A month ago, I exchanged a series of emails with a nice – though somewhat retiring – correspondent, who suggested that I might consider whether the Somerton Man was in fact Charles Gazzam Hurd. Here’s Hurd and his son (Charles Gazzam Hurd Jr):
The Disappeared
The last we know of Hurd’s life (from The Doe Network) is as follows:
- On 18th Feb 1937, Hurd left his workplace at 15 William Street, Manhattan (he was a manager of a real estate and mortgage department) at a normal time
- He had dinner at a restaurant / night club on East 54th Street
- He cashed a small cheque and left
- He crashed his Ford convertible coupe “into a pillar of an elevated railway structure at 3rd Avenue and 37th Street”
- He (apparently) suffered only minor injuries, drove off but then disappeared forever
At the time this happened, he was separated from his (wealthy) wife Marie Louise Schrieber, and was living at the Kenmore Hall Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. She remarried within a year of Hurd’s death.
His son Charles Gazzam Hurd Jr (born 1930, died 2015) seems to have been a thoroughly lovely bloke: “one time he orchestrated an epic Halloween prank involving a séance, the ghost of Benedict Arnold, and a couple of hydrocarbon fireballs that sent several 11-year-old girls into hysterics; an event that surely would have sparked an outcry on social media today.” Rock’n’roll!
Also: Hurd’s granddaughter Amy Hurd Fetchko has been doing a lot of her own digging, and there’s a nice podcast interview with her that covers much of what she has found, triggered by her father writing his memoirs. Did CGH Jr – as he believed he remembered – watch Tarzan with his father four months after his father’s death? Or had his father committed suicide in despair (as part of her family believes)? All very mysterious.
The Theories
It’s not widely known that there’s an (actually fairly sizeable) Internet community of people who try to identify John & Jane Does, often by connecting the few facts associated with a given person (height, build, hair colour, clothing, age) with those of other individuals who have disappeared. Indeed, a few of the more successful instances have ‘broken out’ into mass media (articles, books, TV, and probably even films).
On Reddit’s r/UnresolvedMysteries, plenty of people weigh in (a) that Hurd was probably a drunk driver, and (b) given that the East River was a mere three blocks away from where he was last, therefore (c) the most likely place you’ll find both him and his car (which disappeared at the same time) is the bottom of the river. Drunk driving, depression, head injury, concussion, impulsive suicide… all these are possible and in play (not at all unreasonably, it has to be said). (Websleuths don’t hugely disagree with this.)
Amy Hurd Fetchko also suggests that her grandfather – who she says was definitely a gambler – might possibly have got into money trouble with the Mob, and as a result either got killed or just changed his name and started afresh somewhere else. (She wonders whether the restaurant / night club where he had eaten might have been a Mob joint, etc.)
Alternatively, you won’t have far to look in the broader group of (what one might call) ‘The Disappeared‘ to find middle-aged men who dropped out of their life to start a new life with a second (often bigamous) wife. So it’s not entirely surprising to find that a number of amateur investigators have proposed that Hurd might have – by some random path – have ended up dead on Somerton Beach on 1948, i.e. that he might have started afresh in Australia but ended up as the Somerton Man.
A good source on this theory is a set of (nine) pages on Unexplained Mysteries. As you’d expect, it all pivots on ear shapes and so on. But… all the same, it just feels wrong to me. Dredge the East River, save us all the hassle, OK?
(Now The Real Post Begins)
OK, even though I’ve assembled all the information on Charles Gazzam Hurd in one place above, the stuff that actually interests me here isn’t Hurd himself, but rather the swirl of stuff around ‘The Disappeared’. For me, a much better question would be about why so many people are interested in identifying John / Jane Does.
Is this about closure, doing good, being helpful, connecting to (often long dead) people in a disconnected modern world? Is it about becoming interested in something, and then repeatedly scratching some kind of previously-unnoticed research itch that never quite scabs over? Is it about just finding an online community that you can settle into, safe in the knowledge that there really aren’t any terribly bad theories? Or is it about being nosy, opinionated, mouthing off, bickering, forum fighting, disagreeing, and occasionally trolling relatives and descendants?
Or some wobbly mix of all four?
Regardless, one thing that unites almost all of these cold cases is that there is very rarely any money to be made. Unlike the Zodiac Killer (where just about everybody involved seems to have written one or more awful books, along with a fair few of the fake letters trolling the police in the 1970s), there’s no huge glory to be had in identifying nameless victims. So in many ways, ‘Doe-hunting’ is – on the face of it – a fairly harmless pursuit.
For those who try to do this in a sensible way – i.e. by going to archives and primary sources where possible, and taking a resolutely evidence-centred approach – there’s nothing much you could say is wrong with what they’re doing. What happened happened, and nothing you can do now can unhappen it, right? It’s just trying to help, right?
Sort of, yes: but also sort of no. While it’s certainly nice to help identify people who have died mysteriously without a trace, people have no alienable Human Right to be Identified in the Unlikely Event of Their Mysterious Death. And given that these searches tend to be very long-term, they consume a lot of the searcher’s life, often yielding little or nothing of significant value in return. So, putting all the “The Journey is the Destination” blather to one side, there is a personal cost to the living to be considered here: the John / Jane Doe themselves have nothing much to benefit either – after all, it’s a bit late for closure for them.
And before you channel your inner Moe and say “Think of the family! Think of the family!“: in many, many cases the family simply have no idea at all. Someone just lost touch, and for countless years they stayed lost… until the Online Cold Case Enthusiasts gleefully poked their Internet noses in, typically offering a decades-later hallucinogenic mix of sort-of-hope and victim details gleaned from scratchy old police reports.
In my opinion, the real reason people get involved tends to be something quite different: typically (I suspect) more to do with finding kinship in an online community than with an overdeveloped sense of morality or desire for natural justice. Finding Charles Gazzam Hurd’s family tree more interesting than your own family tree is all very well, but a dispassionate observer probably couldn’t help but wonder whether this does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?
Blame Davina & Co? Why not!
This is also a pastime that familial DNA is rapidly transforming, making it just about as redundant as redundant can be. Why trawl through thousands of pages of scrawly old archives for years (or even decades) for a half-glimpse at something that may or may not be connected, when GEDmatch can move you closer to a rock solid answer inside a day?
Maybe it’s wrong to blame Davina and her TV buddies for making this so gosh-darn visible. All the same, it’s hard not to look at both the serried ranks of DNA-themed documentaries – national treasures (Piss-)Ant & Dec, dahlin’ Stacey Dooley, Bloodline Detectives, etc etc – and the rise in interest in DNA police cold-casery and see some kind of correlation there, right?
And as more and more people upload their DNA to databases, there seems little doubt in my mind not only that database results will become more and supportive, but also that the ever-improving familial-searching tools wrapped around them will automate more and more of the research processes involved.
At the same time, my understanding is that we’re simultaneously about to be hit by a rapid influx of AI-powered tools able to read old handwritten documents. Hence it seems highly likely to me that it won’t be too long before we see companies making this accessible at scale, where their “Google for genealogy”-style offerings pull together and automate a lot of the genealogical grunt work. (And let’s face it, most online family trees you’re likely to see are full of over-optimistic junk unsupported by any genuine evidence. So there’s a great deal to improve on here.)
So, even though we’re just about at the point where a load of researchers are getting actually quite good at genealogy and cold case research, we might also be at the start of a period where all that stuff becomes heavily automated and commoditised. And what then of online cold case forums? Computer says yes, computer says no: but either way, the computer says it.
Looking ahead, then, I expect DNA tools will obliterate not just individual cold cases but in time also the whole idea of cold cases. Similarly, I expect AI will obliterate genealogy (and why on earth haven’t LDS tried this, you’d have thought they’d be at the front of the queue?). I give it 10-15 years before they’re both as passé as wax cylinder recordings.
What Then of Cipher Mysteries?
So what then about the Somerton Man, and the Adirondack Enigma, and so forth? Yes, where cipher mysteries form just one strand of any cold case that is more of a WhoWasIt than a WhoDunnIt, I indeed think it’s a pretty safe bet that the plucky DNA genealogists will (eventually) get on board and figure out the person’s real identity.
In the case of the Zodiac Killer, police cold case teams (and the swarm of TV documentary teams kissing their poh-lice butts) must now surely be slowly grinding their way through the mass of Zodiac envelopes, stamps and other evidential gubbins looking for DNA hits. At the very least, you’d have thought – as I’m told happened not so long ago with the Cheri Jo Bates cold case – they’d have figured out which nutters sent taunting letters to the LAPD (hint: most of these probably weren’t sent by Zodiac). To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if 75% of those were actually sent by idiot Zodiacologists, but that’s perhaps going to be an unpopular opinion for a while yet.
However, the one thing that we’re still a loooong way from is using technology to crack top-end cipher mysteries. For example, while Hauer and Kondrak’s 2021 paper (on the Dorabella Cipher) accepted that Keith Massey’s observations were extremely strong, the authors still just waltzed past them regardless, despite their obvious inconsistency with, say, everything that they had hypothesized, written, and concluded. All of which made what would have otherwise been a basically good paper end up a bit too ‘baity’ for my taste.
So there you have the actual start of the art: known-system ciphers we can now crack in no time, but cipher mysteries? There’s no sea turtle that can hold its breath long enough for cipher mysteries to reveal their secrets. But in the end, perhaps that’s a good thing, right? 😉
I think there’s obviously an intrigue that drives people, but also an obsession that we are somehow better detectives than everyone else. Ironically I think it actually means we never stop. If SM is genetically identified very few SM “investigators” will be satisfied. Some will insist there was a mistake. Others that a higher conspiracy means there was a body switch. Even the more sane ones will simply shift their searching from “Who” to “Why” (or some other question). Sure, DNA can help us discover some lineage, or even categorically place him in a particular place in a particular family tree – but does it explain how he ended up dead on Somerton Beach on the morning of 1 Dec 1948? Even if we can conclusively decide from his lineage that it was suicide or something more sinister, it doesn’t answer the question of the Rubaiyat. It also probably opens more questions about what evidence is legit, what was misunderstood and what was (dare I say it) planted. Cases like SM will never resolve, because we will find different intriguing details to focus on that become “the real mystery” (TM).
As for Hurd, as I think you have concluded, I agree it’s bollocks. Aside from the fact I don’t think the pic is a good likeness, the fact his car was never found does seem to suggest it disappeared with him (as opposed to “as well as him”).
milongal: there’s little danger that DNA-derived identification will form any kind of impediment to some SM sites. No other fact has so far, so why would this one?
But actually, I suspect that a new and different kind of investigation will broadly open up, using the kind of archives we already know about but – without a name – can’t usefully access.
It may well be that we get given – by routes we cannot currently even begin to see – extra information that helps us decrypt his poem-like acrostic.
What happens next is still very much unknown, but all bets are off…
15 Sth Esplinade Somerton Beach is above and directly opposite X marks the spot. In 1948 it’s given block description was a land parcel of roughly an acre and upon it was a single level free standing bungalow at the northern most end abutting Ferris Ave. and a two story original mannor (Alvington), it taking up most of the beach frontage and bordering Madge Terrace. From the late 1800s to about 1925 or so Alvington was the only structure it being home to various generations of William Bickford’s family, last of which was Reginald and Rosa (Cudmore) mit their brood who then moved to a more manageable family home at 17 Tarlton St. (near 90A Moseley). Alvington, from 1938 was used for kids polio convalescence through until it was demolished in the 70′ and converted to luxury appartments. Sometime around WW1 Sydney Edward Ferris built the bungalow (15 Sth.Tce.) next door that his new family (two wives) settled into. and remained til death do us part ’44 and then some. Old Syd who was an orchardist, trader in wool, silk, bricks and also a prolific letters to the Ed. writer, had a son Sydney Eric bn. 1895 by his first wife Caroline who served in both wars, also twin sons bn. 1916 (died at birth) plus a daughter Betty Dulcie bn. 1917 born of the second spouse Phoebe, both strangely passing in 1944. Syd. Snr. followed in ’51 and Jr., whose wife had also died young in ’36 stayed on til his passing in ’83. All this interesting shit was taking place leading up to the Somerton man case and it’s aftermath, which it seems to have little at all do with apart from general vicinity logistics. When the new wars came in 39/41 with them came the arrival of US trained osteopaths Doug and Ella Nunn who appear to have taken up rooms in the very same dwelling (No 15) and who it seems remained until they too were eventually called Home in the ’80s & 90s (from memory) . The house, which 1948 police anals don’t mention appears to be still standing so who knows, maybe the Nunn Jr. tribe are still in residence…What’s all this got to do with ‘Jerry’ Somerton..not much it seems but certainly no less than Charlie Gazzump Hurd, who’s resting peacefully in his Buick no doubt in the deep end of the Hudson River on the Joisy side.
Some doubts surround the 15 Sth Terrace residence shared apparently by the Nunn and Ferris families from ’39 through ’73 at least. Both the Nunns in their respective burial details give Somerton as a last place of abode so?. In the current real estate listings the house which is now valued at 2.25 mil., dates from 1953, though that may refer merely to when the street number changed to 16 in keeping with new developements along the beach…In reference to Jerry Somerton, that’s apparently a name affectionately given to him by Doc Dwyer, Undertaker Elliott and publican Kenny, I’m guessing due to the Tom & Jerry cartoons in vogue at the time and by extension Tom Keane identity possibilities.
Now that a decent man’s time is done, let’s hope beyond all hope that his legacy is not sullied by those grasping Knaves who would seek to twist his final words in the service of promoting false witness for personal advancement…Happy trails Paul Lawson 1918-2021.
@JS couple of things:
Isn’t it Northern Esplanade, not South?
While there may have been some sort of a renumbering, do we know exactly what the renumbering was (the current 16 doesn’t look like the building next to the Crippled Childrens’ Home in the beach photo)?
Here’s 1948:
Ferris Ave
15 Crippled Children’s home
16 Moody P.T.S
Bickford Tce
And ’53:
Ferris Ave
15 Nunn D.A.
16 Moody P.T.S
17 Crippled Children’s Home
Bickford Tce
If you like name coincidences in the 1950s there’s a McTaggart (Mrs J.D.) on the next block toward Glenelg (#13), and in the 40s there’s a Townsend (Flt Off. Eric) (definitely not sibling of the ticket clerk, but haven’t scratched any deeper – mainly because I don’t think there’s any significance) in the Banyanah flats in the other direction.
milongal: some old maps refer to Sth Esplinade from Sea Wall at Glenelg to Broadway, thence plain Esplinade, though most SM references have gone for Sth. Esplinade since thevoutset. You’ll have noted that the Nunns were still recorded as being at No. 15 at the end of S&Mc. in the 70s with no sign of Ferris apart from the street named for the family.
milongal: 15 Esplinade, sans north or south from two people who each lay claim to being resident in the forties. Sydney Ferris and the yank “spy” Ella Nunn both gave that clear detail, one by aforesaid Syd when wife Phoebe died in 1944 and two for the innocent lady when she completed customs on re entering Australia from the US on more than one occasion. PS/NB. Ferris’ digs are actually recorded in mid forties as being an un numbered beachfront dwelling on Ferris St. next to No 21 (Arno Kohler my mate from Wirths circus perhaps). Not new but good reference.
I guess Charlie’s old lady was little Miss rich girl Marie Louise Schrieber bn. 1908, out of Shorthills NJ., whose heartbroken lover, Italian Navy sub Lieutenant Patrizio Pizzaria? swallowed his .25 Beretta when the 18 year old debutante rejected his implicit overtures for a bit of prenuptial nooky in 1926. If she had then re married in ’38, within a year of the ‘presumed’ death than authorities must have made it in absentia; or else flossy could have found herself up on a state bigamy rap if old Chuck had showed his face in The Big Apple within the mandatory 7 year cooling off period.
Patrizio Rizzotti was the stricken liuetenant’s name and he was army, not navy as reported. The deadly deed took place in Florence Italy where Marie’s papa was dealing in silk. Some likely more sordid details are up in on line pay to play newspapers if any serious punters be interested.
Nick Pelling: It would not surprise me one iota if the Unknown Man hasn’t passed our way before announced but unrecognised. Alas there’s been too much water under the Alvington stairs to pick a likely name from the many and the shifting whispering sands of Somerton aren’t about to give up their secrets just yet it would seem.
No need for repetition. The answer to the conundrum ain’t likely to be found anywhere in the interesting Hurd narrative, but from details contained in the subsequent discussions. Patience will be needed in scrolling through Adelaide
S & Mc. records, primarily with regard to two names associated with 21 Ferris St. and 21 Madge/Bickford Tce. 30s and 40s era. I Might I also suggest taking note of the summary addressed to Nick Pelling (unacknowledged).
I’d advise caution when using S & Mc. in that street name number references don’t always align with those given in the alphabetical section and can be out of sync. by years. Otherwise it’s a useful tool for research and reliable in most other categories…For intuitive punters anticipating a negative return on Carl Webb and/or otherwise disinterested in ad nauseam discourse on Dorothy’s school days, this thread offers a realistic path forward to relevant aspects of the case that have been grossly neglected of late….Motto for SM devotees be ‘Hurd is the Word Charlie get’s the Bird’…..THERES YOUR QUEUE EMOJI ENTITY
Non compliance by Emoji means likely to be a CM ‘in house’ generated initiative.