Hello, Apologies for the use of English! My name is Gordon and I am the author of the Tamamshud.blogspot.es blog about the Somerton Man. I would like to thank you all for your interest in the case. I have looked through your comments and below are my thoughts on one the issues raised:
Was it suicide, accident or murder?
1. In the autopsy report, mention is made of the fact that his spleen was engorged in fact 3 times the normal size. Unless there was some kind of physical trauma of which there is no sign,then for the spleen to be so enlarged can take 3 or more days. What this means is that the unidentified poison was administered some days before. Sadly, when a person commits suicide, the whole idea is to end their life as quickly and painlessly as possible.The death of the Somerton Man was a painful and lengthy process. Thus, my view is that this was not suicide.
Could it have been an accident? Given the backdrop of the early Cold War years and the fact that Adelaide and South Australia was the hub of major developments in jet aircraft, atom bombs, electronics, weapons and advanced fuels plus the finding of the rolled up piece of paper torn from the copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the later finding of a code and a further hidden code, points to espionage. Spies and agents were highly skilled, they would take risks but not unnecessary ones and the likelihood of one making a mistake and taking an unidentified substance by accident is possible but remote.
We are left with the distinct probability that this man was murdered.
A footnote to this comment, in WW2, German Intelligence were known to favour poisoning to dispose of enemies or unwanted assets. One particular method was the use of hard to trace poisons sometimes delivered by an ingenious method that made use of commonly available items.
First the target would be given a cigarette, and the person with him may have had a cigarette as well, the target's cigarette would have been laced with a substance that would give the smoker a bad headache, then, when the target complained of a headache, they were given what would appear to be an ordinary aspirin but was in fact a lethal dose of hard-to-trace poison. The deceipt was almost complete. The target would have felt at ease about taking the aspirin, it would not have been suspected as poison.
One last step completes the murder, the poison would have been sufficient to make the man feel unwell but not for him to die immediately, it could take days before he succumbed. This was done so that the man would not have died in an inconvenient location such as the person's home where the poison was administered. In the case of the Somerton Man, there are reasons to believe that he had in fact died whilst lying down and not leant against the sea wall. It may be that he was lying in the back of a car when he succumbed and then was transferred to the beach where he was later found.
I hope that this has been of interest and that you continue to visit the Tamamshud.blogspot.es blog. A new post with an artist's impression of how the man may have looked was put up a few days ago, worth a look.
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Hello, Apologies for the use of English! My name is Gordon and I am the author of the Tamamshud.blogspot.es blog about the Somerton Man. I would like to thank you all for your interest in the case. I have looked through your comments and below are my thoughts on one the issues raised:
Was it suicide, accident or murder?
1. In the autopsy report, mention is made of the fact that his spleen was engorged in fact 3 times the normal size. Unless there was some kind of physical trauma of which there is no sign,then for the spleen to be so enlarged can take 3 or more days. What this means is that the unidentified poison was administered some days before. Sadly, when a person commits suicide, the whole idea is to end their life as quickly and painlessly as possible.The death of the Somerton Man was a painful and lengthy process. Thus, my view is that this was not suicide.
Could it have been an accident? Given the backdrop of the early Cold War years and the fact that Adelaide and South Australia was the hub of major developments in jet aircraft, atom bombs, electronics, weapons and advanced fuels plus the finding of the rolled up piece of paper torn from the copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the later finding of a code and a further hidden code, points to espionage. Spies and agents were highly skilled, they would take risks but not unnecessary ones and the likelihood of one making a mistake and taking an unidentified substance by accident is possible but remote.
We are left with the distinct probability that this man was murdered.
A footnote to this comment, in WW2, German Intelligence were known to favour poisoning to dispose of enemies or unwanted assets. One particular method was the use of hard to trace poisons sometimes delivered by an ingenious method that made use of commonly available items.
First the target would be given a cigarette, and the person with him may have had a cigarette as well, the target's cigarette would have been laced with a substance that would give the smoker a bad headache, then, when the target complained of a headache, they were given what would appear to be an ordinary aspirin but was in fact a lethal dose of hard-to-trace poison. The deceipt was almost complete. The target would have felt at ease about taking the aspirin, it would not have been suspected as poison.
One last step completes the murder, the poison would have been sufficient to make the man feel unwell but not for him to die immediately, it could take days before he succumbed. This was done so that the man would not have died in an inconvenient location such as the person's home where the poison was administered. In the case of the Somerton Man, there are reasons to believe that he had in fact died whilst lying down and not leant against the sea wall. It may be that he was lying in the back of a car when he succumbed and then was transferred to the beach where he was later found.
I hope that this has been of interest and that you continue to visit the Tamamshud.blogspot.es blog. A new post with an artist's impression of how the man may have looked was put up a few days ago, worth a look.