Mx. posted:

excuse me what

christmas boots posted:

Which part of this was unclear?

Inceltown posted:

quote:

Two researchers using forensic genealogy put a name to the so-called Somerton Man this week, saying they had finally solved the central mystery of an Australian cold case that has stymied investigators for 73 years and inspired theories about spies, smuggling, ballet and teeth.

The police in South Australia, who exhumed the man’s body last year, have not verified the identity and said they had no update to give on their own investigation. A spokesperson said they would comment after the results of forensic testing had been received.

But the researchers — an Australian professor of biomedical engineering who has studied the case for over a decade, and an American genetic genealogist whose company works on cold cases in many countries — say they have made a breakthrough. The name they came up with eliminates at least one leading theory, which linked the man to a woman the police interviewed in the 1940s, if not also the more colorful ideas about espionage and codes.

“We’re just saying this is what the DNA tells us,” the professor, Derek Abbott, who works at the University of Adelaide, said in an interview. “It’s up to the cops to make the legal determination of who this guy was.”

He and the genealogist, Colleen Fitzpatrick, president of Identifinders International, said that they began putting the puzzle together in February, thanks to recent advances in extracting DNA from rootless hair.

The hair itself had been caught in a plaster cast of the man’s face that was made more than half a century ago by investigators who hoped someone might recognize him.

The man had been found dead in December 1948, lying against a sea wall on Somerton Beach, near Adelaide in South Australia. He was dressed in a jacket and tie that had their tags cut off; a partly smoked cigarette lay on his collar; and his pockets held unused train and bus tickets, chewing gum, cigarettes, a box of matches, two combs and a scrap of paper. It had a line of type reading “tamám shud,” meaning “finished” in Persian.

At a train station not far away, the police found a suitcase that they traced to the man. In the suitcase, some of the clothing and a laundry bag had “T. KEANE” or “KEANE” written on it, but the police found no one unaccounted for by that name.

After the case gained publicity months later, a man turned in a classic book of Persian poetry, “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,” that he said he found in his car, its last page torn out and letters scribbled on its back cover.

An autopsy could not determine a cause of death, though it found an enlarged spleen and a liver in poor condition, leading to speculation of poison, though no trace of any was found.

Over the decades, the allure of the Somerton Man mystery grew around Australia and then among internet sleuths worldwide.

Some speculated that he was involved in the black market (because of the clipped labels and a boom in postwar smuggling); that he was a spy (because of Cold War tensions and the code-like letters); or that he was a former ballet dancer (because he had unusually strong calf muscles). Some wondered if his relatives might be found because of his distinctive ears and teeth.

By 2011, Dr. Abbott had spent years looking into the case, and he said the police let him take about 50 hairs from the death mask for analysis. In 2012 and 2018, he said, the University of Adelaide extracted some DNA from the hair. This February, Dr. Abbott and Dr. Fitzpatrick finally pulled enough with the help of a California company, Astrea Forensics, to begin a real search.

Using GEDmatch, a genealogical research site that was also used in the Golden State Killer case, they found a distant cousin on the Somerton Man’s paternal side. They then built out a family tree of more than 4,000 people.

“You find out who some of them are, you play with their details — it’s like Sudoku,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said in an interview. “You try and find the top match.”

As early as March, they noticed a man named Carl Webb, who went by Charles, with no date or documentation of death. They looked for historical documents, like electoral rolls, and began trying to vet some of the details contained in them. They found that Mr. Webb was born in 1905 in Victoria — the state that the police, in the ’40s, believed the Somerton Man was from — and had worked as an electrical engineer and instrument maker.

They also learned that his sister, who lived near his home in Melbourne, was married to a man named Thomas Keane.

But they needed more, and kept working with the DNA. They traced the man through his mother’s line to find a living relative and triangulate a match.

“In all this soup and ocean of DNA cousins, we were able to connect one of them to Carl’s father and one of them to Carl’s mother,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “You really kind of narrow it down so much it could be any one of Carl’s siblings — but Carl is the one with no documented death.”

Dr. Abbott said it was a first cousin, three times removed, in Australia, whose matching DNA provided a final clue. Between the DNA and the historical documents, he said, “we knew we had it.”

Through documents, Dr. Abbott and Dr. Fitzpatrick learned that Mr. Webb appreciated and wrote poetry, and enjoyed betting on horse racing — suggesting that the letters in the poetry book were allusions to the names of horses. They also learned that he left his wife, Dorothy Robertson, in 1947, and that at some point she filed for divorce and by 1951 had moved to the town of Bute, South Australia.

Both researchers said many major questions needed to be resolved, like the cause of death, what brought the man to Somerton Beach, and what his life was like. They are hoping that surviving relatives might provide more documents or accounts to fill in those gaps.

“There’s still lots of ongoing interesting research to do about his circumstances and who he was,” Dr. Abbott said. “That’s still on the to-do list.”

Their conclusion does knock out one theory that had entangled Dr. Abbott’s personal life with the Somerton mystery.

In 2009, he tried to find a woman whom the police interviewed in their original investigation because of a phone number in the poetry book. She had died, however, as had her son, a professional ballet dancer whose distinctive teeth and ears resembled the Somerton Man’s. Dr. Abbott managed to interview that man’s daughter, Rachel Egan, a meeting that led to courtship and then marriage in 2010.

Now, if the researchers are correct and it was indeed Charles Webb whose body was found on the beach all those decades ago, those physical features were just a bizarre coincidence, and Ms. Egan is not the granddaughter of the Somerton Man.

“I’m waiting for Derek to file divorce papers,” she said.

Her husband offered a quick clarification.

“She’s kidding,” he said.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Holy poo poo, they've identified the Somerton Man, and "Jestyn" had absolutely nothing to do with it.
(from the NY Times, gently caress them)

I have to admit, I'm kind of disappointed to have this one solved.

Comstar posted:

He was a random guy who died on a beach. No secrets, just complete incompetence and conspiracy theories that were all, completely and utterly wrong.


I presume the Netflix series is coming out next year.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Holy poo poo, they've identified the Somerton Man, and "Jestyn" had absolutely nothing to do with it.
(from the NY Times, gently caress them)

FishBulbia posted:

It sucks that the amount of time you can waste on a videogame has become a proxy measure for how fun/enjoyable it is

Tenkaris posted:

Sir or ma'am, are you in the right thread?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Ngl it's got me shook how toxic gaming culture has a body count, that I'm sure is higher than just three.

FireWorksWell posted:

Do we count swatting?

Tenkaris posted:

Gee I dunno did he talk about swatting in the post you quoted?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

A dispute between two idiot kids playing Call of Duty led to a totally unrelated guy who was adopted father of his orphaned niece and nephew getting murdered by police. Later one of them committed suicide, having not recovered from being hauled out of her home at gunpoint and literally having to step over her father figure as he lay bleeding out. No EMS called of course, just cops with guns storming the home. Admittedly, yet another ACAB problem rather than a gaming problem. But the two gamer kids and the actual swatter all got jail time while the cop who committed the murder is still free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting



Ngl it's got me shook how toxic gaming culture has a body count, that I'm sure is higher than just three.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

A dispute between two idiot kids playing Call of Duty led to a totally unrelated guy who was adopted father of his orphaned niece and nephew getting murdered by police. Later one of them committed suicide, having not recovered from being hauled out of her home at gunpoint and literally having to step over her father figure as he lay bleeding out. No EMS called of course, just cops with guns storming the home. Admittedly, yet another ACAB problem rather than a gaming problem. But the two gamer kids and the actual swatter all got jail time while the cop who committed the murder is still free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

Tenkaris posted:

Gee I dunno did he talk about swatting in the post you quoted??

It is weird though, I haven't really heard of swatting happening outside of gamer circles. Like most swattings have happened to streamers.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

A dispute between two idiot kids playing Call of Duty led to a totally unrelated guy who was adopted father of his orphaned niece and nephew getting murdered by police. Later one of them committed suicide, having not recovered from being hauled out of her home at gunpoint and literally having to step over her father figure as he lay bleeding out. No EMS called of course, just cops with guns storming the home. Admittedly, yet another ACAB problem rather than a gaming problem. But the two gamer kids and the actual swatter all got jail time while the cop who committed the murder is still free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

There was also Stanislav Reshetnikov/Stas Reeplay. Russian streamer who liked to livestream abusive "pranks" on his girlfriend. He hilariously locked her out of the house in nothing but lingerie, while she was pregnant with his kid. She froze to death, and he kept streaming for hours with her body dragged back into the house before someone in the chat called the cops. In this case at least he got arrested and is in prison for murder.

Ngl it's got me shook how toxic gaming culture has a body count, that I'm sure is higher than just three.

quote:

The sheriff further stated that "other people" were living in the residence.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

"She wasn't reported missing" could be one of two disturbing outcomes of this.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

There was also Stanislav Reshetnikov/Stas Reeplay. Russian streamer who liked to livestream abusive "pranks" on his girlfriend. He hilariously locked her out of the house in nothing but lingerie, while she was pregnant with his kid. She froze to death

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

"She wasn't reported missing" could be one of two disturbing outcomes of this.

Busket Posket posted:

Discovery+ has made a documentary about Armie Hammer’s light-speed fall from Hollywood’s Favorite New Hunk to Sleazy Violent Cannibal Freak.

CW for mention of rape and abuse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIQ80m7831I

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I'm reminded of the loving deranged NYT probably story where someone recounts how their grandmother casually poisoned everyone in the family and random animals and visitors and how when she got senile everyone would just dust the rat poison off the tops of the bottles like it was no thing.

Rabbit Hill posted:

I've been listening to a great podcast called Dark Histories (no relation to Dark History with Bailey Sarian; this is written and hosted by an English guy named Ben Cutmore), and in Sept 2019 there was an episode on Graham Young, the "Teacup Poisoner".

That wikipedia article is pretty thorough (TL;DR -- Young became obsessed with poisons at a very young age and proceeded to poison his whole family, his school friends and classmates, his fellow patients at a mental hospital, his coworkers, and his fellow inmates after he was imprisoned, until he was found dead in his prison cell from an apparent heart attack), but it kind of glosses over how bizarrely compulsory his poisonings were. Like a compulsive liar or compulsive fire starter, everywhere the guy went, he was slipping poisons into people's food. Even his friends, even people he liked, even when it was against his best interest. When his coworkers at a chemical lab all started getting sick and a workplace safety inspection concluded that everyone just had a stomach bug, Young argued with the conclusion and insisted that everyone's symptoms were clearly signs of poisoning -- this is what led to him getting investigated, arrested, and then convicted for murder and attempted murder. And even after that, in prison, he kept on poisoning people right and left. It's like the guy genuinely just couldn't help himself.

What was so interesting about this story to me was that, like Young, I too was very interested in poisons as a kid. When I was around 10, my parents took me to a university library book sale and I bought a manual of toxicology published in the 1920s. It quickly became my new favorite book for the next few years -- I read it cover to cover many times over, worked on memorizing the fatal doses and the symptoms pre- and post- mortem of all the poisons listed, wrote short stories about people who were poisoned, etc. But all of this was because the book made me want to become a toxicologist, not a poisoner. I came from a dysfunctional family and was underparented and left unsupervised a lot -- a good breeding ground to turn me into someone like Young -- but it never occurred to me to use all this knowledge to harm anyone, and instead, all my fantasies involved helping people and solving crimes.

Young being a Bizarro-World Me has left me wondering about Nature vs. Nurture, and is it that there was something in me that protected me from becoming like Young, or did Young lack something in him that prevented him from becoming like me?

E: I guess the answer to that is, "Yeah -- a conscience."

Rabbit Hill posted:

quote:

He found a job as a storekeeper at a factory in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, where his duties including making tea for his colleagues.

Kitfox88 posted:

Yes let's give the rehabilitated compulsive poisoner work as a dude preparing food.