The Pathologists Report, New Information...

 

Each week I put aside time to review various aspects of the Somerton Man case. When you let your mind stew over a topic then forget it for a while and then return to it, sometimes, maybe not always, you see something that you had missed first time round or out of nowhere, a new thought occurs to you. Last week, that's exactly what happened, a new thought occured on reviewing the various medical reports in the inquest document, it was so simple and yet I had missed it.

The Medical Team's Assessment

Reading through Dr Dwyer's statement and notes, Dr. Cowan's assessment, Professor Cleland's report, Stanford Hicks' expert opinion and of course the young Doctor John Barkley Bennett who pronounced life extinct when the Police brought the man's body to the hospital, they each were experienced professionals with perhaps the one exception of Dr Bennett,

Yet with all of this medico firepower and expertise, they couldn't say with certainty just what had killed the man although there was agreement that it was a poison, the question was, which poison? In the years that followed the inquest, there was a general consensus that it was most likely to be Digitalis as had been put forward by Stanford Hicks.

The AI Analysis

The light bulb moment was when I realised that these men were limited to the knowledge that was available to them at the time. 

And now 77 years on, there is much more knowledge available on the subject and better still it's accessible. And one way a non-medico person can get to it is to use AI. So that is what I did. I have to tell you working through designing, or engineering I believe is the correct term, the prompt I would need took a little longer than I thought. The prompt had to not only get me to the right information, it also need to stand up to scrutiny and critique. 

Essentially what I did was to ask AI the question, 'given this information about the condition of the man and the damage that had been done to his vital organs, what would have caused that to occur?

The response came a sight quicker than the time it had taken me to properly construct and test the prompt I eventually used. In fact it took about an hour or so to create and test the prompt and just 4 minutes to present me with some answers and a discussion paper to go with them That was followed up by some further research so all in all it was around 4 hours worth

I won't go into the significant amount of detail AI produced but essentially, there were two options. 

Option 1: Digitalis Poisoning

A powerful derivative of the foxglove plant. It was the stand out candidate because of its known ability to stop the heart in Systole, the Somerton Man's heart had apparently stopped mid beat effectively, it was in its contraction phase.

It did that because it had suffered a severe shock caused by the massive dose of digitalis. In 1948, test for poisons were limited to common, simple poisons that were relatively easily detected. Digitalis was a complex, organic molecule which was pretty much invisible to available test procedures.
 
The effect can only occur when Digitalis has been ingested, in other words, it could not have been injected or absorbed through the scrape marks found between the man's knuckles for example. 

Neither would it have been from the foxglove plant, the reason for that being that Digitalis is very bitter to the taste and so would more than likely have been inedible.

Similarly, it wouldn't have been mashed in with the potato that was found in the stomach, for that same 'bitterness' reason. Nor could it have been laced into a cigarette.

The poison had to be taken in a tablet form together with a drink of some kind. I questioned this and the response was it was possible that a strong drink such as whisky or a strong black coffee might have been sufficient to cover the taste if a tablet had been ground up and added to the drink. Possible but not probable.

And so we arrive at the conclusion that the man had taken or been given a tablet, he ingested it, and the digitalis did its work.

The estimate was that it would have taken between 60 and 90 minutes for the heart to stop. Digitalis floods the heart muscle cells with calcium resulting in systolic arrest. The dose was so massive that the other symptoms of Digitalis poisoning, vomiting etc, simple didn't have time to occur.

Option 2: Unknown Soviet Poison

Given the political climate and the unusual code page plus of course two other unusual deaths within two weeks after the finding of the man's body, one in Adelaide and the other in Sydney, it was possible that he had been killed by an unknown poison. 

In those years the Soviets had a specialist unit set up to do nothing other than develop poisons, not ordinary ones, but poisons that would leave no trace and possibly ones that stopped the heart in systole just like digitalis. There were 3 USSR based units known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 2 and Kamera.

As fate would have it, a known Soviet assassin was in Australia purportedly to attend the Lapstone conference in the Blue Mountains, his name was Vitaly Pavlov. the conference ran from November 29th to December 12th 1948, it is not known which days Pavlov attended nor whether he arrived with the main Soviet contingent but I will check that out. Link here: https://tamamshud.blogspot.com/2020/01/nkvd-kgb-assassination-signatures.html More on this in our next post.

Timeline and Conclusion

Adding this to the timeline, it is known that the food had been in the mans stomach for 90 minutes and two hours. That suggests that the tablet was taken about the same time which would seem logical. Meaning our man died approximately two hours after eating.

What we don't know with any degree of certainty is what time he died.

He could have died when he raised his arm on the beach as was witnessed by Mr. Lyons on his evening stroll. Or when he was observed by Gordon Strapps and Olive Neil a short time later. 

According to our medicos, time of death was between 10 pm, (but could have been earlier) and, according to Doctor Bennett, 2 am.

The nagging question remains, why wasn't he seen either walking to the beach or being dropped off? No one saw him on the bus or at the railway station either. 

So there is a possibility that our man was assassinated but it is not as likely as the Digitalis option.

But that is a separate subject for another time.

There we have it, a confirmation from an AI engine that according to its data bank, the man was either killed by a massive overdose of Digitalis or some unknown poison that ended his life in a similar fashion.

I trust that this has been of interest for you, it tidies up a loose end and who knows where it may yet lead us to.