Olympics, Olympics, Olympics. Looks like it’s cold as shit in Korea right now. After months of cloud and fog and dampness in the Pacific Northwest, I’m not about to go gallivanting over to Asia right now to ask the Chinese what they know about 9/11. I need to warm up for a bit first, so this week, I’m planning on making a visit to Australia! It’s a perfect time of year to visit, with the weather in most places being warm and sunny right now. It reminds me of time coaching USC, in fact! Most importantly, however, is that it will give me a chance to access some of the local archives of a very, very curious case indeed…

THE CASE OF THE SOMERTON MAN

Location: Somerton Beach, Adelaide, South Australia

Date: December 1st, 1948

The Story: On the morning of December 1st, 1948, police were called to Somerton Beach, just south of the city of Adelaide, where the body of a man was found washed up on the sand. The body was posed on the beach as though the man was sleeping when he passed away; he was well-dressed in a suit and patent leather shoes, though he did not have a hat (unusual for the era); inside the suit, there was only an unused train ticket, a bus ticket that may or may not have been used, a comb, some gum, a partial pack of cigarettes, and a few matches. There was nothing in the way of ID available to help investigators identify the man, and the coroner’s inquest also found no resemblance to any known missing person, not only in Australia, but in the entire world. To this day, investigators still have no idea who this unknown man could be, or how he came to end up dead on a beach in South Australia.

What’s Weird: The coroner’s office suspected a number of things; first, that the man had died elsewhere, and then been brought to the beach and posed in the position he was found in; and second, that the man may have died from poisoning. They were able to determine that his last meal was a single pasty, eaten somewhere between 3-4 hours before death, but were unable to prove that poisoning was indeed responsible for his death.

Where it gets really weird, though, is where the phrase Tamam Shud comes in.

As the coroner’s office prepared the body, they noticed a small scrap of paper, torn from the page of a very rare copy of a book – the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Translated from the original Persian, Tamam Shud  means “It Is Ended” or “The End”, depending on context. The version in question was printed by Methuen’s New Zealand location, and apparently there were only seven copies that existed in the entire world at that point – good enough to be pretty much a nonexistent book, which makes it so strange as to how the man happened into obtaining a piece of paper from this book.

As it turns out, after the original discovery of the body, police received a tip to a brown suitcase that had its label removed; the suitcase had been found by staff at the Adelaide railway station on January 14th, 1949, but it had originally been checked in at the station on November 30th, 1948 – the day before the unknown man turned up on the beach. Of all the unusual items that turned up in the suitcase, including a dressing gown, undergarments, some tools, and some stencils, it’s unusual to note that the suitcase did not contain any spare socks or any personal correspondence, despite the presence of other clothes and the stencils that might be used on envelopes and letterheads. A few pieces of clothing were marked with the inscription “T. Keane”, while all others had their tags removed that could have identified the owner; despite this, police could not find a single record of a missing T. Keane or similar spelling in any English-speaking country in the entire world.

Police also managed to find the copy of the book from which the phrase Tamam Shud was ripped; it was discovered a few weeks after the body, in a parked car nearby to the beach in Somerton. Forensics matched the paper to this copy of the book, and upon further investigation, noticed the back page was indented with the faint marks of some previously-written capital letters:

WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

This indicates a cipher of some kind, although the fact that the second line has been struck out implies there was an error in encoding along the way; at any rate, the possible cipher has never been decoded.

The book also contained a phone number, belonging to a Ms. Jessica Ellen “Jo” Thomson, who lived very nearby to the beach, although she claimed to not know the dead man when investigated by police. Subsequent investigations in much later years believed that the woman was lying about this, as she appeared to be very evasive to answering questions, and appeared to be quite shocked when seeing the plaster cast of the man’s upper body the coroner’s office made after his death. Regardless, no clear link has been proven yet between the nurse and the dead man – although her real name, Jessie Harkness, or her nickname, Jestyn, may prove to be the decryption key for the cipher – and the woman had asked police in 1949 to not keep her name or her husband’s name on record in any of the police files, citing ruining her reputation in the community – a very curious move indeed, especially since the police agreed to it.

Despite the police’s best efforts, including trying to cross-reference the man’s fingerprints with inventories from police departments all over the world and also marching tons of locals down to the morgue to examine the body, they were unable to find any sort of match to the man.

All in all, this case is one of the weirdest things to ever happen in Australia, and the case by Adelaide police is cold, but still open to this day.

What might have happened?

Some believe that the man may have been a spy of some variety – the war had just ended, but the Cold War was just getting started. The coroner’s inquest also noted that the man had unusually toned calf muscles and wedge-shaped toes, suggesting that he may have been a ballet dancer; he was certainly athletic in life, for sure – an appropriate fit for being a spy.

The coroner, despite not finding evidence of poisoning in the body, still believed that poison was responsible for the man’s death; the only two possible ways that could have killed the unknown were fast-acting poisons that dissolved quickly, and they were both regarded as so rare and deadly that a toxicology professor brought in as a court witness in the inquest refused to say the names of the poisons out loud. The professor, Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks, suspected it was either digitalis or strophanthin that caused the death of the unknown man; strophanthin is a very rare poison used by a Somali tribe to poison their arrows.

Finally, after Ms. Thompson’s death in 2007, her daughter Kate did an interview with the Australian 60 Minutes TV show; she believed her mother knew a lot more about the Somerton Man than what she had told the police initially. According to her daughter, Ms. Thompson had said she did indeed know the man, but had deliberately withheld that info from the cops; she apparently also knew how to speak Russian, curiously enough, suggesting that she too may have been involved in some spy-related activity.

Coach Carroll’s Hypothesis: God DAMN, do I love me a good murder mystery. This one is a doozy, alright. I have my suspicions, you have yours – but to me, this one seems to point towards a good ol’ revenge plot. All I know is that those cops sure had some good hustle to keep looking into all those strange points – with a motor like that, I could definitely have seen myself recruiting them for some special teams play if this had happened 60 years later.

Also, this is clearly a Zygi Wilf mafia thing going on. Just look at that bastard. Guilty as the day he was born. That’s guilty, guilty, GUILTY!

Information for this article taken from here, here and here. 

Credits to Low Commander of the Super Soldiers for the banner image.