A man was found dead on the beach at Somerton Park, 11 km southwest of Adelaide, on 1 December 1948. Months later a scrap of paper was found in a hidden pocket of his trousers reading Tamám Shud, Persian for ended, torn from the last page of a 1941 New Zealand edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A public appeal produced the actual book, and inside the back cover were the faint impressions of five lines of capital letters. Military cryptographers and independent researchers have never got a satisfactory reading out of it; Defence analysts said as much in 1978. On 26 July 2022 Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide announced that genetic genealogy on hair from the death mask identified him as Carl Charles Webb, an electrical engineer born in Footscray, Melbourne in 1905. South Australia Police said they were cautiously optimistic and had not independently confirmed it.
Somerton Park, Adelaide, Australia
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