Somerton Man (2022): A bust instead of a name

The Tamám Shud scrap, found weeks after the body, turned a local unexplained death into an English-language riddle. The Glenelg Rubaiyat, the pencil lines and Jestyn’s number are the exhibits that later books treat as a spy plot. They are also ordinary objects that a coroner could not convert into a named second person or a proved poison.

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.