By Alan Hamill

What happened on Somerton Beach and in Adelaide from the 1930’s to the 1980’s?

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Consider a cause of death of Carl Webb/Alex Dowling where no drugs were involved in the lethal act of murder, however, substances were used to prepare him for the final outcome.

In Adelaide, as in most major cities worldwide at the time, a new medical treatment was being introduced that would be able to cause exactly the same injuries as those the Medical Examiner in Adelaide found at his analysis of Carl Webb.

After about 1941 a new device called an Electro Convulsive Therapy Machine was quietly (almost secretly) being used by hospitals and mental institutions to try to stabilise people found to have serious or major mental health problems.

This treatment is still known simply as ECT.

There was also a thinking that sexuality (or gender traits) could be re-aligned to match a patient’s birth sex.

If you look at medical records of people in USA that have received lethal shocks in the Electric Chair you would notice the same injuries Carl Webb/Alex Dowling displayed when compared to those US subjects when you examine the first few seconds after the shock starts to be delivered. As the voltage is higher in the US function much more damage results later as the time component is longer.

The typical ECT machine is exactly the same size as the carry bag you and I might use at the supermarket so it is extremely portable and can be used anywhere (in a hospital, a house, a car, anywhere).

Did Carl Webb, as an instrument maker, have an involvement with the construction or maintenance of these devices?

These ECT machines would be readily and easily available to someone with the slightest of medical service access. In this case the mention of nurses was a regular occurrence.

Normally a general anaesthetic would be given to the patient undergoing ECT but this would not provide the result needed to confuse a cause of death inquiry when ECT was delivered with homicidal intent.

To prevent structural damage in the victim the resistance would be increased so that the value of current passed through the victim’s head was about 100milliamps if possible, although the machine is normally set at 400-600milliamps. The higher resistance and lower current would allow a longer delivery time sufficient to cause the heart to seize and stop. It also presented less opportunity for burn marks on the patient/victim. This would probably require about 3-4 minutes of delivery.

In a healthy human a current of about 70 milliamps, when delivered hand to hand for about 3-4 minutes, is usually fatal. This is less than the current used by a 40watt light globe.

The time component function is normally set by the telephone dialler which used each digit as half second increments. The finger of the operator would be placed in the 6 if three seconds of delivery was required as the dial returned to its home position. If four and a half seconds was required then 9 would be dialled.

However, if the dial was started and then held before it reached its home position the current would flow till released from the hand hold. It would be easy to hold for 3-4 minutes.

The victim’s internal organs would be severely compressed by all the internal and external muscles, particularly the diaphragm, squeezing very savagely while the current flowed. Most would then relax but show severe trauma and bleeding due to this compression. Carl’s/Alex’s heart couldn’t relax as the blood flow had stopped and held it in the compressed state as mentioned by the ME.

I had mentioned in earlier posts that all the items in SM’s pockets were relevant, and part of the messaging, and I direct your attention again to the two combs.

Dorothy Webb, Carl’s estranged and assaulted wife, had Comber as a family name. Her Father was John Comber Robertson and Comber featured further back as well. John Robertson had a time as Overseer in an Invalid/Mental Home and would have motive to remove Carl from Dorothy’s life.

By Alan Hamill

   Why was the Somerton Man in Adelaide? What happened on Somerton Beach?

Can Charlie really be the “Somerton Man” or is there a glitch in that thinking?

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Coroner Thomas Erskine Cleland

 

How incisive was Coroner Cleland?

In his findings of 1958 (which were adjourned as “Sine Die” – to be resumed at some date in the future if further evidence was found) he made the following statement:-

“I have been discussing the circumstances on the footing that the body found on the morning of the 1st December was that of the man seen in the evening of the 30th November. But there is really no proof that this was the case. None of the three witnesses who speak of the evening of the 30th saw the man’s face, or indeed any part of his body that they can identify. If the body of the deceased was not that of the man mentioned and if the body had been taken to the place where it was found, the difficulties disappear. If this speculation, for it is nothing more, should prove to be correct, the original assumption that it was the deceased who left the suitcase at the luggage room, bought the rail and bus ticket, removed the clothing tabs, and put the printed words “Tamam Shud” in a pocket, would require revision.

The evidence is too inconclusive to warrant a finding.”

I provide to you here a case to support the coroner’s remarks (above) and that there was a man murdered.

When “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock were tried and executed during the Second Boer War, there was no longer the opportunity for compassionate despatch on the front line. No more offering your broken mate his pistol, putting it into his hand and turning away briefly.

There had to be an alternative found that wouldn’t lead to the courtroom again, and it turned out to be something readily available to the Vets on the frontline.

Question :- How to provide a story for Carl Webb to be seen to have died, yet for him to get to freedom and anonymity?

Answer :- Replace him with Alexander Arthur Dowling.

All Carl “Charlie” Webb has to do is to show up and model for the plaster bust. Then he can disappear.

So :-

Alexander Arthur Dowling was drugged using a treatment the medical practitioners were experimenting with at the time. And it was supplied by a few members of the famous Light Horse Regiments to the Army Medical Corps.

Alex Dowling was given an injection of Equine Blood Cultivated Anti-Tetanic Serum that was used in abundance in war to treat injured horses. He would have been injected with a dosage possibly as much as 25 times higher than the recommended rate for a horse, and it would have been injected into the sunburnt upper thigh front on one or other of his legs, then he would be left on Somerton Beach near the steps in a state similar to being drunk.

The Serum was known to cause brain lesions to form and cause incapacity and yet be totally undetectable using any of the tests available at the time. There would be no reaction to it in any other organ other than what was already in existence prior to administration of the Serum.

It may even cause the recipient to exhibit the same signs as a physical handicap affliction without the ugly side affects such as vomiting, and others. It could easily be mis-diagnosed.

The first time this Serum was publicly outed was with the death of a 40 year old woman in 1933 who’s death in Adelaide Hospital was examined by an Assistant Coroner who listed death by an unknown cause, although he knew of the injection of more than 40,000 IUs of this serum and there were no other health issues found in the woman. The attending Doctors were known but exonerated.

As a further demonstration of medical experimentation, in 1934 a 19 year old woman died after surgery inside the Adelaide Hospital. A Coroner’s Inquiry found that the healthy woman was operated on, on several areas of her body, for no logical or apparent reason. The Coroner found causation as murder by persons unknown yet it was done inside Adelaide Hospital (as mentioned previously) and no persons were interviewed in relation to this murder. There were at least 4 other cases of dubious circumstances ignored in 1934.

The rough sewing on many parts of the Somerton Man’s beach clothing, and the thread and thread card, were left to draw attention to this experimentation and to name persons involved.

During experimentation with the Serum, the trainee and graduating doctors as well as the educators of Adelaide would meet almost weekly in the Piccadilly Restaurant at Birk’s Drapery Store on Rundle Street.

The Piccadilly Restaurant and adjoining Panel Room were also regular locations where bridge tournaments were held.

Cowan, Dwyer, Rice, Barbour, Birks, Cleland and McIntyre were some of the doctors’ names who were meeting regularly at the Piccadilly to discuss their work or other issues.

Alex Dowling was likely given the injection on the afternoon of November 30th 1948 at the Strathmore Hotel on North Terrace opposite the Adelaide Railway Station. It would be injected into the upper front thigh muscle of one leg or the other just at the suntan line.

 

Then mid afternoon Alex Dowling was assisted to the steps on Somerton Beach where he would rest and occasionally wave to locals using the beach. It was quite a warm afternoon.

Alex was placed near the steps, and not the ramp, to avoid implicating the Childrens’ Home.

After the sun set on the 30th of November (Tuesday) Alex was assisted back across the road to the Somerton Crippled Childrens’ Home as described by witnesses to Police. He was fed sustenance in the form of a Cornish Pastie or something similar after missing a meal or two.

The locals were well used to incapacitated people coming and going from the Somerton Crippled Childrens’ Home, whether on foot, in wheel chairs or carried and at all hours of the day and night. And more often than not, it was via the ramp instead of the steps. Adults were also accommodated, where circumstances allowed it, to possibly contain an outbreak of some illness or other.

Visitors came and went at will.

The action of injecting into the upper thigh is that these muscles are one the few points in a body where the muscle is large enough to cope with a massive dose of serum. When lying on the beach there would be only a very slow release of the substance, but later in the evening when being walked back across the Esplanade, the leg muscles would be working to distribute the serum efficiently. This would prove the fatal move not long after.

His clothes were changed, as the earlier ones were wet and slightly dirty. He was cleaned up, redressed and manicured extensively. This was to make him look like the dapper Carl Webb.

All players then paused and waited for the high tide across the road to peak and begin to fall. Alex’s body was then wheeled across the road, down the ramp, and placed on Somerton Beach in the exact same position as the evening before. This activity took place about 5.45am and he was left where he was to be found by the jockeys at around 7.00am.

I provide a copy of “Police Reports To The Coroner” number 1948/433 of the details surrounding the death of Alexander Arthur Dowling, whose body washed up on Semaphore Beach and was located about 6.00pm on Saturday 4th December.

Constable Comley recommended to Coroner Cleland that an inquest was “deemed unnecessary” when he submitted the paperwork that was so hurriedly prepared.

Dowling’s wife had died earlier after being in an institution for some time, all his parents had died and his children had disowned him for not paying two maintenance orders for which he served 1 year imprisonment.

Alexander Arthur Dowling was 5’ 10½” tall. He was a white male Caucasian. He had brown hair greying at the sides and his eyes were grey. He was reportedly well dressed, and witnesses reported brown striped trousers, when he waved to them on Tuesday afternoon. He was 58.

Alex was the person/body witnesses reported as raising his arm on Tuesday 30th November at 7.00pm.

Does Alex’s description sound familiar? Unless you had a good study of him up close both he and Carl Webb could be passed off as twins, just a touch older. And when the authorities arrived they placed a jumper/cardigan over his face supposedly as a sign of dignity to the passed.

However, there is still a further twist!

Alexander Arthur Dowling was not the final body lodged for interment in the paupers’ grave in West Terrace Cemetery on Tuesday 14th June 1949. To finish this story as to who was interred, go to Was H C Reynolds a local lad? (#11)

By Alan Hamill

What happened on Somerton Beach and in Adelaide from the 1930’s to the 1980’s?

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Poor old George! Murdered because of his knowledge of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and his ethnicity!

Nope, it was because his name was “George” Marshall, which was the same as the US General in charge of getting the nuclear deterrent into existence.

General George C Marshall was the US Army Chief of Staff and directed to make the atomic devices ready for urgent deployment into Europe.

“George” Marshall’s murder in a suburb of Sydney was to send a message to the US and its allies that the German War Machine was aware of the hierarchy of the nuclear organisation and the quatrain number (23) was to demonstrate that they had inside information about the quantities of material required for those nuclear devices.

Joseph “George” Saul Haim Marshall

This is 34 year old Joseph “George” Saul Haim Marshall (below). His Hebrew name was Yosef Chaim Saul ben Yisroel.

George Marshall was born to Jewish parents in Malaya in 1910. He attended University in Paris. He was an avid “bookologist” and an expert scholar of the writings of Omar Khayyam. His private life could be classed as “troubled” or perhaps “eccentric”. It may have even been due to autism or schizophrenia, which doctors of the period would not have easily recognised. George was living at Potts Point at the time.

On the 19th of May 1945 (the day before it is believed George passed) his former Headmaster, who knew George well, stated that he found George in high spirits. He stated to the Coroner that George had a “first class philosophical mind!”

And the message: –

The trick was that there was no message in the text!
The message was the quatrain number itself!
It was to indicate the number of packages, or more precisely, pounds (lbs) of substance in that shipment.

It didn’t include the gas shipments or deposits.

There would be two shipments of Uranium (U235). One package would be 70lbs and another would be 71lbs in weight.
A third shipment would be 23lbs of Plutonium.
This would provide enough fissionable material for 1 “Little Boy” (141lbs) and enough fusionable material for 1 “Fatman” (23lbs).

More would be produced for following devices, but the timing meant the program had to start with haste.

Do these numbers sound familiar? Yes, quatrain 23 with “George” Marshall and quatrain 70 with Alf Boxall.
Is there one more ROK missing with quatrain 71 highlighted?

And some of this U235 would come from Mount Painter in the Flinders Ranges well north of Adelaide to top up a shortfall in US supplies due to the time it takes to process this material.

The ROK which surfaced for the second time around the 22nd of July 1949 was resurrected for the purpose of distraction to be used in an attempt to disguise a murder on or about November 30th1948. But it wasn’t to be in New South Wales, it would be in Adelaide, South Australia.

The ROK that has been tied to this murder was reportedly handed to SAPOL by a Chemist named Freeman after Freeman’s Brother In Law remembered a book fitting the description was found 8 months earlier in the back seat of Freeman’s car about the 20th of November 1948. The ROK apparently had been thrown there through an open window.

Was the 3rd ROK that re-appeared in mid 1949 the one that carried a highlighted quatrain #70?

We’ll never know as SAPOL lost it almost as fast as it arrived.

Or is this accepted concept rubbish?
Was the ROK actually handed to SAPOL by a female chemist?

The answer to both points above is YES!

 

The 20th of November 1948 was when the Adelaide Air Show took place, and there was significant military presence with world wide Air Forces flying in for the event.

The 20th of November 1948 was also the day Reginald Bickford passed away at his home in Adelaide.

In the early stages of design of the “Little Boy” device it was thought that a black powder fuse device would be employed to start the nuclear reaction in the explosion. These black powder fuses were invented a century before by a chemist with the surname “Bickford”.

Reginald Bickford, the owner and manager of Bickford’s Group of Companies, mentioned above, died on the 20th of November 1948 in Adelaide and his death was investigated and certified by Coroner Cleland.

Later it was decided that this fusing system, although designed to be time fixed to be accurate to no more variation than +/- 10 seconds for every yard of fuse used, this allowance was still too great a variance in a device falling towards a target. Something much more precise was needed.

The ROK mentioned above, however, was actually throw into the back tray tub of a utility that may have belonged to a New South Wales bank officer also going by the name “Freeman” and being related to the man in the photo below (Thomas Spencer Hall Cutlack) through the marriage of each to sisters.

He was related to “Breaker” Morant (Murrant) but more about T S H Cutlack in another post.

Or was the ute actually stolen property of the Freeman Car Dealership?

Later additions to the Coroner’s Report suggest that the back window of the car mentioned above was actually the rear tray of a utility truck, and to add to that, the person handing in the ROK may not have been a Chemist.

And what came of the second ROK also thrown into a car? : –

In a review by the Advertiser (above) looking for Lt Alf Boxall came this little bit (below) that seemingly wasn’t discussed as relevant “till yesterday”!

Then there’s :-

George Marshall was found at Athol Park on Taylor’s Bay, Mosman with a copy of a 20th May newspaper under his head, an opened ROK pencilled at Quatrain 23 squarely on his chest, a tin containing traces of a poison and a drink bottle fitted with a perforated lid to act as a sprinkler.

With George’s Jewish upbringing and his knowledge of the ROK, he would have known that he could not cleanse his own body before death, and that it would take 7 days after his death to cleanse anyone of his faith should they touch him. They would need a pre-prepared “Water of Expiation” or “Mei Niddah” administered initially on the placement of the body, on the 3rd day and again on the 7th day after George’s passing. So the sprinkler bottle was used by someone else to support the interaction he had with Dorothy Graham and her boyfriend Helmut Hendon. The ROK would infer a romantic termination.

The placement of the body may have been done by someone with significant knowledge of Judaism, given the cleansing bottle.

The Coroner did not question either Dorothy Graham’s landlady (detailed later with regard to Helmut Hendon) or the attending certifying doctor.

The location of the body of George Marshall was close to the Clifton Gardens Hotel where Jessica would give a copy of The Rubaiyat to Alf Boxall a few months later. The death of Marshall was reported in the newspaper and Jessica was living in Sydney at the time this occurred.

Jessica converted to Judaism about this time.

Athol Park is where the theosophist Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater would “talk to nature” or “invoke the natural spirits of the area”.

“The Manor” was a Sydney mansion where Bishop Leadbeater would practice occult preachings. He called himself a part of the Liberal Catholic Group but it had little to do with true Catholicism, and he also nominated himself into Masonry and the Masonic protocols.

“The Manor” also served as lodgings for Neo-Nazi operatives using the strange goings on as cover for their presence in Sydney. Visiting German ships’ crews would use the Manor from time to time as well.

A large part of the financing for the purchase of “The Manor” was arranged (and likely contributed to) by Duncan MacDougall/McDougall (husband of Pakie), possibly as a taxation deduction and operations centre.

We also discuss Duncan, Augusta (Pakie) and Robin MacDougall later. Elsie May Liebke, Thomas Lawrence Keane and Elmer Sylvester Klein will feature in a later post as well.

Back to that same office in London again.

“Sir, General Fivestars to see you.”

“Thanks for coming over General.”

“What can I do for you son?”

“Would you show today’s authentication ple….thank you.

We’ve had another letter from Australia and they ask if we know of any Russian Operatives down their way at the moment. They say they’ve been hearing Russian chatter in the area.”

“Well yes and no son, you remember our last conversation about the movement of some substances to Babat, and the contacts you let me have?”

“I do.”

“Well some in the group are Israeli refugees. Because Israel has been a close ally to Russia for many years, Israeli children have been taught the Russian Language for quite a while now. And given that Germany has just surrendered in Europe there is an unhappy German splinter group still looking for these Jewish people who are working to help our ally Russia and the US itself.

A directive was given by Alfred Rosenberg before his execution that German Loyalists should seek out and destroy anyone giving aid against the Nazi Regime.

I would expect that any conversations they would have between each other would be in Russian as it would be extremely dangerous for them if they gave away their background by speaking in Hebrew. We, and by that I mean the US, are spending a lot of money at the moment keeping Russia on our side as an ally. We are having talks. You may have heard of a setup called Lend-Lease? Well these talks may see this funding stopped about June in the next year or so, maybe ’46.

We were thinking of ending the funding but then this Pacific Theatre opened up and we have deferred the talks again. And working in our favour is that Russia has been bickering with Japan for some years, and we hear they may declare war on Japan at any time. So, yes there are people speaking Russian in Australia at the moment, but they are doing the messaging about our shipping tasks.

Do you think you could word a response to the Australians telling them nothing about what we’re doing and everything about what we’re not doing? You know, tell them nothing, take them nowhere!”

“We can arrange that General, and thanks for dropping over.”

The Alf Boxall ROK he handed to his wife in June 1945. If the inscription was a woman’s name his service in the Army would be a walk in the park compared with what his wife would dish out to him for possessing a book of poetry from another woman.