this one?

    https://ebay.us/r7E7jS

    Is there a definitive description anywhere?

    This one matches the images that are circulating from the case files.

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