Episode 16: Sandy Point Skeleton: Solving a decades long enigma. Duration: 42.30. Podcast: Look History in the Eye. 

Host: Kate Follington. 

Guests: Dr Dadna Hartman, Manager Molecular Biology, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Fiona Leahy, Manager Legal, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Dr Runa Daniel, Research Fellow Affiliate, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. 

Theme music: Jack Palmer. 

Fiona Leahy Guest

00:00

There are quite a number of bodies in Waratah Bay. So, as you will know, Bass Strait was and still is a major shipping route, and in the 19th century, Waratah Bay actually provided shelter to a number of the vessels that were travelling between Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney, and also New Zealand, and the stormy weather would force the boats into the bay where they would seek shelter until there was calmer waters. Now, unfortunately, many of these ships ran aground or took on water and were wrecked, often losing their cargo to the delight of the residents of Sandy Point who could pick up barrels of whiskey and other things but, very sadly, also losing their crew and their passengers. 18 adults drowned and only one body had been recovered from those wrecks. 

Kate Follington Host

00:49

The sweeping southern coastline of South Gippsland in Victoria, Australia's most southern point, is stunningly beautiful the country of the Gurnai, Kurnai and Boonwurrung peoples. The rugged, grassy headlands sweep out into the ocean or down to sandy beaches and coves, attracting tourists over the summer, keen for windsurfing, swimming and snorkelling. But because it faces the intense winds of the Southern Ocean, it's not a coastline for the faint-hearted. The coast is wild. The shipwrecks of sealing boats and sailing ships are scattered across the seabed and along the Gippsland shoreline. 

01:29

In 2017, a snorkeler was swimming off the beach at Sandy Point, a protected inlet, when he suddenly noticed a human skull sticking out of the seabed just 25 metres off the beach. What was surprising was that under 20 centimetres of sand was the rest of his skeleton, almost intact, except for a jawline. The police called him the Sandy Point man a complete mystery until 2023. Today we're going to hear how the forensic team uncovered his story, who he was and why he was there. Hi, my name's Kate Follington and you're listening to the podcast Look History in the Eye, produced by Public Record Office, Victoria the archive of the state government. 

02:15

100 kilometres of public records about Victoria's past are carefully preserved in climate control vaults. We meet the people who dig into those boxes, look history in the eye and bother to wonder why. You can download the records that help tell this story by searching Look History in the Victorian Archives Centre and you can see the archival records from our collection that helped solve this case by going to Look History in the Eye online. The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine conduct scientific or medical investigations into 7,000 deaths reported to the coroner each year and in most cases identifying the body is done by the family member and they will help the forensics team confirm that. But in some cases there's actually no way of knowing who the body is. They're simply known as unidentifiable human remains or UHR. Here's Dr Dadna Hartman, a forensic expert, who worked on the case when the skeleton was delivered to her team for investigation. 

Dr Dadna Hartman Guest

03:47

From an anthropology point of view, we could see that we had an individual that was almost complete, a complete skeleton, and this is quite rare for someone perhaps that's been in the ocean for quite some time. And based on the anthropology, you can develop what we call a biological profile, and in this case, this individual looked to be a male of European ancestry, roughly about 21 to 37 years of age and about 170 centimetres tall. There was no evidence of trauma or pathology for this case, and it was also evident that there'd been some sort of dental work taking place. From a dent ology point of view, we could see that there'd been some dental restorations For example, there was a gold filling in the front tooth and these restorations were not typical of Australian contemporary dental work. 

What we call post-mortem dental records can be compared to anti-mortem dental records for long-term missing person cases in the hope that you might be able to find a match. In this case, there were no matches to any anti-mortem dental records that we had access to. From a DNA point of view, our aim is to develop a DNA profile from these cases, and we use a conventional DNA profiling that's known as STR. Profiling Only targets a small number of DNA markers that are really informative for identification purposes. Now, having developed that profile for Sandy Point man, this can then be uploaded or added to the relevant databases, in this case, the Victorian Missing Persons DNA database as well as the National Missing Persons DNA database, in the hope that you might be able to reconcile the DNA profile of our unidentified human remains yes, sandy Point man to a long-term missing person case where family members have given their DNA in the hope of finding their loved one. 

Kate Follington Host

05:59

They had no match. The dental records and his DNA didn't match their long-term missing person databases, both in Victoria and Australia. So where to next? They then tried more detailed analysis, looking at things like hair colour DNA markers that could tell them more about the biogeographical ancestry of the skeleton, and then they tried matching those details to their missing persons database. 

Dr Dadna Hartman Guest

06:24

And in this case we could see that the donor was mainly of European ancestry. We could also target DNA markers that tell us something about how the person may have looked like, so we can look at hair and eye colour and together, taking all this information, we can develop some investigative leads that can help us look at our long-term missing person cases and say are there any one of those long-term missing person cases that match these descriptors? You're trying to narrow that haystack that you need to do one-to-one comparisons to. Unfortunately, again in this case, we didn't find any long-term missing person cases that fitted these descriptors. 

Kate Follington Host

07:07

So they knew from the DNA markers that the man was 169 centimetres tall, had a fair complexion, dark brown hair with blue eyes. 

07:16

They could see that the person had likely died a long time ago. Because of their dental records, he also had a gold tooth, which is a feature not commonly used in Australia for decades, so the person had been dead for a long time. So at this juncture of their forensic investigation, there were a few other avenues that they could follow, and one of those was FIG, and they were the first team to really try this method. It's called Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy and it's now being used around the world, particularly in the United States, and one part of it involves deep diving into the historic archive and to see if the person didn't go missing at all. In fact, he was a known death, but his body was never found. The location is remote, which is helpful, but on a treacherous coastline, just how many people could have died more than, say, 70 years ago? Fiona Lay, an amateur historian and a member of their legal team, volunteered to do some research because Sandy Point is, in fact, quite close to her heart. 

Fiona Leahy Guest

08:18

As many of you might know, sandy Point is a very small township on Waratah Bay in southeast Gippsland. The traditional owners of the Gurnai Kurnai nation lived in this region for thousands of years before European whalers and sealers arrived in the early 19th century, followed by European pastoralists who established settlements and ran cattle. Life was pretty hard in this region, mainly due to the isolation and the poor weather in winter, but also the really swampy farmland that they had to deal with. But some of these families persevered and some of them still live in Sandy Point to this day, including the Pilkingtons who come up later in this story day. Including the Pilkingtons who come up later in this story. So today, the town of Sandy Point has a permanent population of only around 250 people, but over summer this swells to over a thousand people as holiday is from largely from Melbourne, including my own family, head down to Sandy Point to enjoy the beautiful beaches and the prom. 

09:24

So I was actually at Sandy Point in January 2018, having enjoyed Christmas there when news that a skeleton had been found at Shallow Inlet sort of spread through the township, and here is the article that I saw in the local newspaper. It's obviously a big news day. I was a bit distracted by the streaker that spoiled the envelope fireworks, but there was much speculation around town as to who this individual could be. People thought maybe it was a drowned fisherman, because there's a lot of fishing in the inlet, or maybe it was an unlucky tourist who got caught in the surf. Or maybe it was a murder. I was thinking to myself that if I was to dispose of a body, I wouldn't choose shallow inlet, which has very low tides and is currently a very popular spot for swimming, fishing and windsurfing, and then, when I returned to work in late January, I naively expected that the skeleton would have been already identified. I'm a lawyer at the Institute. I'm not a scientist, which will be apparent in my part of this talk and, as you've heard from Dadna, that actually wasn't the case. I think I thought that perhaps the family might have already come forward because of one of their missing loved ones in the area, or the police might have an open case where someone had been missing in Gippsland.

10:58

The other thing that was apparent at this time was that the remains could be quite old and that they may have lain under the sand in Shallow Inlet for quite a number of years. The most likely scenario wasn't murder, I think it was that someone had drowned accidentally, either in the inlet or in Waratah Bay. And, as Dadna has mentioned, my colleagues told me that it was really quite unusual to find remains that were so well preserved, that were in the ocean. So we hypothesised that if the drowning had occurred in Waratah Bay the deceased would have been washed into the inlet with the strong tides and probably covered with sand, and maybe that accounted for the fact that we had an almost complete skeleton at this site. And in my historical research I did find an article that described that long sandy spit that currently narrows that entrance into the inlet from Waratah Bay was washed away and broken through at the turn of the century, in 1901, which significantly widened that entrance, and maybe that explained how a body might be washed into the inlet at this time. 

12:09

Given that the forensic examinations of the remains had not resulted in an identification, I did wonder whether a search of the historic records may shed light on the potential identity of the skeleton. You know who had actually drowned in Waratah Bay over the years, who had drowned in the inlet, and had their body ever been recovered, what could we actually find out? So I started where I'm sure a lot of you people enjoy looking, and that's on Trove. I lost hours of my life, a very enjoyable pastime, looking through old newspaper articles, and I also visited the very excellent Foster and District Historical Society Museum, which some of you may be aware of as well, where I found Don Love's book on shipwrecks on the South Gippsland coast. So, as it turns out, there are quite a number of bodies in Waratah Bay. 

13:01

So, as you all know, Bass Strait was and still is a major shipping route, and in the 19th century, Waratah Bay actually provided shelter to a number of the vessels that were travelling between Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney and also New Zealand, and the stormy weather would force the boats into the bay where they would seek shelter until there was calmer waters. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, many of these ships ran aground or took on water and were wrecked, often losing their cargo, to the delight of the residents of Sandy Point who could pick up barrels of whiskey and other things, but, very sadly, also losing their crew and their passengers. And so there were three particular ships that I found in Don Love's book where people had died and their bodies hadn't been recovered. So these included the Domaine in 1846, the Spencer in 1854 and the Bertha in 1870. And you can see from that list, 18 adults drowned and only one body had been recovered from those wrecks. So that's quite a lot of people in the bay. 

Kate Follington Host

14:10

Luckily for Fiona and Dadna, their forensic odontologist the person who looks at dental evidence offered an important insight into his time of death. Dental fillings can last quite a long time, and the type of fillings used over time also varied, and in this case they were able to zero in on a rough estimate of decades of death. 

Fiona Leahy Guest

14:29

There were a number of dental restorations. There was a gold filling, four teeth with amalgam restorations and a partial root canal, and our forensic odontologist had commented that this work did not look like contemporary Australian dentistry. So in researching the history of dentistry I discovered that although dental amalgam was introduced in the United States as early as 1833, its use was highly contested at this time and it wasn't adopted as the predominant restorative material until the late 1880s. So this suggested that the Sandy Point man had likely had his dental work done sometime after 1880 and therefore we could probably exclude the 18 individuals who had drowned from these shipwrecks that I had found. So I went back to Trove to look for other drownings in the bay after 1880 and discovered another 10 adult men who drowned in the area in the late 19th century or the early 20th century. And this is my short list and I'll talk about three of these men, and some of them might be known to you, particularly Martin. Sorry, let me go back Martin Weiberg, or Weiberg, because he was the notorious Avoca gold robber and he stole 5,000 gold sovereigns from the steamship Avoca when he was working on board as a carpenter. He eventually was convicted of this crime and served five years at Pentridge, but in 1883, his wife and children were living at Walkerville where his wife was working in a guest house, I think as a housekeeper or a cleaner, and that was due to the lime kilns that Walkerville really provided a local industry at that time, and Weiberg was planning to pick them up in his dinghy to sail across Waratah Bay to where his brother had anchored his vessel, the Nova, at the Glenny Islands near Wilson's Prom and thankfully I think it was Mr Dewar who actually was the employer of Weiberg's wife convinced him not to take his wife and children with him because the sea was too rough and he reported that Weiberg was quite drunk. And, as it turned out, Weiberg never made it to the Glenys and the wreckage from his dinghy was found on Yannicky Beach and his body was never recovered. Now Weiberg was from Norway and if you looked at his records from PROV about when he was in Pentridge, you could see that his height was 168 centimetres, which sort of matched the scientific findings. 

17:13

I got very enthusiastic about Weiberg being a potential candidate for the Sandy Point skeleton, so much so that I led the team to call the skeleton the Pirate man, and we kept that name for some time. But I had to look at the other contenders as well. So we had John Jacobson and he was a fisherman who came from Sweden and lived in Tarraville. A lot of Scandinavians lived near Port Albert because they came out for the gold rush and then when they didn't find gold they went down to Gippsland and it reminded them of home and they were fishing people. 

17:49

So I found a report saying that his boat had been found anchored in the shallow inlet and he had gone missing and that his body hadn't been found. I got very excited about this, but as I kept looking I found other reports and one of them said that his boat was actually anchored seven miles from Port Albert and I was thinking he was probably fishing on the east side of the prom, not the west, and he was probably fishing in Corner Inlet. So I discounted him. I also had Christopher Luke Moore on my list and he had drowned at Waratah Bay on the 30th of December 1928. But again, I was looking to see whether his body had ever been recovered and in my search on Find a Grave another great site I found the headstone at Menin Cemetery where he was listed in the inscription with his parents and with his wife Elizabeth. So that made me question whether his body may have been then recovered and buried with his family, although I couldn't find any evidence of that in the newspapers. 

Kate FollingtonHost

18:51

At this point she's narrowed the search down to only a few men who drowned at the turn of the century around Sandy Point and she continues to explore newspaper reports and local records to hone in on who it might be. Meanwhile, Dr Hartman begins the process of exploring two other avenues. One is called bomb pulse dating, which tests evidence of radiocarbon in our bones which are absorbed from the atmosphere. It decays after death and they can measure that to get an estimate on time of death. The term bomb pulse dating actually refers to the increase of carbon in the atmosphere and subsequently into our systems as a result of nuclear bomb testing from the 1950s and 60s. 

Dr Dadna Hartman Guest

19:36

So it's a handy way to test skeletal remains before or after this time frame remains before or after this time frame, so we can use this to see whether an individual may have lived and died before or after that pulse. And this is what we did with the Sandy Point case. Two samples a tooth and a bone were subjected to bone pulse dating and both indicated, similar to the dental work, that when we're looking at an individual, that was not what we considered modern day. So pre-bone pulse dating. 

Kate FollingtonHost

20:10

So they now knew that it was likely that the person died before the spike in radiocarbon activity in the 1950s, placing the time of death sometime between 1900 and 1950. And it was at this point that they turned to fig to narrow their search again. This process compares DNA markers from a body with the DNA databases compiled by family history research companies. Genealogy database records of people's DNA have boomed as a result of thousands of families worldwide donating their saliva in the hope of finding a family member or building their family tree. Their investigation could move, then, from a small subset of DNA available for forensic use through missing person databases to a much larger sample size to work with and then, combining that with historical records, they could help to eliminate irrelevant matches. 

Dr Dadna Hartman Guest

21:07

So forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIG, combines the use of DNA testing as well as traditional genealogy methodology, so historical record, searching to infer relationships between individuals. And for us, really the light bulb moment, if you like, came back in 2018, when just, I think, months before or weeks before the Golden State Killer case, which really put this technique at the forefront of people's mind, was a case of a Jane Doe named buckskin girl. She was named Buckskin girl because of the homemade poncho that she was wearing. She had died in 1981, had been strangled. There was very good forensic evidence, so there was DNA, fingerprints, dental information. However, she still remained unidentified for decades. 

22:06

So in 2018, it was decided that they would do this new type of DNA testing, which looks at thousands or hundreds of thousands of DNA markers at once and can be used to compare against genealogy databases, looking for those familial matches to more distant relatives. 

22:28

And that's exactly what they did. Having developed a potential lead as to who this person was, they then undertook the conventional DNA testing and were able to confirm that she was indeed Marcia King. So for us it was like well, we can use this forensic investigative genetic genealogy for our cases, potentially here in Australia and Victoria, we had to evaluate the use of such a tool here, whether it would work and whether we would be able to get a similar outcome. So the workflow for us might look something like this where we have a sample from an unidentified human remains, we then extract the DNA from those cases, do the appropriate type of testing, and there's different ways of being able to generate the DNA data that is needed to do the genealogy comparisons. We would then need to upload these to genealogy databases that allow agencies like the VIFM to query their DNA profiles against members of those databases. 

Kate Follington Host

23:37

It should be mentioned that there are two databases that the Australian forensic teams are allowed to access FamilyTree DNA and GEDmatch Pro and people must offer their approval for their DNA to be used for this type of investigation. And you can also, if you have donated to a different genetic database, you can upload your genetic profile from other genealogy databases into FamilyTree DNA and GEDmatch Pro if you wish to contribute to the FIG process and assist forensic investigations. The person charged with continuing the investigation into the Sandy Point man was Dr Runa Daniel from the same forensic team in Victoria, but she's an expert in advanced DNA techniques. 

Dr Runa Daniel Guest

24:24

Before I begin, I just wanted to briefly acknowledge members of the team, which are obviously from VIFM, but also Dr Nathan Scudder from the Australian Federal Police, Alison Sears and Dr Jennifer Raymond from New South Wales Police Force and Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick from Identifinders. So before I get into this, I just wanted to explain a little bit about this sort of capability. So forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG, sits under an umbrella term known as forensic DNA intelligence, and this term, or these capabilities, really describe advanced DNA methods that enable us to analyse DNA and generate investigative fle descendants with DNA markers from the Sandy Point man. 

Kate Follington Host

25:29

And then they're climbing back in time, branch by branch, across a few different family trees, to try and find the closest ancestor to their skeleton. Ancestor to their skeleton. 

Dr Runa Daniel Guest

25:40

What happens when we use FIGG is that, as Dadna has described, we have DNA that has been uploaded into law enforcement permitted public genealogy databases, and they are family tree DNA and GEDmatch Pro. Once this happens, we're able to obtain a list of potential genetic relatives and some indication of how these individuals are related to our unknown, but also how these individuals might be related to each other, and when we get that information, what we'd like to do is to be able to identify those individuals and then start building their family trees. So here's an example let's just say we have match one, and when we say match one we're referring to one individual on that list of genetic relatives that shares some DNA with our unknown deceased. The first thing we need to do is to identify who that person is, and to do this we are very reliant on publicly available information, including public records and historic records. 

Kate FollingtonHost

26:44

In this, case, they finally found people who had links to the DNA markers for both his paternal and his maternal sites one of the benefits of having a male skeleton. And you might be wondering how they filter out potentially hundreds of people and hone in on a possible close relative from such a long time ago. They use a tool within the DNA database sites which helps them to match up people who have a high centimorgan. The centimorgan is a value placed on the highest likely genetic match to the DNA placed into the system. Once they are able to find those individuals, they can start to build back the family trees by learning more about them from public records. This method immediately discounted the pirate man Martin Weiberg. His public records, like his prison record, which you can find online, offered clues to his descendants' names, but any ancestral DNA in public databases simply didn't match well to the DNA markers they had for the Sandy Point man. Basically, they had low centimorgans. 

Dr Runa Daniel Guest

27:47

Once we do that, we're able to then move up to the next generation or go back one generation to the parents, and again what we need to do is to identify who the parents are or were using public records and add them to the tree. And we keep doing this as we go back, building this tree up to previous generations. So here you can see that we would add both sets of grandparents and then all four sets of great-grandparents, depending on where we are in the case. We might decide to stop here and then look at another match of the unknown deceased. In this case we have match two. Again, we have some indication of how match two might be related to Sandy Point man and also to match one. So we identify who they are and their parents and we add them to the tree as well as both sets of grandparents and then their great-grandparents. So this is referred to as building back, building back up, and what we're looking for are any similarities between the trees of these individuals and in the case of the Sandy Point man, that's exactly what we found. What we found was that these two matches had great-grandparents in common, so this is a great find for us. When this happens, we refer to that particular couple as the most recent common ancestor, and that's the common ancestor that's shared between two individuals and that's the common ancestor that's shared between two individuals. That means that at the grandparent level, these individuals are actually siblings, these individuals are actually first cousins and it's correct that these two were second cousins, based on the information that we obtained from the public genealogy databases. 

29:45

Okay, let's have a look at these great-grandparents in more detail. This happened in the Sandy Point man case. We found a most recent common ancestor between the paternal and maternal sides. What happens when you find a most recent common ancestor is you need to then conduct research, genealogical research, to find more information about this couple and about all of their children, and what we found was that there was another child, a son, who married and had a daughter. Now, remember, we're actually gaining all of this information from public records and historic records the daughter married and what we knew from our information and what has come from the genealogy databases is that particular couple the mum and dad that I'm showing you here. They were likely to be the parents of Sandy Point man. So what we also checked was that the relationship between Sandy Point man, if he was to be in that position with Match 1 and 2, was actually going to be second cousins and that's correct. 

30:55

So this is how we start to use the information we have to guide how we are distributing our work, the information we have to guide how we are distributing our work. If they upload a tree, we can also get an idea of what the ancestral surnames are in the tree and potential ways that they might be related to Sandy Point man. And again, what we found was that the same individuals had uploaded into both databases and that really helps us to be able to figure out how these individuals are related and whether they're on the maternal able to figure out how these individuals are related and whether they're on the maternal or paternal side. So who are we looking for? We get to this point and this is what we know. We have a few of those individuals have what we would say close enough relationships to Sandy Point man to be considered worthy of us building a tree, and they are in the 200 to 300 centimorgan range that we were able to use the information to start to group individuals who were related to each other and those that were not. What's really important to us is our access to publicly available records primary records, electoral cemetery, military records, newspapers and good old Google searches and this is basically what we're using the information that I've just described and we are going to try to group them according to potential maternal and paternal sides, and then what we need to do is to find a connection between the maternal and paternal sides. And then what we need to do is to find a connection between the maternal and paternal sides, and this could potentially lead us to Sandy Point Man's parents, and that's exactly what happened. 

32:33

So once we got to that point, we needed to figure out which one of that couple's children could be Sandy Point man, and this is actually his family tree. 

32:43

But this is a pedigree chart, so this just shows your direct descendants, and on the left-hand side, which is the paternal side, you can see match one and match two, and on the right-hand side, the maternal side, matched three and matched four, and remember that CM value. 

32:59

We know how far back we should be building approximately to find a most recent common ancestor, and what we noted is that Oliver Mason's sister, charlotte Mason, had married Elizabeth Moore's brother, Cornelius Moore, and they are the couple that linked both sides. So that's the union couple and, based on our analysis, we knew that their children one of them was likely to be Sandy Point man Cornelius Moore and Charlotte Mason had two sons and two daughters. With Sandy Point man being male, we can immediately exclude the two daughters. So then we had two sons. One son was Francis Moore, who was born in 1890 and died in 1962. His whereabouts throughout his life were known, so we excluded him as a possible candidate for Sandy Point man, and he died in 1962. They had another son, Christopher Luke Moore, born in 1899 and based on a headstone that Fiona has shown you. He died in 1928. 

Kate Follington Host

34:11

And this was the breakthrough they needed. They needed a match with DNA probability, a family tree that matches the name of one of the potential drowning victims and a date of death that matched the dental records. It was indeed one of the men identified by Fiona earlier on Christopher Moore. He was originally disregarded because he had a headstone and Fiona had made the assumption that there was probably also a body. In fact, as they discovered later, all that was buried in his grave was his jawbone. So what happened on that day in late December when he drowned? Fiona then went back to her records and ordered up his inquest record. 

Fiona Leahy Guest

34:51

So this was a very exciting moment, obviously for everybody, and, having established that Christopher Moore was the investigative lead, we returned to the historic record to see what we could find. Now, obviously, there's a number of Newspaper reports that were in Trove that described his drowning in Waratah Bay in 1928, in December, but a really critical document that we found was the record of the coronial inquest on 24th of January 1929. And this really provided a missing piece to this puzzle. It comprises a police statement, a really heartbreaking statement by Cornelius Moore, who was Christopher's father, and statements from two men who tried to rescue Christopher on that day at Waratah Bay. 

35:44

So the police officer, constable Hitch, he described first attending the beach on the night that Luke Moore, as he was known, drowned. And Constable Hitch, together with 18 men, searched the whole stretch of the beach from the Derby to Walkerville, which is a distance of 38 miles that's a long way but to no avail. They hadn't found anything. Yet only two weeks later, on the 15th of January 1929, it's quite incredible a local pastoralist, Mr Pilkington, who I mentioned earlier, reported that a jawbone had been found at Shallow Inlet, just four miles east of where the drowning had occurred. So Constable Hitch attended the site and searched the area and he failed to find any other remains. But he wrote in his statement, it would be possible for the remains to wash up on the beaches at Waratah and would not be found except if you were there to pick them up as soon as they came ashore, as the sand on this beach keeps moving about owing to the heavy surf caused by the ocean swell. So Cornelius Moore, Christopher's father, also makes a statement. So Cornelius Moore, Christopher's father, also makes a statement and he describes when they visited Waratah Bay, Waratah Beach, with his son and his son's family on the 30th of December and he heard that an alarm had been raised that some man was in difficulties. He ran to the water's edge and that's where he realised it was his own son. He actually went into the water to try to rescue him, but was struggling in the heavy breakers and had to go back to the shore. Christopher's brother, Francis, was also in the water trying to save him, and two other men were out there trying to save him. Cornelius Moore stayed at Sandy Point searching for the body of his son for 10 days before he decided to return to Buffalo, and then, on the 15th of January 1929, he returned to Waratah for the purpose of identifying a lower jawbone which had been found on the beach, and in his statement he says the jawbone produced is the lower jawbone, which I can identify as that of my son, Christopher Luke Moore, by one molar on the left side of the jaw missing and four fillings of vulcanite, two of which are on each side of the jaw. I have no doubt that what that is is the lower jaw bone of my son, Christopher Luke Moore. The deputy coroner also asked Cornelius whether his son was a good swimmer and he said yes. So, as we know, the remains of the Sandy Point skeleton was missing a lower jawbone, and we also found a reference in the ancestry material that the jawbone had been buried at Meeniyan Cemetery in the grave with Christopher's parents and with his wife, which explains the inscription that we found on the gravestone. 

38:43

We also found some military records from the First World War for Christopher, and he had enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1917 and he was a gunner and he fought in France with the 10th Field Artillery Brigade. I mean, I find it very sad that he went to the First World War and he got ill, he had influenza and was hospitalised, but he survived illness and he survived the war and he returned to Australia in August of 1919. What is interesting about his records is that it gives information that is useful for his identification and that is, in particular, his height at 175 centimetres, and that he had blue eyes and black hair and a fresh complexion, and, of course, this information accorded with the scientific findings that Runa has spoken about. We were also then interested in whether we could find any descendants of Christopher. I mean, who are we going to talk to about this identification, about? 

39:56

this identification and we started looking to ancestry and we could see that he married to Elizabeth Agnes Larkin in 1924 and that he had a daughter, Mary Moore. But sadly Mary died in 1998 and she never married and she didn't have any children. So his line finished with Mary and we were able to confirm this information with further records from her death certificate as well as a probate information. 

Kate FollingtonHost

40:27

It was time for the forensic team to share their findings with any of the living relatives in Australia. So the second hunt began. 

Dr Dadna Hartman Guest

40:34

So, having now developed the investigative lead and supporting historical documentation, our role is to now put together that brief of evidence to then be able to present to the coroner in charge of the case, and some of the work that was done was to try, as Fiona mentioned, find senior next of kin with whom we could speak to about the case and our findings and also, if possible, obtain a DNA sample that we could then compare to the remains to further substantiate the findings. This was indeed Christopher Luke Moore, but we were fortunate enough that in this case we had family members who were willing to provide that sample for comparison and in July 2023, his Honour Coroner John Kane issued his findings that indeed, sandy Point man was Christopher Luke Moore. 

Kate Follington Host

41:38

That's Dr Dadna Hartman and her colleagues from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine speaking about their use of fig processes to solve the Sandy Point case. There are at present over a hundred unidentified human remains that have been reported reported to the coroner. The great-niece of Christopher Moore, Kathy Hogan of Leongatha, told the media at the time that the discovery of Christopher's body had offered closure for the family and they were able to bury Christopher next to his parents and his wife at Meeniyan Cemetery. You're listening to Look History in the Eye, the podcast of the Public Record Office of Victoria. The archive of the State Government. 

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