Tamam Shud case
1948 unsolved death of an unidentified man in Somerton, South Australia
An unidentified body on an Adelaide beach in 1948, a scrap of paper reading "tamám shud" torn from a book of Persian poetry, and a sequence of letters on the back cover that no one has cracked. The Somerton Man case sits at the edge of Cold War paranoia and cipher obsession - still unresolved, still pulling attention.
Tamam Shud case is read about 1,107 times a day, in 25 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 1 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 403 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?Also in Deutsch
Media & music
About this person
On 1 December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Park beach in South Australia. Months later, police discovered a scrap of paper in his fob pocket printed with the Persian phrase "tamám shud" - "It is finished" - torn from the final page of a copy of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. A public appeal turned up the book itself, and on the inside back cover detectives found indentations: a telephone number, another number, and what looked like a coded message that has never been satisfactorily deciphered. The timing - early Cold War - and the unexplained details fed decades of speculation about poison, espionage, and why the body was never identified. In July 2022, genealogist Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and University of Adelaide professor Derek Abbott used DNA from the man's hair to name him Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer born in 1905, though South Australia Police have not verified the conclusion.