MYS0CVC1SMW1WNQ·Mystery · event

The Somerton Man (Tamam Shud)

Australian police · Public domain

Found: 6:30 am, 1 December 1948, Somerton Park beach, Adelaide⁠[2]
Inquest: June 1949; adjourned without finding identity or cause; resumed 1958 with no new finding⁠[1]
Pathologist's view: Death not natural; probably poison taken with suicidal intent (J. B. Cleland)⁠[1]
Tamam Shud: Scrap torn from the last page of a 1941 Whitcombe and Tombs Rubaiyat, found in a fob pocket in June 1949⁠[2]
The code: Five lines of capitals pencilled in the back of that book, the second struck out; 44 letters in the rest⁠[2]
Exhumed: 19 May 2021, West Terrace Cemetery⁠[2]
Proposed identity: Carl 'Charles' Webb, born Footscray 16 November 1905 (Abbott and Fitzpatrick, 26 July 2022)⁠[5]
Official status: Not confirmed; police report to the coroner pending as of 6 July 2026⁠[7]
Status: Partly explained
Questions: 0 of 4 answered

People Carl 'Charles' WebbElectrical instrument maker of Melbourne; proposed identity Derek AbbottProfessor of electrical engineering, University of Adelaide Colleen FitzpatrickForensic genealogist, Identifinders International Jessica Thomson (born Harkness)Nurse whose number was in the book John Burton ClelandPathologist who examined the body and found the scrap

Catalog keyMYS0CVC1SMW1WNQ

Early on 1 December 1948 a well-dressed man was found dead, propped against the sea wall at Somerton Park, a beach suburb of Adelaide. He carried no identification and the labels had been cut from his clothes. The pathologist found congested organs and no natural cause, and thought he had been poisoned; no poison was identified⁠[1]⁠[2]. In June 1949 a rolled scrap of paper printed "Tamam Shud" ("it is ended") was found in a hidden fob pocket. It had been torn from a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that a man handed to police in July; in the back of the book were five lines of pencilled capitals and an unlisted telephone number belonging to a Glenelg nurse, Jessica Thomson⁠[3]⁠[4]⁠[2].

The inquest was adjourned in 1949 without finding who he was or how he died, and the case became Australia's best known unsolved death⁠[1]. In 2009 Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide began working on it with his students. In July 2022 he and the American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that DNA from hairs embedded in the 1949 plaster bust matched relatives of Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905 who had left his wife in 1947⁠[5]⁠[6]. South Australia Police, which exhumed the body in May 2021, called itself "cautiously optimistic" but has not confirmed the identification; in July 2026 its report to the coroner was still being written⁠[6]⁠[7]. Of the 4 questions on this site, 0 are answered. The most likely answer to “How did he die?”, not yet confirmed: he took poison deliberately, probably a cardiac glycoside or a hypnotic.

Key questionsset by the editors

How did he die?Most likely: he took poison deliberately, probably a cardiac glycoside or a hypnotic

What are the five pencilled lines in the Rubaiyat?Most likely: the letters are the initial letters of words of an English text, written as personal shorthand

Who was the Somerton Man?Most likely: he was Carl "Charles" Webb, born in Footscray in 1905, an electrical instrument maker who left Melbourne in…

All 4 questions

What happened

The man is thought to have arrived in Adelaide by overnight train on 30 November 1948. He bought a rail ticket to Henley Beach that he did not use, left a brown suitcase in the station cloakroom, and took a bus toward Glenelg. Two couples on the beach that evening saw a man lying in the same spot, one of them around 7 pm, the other between 7:30 and 8 pm. He was found dead there at about 6:30 the next morning; the autopsy put death at about 2 am, found no foreign substance, and the pathologist John Dwyer was "quite convinced the death could not have been natural"⁠[2]. The suitcase, found in January 1949, held clothes with the name "T. Keane" or "Keane" and some cut labels; it was destroyed in 1986⁠[2].

Police photographs of the body and of where it lay, December 1948South Australia Police, 1948. Public domainArtifact

He was buried in West Terrace Cemetery in June 1949 after police made a plaster cast of his head and shoulders. The cast, which holds strands of his hair, is kept by the South Australia Police Historical Society⁠[2].

Map of the areaOpen the full map

Area Region

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Somerton Park beach, AdelaideBeach

Within 100 m

Glenelg, AdelaideSuburb

Within 1 km

West Terrace Cemetery, AdelaideCemetery

Within 1 km

Adelaide railway stationRailway station

Within 100 m

MappedWithin 1 kmNatural Earth

Timeline

Timeline

Squeezed where little happened. Each mark is a published claim, by how it stands:AcceptedMost likelyStill possibleDisputedRuled out

The accounts

The Rubaiyat was handed in on 22 July 1949 by a man who said he had found it in the back of his unlocked car at Glenelg around the time of the death; police used a pseudonym for him and he has never been named⁠[4]⁠[2]. The telephone number in it led to Jessica Thomson, who lived about 400 metres from where the body lay. Shown the cast, she said she did not know the man; the detective who made the cast described her as close to fainting. She asked that her name be kept out of the case, and it was not made public until much later⁠[2]. She said she had given a copy of the Rubaiyat to an army acquaintance, Alf Boxall, in 1945; Boxall was found alive in Sydney with his copy intact⁠[2].

The "Tamam Shud" scrapSouth Australia Police, 1949. Public domainArtifact

Webb's wife, Dorothy, described him as solitary, moody and violent, said he wrote poems about death, and said he had tried to kill himself with ether in March 1946. She left him in September 1946; he moved out in 1947 and she later divorced him for desertion. Her account is the main source on his state of mind⁠[2]⁠[5].

What was recorded

The coroner's 1949 inquest file survives in State Records of South Australia (GRG1/27, file 71/1949) and is open; the file of the 1958 resumed inquest is restricted. Police files are not in the archive because the case is open⁠[1]. The 1948 and 1949 autopsy reports themselves are missing⁠[2].

The pencilled text in the Rubaiyat is known from the police photograph. It reads WRGOABABD, a struck-out MLIAOI, WTBIMPANETP, MLIABOAIAQC (with an X above the second O) and ITTMTSAMSTGAB. The first letters of lines one and three may be M or W, the first of the last line I or V, and its third-last letter G or C⁠[2]⁠[8]. Naval and later Defence cryptographers could not read it; in 1978 the Department of Defence said there were "insufficient symbols" for a clear meaning and that it might be the product of a disturbed mind⁠[9]⁠[2].

The Rubaiyat (Whitcombe and Tombs, 1941) with the pencilled code and telephone numberSouth Australia Police, 1949. Public domainArtifact

In 2009 Abbott's students compared the 44 letters with letter frequencies in eight languages, with random letters written by 37 sober and 18 intoxicated volunteers, and with the initial letters of English text. The best fit by far, under first- and second-order Markov models, was the initial letters of English words; Playfair, Vigenère and one-time-pad readings keyed on the Bible and the Rubaiyat failed⁠[8]. A 2010 team searched large text collections for the code's initialism patterns and found none in the Rubaiyat⁠[10]. John Rehling (2014) also found the letters almost certainly an initialism of English but found no matching passage in more than 20,000 Project Gutenberg books⁠[11].

The DNA work went in stages. Abbott was allowed to take hair from the bust in 2011; in 2018 the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA recovered the full mitochondrial genome (haplogroup H4a1a1a); in 2022 an autosomal SNP profile from more hair was matched through genealogy databases to distant cousins on both sides of the Webb family, and the family tree narrowed the candidates to the one Webb sibling with no recorded death⁠[5]⁠[6]⁠[12]. Police exhumed the body on 19 May 2021 for their own testing, which has not been reported⁠[2]⁠[7].

The explanations

Identity. The Webb identification predicts that official DNA from the exhumed remains will match the Webb relatives and that no record of Webb's death elsewhere will turn up. It fits the "Keane" clothing, since Webb's sister Freda married a Thomas Keane⁠[5]. It has not been tested by an independent laboratory in public, and the police have said only that the result will be for the coroner to decide⁠[6]⁠[7]. Earlier proposed identities (the seaman H. C. Reynolds from a 1918 identity card, the Austrian milliner Carl Halban) rested on photographs or circumstance and are not supported by DNA⁠[2]. The theory that Robin Thomson, Jessica's son, was the man's child, based on shared rare ear and tooth features, was ruled out by DNA⁠[5].

Plaster bust (death cast) of the Somerton Man, with hair embeddedSouth Australia Police, 1949. Public domainArtifact

Death. The pathologist favoured suicide by poison; a 1994 review by John Harber Phillips suggested digitalis⁠[1]⁠[2]. Webb's history as his wife described it fits suicide, and Abbott and Fitzpatrick hold that view⁠[2]⁠[7]. Murder and espionage theories, built on the Cold War setting and the missing labels, have no physical evidence behind them⁠[2].

The code. The statistical work supports a list of initial letters of English words, written as shorthand, over a cipher; no source text has been found, and Abbott has suggested horse names, since Webb bet on races⁠[8]⁠[11]⁠[2].

Published claims

Published claims and their status

Year	Who	Claimed	Status	Reason
1949	Coroner Thomas Cleland⁠[1]	The man almost certainly died of poison, probably a glucoside, not taken by accident, though whether he took it himself could not be said.	Most likely	The organs pointed to poisoning and no natural disease was found, but no poison was ever detected⁠[1]
1949	Naval code experts, reported by The Advertiser⁠[9]	The pencilled letters in the Rubaiyat are a code that naval experts could not break.	Disputed	Playfair, Vigenère and one-time-pad readings all fail, and the letters behave like the initials of English words⁠[8]
2009	Andrew Turnbull and Denley Bihari, under Derek Abbott⁠[8]	The code is most likely the initial letters of an English text, not a cipher and not random letters.	Accepted	An independent n-gram analysis reached the same result, though no matching passage has been found⁠[11]
2013	Kate Thomson⁠[13]	Her mother Jessica Thomson knew who the man was, lied to police, and was linked to Soviet spying.	Still possible	It rests on what her mother told her, with no document behind it⁠[13]
2013	Roma and Rachel Egan⁠[13]	The Somerton Man was the father of Jessica Thomson's son Robin, who shared his rare ear and tooth traits.	Ruled out	DNA found no family link between Rachel Egan, Robin's daughter, and the man⁠[5]
2014	John Rehling⁠[11]	An n-gram analysis shows the code is almost certainly an initialism of short English text.	Accepted	It agrees with the Adelaide students' Markov tests⁠[8]
2022	Derek Abbott and Colleen Fitzpatrick⁠[5]	DNA from hair in the death mask identifies the man as Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical instrument maker from Melbourne born in 1905.	Accepted	Matches on both sides of Webb's family and the Keane names on clothes in the suitcase support it, though police have not yet reported to the coroner⁠[6]⁠[7]

What would settle it

The coroner's findings, based on police DNA from the exhumed remains compared with Webb relatives, would settle the identity. A source document for the code (a race card, a poem, a draft in Webb's hand) would settle the code, and handwriting comparison with any surviving Webb writing would at least show who wrote it. Cause of death is probably beyond reach: Abbott says the remains can tell nothing more about it⁠[7].