Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Seven

In a very Australian move, Somerton Man was buried by a pub, the Elephant and Castle hotel in West Terrace, Adelaide. The publican, Leo Kenny, was a well-liked man and a member of a well-known family, and the pub itself was the main port of call for the funeral trade, the pathologists, the police and the stonemasons, which I’d wager meant that they had very little trouble from the local toughs. It takes a rare form of suicidal insanity to attack people who can kill you without a trace, declare you dead, bury you and erect your headstone While-U-Wait. Police pubs are usually very quiet. Officers who really need a quick drink to face the world outside get desperately intense about being interrupted. Even my clients at the Magistrates Court, not known for their quick wit or sense of self-preservation, were never silly enough to try to hold up a police pub.

The patrons of the Elephant and Castle took up a collection so that Somerton Man should not be buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave. The Salvation Army conducted the service when he was interred on 14 June 1949. ‘This man had someone who loved him,’ said Captain E J Webb. ‘He is known only to God.’

Over the grave a headstone was erected, which says, ‘Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton beach 1st Dec 1948’. Thereafter, a woman was observed putting a red rose on his grave every year on 1 December. Police interviewed the woman and reported that she had no connection to the case but, frustratingly, they do not give her name. Later, observers noticed that pebbles had been piled on the grave, which is a way of marking a Jewish resting place, but Somerton Man was uncircumcised and therefore very unlikely to be a Jew. Though it is possible. Some Jewish children, trapped in Germany and sent to Christian institutions by prescient parents, remained uncircumcised to escape annihilation. But Somerton Man, who must have been born around the turn of that century, was too old for this to have been his fate.

Years passed without much more than a series of by now predictable headlines declaring that the body of Somerton Man had been identified, followed next day by the news that he had not. Lost luggage was inspected without result and missing persons were either found or continued missing. Nothing. Finally, on 14 March 1958, the long-suffering Coroner, Thomas Cleland, came to the reluctant conclusion that he had to close his inquiry, saying, ‘I, the said Justice of the Peace and the Coroner, do say that I am unable to say who the deceased was. He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1^st of December 1948. I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death’. And that, for the legal system, was that.

Subsequently, the autopsy reports, the suitcase, and The Rubaiyat were thrown out in successive police springcleanings. Other writers have waxed indignant about this but I perfectly understand. The police evidence lockers are always bulging with stuff, so when a case is stonecold, that is what has to happen to the evidence. Besides, supposing we still had the actual socks that Somerton Man wore, would it help us at all? Even if we had samples of his DNA, to whom would we compare it? I have to admit I do wish that the actual autopsies had survived but want, as Grandma used to say, must be my master.

Just after the Coroner called it quits, a New Zealand prisoner named EB Collins announced that he knew Somerton Man. The story appeared in the Sunday Mirror, which was published in Sydney. Gerald Feltus, who has access to the police reports, states that the New Zealand police interviewed Mr Collins, who declined to impart any more information, stating that he was going to be paid a lot of money for his story by a newspaper. However, no story subsequently appeared.

Information volunteered by prisoners is always suspect but it does show that the Somerton Beach mystery still interested the media. The interest has never gone away. The media have had a lovely time with Somerton Man. My researcher collected over a hundred newspaper clippings from the invaluable Trove on the internet, each of them reporting a new solution to the mystery, all of which somehow proved not to be conclusive.

Then there are the coincidences. Fictional detectives are fond of making pronouncements like ‘There are no coincidences’, and they are right in two senses – firstly, in the sense that no coincidences can happen in an intricate, infinitely complex world system in which butterflies flapping their wings create tornados, and secondly in the sense that no coincidences are allowed in fiction. Fictional investigations have much stricter rules than investigations in real life. In the Golden Age of detective stories, the most important rule was that the murder should never turn out to have been committed by a wandering axe murder whom no one had previously noticed. This is not because there are no wandering axe murderers in the world; sadly, there are. It is because readers of crime fiction rightly demand three things – a crime, a detective and a solution. Crime fiction is a puzzle and the author must play fair and give the reader all the facts they need to solve the mystery. Coincidences happen all the time in real life but if they happen in crime fiction, the reader feels cheated. Usually, however, an editor will return a coincidence-ridden manuscript and sternly instruct the author to rewrite it, so the reader never gets to see it.

Coincidences happen in court on many occasions. My favourite was the little ratbag who, after spending his youth with a collection of like-minded friends stealing cars and causing trouble, had been sentenced to a youth training facility but had escaped. He ran away to South Australia, got a job and a bank account, got married, had children and took them back ten years later to visit his old mum in Melbourne, counting, quite reasonably, on the fact that he had changed a great deal and that no one was actively looking for him. Then he stepped out on a crossing and was run over by a car and the police officer who picked him up off the road was – you guessed it – the one who had originally put him away. Apparently, the cop said ‘Hi, Jimmy’, and Jimmy said ‘Hi, Sarge’. When the case came to court, I argued that the Children’s Court sentence was meant to reform and keep him out of trouble, which it appeared to have done, so could we call it quits? And we did.

There have also been some remarkable coincidences in my own writing career, notably the day when my Muse suggested South China Sea pirates for a novel I was already writing. I was at court at the time and rather busy. ‘Nonsense,’ I told her. ‘I am already writing this book. I can’t knock off for a month’s research.’ But she persisted, so I said, ‘All right, Muse, I have to pass Sunshine Library on the way home. If I put my hand on a book about South China Sea pirates in the early twentieth century, I’ll do it. If not, not,’ which at least stopped her nagging. On the way home I ducked into Sunshine Library and there in the middle of the returns tray, right in front of my eyes and right under my hand, was The Black Flag: A History of Piracy in the South China Seas in the Early 20th Century by James Hepburn. I borrowed the book and put the pirates into the plot because ignoring something like that could cause my Muse to get huffy and I would hate to offend her.

Whole philosophical theories have been based on coincidence or synchronicity. Think of Jung. Think of Koestler. The world is not ruled by straight logic or exact causality. Not all of the things that look as if they might be connected are connected. Not all of the things that happen at the same time or in the same way have the same cause. Take, for example, the cases that are often cited as being similar in some sense to the enigmatic death of Somerton Man.

The first is the case of Clive Mangnoson, a two-yearold child, who, in June 1949, was found dead in a sack on the beach at Largs Bay, which is about 20 kilometres down the coast from Somerton Beach. Lying next to the child was his father Keith, suffering from exposure. The two of them had been missing for four days. The child had died of unknown causes and the man was unable to give an account of what had happened. They were found by a man who said he had been led to them by a dream. Mr Mangnoson’s wife said that the family had been terrorised by a man wearing a khaki handkerchief over his face, who, after almost running her down, told her to ‘keep away from the police or else’. Mrs Mangnoson subsequently had a perfectly understandable nervous breakdown.

The connection between the Mangnoson case and the case of Somerton Man is that Keith Mangnoson was one of the people who thought he knew Somerton Man’s identity. He had gone to the police and told them that Somerton Man was one Carl Thompsen, whom he had met in Renmark in 1939. So was young Clive Mangnoson killed by unknown means in order to force his father to withdraw his identification? In which case, why did the killer or killers leave Keith alive? Wouldn’t it have been easier to kill the father and allow the child to live? And why go about it in a way that inevitably attracted attention, in the same way as Somerton Man had attracted attention?

It sounds like a fuck-up to me and I entirely agree with the proposition that if you have a choice between seeing something as a conspiracy or as a fuck-up, you should always go with the fuck-up. But there may be something in the idea. Perhaps the idiots who killed Somerton Man so clumsily took out poor little Clive Mangnoson, as well, and drove his father mad. We still don’t know what killed that poor little child but small children are fragile creatures and they have always been easy to kill.

Before that, another body had been found on Somerton Beach. The South Australian Register reports that on 12 January 1881 an inquest was held on a man who was found dead by a couple looking for some privacy in the sand dunes. Witnesses had seen the man, heavily clothed for the weather, walking along the beach on 6 January ‘looking despondent’. Nothing more was known of him until the lovers found him on 10 January, by which time he had decomposed so far as to be unrecognisable. The man had with him a bloody razor and a knife, both of which would be ‘most inconvenient for inflicting the wound on the throat’. The Coroner brought in an open verdict, having decided that there was not enough evidence to point to suicide, although he thought it probable. Like Somerton Man, this man was never identified.

The death of Somerton Man has also been linked to a suicide by poisoning. A certain Joseph or George Saul Haim Marshall was found dead in Mosman in Sydney with a copy of The Rubaiyat on his chest. He was the brother of a famous barrister called David Saul Marshall, who was Chief Minister of Singapore. The presence of The Rubaiyat at both Marshall’s and Somerton Man’s deaths strikes me as coincidental in the highest degree. To my mind, Marshall’s suicide seems more likely to be an example of the Werther Effect. In the late eighteenth century, hundreds of young men read The Sorrows of Young Werther, a long, soggily romantic, Gothic, self-pitying and very boring novel by the poet Goethe, and then killed themselves in the same way that Young Werther did. Similarly, The Rubaiyat might have supported or comforted a potential suicide, since Khayyam’s conclusion is that this life is all there is, and once over, it is over forever – a philosophical position that might convince the suicide that the pain they were feeling would finally stop.

Commentators on the Tamam Shud case have also noted that Jestyn gave Alf Boxall a copy of The Rubaiyat in Clifton Gardens, which is close to Mosman, and that a woman called Gwenneth Dorothy Graham, who testified at the Marshall inquest on 15 August 1945, was found thirteen days later, naked in a bath with her wrists slit but no Rubiayat on her chest. Her death may have been the result of a a suicide pact with Marshall but drawing a connection with the death of Somerton Man seems to be stretching coincidence too far. In short, with the possible exception of the Mangnoson case, the other cases most commonly compared to the Tamam Shud murder seem to shed no light on the death of Somerton Man.

What then, you might ask, can modern forensic science tell us about him? The scientists must be able to tell us something, I hear you insisting. After all, they’d clear it up in fifty-seven minutes on CSI. Well, let’s see.

In March 2009, Professor Derek Abbott, Director of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Adelaide, set up a task force of geeks hoping to solve the mystery. Their website is a joy, even if you know no mathematics, which I don’t. But although their enthusiasm is charming, even they have not cracked the Tamam Shud code – and if they haven’t done it I believe it cannot be done without further information.

When Professor Abbott researched Somerton Man’s Kensitas cigarettes, which had been placed in an Army Club packet, he discovered that the Kensitas were actually the more expensive brand. This seems an odd thing to do. Usually, people transfer cheaper cigarettes into an expensive packet out of swank, on the same principle as decanting cask wine into expensive bottles. (You’re not fooling anyone with that, by the way). On the other hand, it is not uncommon for someone to offer a down-on-his-luck mate a handful of cigarettes to fill up their own empty packet. I have done it myself. It isn’t as insulting as just handing them the whole packet as though it was a charitable donation. So Professor Abbott’s discovery raises the possibility the poison might have been given to Somerton Man in the form of a cigarette. And inhaling the poison might have changed its effects. Maybe an inhaled poison wouldn’t cause one to throw up.

Professor Abbott also looked at our man’s teeth, such as were left of them, and found that Somerton Man had hyperdontia of the lateral incisors, a genetic disorder that is only apparent in 2 per cent of the population, making it both rare and significant. Although his body is buried, we have photographs and a cast of Somerton Man’s upper body, allowing us to establish that he also has unusual ears.

Back when Bertillon was setting up his system of physical measurement, which preceded fingerprinting, it had already been noticed that ear shapes could be classified in the same way as fingerprints – although the classification of ears is not as useful, because there are comparatively few ear prints found at crime scenes. (It does occasionally happen, however. One of my clients left behind most of one ear when he dived through a window to escape pursuit, though that resulted in a jigsaw puzzle game called ‘match the missing body part’, rather than an expert examination of prints.) Ear prints can sometimes be found on walls and on windows but they have not been as widely accepted as fingerprints and they have been rejected as evidence in the US courts. However, they are, if not unique, pretty distinctive.

A forensic anthropologist Maciej Henneberg, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, has provided an analysis of Somerton Man’s ears, establishing that he has an upper hollow, called a cymba, which is bigger than the lower hollow, the cavum. My sister Janet has ears like this with very short lobes, which made piercing her ears painful. (This does not, by the way, mean I believe that we are related to Somerton Man.) The more usual model is the other way round, an ear with a larger cavum and a smaller cymba.

This combination of hyperdontia and an unusually shaped ear appears in photographs of the son of Jestyn/Teresa Powell. Somerton Man had her phone number in his Rubaiyat and his body was found just below her house. Was he the father of Teresa’s son as the media has suggested? Allow me to observe that this is just like them. After all, the hyperdontia and the ear shape are general family traits. Why jump straight to the conclusion that Somerton Man was Teresa’s lover and the father of her child? Why couldn’t he be her brother or uncle or cousin? Nothing brings out the ghouls like death and sex or preferably both. It’s a truism of newspapers.

I have two reasons for disagreeing with the ghouls – a practical reason and an emotional reason. In practical terms, Teresa Powell was a nurse. She may have been surprised by an unplanned pregnancy but she was working at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and nurses knew things that many other women in 1948 didn’t, one of them being a safe place to get an abortion. If Teresa Powell didn’t want to keep that baby, she didn’t have to do so, which argues that she knew and loved the father and was sure that he would take care of both of them.

And on the emotional level, it seems unlikely that she was relying on Somerton Man, given that she already had a man to marry, as soon as his divorce came through. She may well have been in Adelaide to remove herself from temptation and make sure that Mr Johnson divorced his previous wife without any complicating factors. Under the old Matrimonial Causes Act, anyone who might be involved with a divorcee was obliged to pass the interval between the decrees nisi and absolute, as AP Herbert says, in another country. Or in a nunnery. Any suggestion of collusion and the divorce was off. I do not know whether Mr Johnson was suing for divorce or being sued and at this late date I do not propose to pry. But it is a matter of public record, and as I have referred to earlier, that he married Miss Powell in 1950 as soon as he was free to marry, and they stayed married until he died in 1995 and she died in 2007.

Gerald Feltus, who as we know interviewed Teresa for his book on the Tamam Shud case, was sure that she knew the identity of Somerton Man but that doesn’t necessarily prove that he was her lover. While it is true that Teresa Powell gave a Rubaiyat to a drinking companion in Sydney, I am recapping here, I am not convinced that this links her to Somerton Man. After all, there is no naughty little verse in the front of Somerton Man’s first edition and no inscription from Jestyn, just her phone number in the back of the book, scribbled there perhaps because he had nothing else to write on. (There is no notebook, either in his pockets or his luggage). I do believe he came to Somerton Beach to see Teresa but I don’t think he was her lover. He left his suitcase at Central Station. He wasn’t expecting to stay. If someone comes up with some DNA from the hair caught in that plaster cast, I’d bet a good dinner at my favourite restaurant Attica that the DNA tests would prove that Somerton Man was related to Teresa Powell but not the father of her son.

Like my father, I have always been a cautious gambler and, like him, I never bet my bus money, which means I am tolerably certain about this bet. But if I am wrong, I get another dinner at Attica, so there is, as my nephew says, no actual downside. In any case, there is no way of proving or disproving this theory at present. Professor Abbott’s request for the exhumation of Somerton Man in October 2011 was refused by the Attorney-General, who said that there was no public interest (this phrase has a precise legal meaning) in such an exhumation which ‘went beyond curiosity’. Besides, the chance that Somerton Man and Teresa’s son are not in some way related is estimated at one in 20 million – although that’s the sort of chance that wins lotteries, so it does happen.

Meanwhile, as well as analysing the ears of Somerton Man, Professor Henneberg also examined the photograph of a man called HC Reynolds and found Reynolds’s ears and other facial markers to be the same as the man found dead on Somerton Beach. Henneberg goes so far as to say that ‘Together with the similarity of the ear characteristics, this mole, in a forensic case, would allow me to make a rare statement positively identifying the Somerton Man’. So who is HC Reynolds? The photo in question comes from an old ID card, issued in 1918 by the American authorities and later given to Gerald Feltus by a person he describes only as ‘Ruth Collins, an Adelaide woman’. On the ID card HC Reynolds is identified as British and eighteen years old at the time – the right age for Somerton Man, who was estimated in 1948 to be in his late forties or early fifties.

ID cards were issued to sailors who wanted to go ashore in American ports and didn’t have passports. Passports are a relatively recent invention and not every sailor had one, especially in that era. Extensive searches through various English and Australian archives have failed to find anyone by the name of HC Reynolds who was born, as he must have been, in 1900. One researcher, who is convinced that the ID card was issued to a shipwreck survivor, is still checking survivor lists. It is possible that the researchers haven’t consulted the right database yet but it is also possible that Reynolds wasn’t his real name. Identity is not an absolute. One of Australia’s more famous heroes was an English deserter who was actually called Kirkpatrick but enlisted in the army under the name of Simpson. (He and his donkey later attracted some notice.)

In 1900, birth registrations were patchy. Any genealogical researcher – and there is an army of them out there, combing through all the records in search of their great grandfathers – can tell you that sometimes you need to check baptismal registers and family records, not only to pin down the date of a birth but to establish whether it happened at all.

Adoptions in the old days were frequently informal. The big difference between any country, then and now, is that there was a surplus of children then. Before reliable contraception, many women had, perforce, far more children than they could feed, so some of those children went to orphanages and children’s homes and sisters and aunts. Children born out of wedlock were often not even registered, if they were born at home, and some of them were quietly done away with. The writer and historian Lucy Sussex reports that her grandmother found a tiny skeleton buried in a vicarage garden and buried it again, saying with compassion that it must have been ‘a servant’s child’ and that it was best to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. In short, even if our HC Reynolds is definitely not on the official record, at least under that name, there might be many reasons for it.

Somerton Man continues to attract speculation. There is an article in the 1994 Criminal Law Journal by that excellent judge and historian, John Harber Phillips, who gives a nice little summary of the case and decides that Somerton Man died of digitalis poisoning, despite the previous forensic objections to this idea. My sister believes that the story of Somerton Man is a love story and she might be right. Others have suggested that the piece of paper in his fob pocket saying ‘Tamam Shud’ is a love token rather than a code. We are also told that Stephen King’s novel The Colorado Kid is based on the case of Somerton Man. It is the story of a man found dead on a beach with no identification and the newspaper reporters who try to solve the mystery. I do not usually admire King but I am an avid watcher of Haven, the TV series derived from The Colorado Kid, and the book itself is an interesting meditation on the nature of apprenticeship, experience and learning.

However, it is not about Somerton Man, according to Stephen King himself, who says in his introduction to the 2005 edition that the book was, in fact, inspired by the case of a woman found dead on the shore in Maine. King reports that a fan sent him a clipping, which he has since lost, about a young woman with a bright red purse, who was seen walking on the beach one day, found dead on it the next and remained unidentified for a long time. King loves the strangeness of Maine and in his introduction he says, ‘In this case I’m not really interested in the solution, but in the mystery’.

The same could be said of all of us who have puzzled over the mystery of Somerton Man. ‘Wanting,’ says King ‘is better than knowing.’ And he may be right.

In her 2010 article ‘The Somerton Man: an unsolved history’, Ruth Balint, a senior lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, goes to considerable lengths to understand her subject. For instance, she is conducted around Adelaide by Gerry Feltus, the detective who published his own book on Somerton Man in the same year, visiting various places that are important to Somerton Man’s story, like the station and Somerton Beach. There are theories that point to the Somerton Man being a displaced person, which do make sense considering the time and place.

After the ruin of Europe, thousands of people flooded into the less destroyed parts of the world. Nazis tended to go to Argentina, for example. On the other hand, my old and distinguished friend Dennis Pryor came to Australia from England as a ten-pound tourist and never wanted his money back. Australia was seen as a fresh start, innocent of the dreadful animosities of old Europe.

Balint sees Somerton Man as a wandering refugee, clad in anonymous second-hand clothes, rather than attributing his lack of labels to deliberate action. She points to a conversation the police had with ‘Mr Moss Keipitz, an Egyptian, employed in Adelaide’, who told the police investigation that Keane, the name on Somerton Man’s tie, could have been an Anglicisation of Keanic, which is a Czechoslovakian, Yugoslav or Baltic name. (My mother did think he looked Baltic.) However, Balint adds that since Somerton Man’s fingerprints were only sent to the United States and to other countries in the British Commonwealth, not to Eastern Bloc countries, there is no way to prove or disprove her theory. She observes that there are an infinite number of potential endings to the mystery, which is interesting and also true but not helpful.

One of my favourite theories is that Somerton Man was a time traveller, related to Teresa Powell because he was her great-great-grandson come back from the future, where clearly it is colder than here, hence the heavy garments. According to this theory, Somerton Man was waiting on the beach for the Mothership but he was killed by an acute reaction to some local allergen or a death ray from his enemies before he could be picked up. As one who read their first speculative fiction story at eight – a time travel story by Ray Bradbury called The Sound of Thunder, which scared the hell out of me – I love the idea. Both of the unidentified dead men found on Somerton Beach were inappropriately dressed for the weather in their current location but were they, perhaps, appropriately dressed for their ultimate destination – a colder future earth or a chilly day on Mars? The only trouble with this hypothesis is that time travel really is impossible. Much as I like the idea.

A similar degree of suspension of disbelief is required by the idea that Somerton Man was an alien/human hybrid. As a matter of fact, this theory requires that disbelief be not so much suspended as hung out of the window by its heels. I suspect that the theorists watched The X Files and thought it was fact. Still, it’s an attractive hypothesis, based on the fact, uncovered by Professor Abbott, that Somerton Man had some unusual genetic features – those odd teeth and strange ears. However, strange ears do not a Vulcan make, nor a fairy, werewolf, elf or supernatural personage of any sort. Despite what you may have read in Twilight. Despite the novels of Charlaine Harris. No, really. Srsly.

In the end, after all the theorising, Somerton Man remains an ambiguous figure. Was he on our side or on their side? Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Where did he come from, what was he doing there, how did he die? Only a novelist, I suggest, could possibly provide a solution, because every hypothesis put forward so far has had to ignore at least one of the facts, like the Marx brothers packing a suitcase by cutting off the bits which don’t fit. And my own solution is only a story, or rather, several stories; and I am a storyteller who draws inferences from many sources. We cannot really hope to solve this mystery now, even if we dig up poor Somerton Man and trace his blood relatives by their DNA or the shape of their ears.

When I asked my father to expand on the story of Somerton Man, he confessed that he knew no more. But then he said ‘It’s because it’s a mystery, see, little mate, stories where you know the solution, you forget about them. But if you don’t know – if you can’t know – well, they stick in your mind’.

And they do. It has stayed in my mind all these years.