Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

Thanks to Diane O’D for flagging that long-running Australian current affairs TV programme “60 Minutes” will be covering the Somerton Man this coming Sunday, with reporter Charles Wooley. The team were snapped filming in West Terrace Cemetery (where the Unknown Man’s body lies) last month.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that the fact that their interest and the Tamam Troll attacks on Cipher Mysteries all happened at basically the same time is not entirely coincidental. Perhaps that’s simply what happens when people stick their hot hands into historical hornets’ nests: someone’s gonna get stung.

But this is, of course, exactly how TV film-makers the world over make their programmes: their only concern is with the shining televisual jewel that finally emerges from the edit suite, not the wreckage that’s left behind by their underpaid & overstretched researchers trampling cavalierly over the cultural flowerbeds. It’s rare these days that this process yields even genuine reportage, let alone anything approaching (capital-H) History.

All the same, the programme makers have a moral responsibility to check their facts, to get their basic story straight: so let’s read their initial press release, to see what we should expect of them:-

We all know that fact is stranger than fiction and that’s very much the case with this story.

It’s the true tale of espionage, a love affair and murder – that wouldn’t be out of place in the movies.

Not a great start. Unless 60 Minutes have found a huge cache of evidence everyone else has missed completely (very unlikely), I think it’s important to say that we have:-

* no evidence of “espionage” at all – the “cipher” seems to be a list of initials of a set of phrases, nothing to do with spying
* no evidence of “a love affair” at all – all we have is a phone number in a book that seems to have been connected to the dead man
* no evidence of “murder” at all – the pathologists, lab analysts and coroners found no trace of poison, despite looking really hard

The year was 1948. Communism and democracy were wrestling for world supremacy. The nuclear arms race was in high gear. And there were spies everywhere, even in Australia.

All true (if a tad self-important and grandiose). But the probability that any of this is even remotely to do with a middle-aged bloke found dead on Somerton beach still seems extraordinarily low. I repeat: we still have not one jot of evidence that supports any of this speculation.

Against this sinister backdrop, an unidentified body was found on Adelaide’s Somerton Beach – the so-called Somerton Man.

TV loves sinister backdrops… but that doesn’t make the two things connected, or even likely to be connected.

Now, 65 years after he was buried there are moves to exhume him in an attempt to finally solve this lingering Cold War Mystery.

Professor Derek Abbott has indeed been trying to get the body exhumed. But – contrary to nearly every crime scene TV drama ever shown on television – the courts are respectful of the dead, and don’t allow them to be exhumed on a whim or on a fishing trip for physical evidence. Right now, we simply have insufficient tangible evidence to convince the courts that exhumation is a good idea, and – unless people actually do better quality research and find better quality evidence – that’s how it’s going to stay for the foreseeable future.

This Sunday, 60 Minutes will reveal for the first time the identity of the mysterious nurse who was romantically linked to the Somerton man, and talk to the woman who claims she’s the Somerton Man’s granddaughter.

Well… apart from the awkward fact that the identities of the nurse and her husband have been known by hundreds of researchers for many years now, perhaps we can be generous and say that “60 Minutes” will probably be the first to reveal it on TV.

All the same, the interview with “the woman who claims” (etc) will doubtless be interesting, if perhaps a bit speculative: though if they’ve hooked themselves a gee-new-wine Tamam Troll, that would turn the entire programme into a Tamam Train Wreck of spectacular proportions.

Let’s hope for some fast and furious fact-checking before Sunday! 🙂

I’ve started to amass the raw data for an open source time of death calculation for the Somerton Man.

* The Adelaide Advertiser, 30th November 1948, p.8.
* The Adelaide Advertiser, 1st December 1948, p.10.
* The Adelaide Advertiser, 2nd December 1948, p.6.

30th November 1948
Sunset 7.14pm
Moon set 6.51pm – New Moon
High tide 4.52pm (6.0ft), low tide 10.10pm (2.4ft)
Temperature min 52.1°, max 76.3° [i.e. 11.2°C to 24.6°C]
Barometer 30.05 (3am), 30.09 (9am), 29.99 (3pm), 30.03 (9pm)
Relative humidity 58% (9am), 43% (3pm), 57% (9pm)

1st December 1948
Sunrise 4.56am
Moon rise 4.51am – New Moon.
High tide 4.34am (9.0ft), low tide 11.11am (1.0ft).
Temperature min 65.7°, max 96.0° [i.e. 18.7°C to 35.5°C]
Barometer 29.87 (3am), 29.86 (9am), 29.70 (3pm), 29.71 (9pm)
Relative humidity 20% (9am), 18% (3pm), 39% (9pm)

The initial surprise was that this was a short but extremely dark night – the sun and (new) moon both set around 7pm and rose just before 5am. As a result, anyone observing any event after sunset that evening / night would have had to have been relying almost entirely on street lights.

The second surprise that the high tide at 4.34am was a spring tide (i.e. a very strong tide, and nothing to do with the season ‘Spring’). That is, at the time of a New Moon, what can happen is that one of the two normal tides a day can be exaggerated by the gravitational force of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun all lining up in what is called a “syzygy“, from the Greek ζυγον meaning “yoke”. (I used to play Scrabble with my Grandma after school, and I’m sure she’d have thoroughly appreciated that word: this was the first time I’ve managed to use it in its proper context).

However, I haven’t yet found good enough information to be sure what the temperature was during the night, and I also can’t make out the wind direction or speed from Trove’s scans of the Adelaide Advertiser’s weather maps. If anyone has access to better information for these, please say!

Also, I don’t know how far up Somerton Beach the 9ft high tide would have come at 4.34am. The man’s body would surely have to have been fairly close to the sea wall, simply to have avoided been washed over by the waves. Just a thought!

While responding to Cipher Mysteries comments from the ever-interesting Byron Deveson and others today, it struck me that what we are broadly iterating towards is a kind of “open source autopsy” of the Tamam Shud / Unknown / Somerton Man. And so, my reasoning went, why not take this basic idea and really do it properly?

In short, I propose that we carry out an open source autopsy on the Unknown Man. The point of the exercise would not be to do with whether you think, believe or suspect he was a spy, a paramour, a horse doper, a car thief or whatever, but with the unassailable basic factuality his physical body tells us about what happened to him (pre- and post-mortem) in the period up to the morning of 1st December 1948.

For me, a grain of fact outweighs a ton of speculation: and I believe that by collaborating to dig out all the grains of fact we can here, we will be able to reach a position where we can build up a powerful and convincing story about what happened. Not only that, but by collecting, exposing, and validating all the physical evidence, any conclusions or inferences will be openly accessible and verifiable by all manner of modern forensic professionals.

The first step in this journey of a thousand miles, though, is evidence collection. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of re-reading abbreviated summaries in 60-year-old Australian newspapers about the various autopsies, coronial inquests, and pathology reports. For example, Kerry Greenwood’s recent book (I’m waiting for my copy to arrive, any day now, *sigh*) quotes John Dwyer’s pathology notes, but having direct access to these notes is surely a better place to start.

I surely can’t be the only researcher who wants to go through these reports first-hand!

So, my current list of evidence sources we would need to begin with would look something like this:-

* Dr John Berkely Bennett’s autopsy report [examined the body at 9.30am on 1st December 1948]
* Dr John Matthew Dwyer’s pathology report [carried out the post-mortem at 7:30am on 2nd December 1948]
* Dr Robert Cowan’s report [stomach, stomach contents, a liver section, a muscle section, blood and urine]
* Dr Kenneth A. Brown’s forensic odontology report [he surely wrote and submitted a report, right?]
* The coronial inquest transcript / report [“Inquest Into the Death of a Body Located at Somerton on 1st December 1948, State Records of South Australia, GX/0A/0000/1016/0B, 17th & 21st June 1949”]
* The raw data collected from what is believed to be the Unknown Man’s hair by Professor Derek Abbott’s group.

Note that I’m not interested in the police reports or in any individual claims or narratives at this stage, but only in raw physical evidence. Is there anything missing from this list? Please leave a comment if there is!

Of course, there may be particular reasons why some or all of these can’t be openly published on the Internet. But all the same, I think we should be able to publish detailed summaries of all of the physical evidence and conclusions, not just the edited highlights that prove useful to reinforce some speculative or moral narrative.

To stand any chance of making any headway, I think we need to start with the whole physical story in all its confusing, contradictory detail – because the body itself can’t speculate or lie. Is that too much to ask for?

[NP: here’s a guest post by Gordon Cramer, lightly edited to Cipher Mysteries house style and with some brief comments from me at the end]

An enormous amount of effort has been applied to this case for so many years and I agree with comments regarding the value of Gerry Feltus’ book and the work of Derek Abbott and the students at Adelaide University.

I would suggest, with great respect to all, that the following facts and questions regarding evidence and timeline be taken into consideration when reviewing this case. I hope you will bear with me whilst I attempt to unravel some aspects that I find quite unusual:

1. On December 1st 1948, the Adelaide News published a brief article on the finding of the body of a man at Somerton beach that morning. In the article the man is described as being 5ft 11 inches in height, well-built and having fair hair and hazel eyes. This information was ‘fresh’ and would have come directly from the Police and quite probably the Coroner’s officer.

If you look at the images published at the time and since, his hair was quite dark and in fact has been referred to as being auburn in colour. His eyes were later referred to as blue in colour and not hazel. You could brush this off as a simple mistake but there were quite a number of such simple mistakes as you will read.

2. On Friday 3rd December in the Advertiser, another article appeared and it refers to a ‘reconstructed’ photograph of the body of a man found on Somerton Beach. This coincides with the view I and others have that the images published at the time had in fact been altered. You of course must form your own opinion on that. The same article clearly states that his death was not natural. I mention this because it was said that the Police did not discover the fact it was an unnatural death for some time. How much credence can be placed on the published photograph’s being a true likeness of the man?

3. Around mid-January the suitcase was discovered. It contained a range of items including tools, a glass dish, a razor and more. What puzzles me, given that the death was known not to have been a natural one, is why none of the items was fingerprinted. The blade and handle on the knife, the handle on the brush, the glass dish and more were apparently not dusted for prints. In fact, the Police made it clear that the way they were able to associate the man with the suitcase was the presence of Barbour’s waxed thread used to repair the collar of his coat and a card of similar coloured thread that was found in the suitcase. Why do that when his fingerprints should have been on the items mentioned, including the card of thread and the suitcase, inside and/or outside?

3. When much later a copy of the book was found, it also was not dusted for fingerprints. It should be born in mind that Detective Jimmy Durham had earlier risen to fame because he had been able to capture a palm print from a copy of a second-hand book from a shop and that led to a successful prosecution of a lady who had stolen the book. The question here is why weren’t this book and its pages fingerprinted? The least they would have found should have been the man’s prints and who knows who else’s prints.

4. The final aspect that adds to the puzzle is the manner of his death. Most would know that it was believed with some good cause that the man had been poisoned and that Digitalis or the plant derivative had been used. At the autopsy Cleland described the man’s spleen as being three times the normal size. In a discussion with Derek Abbott his view was that the Somerton Man was very ill and that his spleen could have taken three or more days to reach that size.

Here is where any input would be greatly appreciated: for example, is it true to say that Digitalis can have this enlarging effect on the spleen? If so then we are faced with the possibility that Somerton Man had been poisoned some days earlier when he would have been in Victoria, as is widely thought, or perhaps on the train.

The question here is would a man take poison, carefully pack his suitcase supposedly with the book and then take off on a lengthy train journey not knowing if he would survive it, let alone get to Somerton beach?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[NP: my own brief comments:

(1) “…gingery coloured hair, fairly coarse and turning slightly grey at sides, back of neck and behind ears… grey eyes, clean shaven and natural teeth” according to this later police report.

(2) To be precise about the “reconstructed” picture, it was made by Police Photographer Durham, appeared in the Friday 3rd December issue of the Adelaide News, and was then referred to as a “reconstructed” photo in the Saturday 4th December issue of the Adelaide News. My own best guess is that the “reconstruction” element simply involved putting a shirt and tie on the man’s body, i.e. staging rather than photo-manipulation.

(3) The book certainly should have been fingerprinted, yes: but unfortunately detective work is often full of should haves. 🙁

(4) The man’s enlarged spleen has yet to be explained satisfactorily (and I too think it would have taken several days or indeed weeks to reach that size). But the notion that the Somerton Man was a slow-motion suicide-by-self-administered-poisoning doesn’t yet make sense to me at all. Why lug brushes and knives around if you’re about to die?

Even more to the point, I think it is well worth pointing out that the significant lividity at the back of the man’s head was highly inconsistent with the pose of his body on the beach. The distinctive lividity pattern strongly suggests to me that after dying, the man’s body was laying down (almost certainly on his back) with his head slightly lower than the rest of his body, before being carried to the beach some hours later, again almost certainly in the night hours. So, somebody took his body to the beach after a fair few hours. The pasty in his stomach sounds to me a lot like a light lunch to a man his size, so my own forensic reconstruction is that
* he died in the late afternoon [perhaps in a sequence involving vomiting into his hat and losing his dental plate, right Pete?];
* he was then laid out on his back on someone’s [probably quite small] bed with his head tipped slightly over one side;
* he was finally carried to the beach in the middle of the night to be posed with a cigarette in his mouth etc.
Feel free to comment and disagree with this, but I’m pretty sure this is as close as we can currently get to the correct sequence! ]

Probably the definitive starting point for any discussion about the sad affair of Keith Mangnoson is the inquest report into the death of his young son Clive. It’s on the Internet courtesy of the consistently intriguing blog The Marshall Files, though reading comments there tutting at the moderator of a certain other blog (*cough* Cipher Mysteries *cough*) for letting trolls get so badly out of hand did feel a tad surreal. 😐

But I digress. Let’s try to build up a picture of Keith Mangnoson’s early life…

Born on 9th May 1914 in Adelaide, Keith Waldemar Mangnoson at the age of 14 then…

“…left home and worked on farms in the country until early in 1940, when he got lost in heavy scrub country at near Nadda where he was engaged in wood cutting. After the lapse of several days he was found lying unconscious and suffering from severe sunburn in an empty horse trough. After spending several weeks in the Loxton Public Hospital under the care of the late Doctor Tanko, he was removed to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and later to the Convalescent Hospital at Magill. The doctor who was attending him at the latter informed Mangnoson’s mother that her son was not responding to treatment and advised her to have him placed in the Enfield Receiving Home. He was taken to the Home where he remained for three months, and then his mother took him to a farm at Alma Plains where he stayed for a few weeks.

On May 11, 1941, Mangnoson enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces and served as a Private with the 2/48th Australian Infantry Battalion in the Middle East and later on in the Pacific Area, where he contracted malaria and suffered with war neurosis. On his return to Australia he was admitted to the Military Hospital at Northfield and remained there until he was discharged from the Services on February 7, 1945. He then returned to his mother’s home at 12, Magarey Terrace, Largs Bay and remained there until he was married in the following May.“

Remembering Mangnoson’s claim that he worked with a “Carl Thompsen” in Renmark (250km ENE of Adelaide, not too far from the SA/Victoria state border) in “1939”, we can see that this could only have been in the period before his near-death experience in Nadda (60km South of Renmark, and similarly close to the state border), and while this may conceivably have been in very early 1940, it certainly could not have been any later than that.

Renmark is surrounded by mallee scrubland (fairly arid, with lots of eucalypts): circa 1940, I presume much of this was being cleared (by woodcutters such as Mangnoson) for large-scale farming, as it has now developed a very significant grape, citrus-fruit and nut farming industry. The local papers at the time have columns talking about removing the green tinge from sultanas and whether there would be a market for flax… you get the basic idea.

Trove can also give us (thanks to the Murray Pioneer and Australian River Record, as well as the Adelaide Advertiser and the Adelaide Chronicle) several other brief glimpses into Keith Mangnoson’s early life. In March 1940, he was living in Alma and got engaged to a certain Winifred L. Williams from Renmark:-

WILLIAMS—MANGNOSON — The engagement is announced of WINIFRED L., eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. S. Williams of Renmark, to KEITH, W., second son of Mr. and Mrs. J. Mangnoson of Alma.

On August 1 1940, Mangnoson’s name appears as one of those volunteers for National Service from Renmark whose applications had been rejected.

We also know (according to the front page of the 28th March 1940 Murray Pioneer) that this had been the “Hottest March on Record – Thirteen Centuries at Renmark… all previous records for March heat have been smashed.” (p.16: “Wanted – Wood cutters and stump splitters, Moorook district”.)

However – as normal with just about everything to do with the Mangnoson family and the Somerton Man – throughout all this I find myself playing archival catch-up with the very splendid Barry Traish, who has been raking over (and indeed generously correcting) these Trove scans for some time now. But all the same, I have my own take on what these pieces of evidence could well mean if you put them all together…

If these fragments are all separately correct, then “early in 1940” must surely have been after Mangnoson’s engagement to Winifred Williams (announced in the 7th March 1940 editions of the various newspapers) and probably more than four months before 1st August 1940 (when his application was rejected), for surely he can’t have volunteered to join the AIF while still recovering in the Enfield Receiving Home? All of which seems to me to point to the incident happening some time in mid-to-late March 1940, just after his engagement… yet there is no mention of it in any of the newspapers in Trove.

Of course, the logical question for those Australian genealogist researcher readers who have managed to hold on this far into such a TL;DR post is surely this: whatever happened to Winifred L. Williams of Renmark? Did anyone ever think to ask her about Keith Mangnoson and his 1939 Renmark workmate “Carl Thompsen”? I’m guessing that she would be in her 90s now: I know I’m jinxing it by even asking, but might she even possibly still be alive?