If you missed part one, catch up here.
It’s December 1948, the dawn of the Cold War and the Atomic Age; a mysterious body has just turned up on the shore of Somerton Beach, near Adelaide, Australia. With meager evidence and only a handful of cryptic clues, investigators are stumped as to the man’s identity or where he came from. All they know for sure is that he was poisoned, and it was most likely murder.
By February of 1949, more than a dozen people came forward offering possible identifications, all of them debunked. Over the decades that followed, the names would keep coming, though never bringing investigators any closer to a positive I.D. In 2011, an Adelaide woman came forward with an intriguing piece of evidence she found among her father’s possessions: the seaman’s identification card of one H.C. Reynolds, a man bearing a remarkable likeness to the Somerton Man. The card was issued in the United States on February 28, 1918, listing the man’s nationality as British. Photographic comparisons were certainly encouraging, though ultimately inconclusive. Unfortunately, searches in the National Archives and other resources found no further record of the man, and the case remained open.
The majority of theories regarding the Somerton Man’s identity involve espionage—and given the circumstances, it’s easy to see why. Two sites in particular, the Radium Hill uranium mine and the Woomera Test Range, both near Adelaide, would have been highly valuable intelligence targets. At the time, Soviet spies were known to be active in the area—a problem so significant that it led to the founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) in 1949. Then, of course, there are the strange circumstances of the Somerton Man’s discovery, his cryptic cipher, and the bizarre connection to the Rubáiyát.
The Somerton Man was not the only unsolved poisoning linked to the Rubáiyát. In June 1945, a 34-year-old Singaporean man named George Marshall was found dead in Ashton Park, Mosman. On his chest lay an open copy of the Rubáiyát. His brother, David Marshall, later became the first Chief Minister of Singapore. At the time, George Marshall’s death was ruled a suicide by poisoning, though the eerie parallel to the Somerton case raises questions.
It’s difficult to ignore the connection between the corpse on the beach and Jessica Thompson. Why was her unlisted phone number written in the dead man’s copy of the Rubáiyát? When shown a photograph of him, she was reportedly visibly shaken—yet denied any knowledge of him. Then there’s her association with Alf Boxall and their shared connection to the Rubáiyát. At the time of their relationship, Boxall was a lieutenant in the North Australian Observer Unit (NAOU), a military intelligence unit, while Thompson was a nurse at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. Boxall denied knowing the Somerton Man and, by all accounts, had no further contact with Thompson after 1945. Numerous theories have emerged suggesting that Thompson, Boxall, and the Somerton Man were all spies.
It’s not an implausible theory. Boxall readily admitted to working in intelligence, but what about Thompson? The evidence suggesting she was a spy is purely circumstantial but nonetheless compelling. In 2013, Jessica’s daughter, Kate Thompson, gave an interview in which she claimed her mother had lied to police and almost certainly knew the Somerton Man’s identity. She further alleged that her mother was interested in communism and spoke fluent Russian—though she never revealed where or why she had learned the language.
One of the most puzzling pieces of evidence in the case is the enigmatic series of lines scrawled in the dead man’s copy of the Rubáiyát. Despite decades of effort by some of the world’s top cryptologists, the cipher remains unbroken. Analysts believe the second line, which is crossed out, is an encryption error and should be disregarded. The remaining four lines resemble the Rubáiyát’s quatrain format, but their brevity, lack of a key, and unknown source material—assuming it is a one-time pad cipher—make them virtually indecipherable.
Recently, former U.K. detective Gordon Cramer claimed to have uncovered part of the mystery behind the coded message. According to Cramer, investigators had been interpreting the text incorrectly from the start, and the true message had been hiding in plain sight. He asserts that a series of micro-written characters are embedded within the letters. Due to the limitations of available photographs, much of this micro-writing remains illegible. However, Cramer believes he has identified references to the de Havilland Venom, a post-war British jet, as well as a Bulgarian Airlines commercial flight from Sofia to London. Even more astonishingly, he claims to have found the same style of micro-writing in the inscription Jessica Thompson made to Alf Boxall in her copy of the Rubáiyát. While these claims are intriguing, they remain unproven until the original texts undergo proper forensic analysis.
Another widely discussed theory—one supported by some of Jessica Thompson’s surviving family members—is that she and the Somerton Man were romantically involved. Some have even suggested that Robin Thompson, Jessica’s son with Prosper McTaggart Thomson, was actually the biological child of the deceased man. Robin was around 16 months old at the time of the incident. He passed away in 2009, but his surviving children could provide DNA samples for comparison, potentially shedding light on this decades-old mystery.
In April 2021, the Somerton Man’s grave was exhumed, and viable DNA was successfully extracted for testing. The results of these analyses remain forthcoming, but they could finally reveal the long-buried secrets of the Tamam Shud case.
UPDATE:
In 2022, after more than 70 years of speculation, forensic DNA analysis identified the Somerton Man as Carl “Charles” Webb, a Melbourne-born electrical engineer and instrument maker. The breakthrough came after genealogists traced his DNA to living relatives, confirming his identity beyond doubt. Unlike the long-standing theories of espionage, Webb appears to have been an ordinary man with no known ties to intelligence work. Yet, the circumstances of his death remain as murky as ever. What brought him to Adelaide? How and why did he die? And why was he carrying a book that had been linked to multiple suspicious deaths?
One of the biggest mysteries had been the monogrammed clothing found in his suitcase, marked with the name “Keane.” As it turns out, Webb’s brother-in-law was Thomas Keane, suggesting the items were either borrowed or secondhand—an explanation far less sinister than previously imagined. But that still doesn’t account for the strangest clue of all: Jessica Thompson’s unlisted phone number, written inside Webb’s copy of the Rubáiyát. Her disturbed reaction when shown his photograph and her apparent reluctance to speak freely about the case have long fueled speculation that she knew more than she admitted. Was she an old acquaintance? A former lover? Or was their connection something more clandestine?
Despite solving the question of the Somerton Man’s identity, many of the case’s most haunting details remain unanswered. The coded message scrawled in his Rubáiyát, the torn page with the words “Tamam Shud,” and the eerie parallels to other deaths linked to the same book all suggest a deeper mystery—one that may never be fully unraveled. While the man himself now has a name, the legend of the Somerton Man is far from over.
Jason Roberts is a Seattle-based author noted for his acclaimed western horror series The Dead Wind Trilogy as well as other works of cosmic horror infused with historical fiction. His web-based series, Dark Distractions examines paranormal mysteries, unexplained phenomena, and all things strange.
