‘I put two and two together’: Meet the man who believes he has solved a seven-decade Australian mystery

Prof Derek Abbott spent years trying to find out the identity of ‘Somerton Man’, whose body washed up on a beach in 1948. Maroosha Muzaffar spoke with him about his quest

Professor Derek Abbott in Adelaide (EPA)

As the washing machines at the laundromat spun, Derek Abbott picked up a magazine to while away his time. It was some time in 1995.

Flipping through the pages, Professor Abbott – who taught at the University of Adelaide’s school of electrical and electronic engineering – found an article on “Somerton Man”, a mysterious man whose identity was in question and whose body had washed up on Somerton beach in Australia in 1948.

“Interesting,” he thought. And some time later he folded his laundry and went home.

But the “Somerton Man” kept following him. Years later, in 2007, while pottering around on a household chore, Prof Abbott found another piece about “Australia’s most enduring cold-case mystery”. This time, the article had more details, he says. It mentioned that the body was found with no identifying documents, but there was some code in a poetry book linked to the dead man.

This was the “Aha!” moment, he tells The Independent from his Adelaide home: “So I saw what the code looked like, first hand. And I thought, OK, this is interesting. This is something I can give as a project to my students. We can do statistical analysis on this, not to crack the code but maybe just to check if it really is some kind of code or not in the first place.”

That is what hooked Prof Abbott into the mystery of the “Somerton Man”.

Earlier this week, Prof Abbott – after officially working on the mystery for 11 years — announced that he and the American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick believed they had cracked the identity of the man using DNA sequencing.

Prof Abbott says he faced a number of hurdles in the years before that point, including battling trolling on social media. He laughs: “I did not need that [criticism by naysayers] at the time.” One of the answers to that? Changing his Facebook settings.

Image of the unknown dead man found on Somerton Beach, Adelaide, in 1948 (Australian Police)

Who was the Somerton Man?

On the evening of 30 November 1948, locals found the body of an immaculately dressed man lying on the sand with his head propped against a sea wall. There were no identifying documents on him. However, in his pockets, they found tickets that suggested he had taken the train to Adelaide railway station the day before. He had also checked in his suitcase into the station’s luggage room. The police found that his clothes’ labels were torn off.

Months after his body was found, a pathologist re-examined Somerton Man’s clothes and found a piece of paper rolled up in a hidden pocket. The Persian words “tamám shud” – meaning “the end” or “finished” – were written on it. Eventually, investigators found that this scrap of paper was taken from an edition of a popular 12th-century book of Persian poetry, The Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyam.

The book from which the piece of paper had been torn was later found in the back of an unknown car and handed to the police. Reports at the time mentioned that the car had also been at the beach where the mystery man was found.

Police traced a handwritten phone number on the back cover of the book and, interestingly, a code – some assumed it to be a code from the Second World War – next to it.

This was the code that was published in a local magazine that got Prof Abbott intrigued.

Hurdles to vault

After working with his students trying to figure out the code, Prof Abbott realised “the code is nothing. It’s not a spy code.” The code didn’t “even have this sophistication of the kind of Second World War codes that were known at the time”, he says. But this did not faze him. In fact, it spurred him on. The goal: “give the man his name back. And it seemed to me that this was possible.”

The watershed moment was around 2007 or 2008 when a friend of Prof Abbott told him that he had put his DNA online. And, voila, “he was connected to, you know, dozens of people around the world”. Later, Prof Abbott became aware of a plaster bust of the Somerton Man. The bust was made ahead of the man’s burial in 1948 in the hope that it would help to identify him in the future. Taking a “really close look” at that bust, Prof Abbott noticed “tiny little hairs sticking out of the plaster”.

Police exhumed the stranger’s body in 2021 (South Australia Police)

He says: “I hadn’t seen it before. I thought ‘aha!’ Given what my friend showed me, and now the hairs, I put two and two together: if I could get DNA from this hair, I could do this and find the guy’s surname.”

So, in 2011, he officially got permission from the the police to extract hair from the plaster bust. With the help of an expert friend, Janette Edson, they plucked about 50 hair strands from the bust. Using the DNA testing technology available at the time, they got some “poor results”, he remembers. “Very few DNA markers came out of that.” He continues: “But it was a great achievement because, in those days, getting anything out of old hair was very difficult with the technology. And it also showed that there was actually viable DNA there to start with – otherwise, we never would have got this result.”

Prof Abbott recalls that critics at the time suggested the embalming fluid used on the Somerton Man would have destroyed any DNA: “But... the embalming process was not completed; [it] didn’t reach the hair and it didn’t permeate through the whole body. So we actually found something with some real DNA and this gave us the confidence to do it again.”

The work continued. In 2018, he worked with researchers Jeremy Austin and Guanchen Lee and this time around they “got what’s called the whole mitochondrial genome”. It was a “major breakthrough”, according to Prof Abbott, but the results were not good enough to upload to any genealogy databases. “On one hand, there was elation that we got all that DNA, but on the other this big letdown and disappointment that there wasn’t much we could do with it.”

Last year, authorities exhumed the body of the Somerton Man. South Australia’s attorney general at the time, Vickie Chapman, said in a statement: “For more than 70 years people have speculated who this man was and how he died. It’s a story that has captured the imagination of people across the state and, indeed, across the world, but I believe that, finally, we might uncover some answers.”

Earlier this year, Prof Abbott and Ms Fitzpatrick tested the DNA again and uploaded the results to genealogy databases. “The family tree did grow to about 4,000 people. We already had the name around March this year. But we had no idea it was really him. So we were still working a little bit blind.”

Prof Abbott says that, by using popular genealogy databases such as Ancestry.com, “the first thing we found was a bunch of connections. And the closest match was still very distant. It was a great, great, great nephew [of the Somerton Man] from his paternal side.” Then they found another match on the mother’s side. That “triangulation from two different parts of the tree” led to one name – Carl “Charles” Webb.

Who was Carl Webb?

According to Prof Abbott, Webb was the youngest of six siblings and was born on 16 November 1905 in Victoria’s state capital, Melbourne.

He worked as an electrical engineer and instrument maker and was married to Dorothy “Doff” Webb. The couple had no children and separated in 1947.

Prof Abbott says it is possible that Webb came to Adelaide to find his wife.

Researchers also found that Webb liked to bet on horse races and the code that had captured Prof Abbott’s interest in the first place could be related to betting.

And the words “tamám shud”? Prof Abbott says that Webb was fond of poetry and even wrote some himself.

South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not yet verified the professor’s findings. South Australia Police said in a statement that they were “still actively investigating the ‘Somerton Man’ coronial matter” and that they “are heartened of the recent development in that case, and are cautiously optimistic that this may provide a breakthrough”.

The statement added: “We look forward to the outcome of further DNA work to confirm the identification, which will ultimately be determined by the coroner.”

Meanwhile, Prof Abbott says the real work is “just getting started”. Identifying the mystery Somerton Man is just the first step. He wants to chart more of Webb’s life.