Tamam Shud case (the Somerton Man)

On the morning of December 1, 1948, a well-dressed man was found dead, propped against the sea wall on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia. He carried no identification, the labels had been cut from his clothes, and the autopsy found signs that suggested poisoning but no poison. In a hidden pocket of his trousers police found a tiny rolled scrap printed with the words Tamam Shud, meaning ended or finished, torn from a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The copy it came from was later handed in; on its back cover were five lines of capital letters that look like a code, and the phone number of a local nurse, Jessica Thomson, who denied knowing him.¹

Because South Australia hosted the Woomera rocket range as the Cold War began, many suspected a spy, and the unbroken code fed the idea. In 2021 his body was exhumed, and in July 2022 University of Adelaide professor Derek Abbott and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that DNA from hairs in his plaster death mask matched the family of Carl Webb, a Melbourne electrical engineer born in 1905. South Australian police and forensic authorities have not formally confirmed the identification, and the cause of death and meaning of the code remain unknown.¹²