The woman was taken by police to view the body but said the man wasn’t Boxall and that she didn’t recognise the cast. She was also said to have acted strangely, apparently she was “completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint.” And remember she wasn’t looking at a corpse, just a cast.
The police were now pretty sure Boxall was their man, that was until he turned up alive and kicking with his own copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with the ‘tamam shud’ section intact. So, back to square one. The best bet now is that he was an Eastern Bloc spy, but how, why and who killed him are still complete unknowns. Adelaide is the nearest main city to Woomera where there is a missile launching and intelligence gathering site. It’s possible that the man had been in the area and got the train from Port Augusta, near Woomera, but there’s no hard evidence for this.
60 years on and the case still hasn’t been solved and the code still hasn’t been cracked. Officially the case is still ‘open’. There’s talk that the unnamed woman who reacted so strangely to the cast had a child with Somerton. Some peculiarities about his teeth and ear shape matched with the woman’s son. But both the woman and her son are long dead and permission to exhume Somerton’s body has been denied. So that can’t be delved into further, and still wouldn’t explain so many other oddities of the case. I guess we’ll never know, but my money is on aliens. Or the Yeti.
