The Mangnoson Affair

• Sam, the Sandown Clown
• From "To Trip for God"

Thomm Quackenbush

The internet would have you believe this case is a conspiracy to silence a family. The truth of it is a tragedy, as the truth often is when the nucleus is a dead toddler.

Sergeant Ridley found Clive Mangnoson, aged almost two, a superphosphate sack next to his father on Largs Bay's shores. Ridley had been called by N.W. McRae, a neighbor and friend to the family, who had a dream of the location. Keith Waldemar Mangnoson and his son had been missing for four days after Keith left with his son to buy firewood. (It was not unusual for Keith to bring his child. He would let Clive ride atop the wheelbarrow of wood on the way back.) Policemen and civilians had searched "every nook and corner between Largs Bay and Outer Harbor, without result." Keith and the child may have gone unnoticed only because they were hidden among the dense boxthorns.

Keith was shivering, staring off into the ocean and mumbling, knees drawn to his chest. When Ridley tried to rouse him, Keith could say nothing coherent. Ridley also found an empty pill bottle and a copy of The Advertiser, dated from the 4th, after Keith and his son had gone missing.

Roma stated in the coroner's report, "I bathed and dressed Clive [...] and as I was doing so I noticed my husband was continually looking at the clock and repeated several times he would be late." He did not say (or she did not ask) for what he would be late, though it was certainly not to buy wood. She further testified, "When he rose from his bed two or three mornings last week I noticed he was shaking badly, and seemed to have a vacant look in his eyes." The report stated that Keith had refused dinner and breakfast before he went missing.

At 9:30 that fatal morning, he left with Clive and £2 to buy firewood. At 10:00, Roma suspected that he had "wandered away with the child," which is an odd leap to make within the span of half an hour unless this was a practiced concern. She went to the woodyard, where her husband and son had not been that morning. After asking around town a little, Roma reported them missing at the Semaphore Police Station.

Dr. Alan Percival Cherry, the family doctor, knew on sight that this was the body of Clive Mangnoson. Based on the clouding of the deceased's eyes, he suspected that Clive had been dead for more than a day -- though not the whole time they were missing.

Shortly before her child's death, a man had tried to run Roma over outside her home. She escaped unharmed but not unfazed. The driver exited. "A man with a khaki handkerchief over his face told me to 'keep away from the police -- or else.'" Keith fervently believed that a former coworker of his, Carl Thompsen, was the Somerton Man and sought to identify him. "My husband thought that he had worked with the man at Renmark," she told The Advertiser. "When he came home after seeing the body at the morgue he was so upset that he could hardly eat his tea." The Somerton Man is a still-unsolved case that was likely a murder, though both the man's identity and the poison used have yet to be discovered. Roma suspected that her encounter with the man and her husband's hunch were directly related. She had seen this same man loitering near her home before.

After Keith was checked out in the hospital and diagnosed as suffering from exposure, Detective R.F. Huie spoke to him about the circumstances in which he was found. On the morning of the 8th, Dr. A.W. Welch gave evidence "concerning the mentality of the patient." His physical condition was fair, but his mental state was "most irresponsive."

Under Section 25 of the Mental Defective Act, Keith was at once transferred to Parkside Mental Hospital. If he said anything after this, it is not on record, nor was his testimony to the detective available to us beyond the impression that it was incoherent and worrying.

According to the autopsy, performed June 6, 1949 (three days after his discovery), Clive had not died of natural causes, something that should not come as a surprise. The cold didn't help matters but did not kill him. He had not been injured before this. He died, as it were, healthy, aside from some lingering congestion from a case of bronchitis Clive had yet to fully get over.

After Clive's death, Roma received phone calls saying that she would suffer an accident if she kept trying to figure out what had happened to her son. According to The Advertiser, Acting Mayor of Port Adelaide A.H. Curtis and secretary of the Largs North Progress Association J.M. Gower received several calls of their own, threatening "accidents" on Roma or them if they stuck their nose in the "Mangnoson affair." Notably, none mentioned the Somerton Man, but internet sleuths still assume the connection. A police detective suspected these calls were a specific hoaxer's work with a penchant for harassing grieving women because the death of a two-year-old apparently lacked for villains.

Keith was thirty-five at the time of his son's death. He had left home at fourteen and worked on farms until the early 1940s. After once being missing for several days, he was found in an empty horse trough, unconscious and suffering from severe sunburn. He spent weeks in the Loxton Public Hospital, then was sent to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and then to the Convalescent Hospital at Magill. The attending doctor told Ira Caroline Mangnoson, his mother, that Keith was not responding to treatment and to have him placed at the Enfield Receiving Home, where he remained for three months. After his first stint in Enfield, Keith had "a most peculiar haunted look in his eyes," according to Dr. Cherry. The doctor decided that he ought to keep tabs on Keith because he "was not normal mentally."

In 1941, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces, where he served as a Private, which infected him both with malaria and war neurosis. War had not made him mentally ill, but it exacerbated the worst of his illness. After he was discharged from the hospital in 1945, he moved back into his mother's home, where he remained until marrying the fifteen-year-old Roma, six months after meeting her. He moved into Susan May McIntyre's home -- Roma's mother -- next door to his own mother's home. It is unclear if her mother-in-law mentioned Keith's delicate position. However, it is difficult to believe Roma was unaware that she was marrying a man with profound mental health issues.

Keith purchased the home from McIntyre, though with the condition that she be allowed to keep a room there.

On June 14, 1948, Roma left Keith with Clive in the home while she went to the movies, at which point "a fire occurred in the back portion of the house." The statement does not assign blame for this fire, though it does clarify that the insurance company would not pay for most of what was lost. Roma stated, "the incident seemed to worry my husband and from then he seemed to lose interest in the home and everything else except Clive [...] to whom he was very much attached." He thereafter "suffered severely with a relapse of war neurosis."

Months before Clive's death, Keith left the house with £20 -- around $900 in 2021 American dollars -- and the plans for a new home he intended to build on land he had purchased through the Repatriation Department. He returned four days later, shaking and "seemed to be a nervous wreck," unable to explain what had happened to the money and plans. Dr. Cherry examined Keith and ordered him back to Enfield, where he remained for seven weeks.

On February 17, 1949, he began receiving a war pension of over ten pounds every two weeks. On March 31, it was nearly halved. On April 13, Roma reported a miscarriage to her doctor. While there is no direct mention of a connection between what Keith would do in a month and a half, one can suspect that these losses may have pushed his hand closer.

McIntyre had a prescription for Phenobarbitone, the full bottle she kept behind ornaments on the top chest of drawers in her bedroom. (She stated that she had never even opened it.) After Keith was reported missing, she noticed that it, too, was gone. Before this, Roma had found a few of these pills in his shirt pocket in the wardrobe. When asked about this, Keith said that he had discovered them in the sand and did not want Clive to stumble upon them. The report was not clear if she believed this, but it is a claim that could be owed some skepticism.

Dr. J.M. Dwyer, who performed the autopsy, stated on the first page of the coroner's report that Clive had died of barbiturates -- precisely the class that Phenobarbitone falls under. Still, to be sure, Dwyer retained for analysis Clive's brain, blood, kidneys, stomach, and its contents to further test for barbiturate poisoning. On the internet, it states that the cause of his death was either "unknown" or "a mysterious poison," like with the Somerton Man, but Dwyer's expert assessment was something not only known but available at the scene.

As far as we know, Keith never explained how Clive and he had spent the four days. Dwyer's report stated that Clive appeared "well-nourished;" Keith had not been neglecting to feed his child during this time. Dwyer found "a little partly digested food in the stomach with some fluid and a number of white granules up to 2mm in diameter."

It is no great mystery or conspiracy. Looking at the facts as presented, we have a profoundly mentally ill person who may have decided that he needed to overdose to exit this world and take his beloved child with him. Mr. T.E. Cleland, J.P., City Coroner -- who also worked on the Somerton Man case -- stated in that report would show "not only how, when, and by what means the deceased came to his death but also that he came to his death by being murdered by his father." It could not be more clearly stated, and yet this goes ignored because it is more depressing and mundane than the internet would want it.

Keith Waldemar Mangnoson died in 1991 at the age of 77, having lived with what he did for over forty years. We are left to wonder at and hope for moments of lucidity so that he could process the loss of his beloved son by his hands.