Category Archives: Tamam Shud

Right from the start of her book, Australian crime writer Kerry Greenwood promises a lot to the reader (but mainly to herself): to try to understand the Somerton Man, her late father Al Greenwood, and the Adelaide of 1948; and to provide some explanations. Put all that together and it is, as they say, A Pretty Big Ask.

To her credit, I have to say that she really gives it a go: and for nearly a hundred pages, she actually succeeds. She reaches out towards an authorial tone that remains human(e) and well-informed – even her reminiscences of her father are of a piece with it all, and are neither excessively nostalgic nor cloying.

In fact, up to about page 95, I really felt right there with her overall project: she knows she isn’t Gerry Feltus (and frankly the world is doing OK with exactly one Gerry Feltus) and that’s OK, but she’s trying to write something else entirely, a kind of living, wharfie-centric social history, the schoonered ley lines of the underworld writing their story in dockyard scars and watch-smugglers’ high-tide japes.

But then… the hybrid / crossover narrative range sprawled janglingly out of her non-fiction reach, into a unconvincing Eton Mess of spies, hyperdontia, Israel, Berlin, ciphers, inquests, and even (I don’t want to type it but I know I have to) H. C. Reynolds. And then finished off with a 40-page Phryne Fisher short(ish) story, that feels scratchy, misjudged and dated all at the same time.

As a writer myself, I suspect it’s reasonably clear what happened. For nearly the first half the book, Greenwood works really bloody hard to summon up a kind of writing voodoo spell that I didn’t honestly think was possible: mixing Aussie dockside wisdom with a feel for a time and a place that constantly reads as though it is about to cast a light on a devilishly shadowy corner, through sheer writing force. Greenwood successfully manages to channel her fresh-faced 1975 grape-picking self talking with her dad, often as if his curly-haired ghost was occasionally casting a wry glance over her shoulder and setting right her flights of optimistic historical theorizing. And that is where her book is absolutely at its best.

And yet the remainder of the book is just so, I don’t know, disappointing and hollow. It’s not that it can’t deliver on the elevated promises made at the start (as a reader, you don’t believe that she can, but you don’t really mind as long as you enjoy the ride); it’s just that I think she used up her personal emotional reserves and will-to-get-it-done on the parts she actually knew something about – the rest she’s basically making up, and her heart and soul weren’t in it. By page 100, she’d burnt the project’s inner candle out, and had to complete the remainder by wind-up torchlight… it just wasn’t the same. (Please correct me if you think I’m wrong.)

And so… I’m kind of stuck as to what to say. It comes across as only half the book she aimed to write, but she was trying to write a book that was at least twice as hard to write as a normal book. But can a reviewer really recommend that readers buy it to read the first half of the book? It just doesn’t sound right.

Ultimately, it’s not a ‘proper’ guide to the Somerton Man mystery (Gerry Feltus’ book is as close to that as we’ll probably see this side of an identified body), nor is it a family memoir of a lost Adelaide. And yet… all I can say is that it is what it is, and you’ll buy it if you think it will work for you.

This is just a work in progress post: I’ve taken the Beaumont family data recently posted here as comments by B Deveson and Samuel Z, and converted (most of) them into a single über-diagram.

Please let me know if this is wrong in any way!

The 60 Minutes video segment on the Somerton Man has just gone live, but you’ll have to navigate down the thumbnails on the right hand side of that page to find it – alternatively, this direct link to the video might possibly work for you.

Though it’s always nice to see Gerry Feltus and Derek Abbott on screen 🙂 , the whole point of the programme was that it also included a series of on-screen interviews with Jestyn’s direct family members (daughter Kate Thomson, daughter-in-law Roma Egan, granddaughter Rachel Egan) that revealed some new titbits of information – though (as is normally the case with cipher mysteries) only really enough to tantalize rather than definitively prove or disprove.

As a result, the things we now know are:-
* That Jessica Thomson lied to the police (as just about everyone suspected), i.e. that she did indeed know who the Somerton Man was;
* That Jessica Thomson told her daughter that the whole mystery wasn’t “at a State Police level”;
* That Jessica Thomson told her daughter that she “was teaching English to migrants”, and could speak Russian (if a bit rustily);
* That Jessica Thomson’s daughter now believes that her mother was linked in some way to Soviet spying; and
* That Jessica Thomson’s granddaughter now suspects that the Unknown Man might well have been her actual grandfather.

The first bit of good news is that if (as claimed) Jessica did know the Somerton Man, then we can’t really call him the “Unknown Man” any more, because he was manifestly “The Known Man”. Having said that, I somehow doubt that Gerry Feltus will be changing his book’s title any time soon, though. 😉

As far as the whole Soviet spy scenario goes: ASIO (Australian Secret Intelligence Organization) had an office in Adelaide, and I expect that there is a huge amount of stuff in the archives relating to Russian spies in Australia during that edgy post-WW2 period. Of course, it may be many years yet before anything in such grey archives get declassified… but if this side of the story is even partially right, then that could – much to my surprise – well be where any kind of genuine historical answer will lie.

But all the same… if Jessica Thomson was indeed a Soviet spy, it still makes no sense that she would silently poison another Soviet spy visiting her, even if she were a double agent (other countries’ spies were often far more useful alive-and-known-about than dead-and-buried). Personally, I still think it far more likely that the Somerton Man died by accident or by someone else’s hand than by Jessica’s hand – though I really wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was she who meticulously cleaned and polished his shoes after his demise. Shame the hat was too far gone, though. 😐

Moreover, the notion that the Somerton Man was Robin Thomson’s father (and Rachel Egan’s grandfather) is still a little bit hard for me to digest. Before anything so radical as an exhumation could take place, the simplest explanation of all – that Prosper McTaggart Thomson was the biological parent of both Robin Thomson and Kate Thomson, as you’d basically expect – would surely need to be eliminated first.

Even though Y-DNA testing is not possible here (because it only works for two direct male descendants of a single male ancestor), I would be pretty sure that there must be some other DNA test that could look for some kind of shared allele pattern between Kate Thomson and Rachel Egan that would indicate whether or not they were related (or very probably related) via a shared male ancestor. (I’m not an expert on genetics, though, so please tell me if this is just plain wrong.)

Only if it could be shown beyond reasonable doubt that the two did not share such a male ancestor would it make any obvious sense to push for exhumation – so, has this kind of testing already been done? The programme was silent… but maybe such tests have already been done, who knows?

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?

Despite this week’s lingering yellow downpour from Troll Land, the same period has seen a surprisingly large amount of good stuff concerning the Tamam Shud cold case / cipher mystery emerging into the light.

The first thing I rather like is Pete Bowes’ line of reasoning concerning the Unknown Man’s glass saucer, one of many curious things found in the suitcase he checked into the left-luggage room at Adelaide railway station on the morning of his death.

But why a glass saucer? Pete combines this with the Unknown Man’s fit-looking physical makeup (and hence a healthy diet, though the only thing we actually know for sure that he ate was a pastie) and his 18 (!) removed teeth to deduce that the Unknown Man must have had a dental plate fitted in his mouth, despite the fact that none was found at his autopsy. For Pete, the likeliest function of the glass saucer is as part of a bedtime ritual – taking his plate out and placing it on the saucer for the night.

I’m actually strongly convinced by this line of reasoning: and it has the ring of domestic routine to it that humanizes the Unknown Man, that helps stop us from treating his situation and life too abstractly or theoretically.

But, but, but… what happened to the Unknown Man’s dental plate? Given that it wasn’t in his mouth or his suitcase, I think there are two major scenarios to consider…

Plate scenario #1: the Unknown Man coughs his plate out while vomiting, but nobody notices its absence until after his body has been moved to the beach later.

Plate scenario #2: the Unknown Man dies, but the people in whose company he dies consciously decide to remove his plate to prevent his being identified by it before moving his body to the beach.

Up until now I haven’t really thought it hugely likely that name-tags or labels were removed from the clothes he was wearing: but add in the absence of a hat and the missing dental plate, perhaps this does all indeed amount to a pretty solid overall scenario to consider. Lots to think about there, hmmmm?

The second big idea of the week came from Cipher Mysteries commenter The Dude (see here, here, here, here, and here). Why oh why, commenteth The Dude, is it that people keep yakking about Jestyn (based on the presence of her phone number on the copy of the Rubaiyat eventually linked to the Unknown Man) when it is surely just as likely that the phone number refers not to her but to her partner-and-soon-to-be-husband Prosper Thomson? After all, Prosper used the same number for some of his taxi- and car-related small ads, even if the phone number was itself listed in the phone directory as “Sister J. E. Thomson”.

I completely agree that there are numerous permutations to consider; and suspect that the main reason people put forward such fanciful (and often ridiculous) theories about Jestyn is probably because she gave a copy of the Rubaiyat to Alf Boxall, making it easy to build up a romantic conceptual castle on top of the various fragments. But the existence of two copies of the Rubaiyat falls well short of a proof definitively connecting them: it was, after all, a popular book at the time.

Back in the real world, however, I contend it was far more likely that the Unknown Man was known just as much to Jestyn as to Prosper. It’s surely hard to keep really big secrets in a tiny little house. 😉

But The Dude goes further: given that Prosper was a car dealer and ended up in court several times for forging (or dealing in forged) car documents at a time when there was a lot of interstate car theft and fencing going on in Australia, might it be that the Unknown Man was a fellow car crim (say, from a different state), and that all the stencilling equipment in his suitcase was actually for altering car number plates?

It’s a perfectly viable hypothesis (and far more realistic than any spy hypothesis I’ve heard floated about the case over the years, for example), and one that might even be testable if we could somehow reconstruct the car ring associated with Prosper from people named in court appearances etc. The Dude is already away looking for this kind of thing, good luck with that whole line of inquiry… 🙂

But what if the truth is even simpler? After all, one of the long-standing mysteries about the Tamam Shud case which nobody ever talks about these days is whether it relates to Keith Waldemar Mangnoson at all: for it was Mangnoson who shouted out loud that he had worked with the Unknown Man in Renmark in 1939, and named him as “Carl Thompsen“.

As nearly everyone knows, though, when the Mangnosons ignored the warnings to keep quiet, things turned out very badly very quickly for all of them… but that’s another story entirely (for now). I really don’t know whether these threats were real or hoaxes: but I can’t help wondering whether all these pieces might be connected in a rather more direct way than is usually suggested.

Basically, might this “Carl Thompsen” have been a misspelled / misremembered cousin or relation of Prosper McTaggart Thomson? Might he also have been a trusted out-of-state fellow crim in the same interstate stolen car fencing ring? As always, the police have probably already followed this trail and it could all be no more than a coincidence… but I thought I’d mention it here, just in case someone has already gone hunting for all this (which normally seems to be the case).

Of course, the reason I call this the “Thompson Twins” hypothesis is that the 1980s UK pop group was named after the Tin Tin characters Thompson and Thomson (the original French bureaucrat pair were “Dupond et Dupont”), and here we find ourselves with our own Thompsen and Thomson to work with. “We are detectives, we are select”, you might say (though perhaps a little optimistically)! 😉