No one knows who he was, what he was doing in the area, where he came from, or even how he died. But many intriguing clues were left behind.
A Cold War spy. A ballet dancer. A disguised blackmarket trader. Perhaps, a sailor.
In January 1949, a suitcase was found at Adelaide Railway Station and linked to the man through a spool of thread that matched repair work in his pockets. It contained an odd assortment of items including clothes which also had their labels removed. But still, there was no identification, or anything to help connect the dots as to who the man was.by Kerry Greenwood.
The man’s body was embalmed to give police more time to identify him, and a plaster cast—or death mask—was made of his face, as a physical reminder of who he was before he was laid to rest in an Adelaide cemetery under a headstone reading only “the unknown man”. The story of the “unknown man” made headlines across Australia and New Zealand, and his fingerprints and photograph were sent around the world, including to England, America,his coronial inquest heard. A letter dated January 1949, signed by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, confirmed the US had found no match for his fingerprints in its files.
“People did their best in the past, everybody did everything they could to solve the case, but they haven’t been able to.” “The fact that the remains have also been embalmed [72 years ago] adds another complication, and that's because the embalming fluid can break down the DNA,” Dr Coxon said ahead of the exhumation.“Even if we do find DNA present, we may not actually find a match. It will depend on who’s on the databases that we’re looking at and what information can be extracted from the comparison that’s made.”
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