Boo_ep001

Kat [00:00:00]:
What follows may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:06]:
The world is full of stories. Stories of mysteries, of curiosities, of oddities. Join Cat and Jethro Gilligan Toth for the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected, as they lift the lid and cautiously peer ins the box of oddities.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:34]:
I think one of the first things we need to do is invest in a new chair for me because this one makes way too much noise.

Kat [00:00:44]:
Yes. I vote yes. We've got so many expenses already.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:48]:
It's the cost of doing business. I guess it's a good thing that we don't pay our bills. So here's the thing. This is the first podcast that we've ever done.

Kat [00:00:58]:
Yes.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:00:58]:
And we're pretty excited about it. We hope that you will be too. We're guessing that if you're here, listen. And you know, obviously you are, you share some of the same interests.

Kat [00:01:07]:
Yeah, we like weird stuff, really weird stuff.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:10]:
And in fact, that's what kind of attracted us to each other. We've been married now for a couple of years and Kat's weirdness is what attracted me. The first time that I realized that she was weird was when she told me that when she was younger and she had guests over, she kept what she called a poop chart and required all of her guests to fill it out. She was tracking her guests bowel movements.

Kat [00:01:38]:
I didn't realize we were going to discuss this. Yeah, well, you know, there were prizes involved. It's not like it was just for fun.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:45]:
What kind of prizes?

Kat [00:01:46]:
Oh, just things that I found about around the house.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:01:49]:
Bathroom related. Like here's an old plunger.

Kat [00:01:52]:
No, no actual prizes. One was a statue of a T. Rex that was like a gold lame. It was really nice. You know, various things. It doesn't matter. Let's move on.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:06]:
There are a lot of things that interest us. The box of oddities. We're going to cover a lot of different topics and subjects from just strange and weird things to macabre to just what the.

Kat [00:02:20]:
Right. Yes. Medical oddities. We'll talk about interesting things in the seas because they're big and we're so excited that you can join us.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:32]:
Yeah, we're very excited about that and.

Kat [00:02:34]:
We'Re talking about the stuff anyway, so.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:36]:
Each week we're going to each choose a story independently of each other. And I don't know what you're going to talk about. You don't know what I'm going to talk about. We will spontaneously share that.

Kat [00:02:47]:
And that's it. That's what we'll do. So I think the first order of business is deciding who's going to go first.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:54]:
That's a good question. How do you want to decide? Do you have a coin? We can flip a coin.

Kat [00:02:58]:
I don't have a coin.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:02:59]:
I don't have a coin either, because this is the first podcast and we make no money on it. No coins. Send us a coin.

Kat [00:03:06]:
I have a werewolf book.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:08]:
Okay.

Kat [00:03:09]:
I can toss it. And then if it lands on the front with this lovely werewolf facing up, then you go first. And if it lands with the backside, which has the author's face, which has slightly more hair, then I'll go first.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:24]:
Fair enough.

Kat [00:03:25]:
Okay, ready?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:26]:
Toss the werewolf book. Here we go.

Kat [00:03:29]:
You go first.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:30]:
I go first. All right. I'm gonna talk about the head of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kat [00:03:36]:
Oh, that's so exciting.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:03:38]:
Lee Harvey Oswald's head. I don't know if you realize this or not, but there's still a bit of a conspiracy swirling about whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald is actually who is in Lee Harvey Oswald's grave. They exhumed him in 1981 and determined officially that it was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kat [00:04:01]:
It's my birthday. I was born in 81. Just saying. It's a special year. It was a special year.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:07]:
Special year. They dug up Lee Harvey Oswald and you were born.

Kat [00:04:11]:
Please continue.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:12]:
They officially determined that it was Lee Harvey Oswald, but there are so many questions that are still swirling about that. I thought we would take a moment and relive the day they dug him up.

Kat [00:04:23]:
Cool.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:04:24]:
All right, well, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy and then he himself was assassinated, allegedly on 24 November in 1963. A guy named Michael Eddowes wrote a book in the mid-70s called the Oswald File. In it, he argued that a Soviet imposter took the place of Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald was in Russia and then came to the United States, where he assassinated Kennedy and was subsequently buried in Oswald's grave. Etowes asserted that there were differences between Oswald and the autopsy of the assassin that was performed by the Dallas medical examiner. I think his name was Rose Earl Rose. He pointed out that Oswald was 5 foot 11 in height, according to his U.S. marine records, and that the Dallas pathologist said the assassin was only 5 9. In the book, he went on to cite several other differences. The corpse also had a large scar on the wrist, and Addows claimed that Oswald had no such scar. He also pointed out that as a child, Oswald had a mastoid operation which left him with a depression in the flesh behind one of his ears, about the size of a dime.

Kat [00:05:46]:
What's a mastoid?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:05:48]:
According to Wikipedia, the mastoid part of the temporal bone is the back part of the temporal bone. Its rough surface gives attachment to various muscles and has an opening for the transmission of blood vessels.

Kat [00:06:01]:
Okay, there you go.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:02]:
So now you're learning about.

Kat [00:06:03]:
I feel so good about myself right now. Yep. Okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:06]:
He claimed the corpse of the man that Jack Ruby killed had no such depression in his skull. So Eddowes sought action in Texas courts to exhume the body of Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, there was all kinds of resistance to that, mostly from Oswald's older brother, Robert, who said, no, we're not going to do that. But he prevailed, with the help of Oswald's widow, Marina.

Kat [00:06:33]:
Oh, so Oswald's Marina. Oswald's Marina. That sounds like a lovely place to fish. Oswald's ex was like, let's do this.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:06:44]:
Yeah. Well, she was, I guess, haunted by a visit that she received in 1964 from a bunch of government agents. They just kind of showed up with a stack of cemetery papers and said, here, sign all this. And she couldn't speak or read English very well because she was from Russia.

Kat [00:07:01]:
Right.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:02]:
And so she became convinced that her late husband's remains had been disturbed somehow. She thought maybe that they had been dug up and moved. She grew pretty suspicious that he was not in the grave, that the grave was empty.

Kat [00:07:19]:
Oh, wow.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:21]:
So they contacted the medical examiner at the time. Actually, it was the assistant medical examiner in Dallas, whose name was Linda Horton. She was intrigued with this theory that it actually could have been Oswald's double.

Kat [00:07:34]:
As am I, Linda.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:07:35]:
She said, I feel it's in the best public interest to conduct the exhumation. And this is according to the Dallas Morning News. Quote, if there's any question and a reasonable question that science can resolve, then it is our business. Now, when Oswald was first pronounced dead, an autopsy was done. They did a craniotomy. They cut the top of his head off. Medical examiner Vincent DeMaio, who was involved in the Oswald autopsy, wrote a book called A Life and Death. And in it, he talks about what they did with Lee Harvey Oswald after he was pronounced dead. According to the book, Earl Rose, who was the Dallas county medical examiner at the time, sawed open Oswald's skull to find a completely normal brain. Nothing unusual. He didn't see anything there. Of course, the bullet wound had kind of tore up his insides. And they did a quick autopsy. Then they put all of his vital organs in a plastic bag.

Kat [00:08:34]:
His Bits?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:35]:
Yep. They tucked his bits in his abdominal cavity before sending him off to be prepared for burial.

Kat [00:08:40]:
Like a mom packing a lunch. Yep.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:08:43]:
Here we go. Okay. Wow. I got Oreos at the funeral home, Miller Funeral Home in nearby Fort Worth. The undertaker, whose name was Paul Grudy, and he's an important guy in this story, he didn't waste any time. He got right at it. He was concerned, and he thought probably in the future they would exhume his body for some reason, Oswald's body. So he gave Oswald's body a double dose of embalming fluid to keep him fresh. Fresh. Then he dressed him with clothes off the funeral home rack.

Kat [00:09:16]:
They have, like, stuff lost and found items?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:18]:
Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah. He put white boxers patterned with little green diamonds on Oswald. Some dark socks, a light shirt, a thin black tie, and I guess, like, a cheap brown suit. And then he was. They charged Oswald's family $48 for that.

Kat [00:09:37]:
I can't just go giving that stuff away.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:09:39]:
No. So Fast forward to 1981, October 4th. Now, this is according once again to Vincent Di Maio from his book, A Life and Death. He said, before the sun rose on October 4, we stood by the killer's grave, unseasonably muggy morning, and we dug up Lee Harvey Oswald or somebody, just to be sure America had buried the right man back in 1963. Now, here's how he described it. He said the vault was cracked, which allowed water to seep in. The casket inside was rotting, was brittle, and was splotched with mildew and stains. The handles that were metal were badly corroded. Part of the lid over the cadaver's upper body had caved in. He said that at that point they could look inside and see that there was somebody inside.

Kat [00:10:35]:
Somebody.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:36]:
Don't you want somebody to love? Oh, that's gross. The decaying lid of Oswald's casket, they said, was likely damaged by the gravediggers removing the cracked vault when they pulled it up out of the ground.

Kat [00:10:50]:
Likely, but not for sure. Right?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:10:52]:
They're not. Well, they don't know. As they opened it, the smell of moldy dirt and mildewed wood and rotting flesh emanated from the box in, like, a cloud that just kind of pushed.

Kat [00:11:03]:
People back, sure as it will.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:05]:
Forensic pathologist couldn't ignore that. And some of the civilians that were nearby backed off the casket. The inside of it was just. It was a mess. I mean, it had. It'd been less than 20 years, but still, because it had been so badly damaged.

Kat [00:11:22]:
Oh, sure. I left a lawn chair out over the winter last year, and it was just. It was gross. We had to throw it away.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:29]:
That could be a whole new podcast.

Kat [00:11:30]:
Lawn furniture, autopsies, patio wear gone awry.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:11:35]:
The muscles in the legs were long gone. His skin was just like. Kind of like parchment and shriveled around the bones. He was mostly skeletal, but they didn't really need the whole body. They just needed the head for identification purposes because they were going to check with his marine dental records again. Quoting from his book, he said, with a scalpel, I severed several rotting muscles and dried tendons in the shriveled neck and detached the skull from the spine at the second cervical interspace, the upper neck, and with very little force, just kind of pulled the head from the backbone, snipped an embalmer's wire that held the corpse's mouth closed for the funeral, and the jaw came off in his hand. So then they run the tests, they send it. Send out his dental records, or they send out his head, essentially, and compare them with the dental records. And the medical examiner, Linda Norton, said, quote, the findings of the team are as follows. We independently and as a team have concluded beyond any doubt, and I mean beyond any doubt, that the individual buried under the name of Lee Harvey Oswald in Rose Hill Cemetery is, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald at this point in time. We hope this puts the matter to rest without any further speculation being raised as to the identity of the individual in Rose Garden or Rose Hill. You think that would put an end to it, right? But no.

Kat [00:13:03]:
Now there's people like you, there's people.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:04]:
Like me and Paul Grudy, the mortician who actually prepared the body.

Kat [00:13:09]:
Mm.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:09]:
In the AE Special, the men who killed Kennedy, Paul Groody was interviewed, and he said at the time of the burial, he personally put Lee Harvey Oswald in a steel reinforced concrete vault. The vault was then hermetically sealed, guaranteed not to break or crack or go to pieces. It was heavy concrete and steel with an asphalt lining it was designed to keep.

Kat [00:13:37]:
So it's unlikely that the damage that they discovered when they exhumed him was just like, oh, it's, you know, worms. Worms and stuff.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:13:45]:
He said when he opened the grave in 81, they found that the vault had been broken. And the bottom of the vault was the part that was broken. The top was still intact. It was broken on the bottom. And so his theory is that somebody came in, dug him up, tried to lift the vault out of the ground with like a. Whatever they use at, you know, graveyards for moving Stuff.

Kat [00:14:11]:
Sure. One of those truck.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:13]:
Truck.

Kat [00:14:14]:
Metal truck mouths, something like that.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:17]:
And so when they lifted it up, the weight of it collapsed the bottom of it. And then the casket was damaged in the process. When they put it all back in. He said as they removed the body from the casket, you know, whatever body it was, he said that he did recognize the clothing that he had put on the body. He said that was the body that he put in there. But the head was not the same head. He said it had been removed from the casket and from the body so that they could take pictures of it. But when he looked at it, there was no craniotomy.

Kat [00:14:52]:
Oh, there was no mark from where they had cut off the top of his head.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:14:55]:
Yeah, the skull was complete. It had not been autopsied.

Kat [00:15:00]:
Interesting.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:02]:
Now, when an autopsy is done like this, the skull is cut in order to remove the cap, in order to take the brain out. And in the autopsy, they do have the weight of the brain. They did take his brain out. And in order to do that, they had to take the top of his skull off.

Kat [00:15:17]:
Right.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:18]:
But in looking at the skull they dug up from his grave, the skull was whole. It had not been cut apart or autopsied in any way. He said, knowing that he had handled the body originally and there had been an autopsy on the head, and now there was no autopsy on the head. In his mind, he said it was pretty clear that something had transpired that had caused this.

Kat [00:15:39]:
Well, yeah. Dead head skin doesn't just go back.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:42]:
Together, doesn't grow back together.

Kat [00:15:43]:
I'm not a scientist, but I will attest to the fact that I do not believe deadhead skin grows back together.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:15:56]:
This is what he thinks happened, according to his interview in the ae Special Men who Killed Kennedy. And again, this is the guy who prepared the body.

Kat [00:16:04]:
Right.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:16:05]:
He said, I feel as though someone had gone to the cemetery off hours, taken the head of the real Lee Harvey Oswald that was now dead. And you know how they got it? He says, I don't know. But they went to the cemetery and using a tripod lifting device, tried to pull the vault out of the grave. And in the process, the bottom of the vault fell, breaking the cemetery, breaking the vault, causing the casket to deteriorate to a degree, that they found it, and then they removed the head that was in there and replaced it with Lee Harvey Oswald's real head so that they would find the teeth of Lee Harvey Oswald. He said, that's my theory. This is what I think happened. Whoever caused that is the same faction that caused the assassination in the first place. In my mind, a cover up has taken place.

Kat [00:16:59]:
Sure.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:00]:
So even though the official word still is, yeah, that was Lee Harvey Oswald's body, there are many people that say there's still a lot of unanswered questions. Now, one of the guys, the medical examiners that was there says that as I mentioned earlier, he actually cut the head away from the body. This guy says it was, it was not attached to the body. So there's a discrepancy there.

Kat [00:17:26]:
Sure. That doesn't make any sense.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:28]:
But what really doesn't make any sense is why it was obvious that they did an autopsy on his skull in 1963 when he was assassinated. Why in 1981, the skull was whole and complete and had not been cut open.

Kat [00:17:45]:
Plus markedly shorter.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:47]:
Maybe that was the discrepancy in the height. You know, they thought he was five'eleven he was five'nine it was the two inches they took off the top.

Kat [00:17:53]:
That's probably it.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:54]:
Yeah.

Kat [00:17:54]:
If that's not weird enough, now that's a bad haircut.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:17:58]:
Yeah. Take a little off the top, please. To make things even weirder, the funeral home, once the autopsy was complete, they put the remains in a new coffin and reburied it in the same plot at Rose Hill Cemetery in Dallas. The old coffin was supposed to be destroyed, but it wasn't.

Kat [00:18:18]:
Of course not.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:19]:
Somebody put it up for auction in 2010.

Kat [00:18:21]:
Wait, in 2010?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:18:23]:
Yep, in 2010. They held onto it from 1981 through 2010. The funeral home did. Baumgartner's Funeral home did, and put it up for auction. The ad is still up on the Nate D. Sanders auction site. I'm going to read a little bit of a, of a excerpt from that. The original deteriorated coffin offered here measures 80 inches by 24 inches deep with a thickness of the sides of the casket approximately 1 inch. Sitting on wood crate which measures 84 by 24, accompanied by a letter of authenticity by funeral director Alan Baumgartner, who assisted in the original embalming of Lee Harvey Oswald and later purchased the Miller Funeral Home along with all of its property. And then underneath it says, this Item sold in 2010 for $87,468. Now, Lee Harvey Oswald's brother Robert was pissed, as you could well imagine, because he had told him, okay, fine, you can dig up my brother, but if you put him back in a new coffin, the other one needs to be destroyed. Right?

Kat [00:19:31]:
He was the one who originally didn't want him exam in the first place. Right, right. Okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:36]:
And so they said, oh, yeah, sure, no problem. But they didn't do it. They just held onto it all those years and then sold it.

Kat [00:19:43]:
29 years.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:44]:
29.

Kat [00:19:45]:
I probably forgot.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:19:46]:
Yeah. By now I'm sure nobody will remember. So anyway, Robert Oswald, Lee's brother, took it to court. The judge ordered Baumgartner to pay OSWALD Damages of $87,468, the amount a buyer had agreed to pay for the decaying coffin in the autumn of 2010. And then he got the remains of the coffin back as well. And it is ass that those remains have been destroyed. Now, in the process of researching this, I found an article by a guy who's a rare book dealer and author. His name is Stephen J. Gertz, and there's a picture of him with the coffin. He didn't buy it, but he was allowed in to see it. I guess he knew people or whatever. He said something to the fact that this is the. The rotting remains of Lee Harvey Oswald's coffin. And then underneath, it says, on Saturday, December 11, 2010, I took a nap in it. He actually got in it and took a nap in Lee Harvey Oswald's.

Kat [00:20:44]:
I don't believe it.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:20:45]:
Decaying coffin. He said it's fragile. It's funky and foul inside. I really didn't have time to consider where I was or how I felt beyond feeling that this was the perfect rotten crate to hold the Oswald remains for eternity. I just wanted to get out. Okay, well, sure, but what made you want to get in it in the first place?

Kat [00:21:05]:
That's the question, sir. Now, I just searched that auction site and I did not find the cawthon listing, but I did find a M41, a pulse rifle signed by the cast of aliens.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:21]:
Really? How much is that?

Kat [00:21:24]:
So, okay.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:25]:
Bring me the head of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kat [00:21:27]:
That was weird.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:29]:
Yeah. You know, I'd always thought that that had been pretty much rectified, that it was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald that they. You know, because of the statement from the medical examiner saying beyond a shadow of a doubt. But no, there's still some shadows and some doubts. There's some very shadowy doubts here.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:47]:
This is the box of oddities. I said box.

Kat [00:21:51]:
So now it's time for the thing in the middle.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:21:54]:
Yeah, the thing in the middle, where we do a thing in the middle between my story and your story, or your story and my story, depending upon who goes first.

Kat [00:22:04]:
Right.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:05]:
So we don't really have a name for it.

Kat [00:22:07]:
No.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:07]:
So we're just going to call it the Thing in the middle.

Kat [00:22:10]:
Well, I don't know what we're going to do. That's what we're calling it for today, I guess.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:15]:
Okay, here are five weird facts, really quick. Number five. The longest time between two twins being born is 87 days.

Kat [00:22:23]:
Number four. Female kangaroos have three vaginas.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:26]:
Number three, the oldest condoms ever found date back to 1640. They were found in a cesspit at Dudley Castle and were made from animal and fish intestines.

Kat [00:22:36]:
Number two, the first man to urinate on the moon was Buzz aldrin.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:40]:
At number one in 1567. The man said to have the longest beard in the world died after he tripped over his beard running away from a fire.

Kat [00:22:48]:
Yeah. So, a reminder, don't forget, if you are enjoying the box of oddities like, and subscribe and all that business.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:22:56]:
And Again, it's the boxofoddities.com.

Kat [00:23:00]:
Find us on Instagram also and on Twitter and Facebook.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:04]:
All right, your turn, your turn.

Kat [00:23:07]:
Okay, I'm sorry. I'm still looking at the gun from the Aliens movie.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:11]:
Who could blame me for that?

Kat [00:23:13]:
Okay, so it's interesting because, of course, Russian spies came up with your story.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:18]:
Yes, well, Russia's a big thing right now.

Kat [00:23:21]:
That's true. Interesting. You think it's subliminal? Maybe it is, yeah. Because my story also has a bit of a Russian spy tinge to it.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:34]:
Really?

Kat [00:23:34]:
I'm going to talk today about the Somerton Man.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:38]:
Ooh, dish it, girl. Oh, no, I can't say dish it, girl.

Kat [00:23:44]:
No.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:44]:
Okay.

Kat [00:23:45]:
December 1st, 1948, on Somerton Beach.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:49]:
Does that mean that you won't fill out my poop chart?

Kat [00:23:51]:
What? No, you fill out your own poop chart. You don't listen. You don't listen to me.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:23:55]:
Go ahead.

Kat [00:23:56]:
Just. South of Adelaide, South Australia, a man was found dead on the beach. He was laying back with his head resting against the seawall with his legs extended and his feet crossed. Do you know the story, the story of the Somerton Man?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:24:11]:
I've heard bits and pieces about this, but I'm not really sure what the details are. Just that they don't know where he came from or something.

Kat [00:24:19]:
Okay, so an autopsy was conducted and the pathologist estimated that the time of death was around 2am Dec. 1. The autopsy failed, though, to find the cause of death. Noted that the man was in his 40s with a very fit physique. Coroner's assistant said the man possessed strong and high calf muscles like that of a dancer.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:24:42]:
Hold me closer.

Kat [00:24:44]:
He suspected that the man had been poisoned or had killed himself but couldn't find any real evidence for this theory. The one thing that they did find was that in his tum tum, one of the things that was in there that remained was a pasty. So he had. Had.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:02]:
You'd eaten a stripper?

Kat [00:25:03]:
No.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:04]:
What?

Kat [00:25:04]:
It's Australia. A pastry. Oh, a delicious flaky baked good.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:08]:
I said a pasty.

Kat [00:25:09]:
It was. They call it a pasty in Australia.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:12]:
Well, that could be confusing.

Kat [00:25:13]:
Well for you go to.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:16]:
Go to. No, a dance club and women have got like pick them ups on their nipples.

Kat [00:25:21]:
Oh the raspberry cream and those love so. But no one in town knew who this dude was. No one recognized him. Several people who had walked by the beach noted that they had seen him on the beach in that same position, but they didn't know he was dead or if he was dead. One couple did note that there were a lot of mosquitoes and he didn't seem to be bothered by them, which.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:25:46]:
One of the advantages of being a bloated corpse.

Kat [00:25:50]:
So about a month later, let's see, January 14th, 1949, staff at the Adelaide Railway station discovered a brown suitcase with its label removed, which had been checked into the station cloak room on November 30th. And they believe that the suitcase was owned by the man found on the beach. In the case was a red checked dressing gown, a size 7 red felt pair of slippers, four pairs of underpants, pajamas, shaving items, light brown pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs and some tools. All the labels had been removed from his clothing. There were some dry cleaning notes in there, but they were really inconsistent and didn't seem to make any sense. Like either the dry cleaner didn't know how to consistently label his items or someone had just falsified dry cleaning records, which seems like a felony in Australia. So a coroner's inquest into the death commenced a few days later, but it was adjourned until months later. For some reason, the investigating pathologist reexamined the body and made a number of new discoveries. It noted that the man's shoes were remarkably clean and appeared to have been recently polished. Which seems weird for a guy that had been just wandering around a beach town.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:27:14]:
Did he wash up? Was there water in his lungs? He just looked like he was taking a nap on the beach.

Kat [00:27:20]:
Exactly. The evidence fitted in with the theory that the the body might have been brought to Somerton beach after the man's death and set up against the seawall. But that didn't exactly make sense with rigor mortis and all of that business. But the pathologist was kind of confused because there wasn't any poison. But the way that he was found dead made them think that it might have been poison. It was real confusing for them. So it was right around this time, months later, that a tiny piece of rolled up paper was found in the fob pocket sewn within the dead man's trousers.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:03]:
The fob pocket, that's that little tiny pocket, right?

Kat [00:28:06]:
It's the little pocket that doesn't make any sense.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:08]:
Doesn't make any sense at all. Harkens back to the days of yore when people had fobs.

Kat [00:28:14]:
So it was not only inside the fob pocket, it was sewn inside the fob pocket, which is fun to say. Fob pocket, fob pocket, fob pocket. And on that tiny piece of paper rolled up were the words Tamam Shud. And that comes from the last page of a rare poetry book called the Rubaiyat. In July, not long after this, a businessman told the cops that around the time of the man's death, he found a copy of the Rubaiyat in the backseat of his car. Someone had tossed it through the open window. And yes, the two words of the last page, the Taman Shud, had been raggedly ripped out.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:56]:
Somebody sewing poetry into his pants.

Kat [00:28:59]:
Exactly.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:28:59]:
That's so weird.

Kat [00:29:00]:
It's romantic, isn't it?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:01]:
It is romantic.

Kat [00:29:02]:
Never sew poetry into my pants anymore.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:05]:
You never asked me to.

Kat [00:29:07]:
More intriguing though, were the scribblings which I then wrote. Codes, question mark codes, such as W, R, G, O, A, B, wtpime, B, A, N, E, T, P, and so on and so forth.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:25]:
Maybe they're just really bad vanity plates.

Kat [00:29:29]:
You think so?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:30]:
Yeah.

Kat [00:29:30]:
I don't know. I don't know much about Australian vanity plates, but now that doesn't make any sense because none of them end with so and so's mom.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:29:41]:
Boompah and Mimi.

Kat [00:29:44]:
Dan's girl. And then, in addition to the codes, was a phone number. The phone number led police less than a five minute walk from the dead man's body where he had been found to the doorstep of a young woman. And she told police that she was married. However, recent investigations revealed that she was not married until 1950. She also told police that she was nurse, although new findings show that she had not completed her nursing training. And she was invited to take a look at the bust of the man that had been molded before he was buried.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:24]:
Oh, okay. I thought you meant like his chest size. And now we're Back to the pasties again.

Kat [00:30:29]:
Man, you keep going back to those nipples.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:30:32]:
What's your point?

Kat [00:30:33]:
Depends on how cold it is in here. But you need to stop with that. No more. So the woman checked out the bust and apparently, according to the police, nearly fainted when she saw it, but claimed she didn't know who the man was. Really. And police were like, okay, cool, I guess. And then they ceased further inquiry and.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:02]:
They just let her walk out. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Kat [00:31:04]:
Yeah. Also, they agreed for some reason not to release her identity to the public, which is very strange. But in 2013, her daughter came forward on a television documentary and her real identity, Jessica Jo Thompson, was public. She was generally known as Jess Harkins and then after 1947, as Joe Thompson, which seems interesting to me, but, you know, whatever I don't make. I don't judge people based on their incredibly frequent name changes. Anyway, police had asked Joe whether she had given away a rubaiette recently. The poetry book.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:41]:
Right.

Kat [00:31:42]:
Because they wanted to find connections here. And she indeed had given away a rubaiette recently. But then when they tracked it down, the recipient turned out to be alive and well and his book was intact.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:56]:
That's so weird.

Kat [00:31:58]:
So it just.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:31:58]:
What does all this mean?

Kat [00:31:59]:
It transpired. I don't know. Transpired that Joe Thompson's son, Robin McMahon, ended up becoming a professional ballet dancer. He had extraordinarily strong calves, apparently. Also compelling is that he and the Somerton man share a rare dental trait. They both have their canine teeth next to their central teeth, rather than one more.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:24]:
Out here, you can't talk about your teeth without touching them. I've noticed.

Kat [00:32:27]:
I'm just showing you.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:32:28]:
That's another thing I love about you.

Kat [00:32:30]:
Moreover, there's a rare feature of the ear shape that both men share. In 2011, students from Australia's University of Adelaide took to the case of the Somerton man, and a man named Daniel Abbott, who is a biomedical engineer at the university, studied the mystery for seven years. They worked on trying to decode the letters that were scribbled inside the roubaiet and found a few bits that might have led to an eventual code. But it didn't pan out. He said that DNA is the key to solving the mystery. And DNA did come into play. They were able to find that much of the DNA from, like, the Mid east coast of America was shared with part of Robin DNA. So the son of sketchy name changer McGee Nurse had similar DNA to what would have been found in America on the east coast. But she claimed not to have any connection to East Coast Americans. So there's people that believe that he was an American soldier stationed in Adelaide. Here's also something interesting. This student from Australia's University of Adelaide went to interview Rachel, the supposed granddaughter of the Somerton man, and then they fell in love and got married, which I think is so sweet. He's solving a mystery and she solved a mystery in his heart.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:34:13]:
Yeah, that's really creepy.

Kat [00:34:16]:
So there are many theories regarding the Somerton man.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:34:21]:
So they haven't solved this.

Kat [00:34:22]:
They have not solved it. It's still a mystery. They don't know who he is or what the significance of the Tamanshud is. There are ideas that he might have been a Russian spy, which has really ebbed and flowed. No, what's the word ebbed and what's the Ebbed and waned? Waned and ebbed, Waxed and waned, Waxed and waned.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:34:46]:
Ebbed and flow.

Kat [00:34:47]:
It ebbed and waned in popularity based on the time and what our situation is with Russia at the time. But it's seeming less and less likely now with the connection to America. Though the Somerton man has never been formally linked with Sketchy Joe, name changer, so it's still a mystery.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:35:12]:
But they think he possibly could have been a spy of some sort, and that makes sense.

Kat [00:35:18]:
Did want to mention that much of my research for this came from Newsweek, Wikipedia, the guardian and allthatisinteresting.com.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:35:28]:
You know, I think he's a time traveler.

Kat [00:35:31]:
You think so?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:35:31]:
Yeah, he just kind of dropped into our dimension by mistake. Kind of wandered through a vortex somewhere and found himself on a beach in Australia and decided, time to take a nap. And then he was mugged by a beachcomber. That's what I think happened.

Kat [00:35:46]:
Interesting.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:35:47]:
But there was enough time in between for him to sew poetry in his pants.

Kat [00:35:52]:
So not only the Russian spy connection between our stories, but napping in unusual places.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:35:58]:
Exactly.

Kat [00:35:59]:
A common theme.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:35:59]:
Oh, it all comes together so beautiful.

Kat [00:36:03]:
Well, that was fun.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:04]:
Yay. Good story.

Kat [00:36:07]:
Thank you.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:07]:
I like it.

Kat [00:36:08]:
I'm incredibly interested by the Summertime man. And there's so much information everywhere, and it's one of those things where you could keep pulling and keep pulling and keep pulling and it doesn't matter because nothing's confirmed.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:21]:
And how many years has this been?

Kat [00:36:23]:
He was found in 1948.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:25]:
It's been all these years and they still have no idea.

Kat [00:36:28]:
I mean, I would tell you how many years, but I'd have to do math.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:30]:
Who has time for that, you know. And the erotic thing is that my dad is a math professor.

Kat [00:36:35]:
Did you say the erotic thing?

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:38]:
Did I say that it's weird? That would be weird. That I would think that my dad is a math professor is erotic.

Kat [00:36:45]:
Well, I think it's sexy.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:47]:
But, you know, that's because numbers turn you on. You are really strange when it comes. That's another weird thing about you that I really like.

Kat [00:36:55]:
I'm glad that we're just listing off weird things about me.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:36:58]:
You'll get your chance to list off the weird things about me. But Kat loves numbers so much. But only certain patterns of numbers. Whenever she's pumping gas, she has to pump gas. Only to a palindrome. It's like, oh, $10.05 worth of gas.

Kat [00:37:20]:
That's not a palindrome at all.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:37:22]:
What is that?

Kat [00:37:23]:
That's nothing. That's just 1005.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:37:27]:
Oh, 1001. I meant, yeah. $10.01. I see that on our credit cards all the time. $10.01.

Kat [00:37:35]:
Right. But then again, I am also very lazy. So I'll more often than not have someone else pump my gas, in which case they will not pump it to a palindrome.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:37:43]:
Yeah. And you have to get out and correct their pumping.

Kat [00:37:46]:
I would never do that. As I said, I'm very lazy.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:37:50]:
Well, that's it for the show. I don't know how we're gonna end this.

Kat [00:37:53]:
Oh, I don't have to have a thing. Thank you for joining us. We had fun. We hope you did too.

Jethro Gilligan Toth [00:38:00]:
And so let it be known that the Box of Oddities belongs to you and its fate is in your hands. Therefore, it's been requested by those of whom I report to to beseech you for assistance. The Box of Odds is free. We ask but one thing of you to provide a five star rating and a positive review. True, that is two things, however, tis merely a five star rating and a positive review also. Subscribe to us. Ok, so three things is all we ask. Three things and three things only. Henceforth, the Box of Oddities commits to the telling stories, stories of the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected. We wish to offer our deeply felt gratitude and appreciation for your patronage. The boxofodidies.com on Facebook at facebook.com boxofodditiespodcast on Twitter boxofodities and Instagram at Box of oddities podcast Copyright 2018. All rights reserved.