The Mysterious Death Of The Somerton Man Revisited

**"The Mysterious Death Of The Somerton Man Revisited"** is a video made by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, uploaded onto YouTube on April 17, 2020. It was the sixth episode of the sixth season of *BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime*, and the one hundredth and fourth episode overall. You can find it here.

## Description

In the season finale and 100th episode of BuzzFeed Unsolved, Ryan and Shane revisit the show’s first ever mystery.

## Background

On December 1st, 1948, 16 year old Neil Day was riding horses with a friend along Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. When they passed the body of a man lying in the sand, the friends didn't pay much attention, thinking the man was simply napping on the beach. When they came back to find the man in the exact same position, they discovered he was actually dead. The man was clean shaven, wearing a dry and neatly pressed suit and tie. Oddly, all of the tags of his clothes had been removed and he was found with no belongings or form of identification. His fingerprints were not in any database and no one came forward to identify the man.

A postmortem revealed the man had a strikingly enlarged spleen and internal bleeding in his stomach and liver. There were no indications of violence and no traces of poison. Symptoms of poisoning, such as vomiting, diarrhea, or convulsions were also not present. The coroner also found a pastie in his stomach. In the official publication of the investigation, the coroner wrote, "I am unable to say who the deceased was. I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death."

In January 1949, a month after the body was found, a suitcase was uncovered in the cloakroom of the Adelaide Railway Station. The suitcase, dropped off the day before the body was found, contained, among other odds and ends, clothing with the labels removed and a wax thread not sold in Australia but of the type used to repair the trousers found on the body. Many of these objects indicated that the man, whoever he was, had recently been in the United States. The name Keane, ending in E and Kean, ending in N were found on some of the items. According to an Adelaide newspaper, authorities concluded the name Kean had been left on the belongings to intentionally obscure the man's true identity.

In April 1949, police came upon a mysterious clue that been overlooked in the four plus months that the body was found. Sewn into the waistband of the man's pants was a secret pocket which contained a tightly rolled piece of paper with the Persian words Tamam Shud typed on it. The paper appeared to be torn from an 11th century book of Persian poems, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam or simply the Rubaiyat. Themes around the Rubaiyat center around life's transience and in English, Tamam Shud roughly translates to the end or finished. The discovery of the secret pocket and it's haunting message was enough for coroner Thomas Cleland to declare the man's death was, quote, "not natural."

On July 23, three months after police discovered the Tamam Shud paper, a businessman who had read about the unidentified body in the paper came to police with a copy of the Rubaiyat. The man claimed that he found the book in the back seat of his car after parking it near Somerton Beach with the windows down. Sure enough, a section had been torn out of the last page of the book that perfectly fit the piece found in the unknown man's pants. On the back cover of the book, police discovered five lines of letters, apparently a secret code, and what appeared to be a phone number. To this day, the code has never been cracked and the Australian Navy determined it to be virtually unbreakable, explaining, "there is an insufficient number of letters for definite conclusions to be based on analysis. The letters do not constitute any kind of simple cipher or code. A reasonable explanation would be that the lines are the initial letters of words of a verse of poetry or such like."

While the code failed to yield any new leads, the phone number found in the back of the Rubaiyat led investigators to 27 year old nurse Jessie "Jo" Thomson's doorstep, just hundreds of meters from where the body was found eight months prior. Thomson admitted to once owning a copy of the Rubaiyat but claimed she'd given the copy to a man named Alfred Boxall. Upon investigation, Boxall turned out to still be alive and in possession of a fully in tact copy of the Rubaiyat. By this time, the still anonymous body had been buried but not before a plaster cast had been made for investigative purposes. According to Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane, when Jo Thomson was shown the cast in the hopes of identifying it, she looked like she was about to faint. Nevertheless, Thomson denied knowing the man. Thomson died in 2007, still claiming she did not know the man found on the beach.

## Theories

* **The Somerton Man was responsible for his own death and killed himself.** This could mean he put the paper reading Tamam Shud in his own pocket to be found as a sort of suicide note.
	+ Supporting this theory are the similar elements of another suicide, that of immigrant George Marshall. In June 1945, Marshall was found dead in Mosman, Australia after poisoning himself with barbiturates. With his corpse was another copy of the Rubaiyat. While another dead man turning up in Australia with the same collection of Persian poems may sound like too large of a coincidence to overlook, the Rubaiyat apparently had become quite popular in Australia during World War II. Since the work deals with life and mortality, it's possible both men could have had similar inspiration to have at least a piece of the book with them during their final moments.
* **The man was murdered by Russian spies.** The body was found at the dawn of the Cold War and paranoia about Soviet spies loomed large. A few months before the discovery of the corpse, a Soviet Embassy spy ring had been uncovered in Canberra, Australia. A statement given in 1959 by a man who was on Somerton Beach the night the unidentified man died claims to have seen, "a man carrying another on his shoulder near the water's edge."
	+ In 2013, a theory came out that Jo Thomson, the woman whose phone number was found in the back of that copy of the Rubaiyat, may have been a Soviet spy. The woman who publicly suggested this theory was none other than Kate Thomson, Jo Thomson's daughter. In a 60 Minutes interview, Kate Thomson said her mother had, quote, "A dark side, a very strong dark side. She said to me she knew who he was but she wasn't going to let that out of the bag, so to speak. There's always that fear that I've thought that maybe she was responsible for his death."
	+ According to Kate, she would hear her mother speaking in rushed, quieted Russian to someone over the phone. Her mother had also mentioned she was teaching English to newly arrived immigrants from Russia. Kate remembered her mother at one point saying something along the lines of, "oh, I can still understand Russian." Though, she never mentioned where she learned it.
	+ If the Somerton Man met his end thanks to Russian spies, whether Jo Thomson was involved or not, there's also the question as to how he died. At the time, a well known professor, Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks, proposed that the man had indeed been poisoned but with an extremely rare variety which would decompose soon after death. This would, of course, explain the absence of poison found in the corpse. In court, Hicks refused to say the name of the poisons he was referring to aloud, believing they were too dangerous. Sir Hicks did, however, write two types of poison down on paper and gave it to the coroner. Digitalis and strophanthin.
	+ It should be noted that Jo Thomson worked as a nurse and perhaps could have known about and had access to some rare poisons such as those written down by Hicks. While spies might explain the mysterious code in the back of the Rubaiyat, there is admittedly no physical evidence Jo Thomson was ever involved with Russians in any capacity, much less associated with espionage. Still, one could always argue this only means Thomson was a very good spy.
* **The man was killed as the result of a romantic relationship gone awry.** This is a relatively recent theory and it comes thanks to the tireless work of University of Adelaide Engineering Professor Derek Abbott. Abbott discovered that, about a year before the man's body turned up on Somerton Beach, Jo Thomson had given birth to a son named Robin Thomson. Robin grew up to be a professional ballet dancer, which meant it was easy for Abbott to track down photos of the man.
	+ Based on photos, Abbott found that Robin had a similar strange ear feature to the Somerton Man. Additionally, both Robin and the man found on the beach were missing their incisor teeth, a genetically inherited trait. This information, along with the fact that Jo Thomson was unmarried the year Robin was born, led Abbott to conclude Jo and the Somerton Man, "had a liaison together and she had Robin."
	+ By the time Abbott made this connection, Robin had already died. However, Abbott was able to track down one Rachel Egan, the biological daughter of Robin Thomson, who was living in Queensland. In what might be the craziest reveal in a story full of strange twists, Abbott and Egan eventually fell in love and got married.
	+ In late 2018, while inspecting the original plastic cast police made of the body, the same one that allegedly made his grandmother-in-law nearly faint, Abbott found three hairs, which he believes could contain DNA evidence of a genetic link to his wife. If the Somerton Man was her son's dead father, that could explain Jo Thomson's near fainting upon seeing the plaster cast. While the hairs Abbott discovered may not be able to provide a conclusive answer, it is the most promising lead in the case so far. Even if Professor Abbott is able to prove his wife's relationship to the Somerton Man, many questions remain unanswered, such a who he was, how he was killed, and why he was left dead on the beach. Jo Thomson or another man, for instance, the one spotted carrying a body on the beach, could have been angry at the Somerton Man for not taking responsibility for the child that resulted from his love affair. Or perhaps Jo Thomson, the dead man, or even both were spies and weren't supposed to get involved in a relationship. If the man was Robin Thomson's father and Rachel Egan's grandfather, perhaps the biggest question of all is: why was Jo Thomson so unwilling to identify the body?