John Barkley Bennett put the time of death at no earlier than 2 a.m., noted the likely cause of death as heart failure, and added that he suspected poisoning. The body reached the Royal Adelaide Hospital three hours later. A half-smoked cigarette was lying on the man’s collar, as though it had fallen from his mouth. There were no marks of any sort of violence. Walking over, he saw a figure slumped in much the same position, head resting on the seawall, feet crossed. John Lyons returned from a morning swim to find some people clustered at the seawall where he had seen his “drunk” the previous evening. It was not until next morning that it became obvious that the man was not so much dead to the world as actually dead. “He must be dead to the world not to notice them,” the boyfriend joked. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. Looking on him from above, the woman could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit, with smart new shoes polished to a mirror shine-odd clothing for the beach. Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position.
Lyons thought he might be making a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette. As the couple watched, the man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground. He was lolling about 20 yards from them, legs outstretched, feet crossed. As they walked toward Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed man lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. At 7 o’clock on the warm evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide. Let’s start by sketching out the little that is known for certain. It may be the most mysterious of them all. What we can say is that the clues in the Somerton Beach mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man,” as it is known Down Under) add up to one of the world’s most perplexing cold cases. In fact, this case (which remains, theoretically at least, an active investigation) is so opaque that we still do not know the victim’s identity, have no real idea what killed him, and cannot even be certain whether his death was murder or suicide.
And the only thing that seems to have changed since then is that a story that began simply-with the discovery of a body on the beach on the first day of that southern summer-has bec0me ever more mysterious. They certainly were baffled, though, in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, in December 1948.
Thanks in part to advances such as DNA technology, the police are seldom baffled anymore. It’s fair to say, however, that nowadays the authorities usually have something to go on. Of course, there are always a handful of cases that don’t fit the template, where the killer is a stranger or the reason for the killing is bizarre. The crimes fit a pattern, the motives are generally clear. The boyfriend did it, or the ex-boyfriend did. Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. Sixty-three years later, the man's identity remains a mystery, and it's still not clear how – or even if – he was murdered. Mortuary photo of the unknown man found dead on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, Australia, in December 1948.
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