For 74 Years Nobody Knew Who He Was. The Answer Was Stuck in the Plaster of His Own Death Mask.
A man died on an Adelaide beach in 1948 with a scrap of Persian poetry sewn into his trouser pocket, and Australia spent three generations deciding he was a spy. Hairs caught in the cast of his face, a database of distant cousins and a family tree of four thousand people say he was something much sadder.
In short
What happened. A man found dead on Somerton Park beach near Adelaide on 1 December 1948 went unidentified for 74 years. In July 2022 a University of Adelaide engineer and an American genetic genealogist named him as Carl Webb, an instrument maker from Melbourne.
What it means. The identification did not come from police forensics. It came from hairs trapped in a plaster cast of the dead man’s face, made in 1949 and kept in a museum, and from a family tree of four thousand people built out of distant DNA cousins.
Risks and impact. Nothing practical turns on it. What turns on it is a lesson in how evidence ages: the decisive material sat in a display case for seventy years while the country argued about espionage.
What can be done. Read how investigative genetic genealogy actually works. It is not a fingerprint match. It is family history, done backwards.
What to watch. Whether the South Australian coroner confirms the name. The police report was said in July 2026 to be almost finished.
Shown as a summary because of your reading settings.
What happened
Half past six in the morning, the first day of summer, 1948. Two men out riding along the beach at Somerton Park, a few kilometres south of Adelaide, notice a man propped against the sea wall with his legs crossed and his head down. They had seen him the evening before in the same position and assumed he was drunk or asleep. He is neither.
He is well dressed for a hot night: suit, tie, polished shoes, no hat in a decade when men wore hats. There is no wallet, no papers, no name in his clothes. The labels have been cut out.
📖 What the sources say. In his pockets were an unused second-class rail ticket to Henley Beach, a bus ticket, an aluminium comb of American manufacture, a half-empty packet of Juicy Fruit, an Army Club cigarette packet with Kensitas cigarettes inside it, and a box of Bryant & May matches. Nothing that named him.
Four months later a police officer went through the clothes again and found a small fob pocket sewn inside the trouser waistband. Rolled up in it was a scrap of paper torn from a book. Printed on it were two words in an ornamental typeface: Tamám Shud. Persian. It means it is finished.
The words are the last line of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám — a poem about drinking wine because the grave is coming anyway. Police appealed for the book the scrap came from. A man came forward: he had found a copy thrown into the back of his unlocked car, parked near the beach, around the time of the death. The last page was torn.
On the back cover, pressed into the board, were the indentations of five lines of capital letters, one of them struck out:
WRGOABABD / MLIAOI / WTBIMPANETP / MLIABO AIAQC / ITTMTSAMSTGAB
Nobody has ever read it, and the interesting part is why.
📖 What the sources say. Cryptographers at the Australian Department of Defence examined the letters in 1978 and concluded that no satisfactory answer could be given: if the text was encrypted there were not enough symbols to work with, and it might simply be meaningless — the product, as they put it, of a disturbed mind. Derek Abbott’s group later concluded that each letter is the first letter of a word. In 2014 the computational linguist John Rehling tested that statistically and found it strongly supported, though he could match the initials to no known text. His conclusion was that the letters were written as shorthand, not as a code.
Which is to say: the most famous cipher in Australian criminal history is probably not a cipher. It is more likely the kind of thing a person writes to hold something in their head.
Also in the book: a telephone number, belonging to a young nurse living a few hundred metres from where the body was found. She told police she did not know him. She said the same thing for the rest of her life.
What the evidence supports
Here is the part that matters, and it has nothing to do with codes.
Ten days after the man died, his body was embalmed. The following year the police had a plaster cast made of his head and shoulders, the standard method of the day for keeping a face after the body had to be buried. The man who made it worked the wet plaster directly against the skin. Hairs from the dead man’s head and neck got caught in it and set.
That bust went into storage and eventually into a museum. It sat there while the case was argued over by three generations.
Derek Abbott, an electronic engineering professor at the University of Adelaide, had been working on the case for years. He went to the bust. Hair is one of the harder materials to get usable DNA from — the shaft is mostly keratin, and the root is where the nuclear DNA lives — but hairs pulled into setting plaster keep their roots, and plaster is dry and stable. It is close to an accidental archive.
Abbott worked with Colleen Fitzpatrick, an American forensic genealogist. The profile they recovered went into GEDmatch, a public database where people who have taken consumer ancestry tests upload their results so they can find relatives.
Nobody in that database was the Somerton Man. That is not how this works. What came back was a scattering of distant cousins — people who shared enough DNA with him to be somewhere on the same family tree, but who had no idea who he was.
📖 What the sources say. Abbott and Fitzpatrick built a family tree of some four thousand people out of those matches, then worked archival records for anyone whose life fitted. Fitzpatrick described the moment it narrowed: “In all this soup and ocean of DNA cousins, we were able to connect one of them to Carl’s father and one of them to Carl’s mother.”
Two branches, converging on one couple. Their children were then checked against the registers. Every one of them had a recorded death — except the youngest son.
The background
For most of those seventy-four years, the story was about spies.
It is easy to see why, and the geography did most of the work. South Australia in 1948 held the Radium Hill uranium mine and, a few hundred kilometres north, the Woomera rocket range run jointly with Britain. Australia’s domestic intelligence service, ASIO, was founded about seven months after the body was found, in a period when Soviet penetration of Western governments was being uncovered through the Venona decrypts.
Into that setting drops a man with no identification, his clothing labels cut off, a line of Persian poetry sewn into a hidden pocket, and a page of letters nobody can read — leading to a woman who denied knowing him and whose denial did not convince the detective who took it.
Add a pathologist who believed the man had been poisoned but could not name the poison, and you have a story that writes itself. It was written, repeatedly, for decades — in newspapers, in books, in documentaries.
The trouble is that none of it was evidence. It was absence of evidence, arranged into a shape. Every piece of the spy theory was a thing that was missing: no name, no labels, no identified poison, no acknowledged connection. Mysteries built out of gaps are extremely hard to disprove, which is exactly what makes them last.
What eventually spoke was not a gap. It was a physical object that had been in public view the whole time.
Who it touches
Carl “Charles” Webb was born on 16 November 1905 in Footscray, in Melbourne’s west, the youngest of six children. The family ran a bakery. His father had come from Hamburg. He trained as an instrument maker — precise work, small tools.
In October 1941 he married Dorothy Jean Robertson. He was thirty-five and gave his occupation as instrument maker. She was twenty-one and a foot specialist. He left her in 1947. She filed for divorce in 1951 on the grounds of desertion.
Her affidavit is one of the few documents in which anyone describes him, and it should be read for what it is: sworn testimony by one party in a divorce the other party was not present to answer. In it she called him violent, threatening and moody. She said he had no particular friends of his own and was often in bed by seven in the evening. She described finding him lying in a wet bed staring at nothing, the smell of ether strong enough that the neighbours complained, and said that when she nursed him through it he told her she had been a fool to bother.
And this, which is the sentence that turns a puzzle into a person: he had written many poems, most of them about death, which he said was his greatest desire.
A man who wrote about wanting to die, carrying the last line of a poem about death, folded into a pocket sewn shut.
The deeper story
It is worth being exact about what has and has not been established, because the two get run together constantly.
Established: the DNA profile from the bust, the cousin matches, the tree, the fact that Carl Webb is the only sibling with no death record, and Abbott’s own assessment that he is, in his words, 99.99 per cent sure.
Not established: the identification is still not official. As of July 2026, South Australia Police describe the investigation as complex and ongoing. Their report to the state coroner was said in early July to be finished within a fortnight, with findings expected before the end of the year. Until the coroner rules, the name on the grave is a scientist’s conclusion, not a legal fact.
Probably never establishable: how he died. The body was exhumed in May 2021 and the remains were in reasonable condition for DNA work, which is a very different thing from being able to detect a poison seventy-three years later. The pathologist in 1949 thought poison and could not name it. Skeletal remains are unlikely to settle it now.
Still open: why a man from Melbourne was on a beach in Adelaide. Why his labels were cut out. What the letters on the book cover meant, if anything. Whether the nurse was telling the truth.
That last cluster is the honest residue of the case, and it is smaller than it used to be — but it has not gone away, and a text that pretended otherwise would be doing the same thing the spy books did, only in the other direction.
Something to sit with
There is a particular disappointment that comes with solved mysteries, and this one delivers it fully. Seventy-four years of intelligence agencies and unbreakable ciphers resolve into a man who was cruel to his wife, wrote poems about wanting to die, and went to a beach.
But look at what actually did the work. Not a codebreaker. Not a confession. A tradesman in 1949 pressing plaster onto a dead man’s face and accidentally trapping a few hairs, and then seventy years of that object sitting on a shelf while the answer sat in it.
The lesson is not about DNA, which gets all the headlines. It is about the difference between evidence and story. Every element of the espionage version was a hole — something absent, something unexplained — and holes can be filled with anything. The thing that finally spoke was solid, dull and physical, and it had been available to anyone the entire time.
When the next case is announced as “solved by DNA”, it is worth remembering what that phrase usually conceals. The DNA rarely matches the person. It matches their third cousins. What solves it is somebody sitting down with birth registers and building four thousand people into a tree until only one name is left with nowhere to have died.
Sources
- Somerton Man - case overview, items recovered, the Rubaiyat, the code and the 2021 exhumation — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerton_Man
- Smithsonian Magazine - Australia's Mysterious Somerton Man Identified as Carl Webb, on the work of Derek Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/have-scholars-finally-ide...
- ABC News - Somerton Man Charles Webb's true identity revealed in family photographs and divorce papers — https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-21/somerton-manfamily-photograp...
- ABC News - SA Police report to coroner into Somerton Man case complete 'very soon' — https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/sa-police-report-coroner-int...
- CNN - Somerton man mystery 'solved' as DNA points to man's identity, professor claims — https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/australia/australia-somerton-man-mys...
- Derek Abbott - University of Adelaide staff page, the researcher who ran the identification — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Abbott
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