E15 The Somerton Man

What do you do with a cold case that happened a lifetime ago when things like DNA testing and forensic genealogy didn’t exist? If you’re a professor at Adelaide University in Southern Australia, you do everything you can to solve it. In December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in a suburb of Adelaide. Tucked inside the watch pocket in his pants was a slip of paper with Persian words printed on it which meant “finished.” Over the years, dozens of people tried to identify the man with no success, but Professor Derek Abbott, who enlisted California forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, made it his mission in life to solve the case. In this episode, we walk you through how the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved. Full transcript available at https://www.whatremainspodcast.com. 

True crime meets forensic science in the What Remains podcast from WRAL Studios. With no ID, human skeletal remains often end up at medical examiners’ offices where they sit in storage closets for years, gathering dust as evidence slowly disappears. These are some of the most difficult cold cases to crack. Unsolved murders. Missing people never identified. Families without answers. Every year in the United States there are 600,000 missing person reports and 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains are found. But matching the remains to the missing people is not an easy task.   Meet the passionate scientists, investigators and volunteers dedicating their lives to the seemingly impossible: matching missing persons to unidentified human remains. WRAL Studios presents What Remains, hosted by veteran crime reporter Amanda Lamb.