TAMÁM SHUD: THE MYSTERY OF AUSTRALIA’S UNKNOWN MAN
THE MYSTERY OF AUSTRALIA’S UNKNOWN MAN
On 1 December 1948, a man’s body was found on the beach of an Adelaide suburb. Who he was and how he died have remained a mystery for nearly 70 years, despite a trail of bizarre and tantalising clues. ROY BAINTON re-opens Australia’s weirdest cold case file.
On 1 December 1948, a man’s body was found on the beach of an Adelaide suburb. Who he was and how he died have remained a mystery for nearly 70 years, despite a trail of bizarre and tantalising clues. ROY BAINTON re-opens Australia’s weirdest cold case file.
Iremember walking through Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide in South Australia, back in the early 1960s. The mainly residential seaside suburb is home to Somerton Park Beach, and whilst enjoying a cold beer there that hot day, I had no idea that this was the location of what remains the most perplexing mystery in Australia’s criminal cold case files: the enduring enigma of the ‘Somerton Man’, or as they refer to him down under, the ‘Unknown Man’.
In an age of high-tech CSI, DNA and advanced forensic science, we like to think we’re pretty clever when it comes to solving murder cases. There’s usually a clear motive, and a list of potential suspects soon builds up. Was it the wife/husband? Was there a girlfriend/boyfriend? A mugger? A robber? The starting point is usually the identification of the victim. Yet what happens when absolutely no one knows whose body it is? The ‘Somerton Man’ case is a mystery laden with curious clues, hints and false leads, none of which provide an explanation or a conclusion, even after all this time.
THE BIG SLEEP
Perhaps no one noticed the smartly dressed middle-aged man who stepped from the Melbourne train at Adelaide station at 8.30am on the morning of 30 November 1948. It had been a long journey. He bought a oneway ticket for the 10.50am train to Henley Beach, but the ticket was never used. He was carrying a small brown suitcase, which he deposited in the station’s left luggage room at around 11am. At 11.15am he bought a 7d (seven pence) bus ticket outside the station for a bus going to Somerton, but he got off somewhere along the route. Some researchers suggest that he alighted at Glenelg, close to the St Leonard’s Hotel. Between 7pm and 8pm that night several witnesses claimed to have seen the man. He stopped somewhere to buy a pasty. This much is known: now the mystery kicks in.
In southern Australia, 1 December is regarded as the first day of Summer. It was warm on the evening of Tuesday 30 November when a couple decided to take a stroll along Somerton Beach. John Bain Lyons was a local jeweller, and as he and his wife ambled along the sands in the direction of Glenelg at 7pm, they spotted a smartly dressed man reclining on the sand, his head propped up against the sea wall. He was about 20 yards away when they first noticed him. He seemed quite relaxed, with his legs outstretched and crossed. Mr Lyons had the impression that the man might be drunk, as the reclining figure lifted up his right arm, which then fell back down. It seemed as if he might have been attempting to light a cigarette but abandoned the idea. Half an hour later, a young couple were out for a walk along the Esplanade, and they had a view of the beach from above. The reclining figure was still there, with his left arm laid out across the sand. His shoes were clean and well polished, his suit looked immaculate – yet it seemed an odd sartorial choice for beachwear. He appeared to be sleeping, but with a swarm of mosquitos around his
face, inspiring the young man to comment: “He must be dead to the world not to notice them.”
But the man on the beach was in the deepest sleep of all – he was dead.
The following morning, John Lyons emerged from the sea after a cooling swim and was joined by two men and a horse as they gathered around the dead man, still in the same position that Lyons had seen him the night before, legs crossed and outstretched. There was an unsmoked cigarette behind his ear, and a half smoked stub resting on his collar. There were no signs of violence.
Three hours later, the body was taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where Dr John Barkley Bennett estimated the man had died, possibly from heart failure, at around 2am. There was a dramatic twist when the doctor announced that he suspected the man had been poisoned. The dead man’s pockets were emptied but did not reveal much. For starters, he had no cash or wallet. What was found were two combs, a box of matches, a pack of chewing gum, a pack of Army Club cigarettes and seven Kensitas cigarettes. But there was another puzzle. Any maker’s name labels or tags in his clothing had been carefully cut away, and one of his trouser pockets had been stitched with orange thread.
The police had no leads as to the corpse’s identity. The local press reported that the man found on the beach was one ‘EC Johnson’, but Johnson turned up alive and
1 well on 31 December. A full autopsy and post mortem were carried out. John Dwyer, the pathologist, found a quantity of blood mixed with the remains of a pasty in the man’s stomach. Further examination revealed the dead man had unusually small pupils, his liver was distended with congested blood, and his spleen was three times normal size. With these results, suspicions of poisoning arose. Yet no cause of death was found, and expert chemical analysis on the man’s organs revealed nothing.
So who was this dead man? At the subsequent Coroner’s inquest, the evidence of one expert, who had inspected the man’s legs and feet, suggested his well-developed calf muscles and oddly shaped, pointed feet hinted that the mystery man might have been a ballet dancer. The cadaver was preserved with formalin and a cast was made of his bust for future examination. The corpse’s fingerprints were taken and circulated around the world, but with no result.
Christmas 1948 came and went with the Unknown Man still resting in the morgue. Then, in January 1949, the suitcase he had left at the railway station was discovered. When police opened it, the mystery deepened. There was a reel of orange thread. There were a few items of clothing, from which the nametags had been removed, but on three the names ‘Kean’ and ‘Keane’ remained. There was a stencil kit, the kind of thing used to stencil names on packing crates, a coat, stitched with a peculiar feather stitching, a table knife with the shaft cut down, and six pence. Although the names ‘Kean’ and ‘Keane’ looked like good leads, the police could trace no one, and the local press suggested that the labels were left deliberately as red herrings. Once again the investigation was stalled.
But the strangest evidence – the evidence that would give this case its mysterious name – came when the Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Adelaide, John Cleland, was brought in during April 1949 to examine the corpse. Sewn into the waistband of the trousers was what has been referred to as ‘a secret pocket’. It contained a small, tightly rolled, piece of paper bearing the printed words ‘Tamám Shud’. A reporter for the Adelaide Advertiser, Frank Kennedy, recognised the words as Persian. They were from a work of poetry written in the 12th
THE CORONER WAS TOLD THAT AVERY RARE POISON COULD HAVE BEEN USED
century, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and come at the very end of the English translation by Edward Fitzgerald, after the final verse. They mean literally: ‘It is ended’. The slip of paper appeared to have been torn from a book, and the seemingly hopeless hunt for the original copy began. The police began to suggest that this might point to a straightforward suicide. But there was much more yet to come.
CODES AND POISONS
In June 1949 the body was buried in a plot of dry ground and sealed under concrete, a precaution in case it needed future exhumation. On 23 July a man from the Glenelg area visited the Adelaide police station and presented a very rare first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám published in 1859 by Whitcombe and Tombs in New Zealand. The odd story he told was that the book had been tossed into the back seat of his car by persons unknown. The torn extract matched the ripped space in the book. The identity of the man who found the book was kept secret, and has remained so. In the back of the book, police found five lines of letters written in pencil, and a telephone number. The number was that of a 27-year-old nurse who had trained in Sydney’s North Shore Hospital and now lived not far from where the body had been discovered. Soon local media began to refer to the mysterious lines of letters as ‘code’. Was the dead man a spy?
Attention now focused on the new lead, the nurse. She appears to be as mysterious as everything else in the case, as her real name was not revealed until 2013: Jessica Ellen “Jo” Thomson, née Harkness (see ‘The Jestyn Mystery’, p34). In 1949, when police interviewed her she gave a false surname, and it turns out that she wasn’t actually married at the time. The police agreed to protect her identity, and the media referred to her as ‘Jestyn’. When shown the plaster cast of the deceased man’s head, she thought that it might be someone she knew called Alf Boxall, but said she wasn’t certain. She claimed she had given a copy of The Rubáiyát to Boxall at the Clifton Gardens Hotel in Sydney in 1945 when he was serving as a lieutenant in the Water Transport Section of the Australian Army. Apparently she behaved very oddly
2 when questioned, and almost fainted. She need not have worried, because Boxall turned up, very much alive, and he brought his copy of The Rubáiyát, a 1924 Sydney edition, with him. He knew nothing of the dead man and had no connection to him.
3 The extensive international publicity rolled on as detectives around the globe investigated; but the man remained unidentified. As the Cold War developed, attention focused on the possibility of poisoning, a favourite weapon in espionage circles, and the strange ‘codes’ written in the back of The Rubáiyát. The Adelaide Coroner, Thomas Cleland, was informed by the eminent
4 Professor Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks that it was possible that a very rare poison had been used which would have decomposed “very early after death”. When Hicks appeared at the court hearing, he stated that the poisons he had in mind were so deadly and secret that he would not speak their names out loud; so he jotted them down on a slip of paper and passed them to the Coroner. They were digitalis and strophanthin. Hicks suggested the latter as the culprit. It originates from ouabain, a poisonous cardiac glycoside also named g-strophanthin. Somali tribesmen
have long used extracts containing ouabain to poison arrows used in both hunting and warfare.5
So, who was the Unknown Man – and was he a spy? At Woomera, they were testing missiles and gathering intelligence. Our man died in Adelaide, which is the closest Australian city to Woomera. Many have seen this as a feasible connection. It is also possible that he boarded his train at Port Augusta, which is much closer to Woomera. Then there is the bizarre pencilled ‘code’ in the back of The Rubáiyát. What does it mean?
WRGOABABD MLIAOI WTBIMPANETP MLIABOAIAQC ITTMTSAMSTGAB
Code specialists around the world, including some of the best intelligence experts, and even astrologers, have been wrestling with these random characters for decades – so far without success.
MORE MYSTERIES
There is still an aura of mystery surrounding the nurse ‘Jestyn’ and her relationship with Alf Boxall. It seems that Boxall’s army career might also have involved military intelligence. ‘Jestyn’ died in 2007 and some believe that her real name was kept under wraps as it (or perhaps even her nickname) might have been a key to the decryption of the ‘code’. Also,
6 according to a 1978 TV documentary, when she gave Boxall her copy of The Rubáiyát she had written out verse 70:
Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before I swore – but was I sober when I swore? And then and then came Spring, and Rosein-hand
My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.
Was this just a romantic gesture – or something more cryptic?
In 1947, the year before the mystery man alighted in Adelaide, the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service was carrying out OperationVenona, during which they discovered that the Soviet Embassy in Canberra had been in receipt of topsecret information leaked from Australia’s Department of External Affairs. In 1948, the US banned the transfer of all classified information to Australia. Spies would have had to work much harder that year.
The more you dig into the murky undergrowth of the Tamám Shud case, the denser the tangled roots become. For example, in 1945, three years prior to the death of the ‘Unknown Man’, the body of Joseph (George) Saul Haim Marshall, a 34-year-old man from Singapore, was found in Ashton Park, Mosman, Sydney, with an open copy of the The Rubáiyát (reported as a seventh edition by publishers Methuen) laid on his chest. It was recorded that he’d committed suicide by poison. However, Methuen only issued five editions of The Rubáiyát, so either this was a reporting error or a copy of the New Zealand Whitcombe and Tombs edition. It might be just a coincidence, or some kind of synchronicity, but a quick look on Google Earth reveals that Sydney’s Ashton Park is a short walk from Clifton Gardens. It was in Clifton Gardens, just two months after the dead Marshall was found with The Rubáiyát on his chest, that Jestyn gave Alfred Boxall a copy of the book. And who was Joseph (George) Saul Haim Marshall? It transpires that his brother was the famous barrister and Chief Minister of Singapore, David Saul Marshall. Joseph Marshall’s inquest was held on 15 August 1945. A woman testified at the inquest. She was called Gwenneth Dorothy Graham. Within a fortnight of testifying, she was found naked and dead, face down in a bath with her wrists slit. Omar Khayyám seems to have had a lot to answer for.
In 1949, as the Adelaide police were still scratching their heads over the Unknown Man, at Largs North, just 12 miles (20km) along the beach from Somerton, another bizarre case unfolded. On 6 June, a two-year-old boy named Clive Mangnoson was found dead, his body in a sack. It was established that the child had been dead for 24 hours. Keith Waldemar Mangnoson, his unconscious father, was lying alongside him. The man was taken to hospital suffering from exposure and ended up in a mental institution. Father and son had been missing for four days. It gets weirder: the two were discovered by a man named Neil McRae, who said he had established their location in a dream the previous night. As with the Unknown Man, the coroner did not believe the boy had died from natural causes.
Then came the revelation by the boy’s mother, Roma Mangnoson, that she’d been threatened by a masked man who almost ran her down outside her house in Largs North’s Cheapside Street. The man was driving a battered, cream-coloured car. According to Mrs Mangnoson, “the car stopped and a man with a khaki handkerchief over his face told me to ‘keep away from the police or else’.” She believed this to be connected with the fact that her husband had previously been to identify the Unknown Man at Somerton, whom he believed to be someone he had worked with in 1939 named Carl Thompsen. Local dignitaries, including the mayor of Port Adelaide, AH Curtis, and JM Gower, the Secretary of the Largs North Progress Association, received some strange, anonymous phone calls, threatening an “accident” should they “stick their nose into the Magnonson affair”. The distraught Mrs Magnonson was so affected by her meetings with the police that she required subsequent medical attention.
South Australia’s Major Crime Task Force still regard the Somerton Man as an open case. The South Australian Police Historical Society holds the Unknown Man’s bust, which contains strands of his hair. Unfortunately, the chemicals used in embalming may have destroyed much of the DNA. In any case, a recent request to exhume the body was refused. Witness statements appear to have disappeared from police files, and the suitcase found at Adelaide Station and its contents were destroyed in 1986. There have been approaches from people in Eastern Europe who believe the Somerton Man might be one of many missing persons from the area during the Cold War. But it looks as if we may never know who he was and how he came to die on that stretch of Australian beach. So let’s leave the last word to our 12th century Persian poet, Omar Khayyám:
‘They change and perish all – but He remains…’ Tamám Shud: ‘It is ended’.