Identification
On 3 December 1948, E.C. Johnson walked into a police station to identify himself as living and was dropped from potential as the dead man. That same day, The News published a photograph of the dead man on its front page, leading to additional calls from members of the public about the possible identity of the dead man. By the fourth of December, police had announced that the man's fingerprints were not on South Australian police records, forcing them to look further afield. On 5 December, The Advertiser reported that police were searching through military records after a man claimed to have had a drink with a man resembling the dead man at a hotel in Glenelg on 13 November. During their drinking session, the mystery man supposedly produced a military pension card bearing the name "Solomonson".
A number of possible identifications of the body were made, including one in early January 1949 when two people identified the body as that of 63-year-old former wood cutter Robert Walsh. A third person, James Mack, also viewed the body, initially could not identify it, but an hour later he contacted police to claim it was Robert Walsh. Mack stated that the reason he did not confirm this at the viewing was a difference in the colour of the hair. Walsh had left Adelaide several months earlier to buy sheep in Queensland but had failed to return at Christmas as planned. Police were sceptical, believing Walsh to be too old to be the dead man. However, the police did state that the body was consistent with that of a man who had been a wood cutter, although the state of the man's hands indicated he had not cut wood for at least 18 months. Any thoughts that a positive identification had been made were quashed, however, when Mrs Elizabeth Thompson, one of the people who had earlier positively identified the body as Mr Walsh, retracted her statement after a second viewing of the body, where the absence of a particular scar on the body, as well as the size of the dead man's legs, led her to realise the body was not Mr Walsh.
By early February 1949, there had been eight different "positive" identifications of the body, including two Darwin men who thought the body was of a friend of theirs, and others who thought it was a missing stablehand, a worker on a steamship or a Swedish man. Victorian detectives initially believed the man was from the state of Victoria due to the similarity of the laundry marks to those used by several dry-cleaning firms in Melbourne. Following publication of the man's photograph in Victoria, 28 people claimed they knew his identity. Victorian detectives disproved all the claims and said that "other investigations" indicated it was unlikely that he was a Victorian.
By November 1953, police announced they had recently received the 251st "solution" to the identity of the body from members of the public who claimed to have met or known him. But, they said that the "only clue of any value" remained the clothing the man wore.
Read more about this topic: Taman Shud Case