Somerton Man Charles Webb's true identity revealed in family photographs and divorce papers
Somerton Man Charles Webb Carl Charles Webb Professor Derek Abbott genealology
Ben Cheshire www.abc.net.au ben-cheshire
For seven decades the Somerton Man was simply known by his anonymous autopsy photo. But now he has a name — Charles Webb. And for the first time his relatives explain the answers were in a family photo album all along.
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For decades he has been known only as a man frozen in death, a face without peace, rigid and inscrutable, with deep wells of darkness beneath his lidded eyes.

Now, for the first time, the face of the mysterious Somerton Man, whose body was found lying on an Adelaide beach in 1948, has been revealed in life.

Photos of Charles Webb, who was recently linked to the Somerton Man by DNA and genealogical testing, show him smiling and playing a prank on one of his relatives.

Taken in the 1920s, they were found in a musty photo album kept in a back room by the Webb family, which has now been shared with Australian Story.

Within its pages were the answers to questions that had gripped experts and amateur sleuths alike for 74 years — who was the Somerton Man and what did he look like?

Until recently, the Webb family had no idea of their connection to the long-running mystery, though there were stories of a missing family member many years before.

The news came from Derek Abbott of Adelaide University, who has been researching the case for many years and carried out DNA tests on a hair from the body of the Somerton Man. The finding is yet to be verified by the South Australian police.

After finding a positive match with members of the Webb family, who'd put their family tree on a genealogical website, Professor Abbott contacted Stuart Webb, who he believed was the great-grandson of the Somerton Man's brother.

"Professor Abbott asked me if I was related to Norman Webb, who's my grandfather, and that led to a whole series of questions about my heritage and whether there's any photos or family histories that I can recall," Stuart told Australian Story.

With the help of his aunt, Julie, Stuart found the photo album put together by his late grandparents.

It took only 10 minutes to spot a family group photo which possibly contained an image of Charles.

It showed 19 smiling faces of all ages "at a fantastic family day". "It looks to be somewhere rural, and it looks like they're having fun," Stuart said.

But he wasn't sure which of them was Charles until a week later, when he realised that two of the album's pages were stuck together.

Prising them apart, he found another family photo on which the names had been handwritten — grandpa, grandma, Roy and Charlie.

"And I felt so elated that we had found him. It was like being on a treasure hunt," Stuart said.

Then he went back to the larger family photo and was able to identify Charles as the young man in the back row on the far right, with his hand playfully positioned above the head of the man thought to be his brother-in-law, Gerald Keane.

Family members have also now identified Charles in a 1921 photo showing the Swinburne Technical College under-16 football team. They believe Charles is the player in the front row on the far left.

Meanwhile, DNA tests have confirmed the link between the family and Charles.

Stuart's sister, Cristy Webb, volunteered to do a saliva test and was found to be "right in the middle of the range" of a DNA match, according to Professor Abbott.

"So you are a great, great-niece of Charles Webb," he told Cristy in a Zoom call recorded for Australian Story.

For Stuart and Cristy, it was bittersweet to discover their family's connection to the case.

"It was happiness, it was joy," Cristy said. "But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member.

"This was a person. He wasn't just a media hit for a little while and an unsolved mystery. He was our family."

4,000 Somerton Man DNA matches

Two trainee jockeys exercising their horses found the body on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, on December 1, 1948.

He was alone, without identification, and the labels on his clothing had been ripped out. Nobody came forward to identify him.

In the Cold War climate of the time, there was speculation that the man may have been a foreign spy.

Over the following decades, the Somerton Man became known as one of Australia's most notorious unsolved cases, with an international following.

Last year, SA Police announced they would exhume the body in an effort to finally identify him through improved DNA technology.

While police worked on extracting DNA from the body in cooperation with the state coroner, Professor Abbott had begun his own investigation using a 73-year-old hair from the Somerton Man's body.

The hair was found embedded in a plaster "death mask" made from the man's face before he was buried in 1949.

"The professor definitely wanted to be first over the finishing line of cracking the case," said his wife Rachel Egan, who at one time was thought to be the granddaughter of the Somerton Man.

But Professor Abbott's background is in electrical engineering, not forensics.

For help unlocking the mysteries of the Somerton Man's DNA, he sought help from American forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in using online family tree data to solve cold case crimes.

To their amazement, the hair yielded 2 million DNA markers, each a unique code that represents a person's characteristics.

Loading the information into a genealogical website, they found as many as 4,000 possible matches. But which one was the right one?

"We looked for people with no date of death," Professor Abbott said.

"There was one that stood out because he was male, he was roughly the right age and he was very closely connected to the Keane family, and the Somerton Man had the name Keane on his tie."

That person was Charles, who had gone "off the radar" after 1947.

To prove or eliminate Charles as the Somerton Man, they tunnelled down the family tree on his mother's side to see if they could find somebody alive today who might supply a DNA sample.

That's how they found Antero Bonifacio, who runs a store selling combustion heaters in Bairnsdale, Victoria.

"I got a call from Professor Abbott, wanting to know if I could help with some research and do a DNA test," he recalled.

"And it was like, hang on a minute, is this a scam? But I made sure that he was who he said he was, so I volunteered to do that."

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When the results came back, it was a match. Charles is Antero's first cousin, three times removed.

"I am 100 per cent convinced that we have the right guy. Charles Webb is Somerton Man," Colleen Fitzpatrick said.

SA Police have contacted many of the same family members located by Professor Abbott, but they remain tight lipped about progress on their own, separate, DNA investigation.

In a statement, SA Police said it was still actively investigating the Somerton Man coronial matter.

"We look forward to the outcome of further DNA work to confirm the identification which will ultimately be determined by the Coroner," the statement said.

Retired Adelaide detective Gerry Feltus, who worked on the case for many years, is also waiting on those results before accepting the findings of Professor Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick.

"I'm not going to say I believe it until such time as the police results and the forensic results that were done at the autopsy come back and confirm it, which I think they possibly will," he said.

Forensic scientist and criminologist, Xanthe Mallett, is also cautious about accepting Professor Abbott's results.

"I'm not sure we'll ever be absolutely certain," she said.

"What we would do in a forensic context normally is to take deceased DNA and compare that directly with something we knew belonged to them, like a toothbrush or a hairbrush. We haven't got that here. So my concern is that we may never be able to categorically say that we know this person's identity."

Story with no happy ending

For the living relatives of Charles who've recently discovered their link to the bizarre case, there are other puzzling questions.

"It's quite incredible when you look at these photos and this guy obviously went missing, and nobody came forward," Stuart said.

Antero, looking at old photo albums with his own family, had the same reaction.

"Why didn't any of the siblings try and find out where he went? Did they know he'd gone to Adelaide and never came back?

"Or did he just go off and no-one knew where he was?"

And as they learn more about the life of their long-dead relative, there are sobering reminders that this is not a story with a happy ending.

Charles was one of six siblings who grew up and worked in the family bakery business in Springvale, Victoria.

It's thought that when the bakery closed down, he retrained as an electrical instrument maker.

In 1941, he married Dorothy Robertson, a pharmacist and chiropodist, and the couple moved into a flat in Bromby Street, South Yarra.

When Dorothy filed for divorce in 1951 on the grounds of desertion — presumably not knowing that her husband was lying dead in an Adelaide cemetery – she did not paint a flattering portrait of him.

In the divorce papers, she described Charles as violent, threatening and moody – a man with "no particular friends of his own" who was often in bed by 7pm.

"He has written many poems, most of them on the subject of death, which he claims to be his greatest desire," Dorothy said in the statement.

This seemingly ties in with the mysterious scrap of paper found in the Somerton Man's pocket, which turned out to be an excerpt from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, described as "poetry about death".

One day in March 1946, Dorothy came home to their flat to find Charles was unwell.

"I found him lying in a wet bed, gazing into space," she said in the divorce papers. "He could hardly speak and was rambling."

The flat reeked of ether, an anaesthetic, "so strong that other tenants complained".

"This very much sounds like Charles was attempting suicide," said Carolyn Bilsborow, a University of South Australia lecturer who made a documentary about the Somerton Man case.

"This story turns out that it's not some wild spy drama. It's really a sad, tragic domestic situation."

In the days after Charles's overdose, Dorothy helped nurse him back to health, she said, "even hand-feeding him".

"But as soon as he was about again, he told me that I was a fool to help him get better. From then on, he became more violent."

Interventions by the police and Dorothy's parents were not enough to protect her.

In September 1946, after years of physical and verbal abuse, and threats against her life, Dorothy fled the flat and the marriage, "with only a few shillings to keep me going".

Charles moved out in 1947. Nobody knows for sure what drew him to Adelaide the following year.

But most of the experts interviewed for tonight's Australian Story agree on one thing: It's most likely that Charles took his own life on Somerton beach that summer night in 1948.

The doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination in 1949 found the stomach was deeply congested with blood, and that death had been caused by heart failure due to poisoning.

Professor Abbott, after years examining every aspect of the story, thinks Charles was in a very bad space mentally.

"In the end, when we look at the whole situation of the Somerton Man, it does appear to be a sad story," he said.

But his wife, Rachel Egan, finds some comfort in the fact that Charles now has a name and a family.

"It's been really heartwarming to learn that the family that may not have missed him when he went missing and when he died, are now reclaiming him," she said.