There were four people in John Freeman’s car when the Rubaiyat was found on the floor of the back seat ..

I’ve taken off the last post and decided to repost it re-configured and include some pertinent comments by Clive and Dusty – but mainly because in a rush of blood yesterday I managed to recklessly thread together most of the case incidents that have confounded me for over the life of this blog, probably longer as I can remember reading about an unidentified man being found on an Adelaide beach when I was about sixteen, no doubt on a school day when I was playing truant and surfing at Bondi.

Anyway .. here we go again.

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There were four people in John Freeman’s Hillman Minx sedan when the Rubaiyat was found on the floor of the back seat; Freeman and his wife together with his brother-in-law and his wife, this was the story told to the cold case investigator Gerry Feltus  by an unidentified individual with a familiarity to the case – yet despite the decades of ongoing national and international publicity that has surrounded the case since 1948, none of them has said a word about that day they witnessed the book being found. Neither have any surviving members of their families, which begs the question – were all four sworn to silence?

Why ?

Who would have had the power to silence the four of them so permanently, even to their graves. Not only that but it appears none of the four spoke to anyone about the momentous find in the days following Freeman allegedly handing the Rubaiyat over to DS Leane in July 1949 (there is no record of any witnesses present at the handover) and if they did it’s not conceivable they too were sought out and ordered to remain silent.

There is only one conclusion to draw …

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‘Only other conclusion one can draw, should they dare to do so, is that it aint never happened like Feltus asserts. I myself recall laying odds of London to a brick on, on that unpopular theory from day uno ono!’

Dusty

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Yeah .. and there’s the reason why the book was said to have been ‘lost’ by DS Leane before it was photographed and only a couple of days after it was given to him by Freeman (?) and that would have been the real reason Naval Intelligence didn’t get a gander at it, right? Not that they were told it was lost when they were handed a ‘similar’ book. So cop it sweet lads and do your best.
I’m thinking there’s not a lot of respect there for a wartime outfit.

I remember asking Pelling if having the original book may have helped in the decryption exercise and after a long delay and quite a few gentle reminders his response was  an unequivocal ‘No.’ So good luck with the VM Nick, seriously.

And Gerry Feltus himself wrote that he could only find two ‘reliable’ witnesses who said they saw the Rubaiyat. Two! The Adelaide CIB would have been crawling with suits all wanting a gander at the prize exhibit.

You want a laugh? Read this again ..

https://tomsbytwo.com/2024/01/18/there-appears-to-be-some-inadequacy-in-detective-browns-responses/

Good old Brownie, always with a smile.

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Telling four people they cannot talk/write about the ROK, found in their car, was a bit optimistic, to say the least. I wonder who was responsible for this mythical story?

Clive

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Good question .. and the mythical story segues nicely with the mysterious appearance of the box of matches PC Moss said didn’t exist (you can’t light a smoke without them),

“He didn’t have a match on him.” PC Moss

add to that the striped trousers being worn on the body in the evening  (as per Gordon Strapps’ sworn deposition) and not the plain faun-brown duds he was found to be wearing in the morning and here’s good old Prof Cleland exclaiming ‘hullo hullo hullo what have we got here?’ when he found the TS slip PC Moss didn’t find. Poor old Mossy, the lowest ranked copper gets blamed for being a dill and duffing up the initial search – at least that’s what our eminent Professor (ears) Abbott believes.

I wonder who slipped this ^ little item into the fob pocket of the trousers being worn on the body? Not hard to guess how it was done as the duds were stored in the police lockup before Cowan and Cleland had their little dress-up session.

Then we have the four eyewitnesses who saw a man being transported on another man’s shoulders along the Somerton Beach shoreline later that night on the 30th,

Lifted from The Unknown Man by G Feltus.

– an unidentified body wearing different trousers to those seen to be worn on the body by Strapps in the earlier afternoon, a body with pasty in his stomach and a couple of tickets that helpfully pointed the police to the main railway station with its unlocked suitcase and a very handy spool of Barbour thread. Seems though someone forgot that a man with a half-smoked cigarette tucked under his chin would have the means to have lit it, like a box of matches, but no worries DS Leane noted (as per his sworn deposition) they were there all along, even though they weren’t.

No ID in the suitcase either and no need to bother ace fingerprinter Jimmy Durham and have anything in there fingerprinted officer because you don’t really want to know whose prints they might have belonged to, right officer? And there’s no need to fill out the fingerprint card in the correct manner either is there officer?

And who was that bloke in a suit and wearing a hat young Ms Neill wondered as she watched him watching the man spreadeagled beneath him, artfully placed too with his head out of sight in the shadow of the sea-wall, watched him for quite some minutes she said. What she didn’t say was that he looked like a plain-clothes copper, one no doubt strong enough to carry a dead man on his shoulders.

I’m liking dude’s theory more and more.

Corruption and cash, lots and lots of cash.

Read on.

https://tomsbytwo.com/2025/09/04/4000-cars-stolen-in-the-eastern-states-in-the-last-12-months/

It’s worth mentioning that in G. Feltus’ opinion the following two photographs should not to be believed to be the real thing, his opinion is that they were supplied to the newspapers by an unknown source, possibly the police but who’s to know because nobody’s ever owned up to it.