READING · 5 MIN
THE MAN THEY NAMED.
THE CODE THEY DIDN'T.
For 74 years, nobody knew who he was. Then DNA science finally answered that question - and left the strangest part of the case exactly as unsolved as it's always been.
A body on Somerton Park beach â—˘
On the morning of 1 December 1948, a well-dressed man was found dead, propped against a seawall on Somerton Park beach near Adelaide, South Australia. He carried no wallet, no identification, and the labels had been cut out of every piece of his clothing. His cause of death was never conclusively established. This is presented here as historical true-crime - a real unsolved death, not a game.
A torn scrap that read “it is finished” ◢
Months later, a small rolled-up scrap of paper was found sewn into a hidden fob pocket in the man's trousers, missed at the original autopsy. Printed on it were two words in elegant type: “Tamam Shud”- Persian for “it is finished,” the closing phrase used in some editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It had been torn from the final page of a specific, rare Australian edition of that book. A public appeal led a local man to come forward: he'd found a copy of that exact edition, missing its final page, thrown onto the back seat of his unlocked car near the beach around the time of the death.
Five lines, still unbroken â—˘
Inside the back cover of that book, faintly indented in pencil, was a short block of capital letters arranged in five lines - along with a local telephone number, which led police to a nurse living nearby. Whether those five lines are a genuine cipher, a memory aid, or something else entirely has never been settled; the block is short enough, and unusual enough, that professional cryptanalysts - including, reportedly, Australian and UK military codebreakers consulted over the decades - have never agreed on a method, let alone a plaintext. It remains one of the shortest, most argued-over undeciphered texts in the world, in the same broad territory as trying to crack a simple substitution with almost no material to work with.
The identity, finally, in 2022 â—˘
For seven decades the man's identity was the case's central mystery, driving theories from Cold War espionage to a broken-hearted stranger. In 2022, University of Adelaide researcher Derek Abbott led a team that combined DNA extracted from a decades-old plaster cast of the body with forensic genetic genealogy - matching distant relatives in public ancestry databases - and identified him as Carl (“Charles”) Webb, a Melbourne-born instrument maker. South Australia Police confirmed the identification that year. It closed the question of who he was. It did not touch the five lines of code in the back of a book - that part of the Somerton Man case is exactly as unsolved today as it was in 1949.
Play the ciphers in this story