Strangest fact
A man found dead on an Adelaide beach in 1948 had the labels cut from his clothes and a hidden scrap reading 'Tamam Shud', meaning 'it is ended'.
Why it is odd: He carried almost no clues except a line of poetry about endings, and the book it came from held an unsolved code.
On the morning of December 1, 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia, lying back with his head resting against the seawall. The labels had been removed from his clothes. Police could not work out who he was or exactly how he died, and the case became one of Australia's most famous mysteries.
Months later, investigators found a tiny rolled scrap of printed paper in a small hidden pocket sewn inside his trouser pocket. It bore the words "Tamam Shud," Persian for "ended" or "finished." The words are the last line of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of Persian poems popular in English translation. Months later, police found the copy of the book the scrap had been torn from. In the back were faint marks of five lines of capital letters that look like a code. The book itself was later lost, and no one has ever convincingly decoded the letters.
Because of the code, the hidden pocket and the timing at the start of the Cold War, people suggested he was a spy. The case was never closed. In May 2021, with the approval of South Australia's Attorney-General, the man's body was exhumed, meaning dug up, from Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery so forensic scientists could try to get his DNA.
In July 2022, Derek Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide who had studied the case for about 15 years, and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that they had identified the man. Using DNA from hairs caught in a plaster bust made of the man after his death, they built a family tree from distant relatives and named him as Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria. Abbott said he was 99.9 percent confident.
Police have not confirmed the name. In July 2026, ABC News reported that South Australia Police called their coronial investigation, the inquiry that reports to the coroner, complex and ongoing.
Even if the name is confirmed, Abbott has said the cause of death may never be known, and the code in the book is still unread.