A body on the beach
On December 1, 1948, a man's body was found on Somerton Park beach, south of Adelaide. He was dressed in a suit and tie, but all labels from his clothing had been removed. He carried no wallet and no identification. An autopsy determined he was in his early 40s and in peak physical condition, with Well-defined calf muscles. Pathologists suspected he was killed by a fast-acting, untraceable poison. His spleen was found to be three times its normal size, and his organs were filled with blood. Unable to identify him, police had the body embalmed on December 10, 1948, and a plaster cast made of his head and shoulders. He was eventually buried in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery under a simple headstone: "Here lies the Unknown Man".
Months into the investigation, a small, rolled-up piece of paper was found in a hidden fob pocket of the man's trousers. It contained two printed words: 'Tamám Shud'. The phrase is Persian for "It is ended" or "It is finished" and was identified as being torn from the final page of a poetry collection, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A nationwide police appeal located the specific copy of the book, which had been placed in an unlocked car parked near Somerton beach around the time of the man's death. In the back of this book, written in faint pencil, was a sequence of capital letters, with one line crossed out:
MRGOABABD ~~MLIAOI~~ MTBIMPANETP MLIABOAIAQC ITTMTSAMSTGAB
This five-line text is one of the most famous unsolved codes in Australian history.
The code and the engineer
Despite analysis by Australia's top code-breakers, the message has never been deciphered. Theories about its meaning include a complex one-time pad cipher used by Cold War spies to a simple memory aid. More recent analysis suggests the letters may be acronyms for a series of Adelaide-area railway stations, showing a search. This theory aligns with the 2022 breakthrough in identifying the man himself.
After his body was exhumed in May 2021, researchers used forensic genetic genealogy on hairs found embedded in the original 1948 plaster death mask. In July 2022, Professor Derek Abbott and American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced they had identified the Somerton Man as Carl “Charles” Webb, a 43-year-old electrical engineer and instrument maker from Melbourne. Webb was born on November 16, 1905, and had separated from his wife Dorothy in 1946. Supporting this identification, a suitcase found at Adelaide railway station and linked to the man contained clothing marked with the name "T. Keane"—the name of Webb's brother-in-law. While this identification has been widely accepted by researchers, it has not yet been officially confirmed by South Australian Police.