Mystery Unsolved Inc True Crime

The Mysterious Death Of The Somerton Man

"On December 1st, 1948, sixteen year old Neil Day was riding horses with a friend along Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia."

"When they passed the body of a man lying in the sand, the friends didn't pay much attention, thinking the man was simply napping on the beach. When they came back to find the man in the exact same position, they discovered he was actually dead. The man was clean shaven, wearing a dry and neatly pressed suit and tie. Oddly, all of he tags of his clothes had been removed and he was found with no belongings or form of identification. His fingerprints were not in any database and no one came forward to identify the man."

"A postmortem revealed the man had a strikingly enlarged spleen and internal bleeding in his stomach and liver. There were no indications of violence and no traces of poison. Symptoms of poisoning, such as vomiting, diarrhea, or convulsions were also not present. The coroner also found a pastie in his stomach. In the official publication of the investigation, the coroner wrote, 'I am unable to say who the deceased was. I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death.'"

"In January 1949, a month after the body was found, a suitcase was uncovered in the cloakroom of the Adelaide Railway Station. The suitcase, dropped off the day before the body was found, contained, among other odds and ends, clothing with the labels removed and a wax thread not sold in Australia but of the type used to repair the trousers found on the body. Many of these objects indicated that the man, whoever he was, had recently been in the United States. The name Keane, ending in E and Kean, ending in N were found on some of the items. According to an Adelaide newspaper, authorities concluded the name Kean had been left on the belongings to intentionally obscure the man's true identity."

"In April 1949, police came upon a mysterious clue that been overlooked in the four plus months that the body was found. Sewn into the waistband of the man's pants was a secret pocket which contained a tightly rolled piece of paper with the Persian words Tamam Shud typed on it. The paper appeared to be torn from an eleventh century book of Persian poems, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam or simply the Rubaiyat. Themes around the Rubaiyat center around life's transience and in English, Tamam Shud roughly translates to 'The end' or 'Finished.' The discovery of the secret pocket and it's haunting message was enough for coroner Thomas Cleland to declare the man's death was 'not natural.'"

"On July 23rd, three months after police discovered the Tamam Shud paper, a businessman who had read about the unidentified body in the paper came to police with a copy of the Rubaiyat. The man claimed that he found the book in the back seat of his car after parking it near Somerton Beach with the windows down. Sure enough, a section had been torn out of the last page of the book that perfectly fit the piece found in the unknown man's pants. On the back cover of the book, police discovered five lines of letters, apparently a secret code, and what appeared to be a phone number. To this day, the code has never been cracked and the Australian Navy determined it to be virtually unbreakable, explaining, 'There is an insufficient number of letters for definite conclusions to be based on analysis. The letters do not constitute any kind of simple cipher or code. A reasonable explanation would be that the lines are the initial letters of words of a verse of poetry or such like.'"

"While the code failed to yield any new leads, the phone number found in the back of the Rubaiyat led investigators to twenty-seven year old nurse Jessie 'Jo' Thomson's doorstep, just hundreds of meters from where the body was found eight months prior. Thomson admitted to once owning a copy of the Rubaiyat but claimed she'd given the copy to a man named Alfred Boxall. Upon investigation, Boxall turned out to still be alive and in possession of a fully in tact copy of the Rubaiyat. By this time, the still anonymous body had been buried but not before a plaster cast had been made for investigative purposes. According to Detective Sergeant Lionel Leane, when Jo Thomson was shown the cast in the hopes of identifying it, she looked like she was about to faint. Nevertheless, Thomson denied knowing the man. Thomson died in 2007, still claiming she did not know the man found on the beach."