The Body on Somerton Beach

On December 1, 1948, a dead man was found slumped against a wall on Australia’s Somerton Beach. The man was allegedly well dressed, wearing a full suit and polished shoes, with no signs of trauma, and his identity and cause of death remained unknown to police.

Upon investigation, police made unusual discoveries about the man’s clothing; one of his pants pockets was repaired with an unusual type of orange thread, and the tags and labels on his clothing had been cut off. All That’s Interesting reports that investigators couldn’t even find money, a wallet, or any identification on him.

While the man’s body was being examined, pathologist John Matthew Dwyer noted a couple of  irregularities, such as the fact that the man’s pupils were small and unusually shaped, and the man had blood in his stomach which suggested the presence of “some irritant poison;” however, subsequent tests found that there was no poison in the man’s blood, leading some investigators to believe that the man digested digitalis and strophanthin, two lethal poisons that don’t leave a trace. Though the coroner’s determined that the man had died of heart failure, a cause of death couldn’t be determined.

A renewed search of the man’s possessions occurred several months later and this time, investigators found a small pocket sewn into the waistband of the man’s pants, where a folded piece of paper that read “Tamám Shud,” Persian for “it’s finished,” or “it has ended,” was found. Parade claims that the paper came from a rare book called ‘The Rubaiyat,’ a 12th century work of poetry. Police searched for a copy of the book and couldn’t find it until a man came into the police station with a copy, where the last page of the book that contained “Tamám Shud” had been torn out. The man claimed that he had found the book in the back of his car that he had left parked near Somerton Beach but initially thought nothing of it until he read about the search in a newspaper and realized it was the book that police were searching for.

Inside of the book, investigators found two unlisted phone numbers and a strange code. The first number led nowhere, but the second number led to a nurse named Jessica Ellen “Jo” Thompson who lived on the beach. Thompson claimed that she sold the book to a man named Alfred Boxall who was still alive and had his copy of the book that Thompson had sold him. While Thompson claims that she didn’t know the man, police claim that she reacted strangely to seeing a plaster cast of the man's face and almost fainted.

The man's cause of death remains a mystery to this day, but Derek Abbott, a professor at University of Adelaide claims that he believes he has discovered the identity of the man using hair found among the original evidence. Abbott believes that the man was named Carl “Charles” Webb who was a local engineer.

After more than 70 years, many details of the case still remain unknown.