This week the police disinterred a body, found on a beach in 1948, that has puzzled investigators for decades. “There’s lots of twists and turns i

Australia Exhumes the Somerton Man, and His 70-Year Mystery

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2021-05-22 23:00:03

This week the police disinterred a body, found on a beach in 1948, that has puzzled investigators for decades. “There’s lots of twists and turns in this case, and every turn is pretty weird,” one said.

No one knows how the so-called Somerton man, found well-dressed and dead with a half-smoked cigarette on his lapel, wound up on the beach in South Australia where he was found. No one knows what he was doing there, or even how he died.

This week, after he had spent decades puzzling investigators in Australia and amateur sleuths around the world, his remains were exhumed for what might be the best chance of identifying the man in 72 years.

Called the Somerton man after the beach where he was found in December 1948, the man has proved to be one of Australia’s strangest and most famous cold cases. Should the authorities be able to extract usable DNA from his remains, they could potentially put to rest decades of speculation about whether he was a poisoned spy, a disguised black marketer, a former ballet dancer, a spurned lover or simply the victim of a natural but public death.

“For more than 70 years people have speculated who this man was and how he died,” Vickie Chapman, the attorney general of South Australia, said in a statement this week. “It’s a story that has captured the imagination of people across the state, and, indeed, across the world — but I believe that, finally, we may uncover some answers.”

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