My father told me that every couple of months jeeps full of Important People would arrive in conditions of greatest secrecy, including radio shutdown and darkness, and poke their noses into the arrangements. They would be flown over the rocket range and then everyone would be told to say nothing whatsoever about anything and they would go away again. He also said that if you wanted to know anything about Woomera, you just had to go to the pub, buy a certain person a beer and listen. So much for security. The closest big city to all of these places was – you guessed it – Adelaide, an excellent place for a nest of spies, because, as I may have mentioned before, there is something odd about Adelaide.
So am I prepared to claim that Somerton Man was working for the Russians? It is, at least, a possibility. As part of the ABC’s attempt to solve the case of Somerton Man, in 1978, there was an interview with a spook, which deserves consideration, perhaps for what was not said rather than what was said. The interviewee, John Ruffels, is a researcher working on the theory that Somerton Man was a spy. He comes to an interesting conclusion about the manner of his death.
My theory is that he discarded the book… was taken some place for interrogation, not strong armed or beaten but injected with a truth drug, sodium pentothal for instance ... An overdose was administered. Then in a panic or some sort of standard procedure ... they cleansed everything of labels and [dropped him on the beach to die].
I shall speak later about the use of sodium pentothal and I don’t think that the murderers cleansed the body of labels because the suitcase was label-less as well. I think Somerton Man rendered himself unidentifiable. If the Tamam Shud case is an example of the Funny People at work, they were very inefficient.
But then, we knew that.
Chapter Seven
In a very Australian move, Somerton Man was buried by a pub, the Elephant and Castle hotel in West Terrace, Adelaide. The publican, Leo Kenny, was a well-liked man and a member of a well-known family, and the pub itself was the main port of call for the funeral trade, the pathologists, the police and the stonemasons, which I’d wager meant that they had very little trouble from the local toughs. It takes a rare form of suicidal insanity to attack people who can kill you without a trace, declare you dead, bury you and erect your headstone While-U-Wait. Police pubs are usually very quiet. Officers who really need a quick drink to face the world outside get desperately intense about being interrupted. Even my clients at the Magistrates Court, not known for their quick wit or sense of self-preservation, were never silly enough to try to hold up a police pub.
The patrons of the Elephant and Castle took up a collection so that Somerton Man should not be buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave. The Salvation Army conducted the service when he was interred on 14 June 1949. ‘This man had someone who loved him,’ said Captain E J Webb. ‘He is known only to God.’
Over the grave a headstone was erected, which says, ‘Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton beach 1st Dec 1948’. Thereafter, a woman was observed putting a red rose on his grave every year on 1 December. Police interviewed the woman and reported that she had no connection to the case but, frustratingly, they do not give her name. Later, observers noticed that pebbles had been piled on the grave, which is a way of marking a Jewish resting place, but Somerton Man was uncircumcised and therefore very unlikely to be a Jew. Though it is possible. Some Jewish children, trapped in Germany and sent to Christian institutions by prescient parents, remained uncircumcised to escape annihilation. But Somerton Man, who must have been born around the turn of that century, was too old for this to have been his fate.
Years passed without much more than a series of by now predictable headlines declaring that the body of Somerton Man had been identified, followed next day by the news that he had not. Lost luggage was inspected without result and missing persons were either found or continued missing. Nothing. Finally, on 14 March 1958, the long-suffering Coroner, Thomas Cleland, came to the reluctant conclusion that he had to close his inquiry, saying, ‘I, the said Justice of the Peace and the Coroner, do say that I am unable to say who the deceased was. He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1st of December 1948. I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death’. And that, for the legal system, was that.
Subsequently, the autopsy reports, the suitcase, and The Rubaiyat were thrown out in successive police springcleanings. Other writers have waxed indignant about this but I perfectly understand. The police evidence lockers are always bulging with stuff, so when a case is stonecold, that is what has to happen to the evidence. Besides, supposing we still had the actual socks that Somerton Man wore, would it help us at all? Even if we had samples of his DNA, to whom would we compare it? I have to admit I do wish that the actual autopsies had survived but want, as Grandma used to say, must be my master.
Just after the Coroner called it quits, a New Zealand prisoner named EB Collins announced that he knew Somerton Man. The story appeared in the Sunday Mirror, which was published in Sydney. Gerald Feltus, who has access to the police reports, states that the New Zealand police interviewed Mr Collins, who declined to impart any more information, stating that he was going to be paid a lot of money for his story by a newspaper. However, no story subsequently appeared.
Information volunteered by prisoners is always suspect but it does show that the Somerton Beach mystery still interested the media. The interest has never gone away. The media have had a lovely time with Somerton Man. My researcher collected over a hundred newspaper clippings from the invaluable Trove on the internet, each of them reporting a new solution to the mystery, all of which somehow proved not to be conclusive.
Then there are the coincidences. Fictional detectives are fond of making pronouncements like ‘There are no coincidences’, and they are right in two senses – firstly, in the sense that no coincidences can happen in an intricate, infinitely complex world system in which butterflies flapping their wings create tornados, and secondly in the sense that no coincidences are allowed in fiction. Fictional investigations have much stricter rules than investigations in real life. In the Golden Age of detective stories, the most important rule was that the murder should never turn out to have been committed by a wandering axe murder whom no one had previously noticed. This is not because there are no wandering axe murderers in the world; sadly, there are. It is because readers of crime fiction rightly demand three things – a crime, a detective and a solution. Crime fiction is a puzzle and the author must play fair and give the reader all the facts they need to solve the mystery. Coincidences happen all the time in real life but if they happen in crime fiction, the reader feels cheated. Usually, however, an editor will return a coincidence-ridden manuscript and sternly instruct the author to rewrite it, so the reader never gets to see it.
Coincidences happen in court on many occasions. My favourite was the little ratbag who, after spending his youth with a collection of like-minded friends stealing cars and causing trouble, had been sentenced to a youth training facility but had escaped. He ran away to South Australia, got a job and a bank account, got married, had children and took them back ten years later to visit his old mum in Melbourne, counting, quite reasonably, on the fact that he had changed a great deal and that no one was actively looking for him. Then he stepped out on a crossing and was run over by a car and the police officer who picked him up off the road was – you guessed it – the one who had originally put him away. Apparently, the cop said ‘Hi, Jimmy’, and Jimmy said ‘Hi, Sarge’. When the case came to court, I argued that the Children’s Court sentence was meant to reform and keep him out of trouble, which it appeared to have done, so could we call it quits? And we did.