At dawn on a December morning in 1948, the corpse of a man was discovered lying propped up against the seawall of Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia.

In the months following his death, there was a huge publicity campaign to try to identify the man. His fingerprints were circulated through police bureaus nationally and overseas. Dozens came to view the body and police received hundreds of letters from people claiming to suspect the man’s identity.

Yet by the time of the inquest all that the city coroner could state with certainty was that ‘the identity of the deceased was quite unknown; that his death was not natural’.

For 65 years the Somerton Man’s case has remained one of Australia’s most baffling and mysterious cold cases, and its retelling has become embroidered with myth.

A returned soldier, a displaced person, a jilted lover, a spy... the evidence points to all these possibilities.

Senior detective Gerry Feltus guides us along the route of the original police investigation and in doing so, exposes the anxieties and preoccupations of post war Australia.