Unraveling the Mystery of the Somerton Man

On a chilly morning in December 1948, a couple found a man’s body propped up against the seawall of Somerton Beach in South Australia. He was dressed sharply, every label cut from his clothing, no wallet, no hat — and no one in Australia, or the world, knew who he was. The only thing in his pockets: a train ticket, a bus ticket, some Juicy Fruit gum, and a torn-out scrap of paper with the words “Tamám Shud” — Persian for “It is finished.” This is the Somerton Man case: Australia’s greatest unsolved mystery, a story of secret codes, vanished names, and decades of obsession.

The morning of December 1, 1948, police arrived at Somerton Park beach, about seven miles southwest of Adelaide. The unidentified man was around 5'11", fit, in his early 40s, with fair-to-ginger hair, grey eyes, and high, dancer-like calf muscles. He wore a fashionable, American-style, double-breasted jacket and brown trousers, but every single clothing label had been meticulously removed. His shoes were freshly polished. Not a scrap of ID. Even his dental records matched no one on file.

They found an unused train ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach, a used bus ticket, an American-made aluminium comb, a half-empty pack of Juicy Fruit, some matches, and seven cigarettes of a different brand hidden inside an Army Club packet. No wallet, no hat — which was considered almost unthinkable for a man in public at the time.

The autopsy offered more questions than answers. Pathologist John Burton Cleland noted his spleen was three times the normal size, his liver was engorged, and there was blood in his stomach. There was no sign of violence, but his organs were so congested it looked like poisoning — except, the toxicologists couldn’t find any trace of poison. Even the contents of his last meal, a pastry eaten three to four hours before death, showed nothing unusual. Cleland concluded: “I am quite convinced the death could not have been natural ... the poison I suggested was a barbiturate or a soluble hypnotic,” but admitted he could not find proof.

Two weeks after the body was found, another strange clue surfaced. Staff at the Adelaide railway station discovered a brown suitcase checked into the cloakroom after 11 a.m. on November 30 — just hours before the man is believed to have died. Inside: a red-checked dressing gown, slippers, shaving gear, pajamas, electrician’s tools, and a stenciling brush like those used on merchant ships. Most items had their labels ripped off, but three bore the name “Keane.” No one named Keane was missing anywhere in the English-speaking world, and police later speculated the tags might have been left intentionally as a red herring.

The suitcase held something else: a spool of bright orange Barbour brand waxed thread, a rare type not sold in Australia. This thread matched repairs found on the Somerton Man’s trousers, linking the case to the dead man. The coat inside the suitcase had American-style manufacturing details and had not been imported, suggesting the man himself had been to the United States or bought it off someone who had.

As the investigation unfolded, witnesses remembered seeing a well-dressed man lying in the same spot on Somerton Beach the previous evening. One couple saw him move his right arm, then drop it limply. Another realized he didn’t react to swarming mosquitoes and assumed he was drunk or asleep. Hours later, he lay dead in exactly the same position.

The real twist came months into the investigation. In a hidden pocket inside the man’s trousers, police found a tightly rolled scrap of paper. Its words: “Tamám Shud.” Detectives recognized the font as coming from a book of poetry: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Police issued a public appeal — and soon, a local man handed in a copy of the Rubaiyat missing its final page. It had been tossed into the back seat of his car, parked on Jetty Road in Glenelg, not far from where the body was found. The torn edge matched the scrap in the Somerton Man’s pocket.

But that book had even more. Imprinted on its back cover, detectives saw faint handwriting: a local telephone number, an untraceable number, and five lines of text, now famous as the “Somerton Man code.” The letters, grouped in what looked like a cipher, resisted all attempts at decoding. In 1978, Department of Defence cryptographers called it impossible to solve, stating the text was too short, possibly a meaningless product of a disturbed mind. Decades later, computational linguists thought the letters were the first letters of words, maybe a form of shorthand, but no one has ever cracked it.

The phone number led to Jessica Ellen “Jo” Thomson, a nurse living just 400 meters from where the body was found. When interviewed, she denied knowing him, but according to police, her reaction to a bust of the dead man was so shocked she nearly fainted. Years later, her daughter would say Jessica knew the man’s identity — and that knowledge was “known to a level higher than the police force.” Jessica’s son Robin had two rare genetic traits — a larger cymba than cavum in the ear, present in less than 2% of Caucasians, and hypodontia of both lateral incisors, also found in roughly 2% of people. The combination made some wonder if Robin was the Somerton Man’s child, but DNA links to the Thomson family have complicated this theory.

The case drew international attention. The FBI and Scotland Yard compared his fingerprints to their own records: nothing. At least eight different “positive” identifications were floated in the first few months — from missing woodcutters to Swedish sailors — and by 1953, police had received the 251st “solution” from the public, but none panned out.

Speculation swirled about espionage. The death occurred at the dawn of the Cold War, near secret sites like the Radium Hill uranium mine and the Woomera Test Range. A secret code, possible undetectable poison, and a dead man with no identity all fit a spy thriller. Some linked him to Alf Boxall, a military officer involved in wartime intelligence, but Boxall was found alive, and his copy of the Rubaiyat — a gift from Jessica Thomson — was intact.

In 1949, the Somerton Man was buried in West Terrace Cemetery by the Salvation Army, his service paid for by the South Australian Grandstand Bookmakers Association to prevent a pauper’s burial. For years, flowers appeared on his grave, and police reportedly saw a woman leaving the cemetery but she denied any connection.

For over 70 years, every new scientific advance brought hope of a breakthrough. In 2021, Operation Persevere exhumed the Somerton Man’s remains, using modern DNA techniques to search for his identity. In July 2022, Derek Abbott, a University of Adelaide professor, working with genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, identified him as Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer born in 1905 in Footscray, Melbourne, using hair DNA from a police plaster cast. South Australia Police have not yet verified this identification.

The book that inspired the mystery, Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery by Kerry Greenwood, won the 2013 Davitt Award, underscoring the case’s lasting grip on public imagination.

Here’s the kicker: the code scribbled in the Rubaiyat, the cause of death, and the reason Carl Webb — if it was him — ended up with no name, no ID, and a Persian phrase meaning “It is finished” in his pocket, remain open questions. And the original Rubaiyat used in the case is lost, making the solution to the code possibly impossible — unless someone, somewhere, still has a clue.