Background
On the morning of 1 December 1948 a man's body was found propped against the seawall at Somerton Park beach, south of Adelaide. He carried no identification or wallet and every label had been cut from his clothing. Police could not identify him, and the case became known as the Somerton Man or Tamam Shud case.
What happened
In a hidden pocket of his trousers was a small paper scrap printed with the Persian phrase "tamám shud," roughly "it is finished." It had been torn from the last page of a rare 1941 New Zealand edition of Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát. After a public appeal, a man handed in the matching book, saying he had found it in a car parked in Glenelg.
Indentations in the back of the book revealed five lines of capital letters, a coded text, and a telephone number. The number belonged to a nurse living about 400 metres from where the body lay. In January 1949 a suitcase linked to the man was found at Adelaide railway station.
Investigation and identification
The cause of death was never established. The autopsy found no foreign substance; the coroner considered poisoning likely but could not say whether it was self-administered or inflicted by another person. In 1994 a Victorian judge found digitalis the probable agent. In 1978 defence cryptographers said the text was too short to decode, and later analyses suggested the letters might be the initials of English words.
The body was exhumed in 2021. In July 2022 Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick said he was Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer born in Melbourne. The identification relied on DNA from hair embedded in his plaster death mask and genetic genealogy. South Australia Police have not independently verified the result but said they were "cautiously optimistic."
Where it stands today
Although the man's likely identity is now widely accepted, the cause of death and the meaning of the code remain unknown. Researchers have suggested he may have taken his own life, but this is unproven. The Somerton Man remains one of Australia's best-known unsolved mysteries.