The Body on Somerton Beach
Have you heard of the mystery of the Somerton Beach man?
On December 1, 1948, a man was found dead against the seawall at Somerton Beach, near Adelaide, Australia.
The night before at approximately 7:00 PM, a couple walking along Somerton Beach noticed a well-dressed man slumped awkwardly against the seawall. He briefly raised his right arm and let it fall. The couple assumed he was just drunk and sleeping it off.
The Next Morning, at approximately 6:30 AM, two young riders were training horses on the beach when they spotted the man, staring blankly at the sky. A swimmer, who had seen him the day before, noticed the body was still there. He found the man cold and unresponsive and notified the police.
His fingerprints revealed nothing. His clothing labels had been removed. There was no identification, no wallet, and no obvious explanation for his death.
The autopsy showed the Somerton Man was in good physical shape, ruling out a natural death but could not determine the cause of death. Poisoning was suspected, but none was identified.
Then investigators discovered a suitcase at a nearby railway station. It contained clothing believed to belong to the dead man. Once again, the labels had been carefully cut away.
But the strangest clue was hidden in a tiny pocket in his trousers.
A scrap of paper bearing two words: “Tamám Shud.” tu-malm-shood
Persian for “ended” or “finished.”’
Police asked the public for help. A local man came forward with a rare translation of a famous collection of four-line Persian poems called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He found it tossed onto the back seat of his unlocked car parked near Somerton Beach. The words had been torn from the final page of the book.
On the inside back cover, detectives could read indentations left from previous handwriting: a local telephone number, another unidentified number, and text that resembled a coded message. Authorities have never deciphered or interpreted the code in a way that satisfies them.
The phone number belonged to a local nurse. She lived just steps from where the body was found, sparking decades of romantic and espionage theories. Although no relationship was ever established.
The death occurred at a time of heightened international tensions following the beginning of the Cold War. For 74 years, the man's identity remained a mystery.
In July 2022, a University of Adelaide professor and American genealogist used DNA from hair samples to match the man to Carl "Charles" Webb, a Melbourne-born electrical engineer. Webb had been missing since April 1947, and historical records showed a separation and divorce proceedings from his wife and suggest his mental state may have led him to suicide.
South Australia Police exhumed the body to extract DNA for formal testing but say they have not yet officially confirmed his identity.
Why were the labels cut? Removing labels from clothing was a common tactic for spies, but in Webb's case, historians believe it was done to spare his family the immense social shame and scandal associated with suicide in 1940s Australia. But clothes were hard to come by in the 1940s, and people often wrote their names on items. So, when they were picked up second-hand, people would cut the names out.
Was he a spy? Or was it a suicide? We may never know.
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