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Is this history's most baffling cold case? This is the true story of the Somerton Man, an enigma that haunted Australia for 77 years.
On December 1, 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach, dressed in a perfect suit with all labels cut away. He had no ID, no wallet, and no name. The only clue: a tiny scrap of paper hidden in his pocket with two words: "Tamám Shud" (It is Ended).
This story based on true events has all the makings of a spy thriller: an untraceable poison, an unbreakable five-line code, a mysterious nurse, and the shadow of Cold War espionage. For decades, the world believed this was a story of a secret agent silenced by his enemies.
But what if the truth was something else entirely?
This documentary explores every twist of this incredible cold case, from the initial discovery to the decades of dead ends. We investigate:
• The "Tamám Shud" clue and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
• The unbreakable code that baffled cryptographers.
• The mysterious nurse, "Jestyn," who lived nearby.
• The compelling espionage theory involving the Woomera rocket range.
And finally, we reveal the stunning 2022 DNA breakthrough that cracked this cold case wide open. The truth, hidden in a single strand of hair, reveals the man's real name and reframes this epic mystery into a deeply personal and tragic true story.
This is the definitive story of the Somerton Man, Carl "Charles" Webb.
Connect With Us: We love hearing from our global audience! Let us know your theories and thoughts on this true story in the comments.
• Which country and city are you watching from?
• What cold case should we investigate next?
Thank you for watching!
#TrueStory #ColdCase #SomertonMan #UnsolvedMystery #Documentary #TrueCrime #StoryBasedOnTrueEvents #CarlWebb #TamamShud #History
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0:00
December 1st, 1948. On the quiet sands of Summerton Beach,
0:05
Australia, a man is found dead. He's dressed in a perfect suit, his shoes
0:10
polished, but he has no wallet, no money, and no name. Every single label
0:16
from his clothing has been meticulously cut away. He is a ghost. The autopsy
0:22
suggests a rare, untraceable poison, but finds no answers. Police are baffled
0:28
until they discover one impossible clue. A tiny scrap of paper hidden deep in a
0:34
secret pocket printed with just two words. Tam shut. It is ended. This
0:41
single clue ignites one of history's greatest unsolved cases. It leads to a
0:46
rare book of poetry, an unbreakable five-line code, a terrified local nurse
0:51
who seems to recognize him, and the dark shadows of cold war espionage. Was the
0:57
Summitton man a jilted lover, a poet, or a professional spy silenced by an
1:03
unknown enemy? For 77 years, the mystery remained frozen in time. But the truth,
1:11
finally extracted from a single strand of hair, is more personal and perhaps
1:16
more tragic than anyone ever imagined. If you're ready, let's begin.
1:28
Don't forget to subscribe to the True Stories Live channel and like the video.
1:35
It is a ghost story without a ghost, a crime without a culprit, a name without
1:41
a face. For 77 years, he has been a blank page in the archives of the
1:46
unexplained, a riddle etched in sand. His identity was a mystery, his death a
1:53
paradox, and his legacy a single impossible clue. This is the story of
2:00
the man who was never there. It begins not with a scream, but with the quiet
2:05
hiss of the tide on Summerton Beach, South Australia. The date is December
2:11
1st, 1948. The world is exhausted, still breathing in the dust of a war that has
2:17
just ended and bracing for the chill of a new cold one. Adelaide is a quiet
2:23
city, far removed from the shattered capitals of Europe. It is not a place where international mysteries are
2:30
supposed to wash ashore. At 6:30 a.m., a man walking along the shoreline noticed
2:36
something out of place. He had seen the figure the night before around 700 p.m.
2:42
lying on the sand near the steps to the crippled children's home. He had assumed it was just a local drunk sleeping off
2:50
the night. But now, in the sharp early light of a summer morning, the man was
2:55
in the exact same position. He was dressed impeccably. He wore a brown
3:01
double- breasted suit, a white shirt, and a fashionable red, white, and blue
3:06
tie. His shoes, brown and polished, were clean despite having rested on the damp
3:13
sand. He was middle-aged, perhaps in his mid-4s, with grayish brown hair and an
3:18
athletic build. He looked, according to those who found him, peaceful. He was slumped against the seaw wall, his head
3:25
tilted back, his legs extended. Stranger still, a half-sm smoked cigarette rested
3:31
on the collar of his jacket as if it had fallen from his lips just as he lost
3:37
consciousness, though it had not been lit. When police arrived, the scene deepened from strange to baffling.
3:44
Detective Sergeant Lionel Lean, a seasoned officer, was one of the first to assess the body. There were no signs
3:52
of a struggle, no disturbance in the sand around him. It looked as though the man had simply laying down and died.
4:00
They searched his pockets. They found a book of matches, a metal comb, a pack of
4:06
army club cigarettes which contained seven cigarettes of another more expensive brand, Kenitus, a used bus
4:14
ticket from the city to the St. Leonard's bus stop, a short walk from the beach, and a small unused railway
4:21
ticket from the city to Henley Beach. What they did not find was far more
4:26
important. No wallet, no money, no identification, no driver's license, no
4:32
letters, no keys, nothing to anchor him to the world. The detectives rolled the
4:38
body over. They checked the inside of his pockets. They examined his suit. And
4:44
then they found the most disturbing detail of all. Every single identifying
4:49
label from his clothing had been meticulously removed. The tailor's name on the suit, the brand on the tie, even
4:57
the small tag on his socks. All of it cut away with clinical precision. This
5:02
was not a robbery. A thief would have taken the suit, or at least the shoes.
5:08
This was not a simple drowning. His clothes were largely dry. This was an
5:13
eraser. Someone had deliberately, carefully, and successfully scrubbed this man from existence. The man from
5:21
Summitton Beach was taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital Morg. There, the
5:27
mystery only intensified. Pathologist Dr. John Dwire conducted the autopsy,
5:33
but the man's body offered no easy answers. His hands were soft and clean,
5:39
showing no signs of manual labor. His calf muscles, however, were high and
5:44
defined, which Dwire noted were like those of a dancer or someone who wore
5:50
high heeled or pointed boots. His last meal was a pasty ingested 3 to 4 hours
5:57
before death. But the cause of death, that was the problem. His spleen was
6:02
congested, three times its normal size. His liver was damaged. There was blood
6:08
in his stomach. These findings were all consistent with poison, but every test
6:14
for known poisons came back negative. There was no bullet hole, no stab wound,
6:21
no sign of blunt force trauma. The immediate police theory was suicide, but
6:27
it didn't fit. Where was the vial, the empty bottle, the note? And why go to
6:33
such elaborate lengths to remove all identification? If you wanted to end your life, why make yourself a ghost?
6:40
The police were stumped. They had a body, but no person. His fingerprints
6:46
were taken. They were sent across the globe to Scotland Yard in the UK, to the FBI in the United States, to every major
6:54
police force in the English-speaking world. The result was silence. No match found. Desperate, they had a plaster
7:01
cast made of his head and shoulders. This image, the face of the unknown man,
7:07
was published in newspapers across the country. He had a strong jaw, high
7:12
cheekbones, and a calm, almost noble expression in death. Thousands saw the
7:18
face. Newspapers dubbed him the mystery man. People came to the morg in droves,
7:24
searching for lost husbands, brothers, and sons. But no one no one recognized
7:30
him. The police had one last hope. The railway ticket found in his pocket. It
7:37
suggested he had arrived in Adelaide by train. On January 14th, 1949, weeks
7:44
after the body was found, staff at the Adelaide Railway Station found a suitcase. It had been checked into the
7:52
cloak room at 11 a.m. on November 30th, the day before the body was discovered.
7:59
The label, just like the man's clothes, had been torn off. Inside this case,
8:05
police hoped to find the key, the single item that would unlock the riddle of Summerton Beach. They opened the lock.
8:13
Inside, they found clothes, toiletries, and a collection of tools. But what they
8:18
found was not an answer. It was the beginning of an entirely new mystery.
8:24
The brown suitcase was not locked. Inside, detectives found a meticulous,
8:29
almost curated collection of items. A red check dressing gown slippers, four
8:34
pairs of underpants, three singlets, pajamas, a shaving kit, a yellow handled
8:41
paintbrush, a small screwdriver, and a sharpened table knife. And then the
8:47
stranger items. A stenciling kit, the kind used by officers on merchant ships
8:52
to mark cargo. a spool of Barber brand waxed thread, an unusual type not
8:58
readily available in Australia, suggesting it was imported. And just like the man himself, the clothes in the
9:05
suitcase were all missing their labels, all except three. On a tie, the name
9:10
Teen was printed on a singlet, Keen. On a laundry bag, Keen without the E. This
9:16
was it, the first solid lead. Police fanned out across Australia searching
9:22
for any missing person named Teen or Keen. They scoured maritime records,
9:28
immigration lists, and police reports. The search went nowhere. No Teen was
9:34
missing. The name, it seemed, was another dead end. Perhaps a false name,
9:39
or perhaps the name of the actual owner, and the Summerton man had simply stolen the suitcase. But the contents pointed
9:47
to a deeper level of preparation. The stenciling kit, the waxed thread, which
9:53
was found to be the same thread used to repair a tear in the lining of the mystery man's own suit pocket. This was
10:00
his suitcase. And the keen tags were not a mistake. They were a deliberate piece
10:06
of misdirection left behind to send investigators chasing a phantom. This
10:12
was a man who knew how to cover his tracks. A man who understood forensics, who knew that labels and names were
10:18
anchors. He had cut every anchor, leaving himself perfectly a drift. With
10:24
the suitcase providing only more questions, the investigation turned back
10:29
to the body itself. The man had now been in the morg for months, preserved with
10:35
formulin, awaiting an identity that never came. The coroner, Thomas Cleland,
10:41
began his inquest. He too was baffled by the lack of a clear cause of death. He
10:47
consulted Sir John Burton Cleland, a renowned pathologist. Cleland examined the body again. He noted the man's
10:54
physical perfection, the strange dancer-like calves, the clean hands. He
11:00
reviewed the autopsy findings, the congested organs, the internal bleeding.
11:05
He concluded that the evidence was overwhelmingly consistent with poison,
11:10
but a poison that was untraceable, or perhaps one that the pathologist simply
11:15
didn't know to look for. He hypothesized two possibilities, digitalis or a
11:22
stroenthan. Both are powerful cardiac toxins, difficult to detect even today
11:29
and virtually impossible in 1948. They could be administered in a small lethal
11:35
dose and would leave symptoms almost identical to a massive natural heart
11:40
failure. This changed everything. Suicide was one thing, but a
11:46
professional assassination using a rare, untraceable poison that pointed to
11:52
something far more sinister. The inquest was adjourned. The man remained
11:59
unidentified. The police had exhausted every conventional avenue. They had a body, a
12:06
suitcase of cryptic belongings, and a theory of a perfect traceless murder.
12:11
But they had no victim, no motive, and no suspect. The state government, facing
12:18
a dead end, decided the man would be buried. In June 1949, more than 6 months
12:24
after he was found, the Summerton man was given a burial service. Detectives,
12:30
morg attendants, and a few curious locals watched as the casket was lowered
12:36
into the ground at Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery. The Salvation Army
12:42
officiated, reading from the scriptures. The headstone was a simple, stark block.
12:48
Here lies the unknown man who was found at Summerton Beach 1st December 1948.
12:55
It seemed the mystery would be buried with him. But Professor Cleland, the pathologist, was not satisfied. He was
13:03
haunted by the case. Before the man was buried, he had ordered one final
13:08
thorough examination of the suit the man was wearing. He ran his fingers over
13:14
every inch of the fabric, searching for anything he might have missed. in the waistband of the trousers stitched deep
13:22
inside a small hidden fob pocket. A pocket within a pocket almost completely
13:28
concealed, his fingers brushed against something. It was a tiny, tightly rolled
13:34
scrap of paper. He carefully extracted it. He unrolled it. On the paper,
13:39
printed in a distinctive, ornate font, were two words. two words that would
13:45
ignite the investigation, sending it into the realm of codes, espionage, and
13:51
international intrigue. The words were tam
13:57
tam sh. The words were meaningless to the Adelaide police, but a quick trip to
14:03
the public library provided a translation. They were Persian. They meant it is ended or the end. They were
14:11
identified as the final phrase from a famous 11th century collection of poetry, the Rubiat of Omar Cayam. The
14:20
poems translated by Edward Fitzgerald were a meditation on life, death, and
14:26
fate. They were famous for lines like, "The moving finger writes, and having
14:31
writes on." This was a poetic almost theatrical clue. But what did it mean?
14:38
Was it a suicide note? A final fatalistic message. The police now had a
14:44
new urgent task. Find the exact book from which this scrap of paper was torn.
14:50
The font was distinctive. They learned it came from a very specific and rather
14:56
rare 1941 edition published by Witam and Tombs. The public was electrified. The
15:03
case of the mystery man suddenly had a literary, romantic, and sinister new
15:08
layer. Police appeals went out across the country. Does anyone have a copy of
15:14
the Rubayad of Omar Cayam with the final page torn out? The clue trail which had
15:20
been frozen solid for months was now red hot. Then on July 23rd, 1949,
15:28
a man walked into the Adelaide police station. His name was not released to
15:34
the public. He was a local businessman. He told the detectives an incredible story. He said that just after the
15:41
Summerton man was found back in early December, he had parked his car near Summerton Beach. He had left the car
15:48
unlocked. When he returned, he found a book tossed onto the back floorboard. He thought nothing of it, assuming a
15:54
relative had left it there. He took the book, a copy of The Rubayat of Omar
16:00
Cayam, and put it in his glove box. He had forgotten all about it until he saw
16:06
the latest newspaper appeal. He retrieved the book. He checked the last page. It was torn. The words Tamam Shu
16:14
were gone. He handed the book to the detectives. It was the 1941 Witam and
16:21
Tombs edition. They took the tiny scrap of paper found on the Summerton man.
16:26
They matched it to the tear. It was a perfect fit. The fibers aligned exactly.
16:32
This was without question the book, the book that had been in the Summerton man's possession and which he or someone
16:40
else had discarded in a random car on the night he died. The police holding
16:45
the book felt they were moments away from solving the case. They opened the
16:50
back cover, expecting a name, an address, anything. What they found was
16:56
not an answer. It was a challenge. On the back cover, written faintly in pencil, were five lines of capital
17:03
letters. They were grouped, seemingly random. W R G O A B A B D M L I A O I W
17:13
T B I M P A N E T P M L I A B O A I A Q
17:20
C I T T M T S A M S T G A B. It was a
17:25
code. The Summerton man was not just an erased identity. He was not just a
17:30
victim of a subtle poison. He was, it now seemed, at the center of a cryptographic puzzle. This changed the
17:37
investigation entirely. The book was immediately handed over to the Australian Department of Defense. Naval
17:45
cryptographers, men who had spent the war breaking Japanese and German codes,
17:50
were tasked with deciphering it. They studied the letters looking for patterns, for substitutions, for
17:57
ciphers. They found nothing. The lines were too short for a standard frequency
18:03
analysis. The letter combinations were baffling. M L I AI was not a word. W R G
18:11
O A B A B D was nonsense. The experts concluded it was likely a one-time pad
18:18
cipher, a type of code that is mathematically unbreakable without the corresponding key. Or they theorized it
18:26
was not a cipher at all, but the first letters of words from a specific text, a
18:31
poem code. Perhaps the code's key was another book or even the Rubayat itself.
18:38
But no attempt worked. The code remained silent. The police were frustrated. The
18:44
code was a dead end. But the book had one more secret. On the same back cover,
18:49
below the impenetrable code was something else, something far more concrete. It was a phone number. A phone
18:57
number for a woman who lived in Glennel, a suburb right next to Summerton Beach.
19:02
Detectives quickly traced the number. It belonged to a young woman, a nurse. Her
19:08
name was Jessica Thompson, though she was known to her friends as Justin. She
19:14
lived less than 400 meters from the spot on the beach where the Summerton man's
19:20
body was found. After months of chasing phantoms and dead ends, the police
19:26
finally had a person. A living, breathing connection to their unknown
19:31
man. They took the plaster cast of the man's head and drove to her house.
19:37
Certain they were about to hear the name that had eluded the entire world.
19:42
Detective Sergeant Lean stood at the door. He presented the plaster cast the white ghostly face of the Summerton man
19:50
to the young nurse. Her reaction was immediate and visceral. According to the
19:55
police reports, she was completely taken aback to the point of looking as if she
20:01
was about to faint. She recoiled from the cast, her face pale. She was clearly
20:08
shocked, but it was not the shock of a stranger. It was the shock of recognition.
20:14
Lean pressed her. Do you know this man? Do you know who he is? The young nurse,
20:20
her composure fractured, looked away from the cast. She denied it. She said she had no idea who he was. She did not
20:28
know his name, nor had she ever seen him before. Lean was an experienced detective. He knew a lie when he heard
20:35
one. Her physical reaction had betrayed her words, but he couldn't force a
20:40
confession. She was evasive, nervous, and claimed the man must have been
20:46
mistaken, or that perhaps he was a local she had seen in passing but did not know. Lean then asked her about the
20:53
book, The Rubayat of Omar Cayam. Here her story shifted. She admitted that she
21:01
had once owned a copy of that specific rare edition. She told the police a
21:07
story. Sometime during the Second World War in 1945,
21:12
she had been working at the Royal Northshore Hospital in Sydney. She said she had given her copy of the book to a
21:19
man, an army officer named Alf Boxhall. This was a bombshell, a name, a
21:24
connection. Police immediately launched a search for Alf Boxhall. They feared he
21:29
was the Summerton man, that he had come to Adelaide to see the nurse and had met
21:34
his end on the beach. They tracked him down. Alf Boxhall was alive. He was not
21:41
the Summitton man. Detectives from Sydney police went to interview him. They asked him about the nurse and they
21:47
asked him about the book. Boxhall confirmed her story. He said he had known her in Sydney and yes, she had
21:54
given him a copy of the Rubiat. He still had it. He went to his bookshelf and
22:00
retrieved it. He handed it to the detectives. The detectives opened the back page. Their hearts sank. It was
22:08
intact. The Tamshud page was still there. This was not the Summerton man's
22:13
book. This meant the young nurse had at one time been connected to two men, both
22:19
of whom she had given or been associated with this specific rare book of poetry.
22:25
But Boxhall's book held one more chilling secret. When the nurse had given it to him, she had written a short
22:32
inscription inside. It was verse 70 from the Rubayat. Indeed, indeed repentance
22:39
oft before I swore, but was I sober when I swore. And then, and then came spring,
22:45
and rose in hand, my thread bare penitence of pieces tore, and beneath it
22:51
she had signed her name, Justin. The police were back to square one, but with
22:56
a new tantalizing center to the mystery. This young nurse, Justin, was the only
23:03
person with a tangible link to the unknown man. She lived near the beach.
23:09
Her phone number was in his book. She reacted to his image with terror, and she had a history with another man
23:16
involving the very same book of poetry. Yet, she denied everything. Why was she
23:23
afraid? Was she protecting someone? Or was she herself involved? The police
23:29
were suspicious. They kept her name out of the official public record, fearing
23:35
it might compromise the investigation or perhaps put her in danger. She told them
23:41
that she was now married and trying to build a new life. She begged them not to
23:46
link her to the case. The police, with no hard evidence to charge her, could
23:51
only agree. The investigation had hit a wall. The code was unbreakable. The only
23:57
human link was a terrified woman who refused to talk. The case was now
24:02
hopelessly tangled. They had a man erased of all identity, a professional,
24:08
untraceable poison, a suitcase full of misdirection, a cryptic, unbreakable
24:14
code, and at the center of it all, a nurse with a secret, a connection to an
24:19
army officer, and a profound visible fear of the dead man's face. The theory
24:25
of a simple suicide was long gone. This was something else. This was complex,
24:31
planned, and deeply hidden. The tam shud clue it is ended was not just a poetic
24:38
flourish. It was a message. But for whom? The police were forced to look
24:43
away from the clues and back at the context. This was 1948.
24:49
The cold war was escalating. And just north of Adelaide in the desolate desert, the Australian government was
24:56
working on a top secret project. A project that the new Soviet enemy would do anything to learn about. The year
25:04
1948 was not a peaceful time. The Iron Curtain had descended across Europe. The
25:10
Berlin blockade was underway. And in Australia, the Cold War was arriving in
25:16
the desert. Just north of Adelaide was the Wura prohibited area, a newly
25:22
established top secret Angloan weapons testing range. It was one of the
25:27
largest, most secretive military facilities in the Western world. Nearby was Radium Hill, a mine for uranium, the
25:35
key ingredient for the atomic bomb. South Australia, the quiet provincial
25:40
state, had suddenly become a vital nerve center for Western military technology,
25:45
and that made it a prime target for Soviet espionage. This context cast the
25:51
Summitton man in a terrifying new light. Suddenly, the bizarre clues began to
25:57
align. A man with no identity, his labels removed. A classic technique for
26:03
a field agent. A professional untraceable poison. The signature of an
26:08
intelligence agency's wet work. A complex unbreakable code. A
26:14
communication. Was the Summerton man a spy? The theories multiplied. Was he a Soviet
26:21
agent sent to infiltrate Womera who had been silenced by his own people? or was
26:27
he a western operative, perhaps American or British, who had been caught and executed by a Soviet sleeper cell? The
26:35
code was re-examined. Was M L I A B O A
26:40
I A QC an acronym for a secret project? Were the letters a key to a radio
26:47
transmission? The man's athletic build, his clean hands, he wasn't a laborer. He
26:53
was a courier, a dancer, moving between two worlds. And what of the nurse,
26:58
Justin? In this light, she was no longer just a frightened woman. Was she a honeypot, a
27:06
contact, or a handler? Her connection to two men with intelligence backgrounds,
27:12
Alfall, the army officer, and now possibly the Summerton man, seemed too
27:18
great a coincidence. The timing was also suspicious. The man's body was found on
27:24
December 1st, just months earlier in 1948. The United States had launched
27:30
Project Venona, a top secret program to decrypt Soviet intelligence messages.
27:36
Venona would eventually expose a massive Soviet spy ring operating in Australia
27:42
with agents inside the government itself. Was the Summitton man the first
27:47
casualty of this secret war? Was his death a warning? This theory of
27:53
espionage and cold war assassination was the most compelling. It explained the
27:59
professionalism, the secrecy, the poison, and the code. It tied the
28:04
mystery to the global anxieties of the age. But it was, like all the others,
28:10
impossible to prove. There was no hard evidence. No government claimed him. No
28:16
defector ever mentioned a dead agent on an Australian beach. The code remained
28:21
unbroken. The case went cold. Decades passed. The 1940s became the 1950s. The
28:29
Cold War raged and then it thawed. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union
28:34
dissolved. The Womera range became less secret. The Summerton man remained
28:39
frozen in time. He became a legend, a campfire story for detectives, a holy
28:46
grail for amateur sleuths. Books were written, documentaries were made, online
28:52
forums buzzed with endless elaborate theories, but the man in the grave
28:57
remained silent. His identity was the one piece of key that could unlock the
29:03
entire cipher. Without it, he was just a collection of questions. The nurse,
29:09
Jessica Thompson, lived out her life in Adelaide. She was occasionally
29:15
approached by researchers, but she never changed her story. She never admitted to
29:20
knowing the man. She took her secrets, whatever they were, to her grave in
29:26
2007. It seemed Tamshu was right. It was ended. But in the 21st century, a new
29:33
kind of science emerged. A science that could read the stories written in human
29:38
cells. Forensic genealogy, the use of DNA to build family trees, began solving
29:44
decades old cold cases. And one man, a professor at the University of Adelaide
29:50
named Derek Abbott, became obsessed. He believed this new science could finally
29:57
give the Summitton man his name back. He and his team began a long, difficult
30:03
campaign. They lobbyed the South Australian government. They argued that the unknown man deserved a name, that
30:11
history deserved an answer. Finally, in 2021, 73 years after the man was found,
30:18
the government agreed. The attorney general granted a license to exume the
30:24
body of the Summerton man. The world watched as on a quiet morning, investigators dug into the hard earth of
30:31
the West Terrace Cemetery. They were searching for the last physical traces of the ghost. They hoped to find teeth
30:38
or bone fragments, anything that might still hold a strand of DNA.
30:45
But the grave, like the man's life, offered up its secrets grudgingly.
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The excumation was a dead end. 73 years and the damp Adelaide earth had left
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little behind. The man's body had been imbalmed with formalin, a process
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notorious for destroying DNA. The coffin had collapsed. There were no teeth, no
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bones, nothing that could be used. The ghost had slipped away again. But
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Professor Abbott was not defeated. There was one other source, the plasticcast.
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When police had made the bust in 1949, they had inadvertently trapped several
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of the man's hairs in the plaster. For decades, these hairs sat unseen inside
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the cast. Abbott, working with the renowned American genealogologist Colleen Fitzpatrick, managed to extract
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a few of these hairs. The challenge was immense. The DNA was highly fragmented,
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broken down by time. But they found mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material
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passed down from a mother. This was not enough for an identification, but it was
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a start. It allowed them to begin building a massive family tree, working
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forward from the man's maternal ancestors, searching for a modern-day
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relative. Simultaneously, they began the painstaking work of extracting nuclear
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DNA, the code that makes a unique individual. It took years, but in 2022,
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they had a breakthrough. They had enough of a profile to upload to genealogical databases. The team uploaded the data,
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they waited, and they got a match, a distant cousin. Using this link, Abbott
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and Fitzpatrick raced through public records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death notices. The family
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tree, which had started with thousands of names, began to shrink. They narrowed
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it down to a single family branch and then to a single name. After 74 years,
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the ghost was finally given a face. The Summerton man was Carl Charles Webb. The
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revelation announced in July 2022 sent shock waves around the world. But the
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name did not answer the questions. It created an entirely new set of them. Who
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was Carl Webb? He was not a Russian spy. He was not a British agent. He was not a
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dancer. He was an electrical engineer and instrument maker from Melbourne. He
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was born in 1905, making him 43 years old when he died. He
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was described as a quiet, thoughtful man. He wrote poetry. He was separated
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from his wife, Dorothy. He was in almost every way ordinary. And this is the
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final shocking twist of the Summitton man mystery. The answer was not
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espionage. The answer was human. The new evidence painted a picture not of a spy,
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but of a man in quiet turmoil. He had left his wife. His trail goes cold in
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Melbourne in 1947. He reappears in Adelaide, checking a suitcase, buying random bus tickets, and
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ending up on a beach. The unbreakable code. Researchers now believe it may not
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be a code at all. Webb was a poet. The jumbled letters may have been his own form of shortorthhand notes for a poem
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or perhaps the tormented random jottings of a distressed and confused mind. The
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untraceable poison. It was likely still poison, but perhaps not the tool of an
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assassin. It may have been the tool of a man with technical knowledge. A man who
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knew how to source a substance that would end his life quickly and without a
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trace. a suicide planned with the same precision he used to build electrical
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instruments and the nurse Jessica Justin Thompson. This may be the key.
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Researchers are still investigating the link. But the prevailing theory is deeply personal. Carl Webb may have
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known her. He may have been infatuated with her. He may have traveled to Adelaide to find her. The tamam shud
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clue it is ended was not a spy signal. It was a final fatalistic note from a
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poet. A man who for reasons of love, loss or despair decided to end his life.
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The labels were cut, the name Keen used, the suitcase checked, all to spare his
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family the shame of his suicide. He was an instrument maker who at the very end
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deconstructed himself. The greatest mystery of the 20th century was not in
35:47
the end about the Cold War. It was not about spies or secret missions. It was a
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profound human tragedy. A story of a quiet man named Carl Webb who walked
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into the ocean air of Summerton Beach and chose to become a ghost. He
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succeeded so perfectly that he created a legend. He became a blank canvas upon
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which a frightened postwar world painted its greatest fears. Spies, assassins,
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and secret codes. But the ghost is gone. In his place, there is only a man. The
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code is broken. Tam should it is ended. And so, the ghost of Summerton Beach
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finally has a name. Carl Webb. A 77-year mystery which sparked theories of Cold
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War spies and elaborate codes has found its solution not in espionage but in a
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quiet human tragedy. This case has fascinated the world for decades and we
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thank you for joining us on this journey to uncover the truth. Now we want to
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hear from you. What are your thoughts on this final heartbreaking revelation?
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Please be sure to write in the comments your opinions and critiques about our story. We love hearing from our global
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audience. So, please also let us know which country and which city you are
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following us from. We will continue to bring you the most compelling cases from history. Until the next true story, take
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care of yourselves. Goodbye, dear friends.
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