On the morning of 1 December 1948, beachgoers at Somerton Park, just south of Adelaide, found a man slumped against the seawall as if asleep. He was around 40, fit, well dressed in a suit and polished shoes — on a hot Australian summer morning — and dead. He carried no wallet, no ID, and no hat, and every label had been cut out of his clothes.
The autopsy deepened the puzzle: his organs suggested poisoning, yet no poison was ever identified. Australia had a corpse nobody could name, dying in a way nobody could explain.
“Tamám Shud”
Months later, re-examiners found a tiny rolled scrap of paper deep in the fob pocket of his trousers. Printed on it were two Persian words: Tamám Shud — “it is ended.” The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and when a member of the public produced the very book — tossed, he said, into his unlocked car near the beach — its back cover held faint pencil markings: five lines of capital letters that read like a code, plus a phone number.
The number belonged to a nurse living minutes from where the body was found. She denied knowing the man — unconvincingly, in the opinion of nearly everyone who has studied the case since. The pencilled letters have never been decrypted, despite decades of attempts by naval intelligence, cryptographers and hobbyists. Cold War spy theories attached themselves to the case and never let go.
The professor who wouldn’t drop it
University of Adelaide professor Derek Abbott spent more than a decade pursuing the case, eventually securing the exhumation of the body in 2021. Working with American forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, he extracted DNA from remaining hair and built a family tree of thousands of names.
In July 2022 they announced their result: the Somerton Man was Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905, whose marriage had collapsed and who had quietly dropped out of every record in 1947. Police conducted their own confirmatory testing following the announcement, and the identification is now widely accepted.
Named, but not explained
A name, it turns out, is not the same as an answer. Why were the labels cut from Webb’s clothes? What killed him? What do the pencilled letters mean, and why did a dying man carry a torn message reading “it is ended”? Webb reportedly wrote poetry and had an interest in the darker corners of verse — suggestive, perhaps, of a planned final act rather than espionage. But that remains inference.
Seventy-odd years of mystery ended with a name on a family tree. The last page of this particular book, though, still hasn’t been found.
