The Somerton Man

What this episode covers

On the first of December, 1948, the body of a well-dressed man was found propped against a seawall on a beach in Adelaide, Australia. He was clean-shaven, manicured, dressed in a brown suit. He had no wallet. No identification. No hat. And every single label had been cut from his clothing.In a hidden pocket sewn into his trouser waistband, investigators found a small rolled piece of paper torn from the last page of a book — two Persian words: Tamám Shud. Ended.The book was later found in a stranger's car. In the back was a phone number, leading to a young nurse who lived four hundred metres from where the body was discovered. She fainted when the police came to her door. She insisted she did not know him. She held to that story for the rest of her life.In 2022 — seventy-four years after the discovery — DNA exhumation finally identified the dead man as Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne. But knowing his name doesn't explain why every label was removed, why a poetry book carried a stranger's number, why a nurse fainted at the police, or why the five-line cipher written in the book has never been solved.A real case. A documented investigation. An identification seventy-four years late — and almost nothing else explained.Episode Four of The Quiet Files.Sources: South Australia Police case file 12/1948; Inquest into the Death of an Unknown Man (Coroner T.E. Cleland, June 1949); Professor Derek Abbott's DNA identification, July 2022; contemporary Adelaide Advertiser coverage.

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