Tamám Shud (Somerton Man)

“Taman Shud” is how most people first meet the Somerton Man case, one of Australia’s most famous unsolved deaths. On the morning of 1 December 1948, an unknown man was found dead against the seawall on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia. The labels had been cut from his clothes and he carried no identification. Months later, a tiny rolled slip of paper was found in a hidden pocket of his trousers. It bore the printed words “Tamám Shud”, Persian for “it is ended”, torn from the last page of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In July 2022, a DNA study led by Professor Derek Abbott named the man as Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne. How and why he died is still not known.

Taman Shud or Tamám Shud?

The words on the slip were “Tamám Shud”. Early newspaper and police reports printed them as “Taman Shud”, with an n, and that spelling stuck in the press and in many later books. That is why both spellings are used for the case today. The phrase is the colophon at the end of the Rubaiyat, the Persian quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam and made famous in English by Edward FitzGerald. It simply marks the end of the book, much like “The End”.

The Body on the Beach

On the evening of 30 November 1948, people walking on Somerton Beach noticed a well-dressed man lying on the sand with his head against the seawall. One couple saw him at about 7 pm extend his right arm fully and then let it drop. Another couple watched him from about 7.30 to 8 pm and did not see him move. Both took him for a drunk sleeping it off. One witness later told police she had seen a man at the top of the beach steps looking down at the sleeper.

At about 6.30 the next morning, the man was found dead in the same spot. The finder named in The Advertiser was Mr J. Lyons of Whyte Road, Somerton. The dead man lay with his legs stretched out and his feet crossed. He was neatly dressed in a suit and tie. He was about 40 to 45 years old, in good physical shape, and had no identification at all.

The Autopsy

The pathologist, Dr John Dwyer, found no wounds and no sign of violence. The spleen was about three times its normal size. The liver and other organs were congested, and under the microscope the centres of the liver lobules were destroyed. His last meal was a pasty, eaten three or four hours before death. Death was estimated at about 2 am on 1 December. Tests found no foreign substance in the body.

Dwyer was sure that death “could not have been natural”. Coroner Thomas Erskine Cleland reached a careful verdict at the inquest in June 1949. He said he was prepared to find that the man died from poison, probably a glucoside, but could not say whether he took it himself or someone gave it to him. Later writers suggested digitalis or ouabain, two heart poisons that were hard to detect at the time. In 1994, former Victorian Chief Justice John Harber Phillips reviewed the case and wrote that there seemed little doubt it was digitalis. No test has ever confirmed that.

What He Carried

His pockets held an unused second-class rail ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach, a bus ticket from the city, a narrow American-made aluminium comb, a half-empty packet of Juicy Fruit gum, an Army Club cigarette packet holding seven Kensitas cigarettes, and a quarter-full box of Bryant and May matches. There was no wallet and no money to speak of.

On 14 January 1949, police found a brown suitcase at the Adelaide railway station cloakroom. It had been checked in after 11 am on 30 November 1948. The labels on the clothes inside had also been removed. Among the contents was a card of orange Barbour waxed thread, the same kind used to mend a pocket of the dead man’s trousers. The suitcase did not lead to a name.

The Scrap in the Fob Pocket

Around the time of the inquest, in June 1949, a closer search of the trousers found a tiny fob pocket sewn inside a trouser pocket. In it was a tightly rolled scrap of paper printed with “Tamám Shud”. It had been torn from a printed book, and it was soon matched to the Rubaiyat.

Police appealed for the copy it came from. On 22 July 1949, a man the police called Ronald Francis handed one in. He said he had found it in the back of his open car on Jetty Road, Glenelg. Accounts disagree on whether that was a week or two before the body was found or just after. The book was a 1941 edition of FitzGerald’s translation published by Whitcombe and Tombs of Christchurch, New Zealand. Its last page was torn where the words should have been.

The Code

Indentations on the back of the book showed pencilled capital letters in five lines. The second line was struck out. The first letter of the first line could be W or M, though W is widely accepted.

WRGOABABD MLIAOI WTBIMPANETP MLIABOAIAQC ITTMTSAMSTGAB

Nobody has ever decoded it. In 2004, retired detective Gerry Feltus suggested the last line might be the first letters of a phrase beginning “It’s Time To Move To South Australia”. Between 2009 and 2011, Derek Abbott’s students at the University of Adelaide ran statistical tests and concluded that each letter was most likely the first letter of a word, not a random string. In 2014, researcher John Rehling also found support for an English initialism but no matching text, and suggested it might be a private shorthand whose meaning may never be recovered.

The Nurse in Glenelg

The book also held a local telephone number and a second, unidentified number. The local number belonged to Jessica “Jo” Thomson, born Jessie Harkness in Marrickville, New South Wales, in 1921. She lived in Moseley Street, Glenelg, about 400 metres north of where the body was found. She told police she was married. She was not. She married Prosper Thomson in May 1950, after his divorce was finalised. She asked police to keep her name out of the case, and her real name was not made public until 2002.

When Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane showed her a plaster cast of the dead man, he said she was “completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint”. Paul Lawson, who made the cast, recalled that she looked away and would not look at it again. She denied knowing the man.

She did say that during the war she had given a copy of the Rubaiyat to an army officer named Alf Boxall. In August 1945, at the Clifton Gardens Hotel in Sydney, she had given it to him inscribed and signed “JEstyn”. Police found Boxall alive in Sydney in July 1949. His copy was a different edition with its final page intact. He died in 1995. Thomson never gave a fuller account and died in 2007.

The Spy Theory

The case came early in the Cold War, and the cut labels, the hidden pocket and the code led many writers to suspect espionage. A book code or one-time pad would fit the idea that the Rubaiyat was a key. Thomson’s refusal to talk added to the speculation. No intelligence service has ever claimed the man, and no document has linked him to spying. The 2022 identification points to an ordinary civilian life.

Grave and Flowers

The man was buried in West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide, on 14 June 1949. Years later, flowers began to appear on the grave. Police questioned a woman seen leaving the cemetery, but she said she knew nothing about him.

Who Was the Somerton Man?

Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide spent years on the case. In 2010 he married Rachel Egan, daughter of Jessica Thomson’s son Robin, who was born in July 1947 and died in 2009. Abbott thought Robin might be the dead man’s son, and pushed for the body to be exhumed. South Australia’s Attorney-General, Vickie Chapman, approved the exhumation in October 2019, and it took place on 19 May 2021.

On 26 July 2022, Abbott and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that DNA from the man’s hair matched living relatives of Carl “Charles” Webb. Webb was born in Footscray, Victoria, on 16 November 1905, and worked as an electrical engineer and instrument maker. He married Dorothy “Doff” Robertson on 4 October 1941. She left him in September 1946, citing abuse, and he moved out in 1947. She later filed for divorce, which was granted in 1952. Dorothy said he wrote poems, most of them about death, which he called his greatest desire. Abbott’s research also found that Webb liked to bet on horses, which led him to suggest the code might list horse names.

South Australia Police did not confirm the result but said they were cautiously optimistic.

The Questions That Remain

The name answers the oldest question, not the hardest ones. Nobody knows why Webb came to Adelaide, why the labels were removed, what killed him, or what the letters mean. His link, if any, to Jessica Thomson is unknown. A man who wrote about longing for death, carrying the last words of a poem about death, may simply have chosen to end his life. A poisoning by someone else has never been ruled out. More than seventy years of theories have narrowed to one documented life and a handful of open questions.

Sources

• Tamam Shud case, Wikipedia