Tamam Shud case

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 poiso…