The Seawall

Cold open

SFX: low surf. Gulls far off. A horse's hooves on wet sand, slow, coming closer.

EliasReconstruction It's just after half past six on the morning of the first of December, 1948. Summer has started in South Australia. The tide is low and the light is flat and grey over the water.

Two men are exercising horses along Somerton beach, a quiet stretch of sand south of Glenelg, about eleven kilometres from the centre of Adelaide.

Near a short flight of concrete steps, opposite a building the locals call the Crippled Children's Home, a man is sitting on the sand. His back and head are against the low seawall. His legs are crossed at the ankle. He is wearing a good suit.

He doesn't look up when the horses stop.

SFX: hooves stop. Surf continues.

EliasA local man named John Lyons comes up out of the water from his morning swim. He sees the riders, and he sees what they are looking at. And he realises he has seen this man before. Twelve hours earlier. In exactly this spot.

MUSIC: Yakhfa theme rises.

EliasOver the next seventy-eight years, that man will be photographed, fingerprinted, embalmed, cast in plaster, buried, dug up, and tested with technology no one in 1948 could imagine. Police on three continents will look at his face. Cryptographers will lose years to a few lines of pencil he may or may not have written.

And for most of that time, nobody will be able to say his name.

I'm Elias. This is Yakhfa. Season One: Tamám Shud. Episode One: The Seawall.

MUSIC: theme resolves, cut to silence.

Act 1: The evening before

SFX: evening surf, softer. A distant tram bell.

EliasLet's go back a day. Tuesday, the thirtieth of November, 1948. It's a warm evening, and around seven o'clock John Bain Lyons, a jeweller, is walking home along the beach with his wife. They live a few streets back from the Esplanade, and this is their regular stroll: north to Broadway, then back again.

On the way back, by the steps opposite the Crippled Children's Home, they pass a man lying on the sand. He's on his back, his head propped against the seawall, his feet stretched toward the water and crossed. He's maybe fifteen or twenty yards away.

As they watch, the man's right arm lifts up, then drops back down.

Lyons told the coroner what he made of it.

Lyons · inquest testimony, read by a voice actorI assumed he was drunk and was sleeping it off.

EliasIt's a reasonable thought. It's a public beach on a warm night. Plenty of men had a drink after work. The Lyonses walk on.

MUSIC: single low piano note.

EliasAround twenty past seven, a young couple arrive and sit on a bench on the landing near the same steps. Gordon Strapps and Olive Neill. They stay about forty minutes, until around eight.

They notice the man too. And their account doesn't quite match the Lyonses'.

Strapps remembered the man's legs as straight out, not crossed. He never saw him move. The mosquitoes were bad that evening, and the man didn't swat at a single one. Strapps joked to Olive that he must be dead to the world.

Olive Neill noticed his hand.

Neill · inquest testimony, read by a voice actorHis hand seemed to be in a funny position.

EliasShe actually suggested to Gordon that the man might be dead. Neither of them went down to check.

And Olive mentioned one more thing at the inquest. While they sat there, there was one man up on the road above them. Nobody ever identified him. Nobody ever came forward.

SFX: surf. Silence underneath.

EliasSo here is what we have. Between about seven and eight o'clock on the thirtieth of November, at least four people saw a man lying in the spot where a body would be found the next morning.

But not one of them saw his face. And that matters more than it sounds. Because later, when the coroner tried to put this together, he couldn't rule out the simplest and strangest possibility: that the man on the beach that evening, and the man found dead the next morning, were two different people.

Act 2: The body

SFX: footsteps on sand. A telephone bell, old and mechanical.

EliasOn the morning of the first, after Lyons sees the riders, he goes home and telephones the police station at Brighton. At about a quarter to seven, Constable John Moss arrives on the beach.

Here is what Moss found, from his own evidence.

The man was on his back, feet to the west, head against the seawall, tilted slightly to the right. His right arm was doubled over, palm up. His left arm lay on the sand beside him. A half-smoked cigarette sat on the right collar of his coat, held there by his cheek, as if it had fallen from his mouth. It hadn't burned him. There was no mark on the skin.

There was no sign of a fight. No hat, which in 1948 was strange for a man in a suit. And the sand around him hadn't been churned up.

MUSIC: slow pulse begins.

EliasThen Moss went through his pockets. This is where the case starts to turn.

The man was carrying almost nothing. No wallet. No money. No keys. No identification of any kind. What he did have:

An unused second-class railway ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach, a seaside suburb north of here.

A bus ticket from the city. It was later traced to the bus that left Adelaide at about a quarter past eleven that morning, heading toward Glenelg and Somerton.

Two combs. One of them a narrow aluminium comb, made in the United States.

A half-used packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum.

A box of Bryant and May matches.

And a packet of Army Club cigarettes. Except the seven cigarettes inside it weren't Army Club. They were Kensitas, a more expensive brand.

EliasWhy carry one brand in another brand's packet? Maybe he was refilling from whatever he had. Maybe it meant nothing. Or maybe, as people would later argue, somebody else filled that packet for him.

MUSIC: pulse holds.

EliasThen there were his clothes. He wore a white shirt, a red, white and blue tie, brown trousers, socks and well-polished shoes. A brown knitted pullover. A grey-brown double-breasted jacket of good quality.

And every label on his clothes had been removed.

SFX: scissors, a single clean snip.

EliasNot torn. Removed. You don't lose the labels from your shirt, trousers and jacket by accident. Someone took the time to do it. Maybe him. Maybe someone else. Either way, it looked like a man who did not want to be traced.

He was taken by ambulance to the Royal Adelaide Hospital. At nine-forty that morning a doctor, John Bennett, examined him in the back of the police ambulance and confirmed what everyone already knew. From the stiffness of the body, Bennett judged he'd died no earlier than about two in the morning.

So sometime after the young couple left at eight, and before the riders came by at dawn, the man on the beach stopped breathing. Quietly enough that nobody living a few streets away heard a thing.

Act 3: The autopsy

SFX: a hospital corridor, 1940s. Footsteps, a door.

EliasAt half past seven on the morning of the second of December, the government pathologist, Dr John Dwyer, began the post-mortem.

The man on his table was somewhere around forty to forty-five. About five foot eleven. Fit. Dwyer described the heart as normal, the heart of a man in good physical training. He had strong, high calf muscles, the kind you see in people who spend a lot of time on their toes. At the inquest, one witness would even wonder aloud whether he'd been a dancer.

But inside, things were wrong.

MUSIC: low drone enters.

EliasHis stomach was deeply congested, and there was blood mixed in with the food in it. The food itself looked like a pie or a pasty, his last meal, eaten maybe three or four hours before he died. His kidneys were congested. His liver was swollen with blood. His pupils were small and unusual, uneven at the edges.

And his spleen. Dwyer used words you don't often hear from a pathologist on the record. Strikingly large and firm. About three times normal size.

Dwyer couldn't find a natural explanation. The immediate cause was heart failure. But what made the heart fail? He told the coroner:

Dwyer · inquest testimony, read by a voice actorI feel quite certain that the death was not natural.

EliasHe suspected poison. A barbiturate, he thought, or some kind of sleeping drug. So samples of the blood, the stomach and the organs went to the government analyst, Robert Cowan.

Cowan tested for every common poison he knew. He found nothing.

Dwyer later admitted he was astounded.

MUSIC: drone thins.

EliasSo now the police had a problem. A healthy man, dead without a mark on him, organs that looked poisoned, and no poison anywhere.

One more expert was brought in. Cedric Stanton Hicks, a physiologist at the University of Adelaide, and one of the country's leading authorities on drugs and toxins.

Hicks had an answer. Or half of one. There was a group of drugs, he said, that make the heart stop mid-beat, in contraction. In a small enough dose, taken by mouth, some of them would slip straight past the standard chemical tests of the day.

Then he did something that people still talk about. He wouldn't say the names out loud in open court. He wrote two names on a scrap of paper and passed it to the coroner instead.

SFX: paper unfolding.

EliasThe note was entered as an exhibit. Later accounts say the two names were digitalis and strophanthin, both drawn from plants, both used in medicine, both lethal in the wrong dose.

Hicks said everything about the death was consistent with one of those drugs. Nothing was inconsistent with it. The one thing missing was vomiting. If the man had vomited, Hicks said, he would have been confident.

And then Hicks added a detail that changes how you hear the whole story. He told the court he'd been working on the assumption that the dose was self-administered.

Closing: An open finding

SFX: a courtroom. Chair scrape. A gavel, once.

EliasThe inquest opened on Friday the seventeenth of June, 1949. The city coroner was Thomas Erskine Cleland.

By then the man had been dead for more than six months. His photograph had run in the papers. His fingerprints had gone to police forces across the English-speaking world. Every lead had come back empty. On the tenth of December, with no one to claim him, his body had been embalmed. Later, a plaster cast was made of his head and shoulders, so that if anyone ever did come forward, there would still be a face to show them.

Cleland heard from Lyons, from Strapps and Neill, from Constable Moss, from Dwyer and Hicks and the others. And on the twenty-first of June he set down what he could and couldn't say.

He was prepared to find that the man had died of poison, and that the poison probably wasn't taken by accident. But who gave it to him, he couldn't say.

Cleland · inquest testimony, read by a voice actorThe evidence is too inconclusive to warrant a finding.

EliasHe adjourned the inquest with no date to resume. When the file was finally closed, in March 1958, almost ten years later, the official finding was that the coroner was unable to say who the dead man was, how he died, or what caused his death.

MUSIC: theme motif, quiet, solo.

EliasAnd there was one more thing Cleland pointed out, the thing we left hanging in Act One. None of the witnesses from the evening before had seen the man's face. So no one could prove that the man who moved his arm at seven o'clock was the man who was found at dawn.

Which leaves two very different stories. In one, a man walks onto a beach, lies down by the seawall as the sun sets, and dies alone in the night of something no lab could find.

In the other, he died somewhere else. And somebody brought him there.

Pause. Surf only.

EliasTen years after the inquest, a man came forward and told police that on that same night, he and three others had seen a well-dressed man walking along Somerton beach, carrying another man on his shoulders.

We'll come back to that.

MUSIC: theme builds.

EliasBecause six weeks after the body was found, on the fourteenth of January 1949, staff at Adelaide Railway Station went to the cloakroom and pulled out a brown suitcase that had been left there on the thirtieth of November. Nobody had come back for it. The label had been removed.

Inside, the police would find clothes that fit the dead man. An electrician's screwdriver. A table knife that had been cut down. And, on three items that someone forgot, or chose not, to cut, a name.

Next time on Yakhfa: The Suitcase.

MUSIC: theme out.

EliasYakhfa is researched from the original 1949 inquest record and published reporting. Sources for this episode are below. Every mystery leaves a trace. Thanks for listening.