Somerton Man

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Roisterer (talk | contribs) at 12:36, 17 May 2009 (→‎Autopsy: refs). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Somerton Man
Police photo of the dead body, 1948.
Bornc. 1903
DiedDecember 1, 1948
Somerton, Adelaide, Australia
Cause of deathUnknown poison
Resting placeWest Terrace Cemetery,
Adelaide, South Australia
Gravesite: P3, 12, 106
NationalityUnknown
OccupationUnknown
Known forMysterious death

The Taman Shud Case,[1] also known as the "Mystery of the Somerton Man", is an unsolved case revolving around an unidentified man found dead at 6.30am, December 1, 1948 on Somerton beach in Adelaide, Australia.

Considered "one of Australia's most profound mysteries",[2] the case has been the subject of intense speculation over the years regarding the identity of the victim, the events leading up to his death and the cause of death.

Victim

The man, of European appearance, was thought to be aged about forty to forty-five and in top physical condition.[3] He was 180 cm tall, with hazel eyes, fair to gingery coloured hair,[4] slightly grey around the temples,[5] broad shoulders, a narrow waist, hands and nails that showed no signs of manual labour, big and little toes that met in a wedge shape, like those of a dancer, and calf muscles formed high in his leg, consistent with people who regularly wore high-heeled shoes.[6] He was dressed in a fashionable European grey and brown double-breasted coat, white shirt, red and blue tie, brown trousers, socks and shoes and a brown knitted pullover,[7] although all labels on his clothes were missing.[5] Clean-shaven and with no distinguishing marks,[5] he carried no identification (which led police to believe he committed suicide)[8] and his dental records did not match any known person.

When police arrived, they noted no disturbance to the body and that the man's left arm was in a straight position and the right arm was bent double.[5] A half-smoked cigarette was on the right collar of his coat.[9] A search of his pockets revealed a used bus ticket from the city to Glenelg (the suburb adjoining Somerton), an unused second-class rail ticket from the city to Henley Beach, a narrow aluminium American comb,[10] sixpence, an Army Club cigarette packet containing cigarettes of a different brand, Kensitas, and matches.

Witnesses came forward to declare that on the evening of 30 November they had seen a man resembling the dead man in the same spot near the Crippled Children's Home where the corpse was later found.[9] They recounted that he had not moved during the time he was in view of them (in one case for half an hour) but they had thought he was drunk or asleep, and so did not investigate further.[11]

Autopsy

Location on Somerton beach where the corpse was found is marked by an 'X'.

An autopsy was held and found that the time of death was around 2am on 1 December, that his stomach was highly congested with blood and his heart had failed, traits consistent with poisoning.[11] However, besides the revelation that the man's last meal was a pasty,[9] tests failed to reveal any foreign substance, although poisoning remained a prime suspicion (the pasty was not believed to be the source of the poison).[11] Other than that, the coroner was unable to reach a conclusion on the man’s identity, cause of death or whether the man seen alive at Somerton Beach on the evening of 30 November was the same man, as nobody had seen his face while he was alive.[7] Scotland Yard was called in to assist with the case but with little result[12] and a photograph of the man and details of his fingerprints were widely circulated throughout the world but no positive identification was made.[11]

Due to the body remaining unidentifiable, the body was embalmed on 10 December 1948, the first time in the memory of the police that such a situation had occurred.[13]

Media reaction

A plaster cast of the dead body of the unknown man taken by the police in 1949.

The two daily Adelaide newspapers, The Advertiser and The News, covered the death in separate ways. The Advertiser, a morning broadsheet, first mentioned the case in a small article on page three of its 2 December 1948 edition. Entitled "Body found on Beach", and found between an article on the state cabinet review of holidays and a death after a fall at a Broken Hill race course, it read:

"A body, believed to be of E.C. Johnson, about 45, of Arthur St, Payneham, was found on Somerton Beach, opposite the Crippled Children's Home yesterday morning. The discovery was made by Mr J. Lyons, of Whyte Rd, Somerton. Detective H. Strangway and Constable J. Moss are enquiring."[14]

The News, an afternoon tabloid, featured their story of the man on its first page, giving more details of the dead man[5].

By the next day, E.C. Johnson was no longer believed to be the missing man[15] (Johnson having walked into a police station to identify himself)[10] and on 3 December, The News published a photograph of the dead man on its front page[16] leading to further calls from members of the public about the possible identity of the dead man. By 4 December police had announced that the man's fingerprints were not on South Australian police records, forcing them to look further afield.[17] On 5 December The Advertiser reported that police were searching through military records after a man claimed to have drunk with a man resembling the dead man at a hotel in Glenelg on 30 November. During their drinking session, the mystery man supposedly produced a military pension card bearing the name "Solomonson".[18]

Attempts to identify the body

There were a number of possible identifications of the body made, including one in early January 1949 when two people identified the body as that of 63 year old former wood cutter Robert Walsh. Police were sceptical, believing Walsh to be too old to be the dead man but did state that the body was consistent with that of a man who had been a wood cutter, although the state of the man's hands indicated he had not cut wood for at least eighteen months.[19] Any thoughts that a positive identification had been made were quashed however when Mrs Elizabeth Thompson, one of the people who had earlier positively identified the body as Mr Walsh, retracted her statement after a second viewing of the body, where the absence of a particular scar on the body and the size of the dead man's legs led her to realise the body was not Mr Walsh.[20]

By early February 1949, there had been eight different "positive" identifications of the body,[21] including two Darwin men who thought the body was of a Darwin friend of theirs,[22] a missing stablehand, a worker on a steamship[23] and a Swedish man.[21]

The brown suitcase

Adelaide Railway Station, where a brown suitcase, believed to belong to the dead man, was found.

A new twist in the case occurred on 14 January 1949 when staff at Adelaide Railway Station discovered a brown suitcase with its label removed that had been checked into the station cloak room at 11.00am on 30 November 1948.[24] In the case there was a red checked dressing gown, a pair of size seven red felt slippers, four pairs of underpants, pyjamas, shaving gear, a pair of light brown trousers with sand in the cuffs, an electrician's screwdriver, a stencilling brush, a table knife cut down into a short, sharp instrument and a pair of scissors as used on merchant ships for stencilling cargo.[25]

Also in the suitcase was cotton of "an unusual type", that was the same as that used to repair lining in a pocket of the trousers the dead man was wearing.[25] All identification marks on the clothes had been removed but police found the name "T. Keane" on three items, along with three drycleaning marks; 1171/7, 4393/7 and 3053/7.[26] Police believed that whoever removed the clothing tags purposefully left the Keane tags on the clothes, knowing Keane was not that the dead man's name.[25]

Initially, the clothes were traced to a local sailor, Tom Keane. As Keane could not be located some of his shipmates viewed the body at the morgue, and stated categorically that the corpse was not that of Keane,[9] nor did the clothes belong to the missing sailor.[7] A search concluded that there was no other T. Keane missing in any English-speaking country[27] and a nation-wide circulation of the drycleaning marks also proved fruitless. In fact, all that could be garnered from the suitcase was that a coat in the case was of American origin.[4]

Police checked incoming train records and believed the man had arrived by overnight train from either Melbourne,[28] Sydney or Port Augusta.[11] They believed he then showered and shaved at the adjacent City Baths before returning to the train station to purchase a ticket for the 10.50am train to Henley Beach, which, for whatever reason, he did not catch.[25] He then checked in his suitcase at the station cloak room before catching a bus to Glenelg.[29]

The lack of success in determining the identity and cause of death of the Somerton Man had led authorities to call it an "unparalleled mystery" and believe that the cause of death may never be known.[27]

An editorial called the case "one of Australia's most profound mysteries"[2] and noted that if he died by poison so rare and obscure it could not be identified by toxicology experts, then surely the culprit's advanced knowledge of toxic substances pointed to something more serious than a mere domestic poisoning.[2]

Inquest

Suitcase and effects, found at Adelaide railway station, belonging to the Somerton Man.
The handwriting of the Somerton Man showing his pencil markings in the back of a book of poetry by Omar Khayyam. The markings are presumed to be some sort of code.

A coronial inquest into the death initially commenced a few days after the body was found but was adjourned until 17 June 1949.[30] The investigating pathologist Sir John Burton Cleland re-examined the body and made a number of discoveries. Cleland noted that the man's shoes were remarkably clean and appeared to have been recently polished, rather than the state expected of the shoes of a man who had apparently been wandering around Glenelg all day.[12] He added that this evidence fitted in with the theory that the body may have been brought to Somerton beach after the man's death, accounting for the lack of evidence of vomiting and convulsions, the two main effects of poison.[12] Despite these findings, Cleland was unable to determine the cause of death of the Somerton Man.[31]

The Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam

Around the same time as the Inquest, a piece of paper with the words "Taman Shud" printed on it were found in one trouser pocket.[32] Public library officials were called in to translate the note, who identified it as a phrase, meaning "the end," found on the last page of a collection of poems called the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.[32] A photograph of the scrap of paper was sent to interstate police and released to the public,[32] leading a local doctor to reveal he had found a copy of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat in the back seat of his unlocked car in Glenelg on the night of 30 November 1948.[33] The man had known nothing of the book's connection to the case until he saw an article in the previous day's newspaper.[33][34]

The book was missing the words "Taman Shud" on the last page and microscopic tests indicated that the piece of paper came from the book.[35] The Rubaiyat's last verse, immediately before "Taman Shud", is

And when thyself with silver foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the grass
And in your joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made One - turn down an empty Glass![36]

This led police to theorise that the man had committed suicide by poison, although there was no other evidence to back the theory.

In the back of the book were faint pencil markings of four lines of capital letters:

MRGOABABD
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB[28]

In the book (see image right), it is unclear if the first two sentences begin with an 'M' or 'W', and there appears to be a deleted or underline line of text that reads 'MLIAOI'. Although the last character in this line of text looks like an 'L', it is fairly clear on closer inspection of the image that this is formed from an 'I' and the extension of the line used to delete or underline that line of text. Also, the other 'L's have a curve to the bottom part of the character. There is also an "X" above the last 'O' in the code, and it is not known if this is significant to the code or not. Initially, the letters were thought to be words in a foreign language[33] before it was realised it was a code. Code experts were called in at the time to decipher the lines but were unsuccessful.[37] When the code was analysed by the Australian Department of Defence in 1978, they made the following statements about the code:

  • There are insufficient symbols to provide a pattern.
  • The symbols could be a complex substitute code or the meaningless response to a disturbed mind.
  • It is not possible to provide a satisfactory answer.[38]

Also found in the back of the book were the phone numbers of two Adelaide telephone subscribers,[35] one of which was a woman living in Glenelg.[39] The woman said that she once owned a copy of The Rubaiyat but had given it to an army lieutenant named Alfred Boxall who was serving in the Water Transport Section of the Australian Army[40] when she was working at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney during World War II.[37]

The woman stated that after the war she had moved to Melbourne and married. Later she had received a letter from Boxall but had told him she was now married.[37] She added that in late 1948 a mystery man had asked her next door neighbour about her.[37] Shown the plaster cast bust of the dead man, the woman identified it as Boxall.[41]

Police believed that Boxall was the dead man until they found Boxall alive with his copy of The Rubaiyat, complete with "Taman Shud" on the last page.[41] Boxall was now working in the maintenance section at the Randwick Bus Depot (where he had worked prior to the war) and was unaware of any link between the dead man and him.[42] In the front of the copy of the Rubaiyat that was given to Boxall, the woman 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 Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.[38]

The woman now lived in Glenelg but denied all knowledge of the dead man or why he would choose to visit her suburb on the night of his death. She also asked that as she was now married she would prefer not to have her name recorded to save her from potential embarrassment of being linked to the dead man and Boxall.[37] Amazingly, police agreed, leaving subsequent investigations without the benefit of the case's best lead.[11] In a TV program on the case, in the section where Boxall was interviewed, her given name was given in a voice-over as Jestin, apparently obtained from the front of the book, but this was covered over when the book was displayed in the program.[38] Jestin is typically a boy's name of Welsh origin, with variants being Jesstin or Jeston.[43] It seems likely this was a nickname she used.

The Spy theory

Rumours began circulating that Boxall was involved in military intelligence during the War, adding to the speculation that the dead man was a Soviet spy poisoned by enemies unknown. When Boxall was asked in an interview whether he told the woman if he had worked in a military intelligence unit, he stated "No", rather than denying that he had worked in an intelligence unit.[38] The fact that the man died in Adelaide, the nearest capital city to Woomera, a top-secret missile launching and intelligence gathering site,[44] heightened this speculation. It was also recalled that one possible location the man may have traveled to Adelaide from was Port Augusta, a town relatively close to Woomera.

Additionally, in April 1947 the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service, as part of Operation Venona, discovered that there had been top secret material leaked from Australia’s Department of External Affairs to the Soviet embassy in Canberra.[45] This led to a 1948 U.S. ban on the transfer of all classified information to Australia.[45]

As a response, the Australian government announced they would establish a national secret security service (which became the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)) [46]

Possible link to Mangnoson case

On 6 June 1949, the body of two year-old Clive Mangnoson was found in a sack in the Largs Bay sand hills, about twenty kilometres down the coast from Somerton.[47] Lying next to him was his unconscious father, Keith Waldemar Mangnoson,[48] who was taken to hospital in a very weak condition, suffering from exposure,[47] and following a medical examination, was transferred to a mental hospital.[49]

The Mangnosons had been missing for four days, and it was believed that Clive had been dead for twenty four hours when his body was found.[47] The two were found by Mr Neil McRae[50] of Largs Bay, who claimed he had seen the location of the two in a dream the night before.[51]

Like Somerton Man, the coroner could not determine Mangnoson's cause of death, although it was believed it was not natural causes.[12] The contents of the boy's stomach was sent to a government analyst for further examination.[47]

Following the death, the boy's mother Mrs Roma Mangnoson reported being terrorised by a masked man, who, while driving a battered cream car, almost ran her down outside her home in Cheapside Street, Largs North.[12] Mrs Mangnoson stated that "the car stopped and a man with a khaki handkerchief over his face told her to 'keep away from the police or else'". Additionally a similar looking man had been recently seen lurking around the house.[12]

Mrs Mangnoson believed that this situation was related to her husband's attempt to identify the Somerton Man, believing him to be a man he had worked with in Renmark.[12]

The acting mayor of Port Adelaide and the secretary of the Largs North Progress Association also received threatening phone calls concerning Mangnoson.[12]

Soon after being interviewed by police over her harassment, Mrs Magnoson collapsed and required medical treatment.[52]

Post Inquest

Burial of the Somerton Man on 14 June 1949. By his grave site is Salvation Army Captain E. Webb, leading the prayers, attended by reporters and police.
Tombstone of the Somerton Man found at Somerton Beach, Adelaide, at his gravesite. He died 1 December 1948 and was buried on 14 June 1949.

Following the inquest, a plaster cast was made of the man's head and shoulders,[30] who was then secretly buried at Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery. The Salvation Army conducted the service and The South Australian Grandstand Bookmakers Association paid for the service to save the man from a pauper's burial.[3]

Years after the burial, flowers began appearing on the grave. Police questioned a woman seen leaving the cemetery but she claimed she knew nothing of the man.[7] About the same time, the receptionist from the Strathmore Hotel, opposite Adelaide Railway Station, revealed that a strange man had stayed in Room 21 around the time of the death, checking out on 30 November 1948. She recalled that cleaners found a black medical case and a hypodermic syringe in the room.[7]

On 22 November 1959 it was reported that an E.B. Collins, an inmate of New Zealand's Wanganui Prison, claimed to know the identity of the dead man.[4]

There have been numerous unsuccessful attempts in the 60 years since its discovery to crack the code found at the rear of the book, including efforts by military intelligence, mathematicians and astrologers. While no answer has been accepted as correct, a leading theory is that the code indicates the initial letters of words. If this is true, then it has been suspected that the final line "ITTMTSAMSTGAB" could start "It's Time To Move To South Australia Moseley Street …" (Moseley Street is the main road through Glenelg).[11]

The simple burial site of the Unknown Man at the West Terrace cemetery in Adelaide. The tomb is located at grave site number 106 on row 12 of an area of the cemetery called "Plan 3." To find it is difficult, but it is easiest if visitors go to a road called "Road 5 East" and then walk about 40 paces along row 12.

In 1978 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced a programme on the Taman Shud case, entitled The Somerton Beach Mystery, where reporter Stuart Littlemore investigated the case, including interviewing Boxall, who could add no new information on the case,[41] and Paul Lawson, who made the plaster cast of the body, and who refused to answer a question about whether anyone had positively identified the body.[38]

In 1994 John Harber Phillips, Chief Justice of Victoria and Chairman of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, reviewed the case to determine the cause of death and concluded that "There seems little doubt it was digitalis".[53] Phillips supported his conclusion by pointing to the fact the organs were engorged, consistent with digitalis, the lack of evidence of natural disease and "the absence of anything seen macroscopically which could account for the death."[53] Three months prior to the death of the man, on 16 August 1948, an overdose of digitalis was the cause of death for United States Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White. He had been accused of Soviet espionage under Operation Venona.[54]

Former South Australian Chief Superintendent Len Brown, who worked on the case in the 1940s, recently stated that he believed that the man was from a country in the East European Communist Bloc, which led to the police's inability to confirm the man's identity.[55]

The case is still considered "open" at the South Australian Major Crime Task Force[55] and the bust, still containing hair fibres of the man[9] is in the possession of the South Australian Police Historical Society.[55] Any further attempts to correctly identify the body has been hampered by the fact that the formaldehyde used to embalm the body has destroyed much of the DNA[55] and other key evidence no longer exists, such as the brown suitcase, which was destroyed in 1986 and many statements have disappeared from the police file over the years.[9]

Current attempt to solve the case

In March 2009 a University of Adelaide team led by Professor Derek Abbott began an attempt to solve the case, through cracking the code and exhuming the body to test for DNA.[56] In a current affairs program on the efforts of the team, retired detective Gerry Feltus, who worked on the case for many years, admitted that he knew the identity of the mystery woman but, wanting to protect the woman's privacy, refused to disclose it.[56]

As one journalist wrote in 1949, alluding to the line in The Rubiayat, "the Somerton Man seems to have made certain that the glass would be empty, save for speculation."[2]

The identity of the deceased man and even the cause of death remain unsolved to this day.

The Somerton Man in popular culture

  • There is a reference to this murder in the novel Hill of Grace by Stephen Orr ISBN 1862546487.

See also

References

  1. ^ While the words that end The Rubiayat are "Tamam Shud", it has always been referred to as "Taman Shud" in the media.
  2. ^ a b c d The Advertiser, "Taman Shud", 10 June 1949, p. 2
  3. ^ a b Pyatt, D. Mystery of the Somerton Man, Police Online Journal, Vol. 81, No. 4, April 2000.
  4. ^ a b c Offficer in Charge, No. 3. C.I.B. Divison, "Unidentified Body Found at Somerton Beach, South Australia, on 1st December, 1948", 27 November 1959.
  5. ^ a b c d e The News, "Dead Man Found Lying on Somerton Beach", 1 December 1948, p. 1
  6. ^ Fife-Yeomans, J. "The Man With No Name", The Weekend Australian Magazine, 15-16 September 2001, p 30
  7. ^ a b c d e Jory, R. (2000) "The dead man who sparked many tales", The Advertiser, 1 December 2000.
  8. ^ The News, "Five 'positive views' conflict", 7 January 1949, p. 3
  9. ^ a b c d e f Orr, S. "Riddle of the End", The Sunday Mail, 11 January 2009, pp 71, 76
  10. ^ a b The News, "Dead Man Walks Into Police H.Q." 2 December 1948, p. 2
  11. ^ a b c d e f g Clemo, M. "'Poisoned' in SA - was he a Red Spy?", Sunday Mail (Adelaide), 7 November 2004, p 76.
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h The Advertiser, "Curious aspects of unsolved beach mystery", 22 June 1949, p. 2
  13. ^ The Advertiser, "Somerton Body Embalmed", 11 December 1948, p. 2
  14. ^ The Advertiser, "Body found on Beach", 2 December 1948, p. 3
  15. ^ The Advertiser, "Dead man still unidentified", 3 December 1948
  16. ^ "Mystery of Body on Beach", The News, 3 December 1948, p. 1
  17. ^ The Advertiser, "Somerton Beach body mystery", 4 December 1948, p. 1
  18. ^ The Advertiser, "Still no clue to Somerton mystery", 5 December 1948, p. 1
  19. ^ The Advertiser, "Somerton body said to be that of wood cutter", 7 January 1949, p 2
  20. ^ The Advertiser, "Identity of body still in doubt", 10 January 1949, p.2
  21. ^ a b The News, "Body Again 'Identified'", 4 February 1949, p. 13
  22. ^ The Advertiser, "Two More 'Identify' Somerton Body", 30 January 1949, p. 2
  23. ^ The Advertiser, "Somerton Body may be that of stablehand", 19 January 1949
  24. ^ The Advertiser, "Somerton Mystery Clue", 15 January 1949
  25. ^ a b c d The Advertiser, "Definite Clue in Somerton Mystery", 18 January 1949
  26. ^ The News, "Marks May Be Clue To Beach Body", 15 January 1949, p. 8
  27. ^ a b The Advertiser, "'Unparalleled Mystery' Of Somerton Body Case", 11 April 1949
  28. ^ a b Maguire, S. "Death riddle of a man with no name", The Advertiser, 9 March 2005, p. 28
  29. ^ The News, "Five 'Positive' Views Conflict", 7 January 1949, p. 12
  30. ^ a b The Canberra Times, "Inquest to Open on Body of Unknown Man", 15 June 1949
  31. ^ The Advertiser, "Possible Clue in Somerton Body Case", 23 July 1949, p. 1
  32. ^ a b c The Advertiser, "Cryptic Note on Body", 9 June 1949, p. 2
  33. ^ a b c The Advertiser, "New Clue in Somerton Body Mystery", 25 July 1949, p. 3
  34. ^ Intriguingly, the day after the copy of The Rubiayat with the scrap of paper missing was handed into police, another Glenelg resident supplied a copy of The Rubiayat to police, stating that he too had found the book in the back of his car at the time of the discovery of the body. The Advertiser, "Army Officer Sought to Help Solve Somerton Body Case", 27 July 1949, p. 1
  35. ^ a b The Advertiser, "Police Test Book For Somerton Body Clue", 26 July 1949, p. 3
  36. ^ Khayyam, p. 50
  37. ^ a b c d e The Advertiser, "Army Officer Sought to Help Solve Somerton Body Case", 27 July 1949, p. 1
  38. ^ a b c d e Episode of Inside Story, presented by Stuart Littlemore, ABC TV, 1978.
  39. ^ The Canberra Times, "No Sydney Clue to Dead Man Found at Somerton, S.A., 28 July 1949
  40. ^ Boxall was born in London on 16 April 1906, enlisted in the Australian Army on 12 January 1942 and was not discharged until 12 April 1948. World War II Nominal Roll, "Boxall, Alfred" http://www.ww2roll.gov.au/script/veteran.asp?ServiceID=A&VeteranID=192049 Accessed 8 December 2008.
  41. ^ a b c Lewes, J. (1978) "30-Year-Old Death Riddle Probed In New Series", TV Times, 19-25 August 1978.
  42. ^ The Advertiser, "Ex-Officer Found - And His 'Rubiayat'", 28 July 1949, p. 1
  43. ^ Think Baby Names. http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Jestin Accessed 26 March 2009.
  44. ^ A joint project between the Australian and British militaries, Woomera was the home of the world's longest overland range for guided missiles. The Advertiser, "Woomera, Australia's Newest, Most Hush-Hush Township", 4 July 1949, p. 2
  45. ^ a b Cain, F. (2004) "Australian Intelligence Organisations and the Law: A Brief History", University of NSW Law Journal, Volume 27 (2), 2004. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UNSWLJ/2004/23.html Accessed 3 May 2009
  46. ^ The News, "Guard on Secrets", 3 March 1949, p.4.
  47. ^ a b c d The Advertiser, "Son Found Dead in Sack Beside Father", 7 June 1949, p. 1
  48. ^ Mangnoson was born in Adelaide on 4 May 1914 and served as a Private in the Australian Army from 11 June 1941 until his discharge on 7 February 1945. World War II Nominal Roll, "Mangnoson, Keith Waldemar", http://www.ww2roll.gov.au/script/veteran.asp?ServiceID=A&VeteranID=676573#summary1 Accessed 2 March 2009
  49. ^ The Advertiser, "Mangnoson Admitted to Mental Hospital", 9 June 1949, p. 4
  50. ^ McRae was born on 11 May 1915 in Goodwood, South Australia, World War II Nominal Roll, "McRae, Neil" http://www.ww2roll.gov.au/script/veteran.asp?ServiceID=A&VeteranID=674929 Accessed 2 March 2009
  51. ^ The Advertiser, "Dream Led Him to Child's Body", 7 June 1949, p. 1
  52. ^ The Advertiser, "Sequel to Largs Tragedy", 23 June 1949, p. 9
  53. ^ a b Phillips, J.H. "So When That Angel of the Darker Drink", Criminal Law Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, April 1994, p. 110.
  54. ^ The Washington Post, "Harry Dexterr White, Accused In Spy Inquiry, Dies at 56", 18 August 1948, pp 1-2.
  55. ^ a b c d "Blast from the Past", South Australian Police Historical Society, http://www.sapolicehistory.org/Oct07.html Accessed 30 December 2008
  56. ^ a b Stateline South Australia, "Somerton Beach Mystery Man", Transcript, Broadcast 27 March 2009. http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/sa/content/2006/s2529870.htm Accessed 27 April 2009.

Sources

  • Khayyam, O. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: First and Fifth Editions, translated by Fitzgerald, E. Courier Dover Publications, 1990. ISBN 0 4862 646 7X.

Videos

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Somerton_Man&oldid=290497174"