April 2000 Volume 81 Number 4 "serving the protectors"
Mystery of the Somerton Man
By Dorothy Pyatt

he earliest known movements of the Somerton man were during the morning of November 30, 1948, when he lodged a suitcase in the cloakroom of the Adelaide Railway Station. He then bought a second-class ticket to Henley Beach, but for some reason did not use it - perhaps he missed the train.

He put the ticket in his pocket, crossed North Terrace to a bus stop outside the Strathmore Hotel at about 11:15 and caught a bus to Glenelg. At about 7pm that evening, a man named Lyons and his wife were strolling along the beach at Somerton, enjoying the pleasant evening air.

They were about opposite the old Crippled Children’s Home, when Lyons looked up and noticed a man lying on the sand with his head against the seawall and feet pointing toward the sea. He was within about a metre of the steps up the seawall. As Lyons looked at him, the man made a movement with his right hand as though he was trying to smoke a cigarette.

Lyons said to his wife: “Look at the way that man is slumped.”

They thought the man was drunk and walked on. Half an hour later, a young girl named O’Neill and her boyfriend, Strapps, were walking along the promenade on the top of the seawall at Somerton. They stopped for a while on a seat near the steps down to the beach. O’Neill could see a man’s left hand lying beside his body. From the position of the hand she had a thought that perhaps there was something wrong with him. “I’ll have a look at him,” she said to her companion.

“Oh, don’t be a stickybeak,” Strapps replied.

“Perhaps he’s dead,” she said jokingly.

O’Neill and Strapps remained there for about half an hour. During that time the man did not move. They thought he may have been sleeping, as he did not appear to be worried by the mosquitoes.

The following morning, Lyons went to the beach again at about 6:30am to have a swim with some friends. After his swim, he again saw the same man in the same position beside the seawall.

He became suspicious and took a closer look. He decided that the man was dead and hurried to his nearby home to ring the Brighton police station. Lyons returned to the body and was soon joined by the station’s officer-in-charge, Constable Moss, who examined the body. He looked for signs of disturbance, but there were none. He found the body fully clothed with no indications of violence. The left arm was lying beside the body and the right arm was bent double. A half-smoked cigarette was lying on the right collar of his coat.

The body was taken by police ambulance to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where an opinion was given that death had occurred at around 2am. The body was taken to the morgue and police enquiries commenced.

There was nothing unusual about a man dying in a public place. It was assumed that someone would soon come forward to claim him.

Two days later a post mortem was conducted. Until then it was thought that the man had died from natural causes. Now, however, a mystery began to emerge: despite numerous tests, no cause of death could be discovered.

The body was found to be that of a tall 45-year-old in excellent physical condition. He was said to be of European appearance and dressed in quality clothing. Consistent with poisoning, his stomach was found to be highly congested with blood, and his heart had failed.

But tests failed to reveal any poison. It seemed that someone’s sophisticated knowledge of poisons had brought about the man’s death.

Neither scars nor any other identifying marks could be found on his body.

The police began extensive enquiries to establish the man’s identity. Photographs and his fingerprints were circulated throughout Australia, New Zealand and all English-speaking countries. No record of the man could be found.

A police search of his clothes’ pockets revealed an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a used bus ticket to Glenelg, cigarettes and matches, but no money. All his clothes’ identification marks had been removed. The mystery deepened and the press became interested.

In January 1949, police enquiries revealed an unclaimed suitcase in the cloakroom at the Adelaide Railway Station. It was the suitcase lodged on November30. It was in fairly new condition and a luggage label had been removed from it. Clothing in the case matched that worn by the man, but most of it had all identification marks removed. Also in the case was a brush used for stencilling, a knife with a sharpened point and a pair of scissors with sharpened points. They were the type used by third officers on merchant ships responsible for stencilling cargo.

The Australia-wide circulation of a dry-cleaning mark proved fruitless, and even the name T. Keane - found on three items - led nowhere. Other than discovering the man’s coat was of American origin, it seemed that painstaking efforts had been made to conceal his identity.

And so the mystery deepened. Numerous people went to view the embalmed body, claiming that he was someone known to them, but still the identity was not established.

In April, a Professor Cleland made a further examination of the clothing found on the body and discovered another cryptic clue. In an obscure trouser fob pocket he found a tiny, rolled up piece of paper. Printed on this paper were two words: “Taman Shud”. With no knowledge of these words, enquiring police were alerted by an Advertiser reporter to the poem, The Rubaiyat, written 900 years ago by the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. The theme of his poem was that one should live life to the full and have no regrets when it ended. The words Taman Shud - which appear at the very end of the book of poems - mean “the end” or “the finish”.

This strange find opened up new lines of police enquiries. Police began a search for a copy of The Rubaiyat which may have had the last page missing.

In June, Adelaide Museum taxidermist, Paul Lawson, was asked to make a plaster cast of the man’s head and shoulders. He found the body tall and beautifully formed, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. It seemed the man had been strong and robust, with well-cared-for hands and nails which showed no signs of hard work. His big and little toes met close together in a wedge shape, like those of a dancer. His calf muscles were formed high up in his leg, like those of women who regularly wear high-heeled shoes.

Police enquired as to whether the man had been a dancer or a stockman, but their enquiries proved fruitless.

Shortly afterwards, in 1949, the body was buried in the West Terrace Cemetery. Police kept the arrangements secret to keep sightseers away. The South Australian Grandstand Bookmakers Association paid for the burial service to save the man from a pauper’s burial. The Salvation Army conducted the service.

An inquest had been opened shortly after the body had been found but was adjourned. It was resumed three days after the burial. The coroner was unable to make any finding on the man’s identity or cause of death. The matter was further adjourned without reaching any conclusion. Indeed, the coroner said there was no absolute certainty that the man seen alive was the man found on the beach the next morning, as nobody had seen his face while he was alive.

The wide publicity given to the case brought some result. A doctor who lived at Glenelg came forward with a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, from the last page of which a piece had been torn out. Although the scrap of paper bearing the words Taman Shud had been neatly cut around the edges, tests proved that it came from the same book produced by the doctor. The doctor told police that he had found the book tossed on the front seat of his car when it was parked in front of his house on November 30. It was a finding to which the doctor had previously attached no importance.

Detectives found faint pencil markings on the back of the book, which appeared to be four cryptic lines of capital letters, but code experts were unable to shed light on them.

Other enquiries into what appeared to be telephone numbers in the back of the book also failed to reveal any clues.

The last stanza in the book before the words Taman Shud read:

And when yourself with silver foot shall pass
    Among the Guests Star-scattered on the grass
    And in your joyous errand reach the spot
    Where I made One - turn down an empty glass!

Many unsolved questions remain intriguing. Who was this man and how did he die? Why did he appear to make such efforts to remain anonymous? Did he die by his own hand and, if so, how? Was he murdered and matters arranged to give the appearance of suicide? What manner of death was it to have left no clues? Was a poison used which conveniently dissipated so that no trace of it remained? If it was suicide, why would a man in top physical condition want to die? Was it an affair of the heart, or some other desperate problem that beset him?

It was the time of the Cold War and the Berlin Blockade. The rocket range was being established at Woomera and, at that time, one of the world’s top physicists was in Adelaide. It was suggested that the man may have been involved in espionage and been killed because of what he knew.

Was he an agent for a foreign power, a spy or an intelligence officer?

While the circumstances surrounding this death were unusual, it seems likely that he committed suicide. But did he swallow or inject himself with some obscure poison?

If that is so, one can only speculate as to his state of mind as he lodged that suitcase in the Adelaide Railway Station and caught the bus to Glenelg, perhaps reading that last stanza in the old Persian book of poems before he tossed it away.

Will the mystery ever be unravelled?

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