Professor Abbott also looked at our man’s teeth, such as were left of them, and found that Somerton Man had hyperdontia of the lateral incisors, a genetic disorder that is only apparent in 2 per cent of the population, making it both rare and significant. Although his body is buried, we have photographs and a cast of Somerton Man’s upper body, allowing us to establish that he also has unusual ears.
Back when Bertillon was setting up his system of physical measurement, which preceded fingerprinting, it had already been noticed that ear shapes could be classified in the same way as fingerprints – although the classification of ears is not as useful, because there are comparatively few ear prints found at crime scenes. (It does occasionally happen, however. One of my clients left behind most of one ear when he dived through a window to escape pursuit, though that resulted in a jigsaw puzzle game called ‘match the missing body part’, rather than an expert examination of prints.) Ear prints can sometimes be found on walls and on windows but they have not been as widely accepted as fingerprints and they have been rejected as evidence in the US courts. However, they are, if not unique, pretty distinctive.
A forensic anthropologist Maciej Henneberg, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, has provided an analysis of Somerton Man’s ears, establishing that he has an upper hollow, called a cymba, which is bigger than the lower hollow, the cavum. My sister Janet has ears like this with very short lobes, which made piercing her ears painful. (This does not, by the way, mean I believe that we are related to Somerton Man.) The more usual model is the other way round, an ear with a larger cavum and a smaller cymba.
This combination of hyperdontia and an unusually shaped ear appears in photographs of the son of Jestyn/Teresa Powell. Somerton Man had her phone number in his Rubaiyat and his body was found just below her house. Was he the father of Teresa’s son as the media has suggested? Allow me to observe that this is just like them. After all, the hyperdontia and the ear shape are general family traits. Why jump straight to the conclusion that Somerton Man was Teresa’s lover and the father of her child? Why couldn’t he be her brother or uncle or cousin? Nothing brings out the ghouls like death and sex or preferably both. It’s a truism of newspapers.
I have two reasons for disagreeing with the ghouls – a practical reason and an emotional reason. In practical terms, Teresa Powell was a nurse. She may have been surprised by an unplanned pregnancy but she was working at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and nurses knew things that many other women in 1948 didn’t, one of them being a safe place to get an abortion. If Teresa Powell didn’t want to keep that baby, she didn’t have to do so, which argues that she knew and loved the father and was sure that he would take care of both of them.
And on the emotional level, it seems unlikely that she was relying on Somerton Man, given that she already had a man to marry, as soon as his divorce came through. She may well have been in Adelaide to remove herself from temptation and make sure that Mr Johnson divorced his previous wife without any complicating factors. Under the old Matrimonial Causes Act, anyone who might be involved with a divorcee was obliged to pass the interval between the decrees nisi and absolute, as AP Herbert says, in another country. Or in a nunnery. Any suggestion of collusion and the divorce was off. I do not know whether Mr Johnson was suing for divorce or being sued and at this late date I do not propose to pry. But it is a matter of public record, and as I have referred to earlier, that he married Miss Powell in 1950 as soon as he was free to marry, and they stayed married until he died in 1995 and she died in 2007.
Gerald Feltus, who as we know interviewed Teresa for his book on the Tamam Shud case, was sure that she knew the identity of Somerton Man but that doesn’t necessarily prove that he was her lover. While it is true that Teresa Powell gave a Rubaiyat to a drinking companion in Sydney, I am recapping here, I am not convinced that this links her to Somerton Man. After all, there is no naughty little verse in the front of Somerton Man’s first edition and no inscription from Jestyn, just her phone number in the back of the book, scribbled there perhaps because he had nothing else to write on. (There is no notebook, either in his pockets or his luggage). I do believe he came to Somerton Beach to see Teresa but I don’t think he was her lover. He left his suitcase at Central Station. He wasn’t expecting to stay. If someone comes up with some DNA from the hair caught in that plaster cast, I’d bet a good dinner at my favourite restaurant Attica that the DNA tests would prove that Somerton Man was related to Teresa Powell but not the father of her son.
Like my father, I have always been a cautious gambler and, like him, I never bet my bus money, which means I am tolerably certain about this bet. But if I am wrong, I get another dinner at Attica, so there is, as my nephew says, no actual downside. In any case, there is no way of proving or disproving this theory at present. Professor Abbott’s request for the exhumation of Somerton Man in October 2011 was refused by the Attorney-General, who said that there was no public interest (this phrase has a precise legal meaning) in such an exhumation which ‘went beyond curiosity’. Besides, the chance that Somerton Man and Teresa’s son are not in some way related is estimated at one in 20 million – although that’s the sort of chance that wins lotteries, so it does happen.
Meanwhile, as well as analysing the ears of Somerton Man, Professor Henneberg also examined the photograph of a man called HC Reynolds and found Reynolds’s ears and other facial markers to be the same as the man found dead on Somerton Beach. Henneberg goes so far as to say that ‘Together with the similarity of the ear characteristics, this mole, in a forensic case, would allow me to make a rare statement positively identifying the Somerton Man’. So who is HC Reynolds? The photo in question comes from an old ID card, issued in 1918 by the American authorities and later given to Gerald Feltus by a person he describes only as ‘Ruth Collins, an Adelaide woman’. On the ID card HC Reynolds is identified as British and eighteen years old at the time – the right age for Somerton Man, who was estimated in 1948 to be in his late forties or early fifties.
ID cards were issued to sailors who wanted to go ashore in American ports and didn’t have passports. Passports are a relatively recent invention and not every sailor had one, especially in that era. Extensive searches through various English and Australian archives have failed to find anyone by the name of HC Reynolds who was born, as he must have been, in 1900. One researcher, who is convinced that the ID card was issued to a shipwreck survivor, is still checking survivor lists. It is possible that the researchers haven’t consulted the right database yet but it is also possible that Reynolds wasn’t his real name. Identity is not an absolute. One of Australia’s more famous heroes was an English deserter who was actually called Kirkpatrick but enlisted in the army under the name of Simpson. (He and his donkey later attracted some notice.)
In 1900, birth registrations were patchy. Any genealogical researcher – and there is an army of them out there, combing through all the records in search of their great grandfathers – can tell you that sometimes you need to check baptismal registers and family records, not only to pin down the date of a birth but to establish whether it happened at all.