10 Minute Mystery
The Somerton Man: Australia's Most Baffling Cold Case Finally Gets a Name
16 Jul 2025
The Somerton Man: Australia's Most Baffling Cold Case Finally Gets a NameYou know that feeling when you start telling someone about a case and you realize halfway through that you sound completely unhinged? That's the Somerton Man. A well-dressed guy dies on an Australian beach in 1948, and everything about it is wrong. Someone meticulously cut every label out of his expensive clothes. He had no ID, no wallet, but there was this tiny scrap of paper in his pocket with two Persian words meaning "the end."The police find a book with the matching torn page, plus a secret code nobody can crack. Then there's this nurse who clearly knows something but won't talk, and her whole reaction when they show up at her door makes you wonder what she's hiding. The case goes cold for 74 years until DNA technology finally identifies him as Charles Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne.Here's the thing though. Finding out who he was made everything more confusing. Now we know his name, but we still don't know why he died, how he ended up on that beach, or what those five lines of coded letters mean. The nurse took her secrets to the grave, and we're left with this perfectly solved unsolved mystery. It's the kind of case that makes you lie awake at night wondering if we'll ever really know what happened on Somerton Beach.#UnsolvedMystery #DNABreakthrough #AustraliaMystery #ForensicGenealogyThanks for listening to 10 Minute Mystery. If you found this episode interesting, please subscribe, leave a review, or share it with fellow mystery fans. Your support helps more people discover these stories and allows me to keep producing new episodes. For questions or feedback, you can reach me at [email protected].
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