Somerton Man (1948): A stranger on the sand

Jessica Thomson, the nurse behind the Jestyn inscription, is the living figure English readers most often meet. She denied knowing the man. Later interviews, including remarks after her death by her family, have been read both as concealment and as the stress of a police visit. Neither reading is a 1949 finding. Prosper Thomson, her then husband, is in the same neighbourhood file and was not charged with any offence arising from the death.

The five lines of letters in the Rubaiyat were sent to code-minded officials and, later, to hobbyists. No agency published a decrypted text that a court accepted. The 1949 plaster bust, made to help identification, became the physical bridge to the 2020s: hairs in the plaster were the samples Abbott’s team used for forensic genealogy.

Carl Webb was an electrical instrument maker from Melbourne, married to Dorothy Robertson, and last placed by family paper in the late 1940s. Abbott and Fitzpatrick’s 2022 announcement matched DNA to Webb relatives. South Australia Police did not immediately issue their own identification. Later reporting treated Webb as the name that fits; a formal coronial amendment is a separate legal act from a university press conference.