The Somerton Man, Named at Last

At about half past six on the morning of 1 December 1948, a body was found propped against the seawall on Somerton Park beach, south of Adelaide. The man was around forty-five, athletic, clean-shaven, dressed in a suit and polished shoes on a warm summer morning. There was no wallet, no identification, and no hat — unusual for a man of that period. An unsmoked cigarette lay on his collar. Witnesses the previous evening had seen a man in that spot who moved his arm once and then lay still; they assumed he was drunk or asleep.

The autopsy found a congested spleen, a damaged liver, and blood in the stomach — a pattern consistent with poisoning by a substance the laboratory could not detect. No poison was ever identified. Every label had been removed from his clothing. His fingerprints and dental records matched no one, in Australia or in the international records circulated afterwards.

Tamám Shud

Months later, a pathologist re-examining the clothing found a tightly rolled scrap of paper sewn into a hidden fob pocket in the trousers. Printed on it were two words: Tamám Shud — 'it is ended', the closing line of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. A public appeal produced the book itself: a rare copy, found by a man in his unlocked car parked nearby, with the corresponding piece torn from the final page. In the back were faint pencilled capitals in five lines, one struck out — a code that Australian naval intelligence, the FBI and generations of amateurs have never broken, and which the leading statistical analyses suggest may be initials rather than cipher.

Also pencilled in the book was an unlisted telephone number belonging to a young nurse, Jessica Thomson, who lived a few hundred metres from where the body was found. She acknowledged giving a copy of the Rubáiyát to an army officer named Alf Boxall during the war — but Boxall turned up alive in Sydney in 1949, his copy intact. Thomson's manner when shown the plaster death mask was described by police as being close to fainting, and she declined for the rest of her life to say more. A suitcase, checked into the Adelaide railway station cloakroom the previous day, held tools, stencilling brushes of a kind used by merchant seamen, and clothing with the labels removed — except for three garments marked with the name 'Keane'. No Keane was ever found.

It is ended.

— The scrap sewn into the dead man's pocket

The name

The case became Australia's most-argued mystery, generating theories of Cold War espionage, a jilted lover, and a secret son. The answer, when it came, was methodical rather than dramatic. Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide had spent years working on the case; a plaster death mask made in 1949 retained hairs embedded in its surface. Abbott, with the American genetic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, extracted a DNA profile from a single rootless hair and built the family tree outward from distant matches — the same technique that had caught the Golden State Killer.

In July 2022 they announced the name: Carl 'Charles' Webb, born in Melbourne in 1905, an electrical engineer and instrument maker, estranged from his wife Dorothy, who had left him and moved to South Australia. He had no known intelligence connections, and no relatives had ever reported him missing. South Australia Police, working from the exhumed remains, later reported their own results as consistent with the identification.

So the man has a name, an occupation, and a reason to have travelled to Adelaide. What he died of, why every label had been cut from his clothes, what the pencilled letters meant, and what Jessica Thomson knew and would not say — those parts of the file remain exactly where they were in 1948.