Tamam Shud

In December 1948 an unidentified man was found dead on Somerton beach in Adelaide, Australia. Early attempts to identify him failed; there was no dental record match, and he was only carrying paraphernalia such as cigarettes and some change. The autopsy raised suspicions: His spleen was enlarged, his liver distended, and there was blood in his stomach. This, along with the fact that he’d been seen slumping on the beach prior to his death, suggested he’d been poisoned, but no trace of poison was found. A number of false identifications were made, but by the middle of 1949 little progress had been made. Then things got really weird. Here’s how Smithsonian Magazine told it: The police had brought in another expert, John Cleland, emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide, to re-examine the corpse and the dead man’s possessions. In April, four months after the discovery of the body, Cleland’s search produced a final piece of evidence – one that would prove to be the most baffling of all. Cleland discovered a small pocket sewn into the waistband of the dead man’s trousers. Previous examiners had missed it, and several accounts of the case have referred to it as a “secret pocket,” but it seems to have been intended to hold a fob watch. Inside, tightly rolled, was a minute scrap of paper, which, opened up, proved to contain two words, typeset in an elaborate printed script. The phrase read “Tamám Shud.” These two words (misprinted by newspapers as “Taman Shud” at the time, and the name has stuck) are the last words of the Persian poetry collection known as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; they mean “it is completed”. It had been torn from a copy of the book that had been thrown into a car near the beach, and that book contained a phone number belonging to a former nurse, along with a cipher the police could not solve. The former nurse told the police she’d given the book to a man named Albert Boxall: the case appeared to be solved – right up to the point they called at Boxall’s house and found him alive and well, with the book the nurse had given him. The words “Tamám Shud” were still in it: the piece of paper didn’t come from that book. The case has never been solved. One curious detail is that another man died in Australia following the war having – it is said – committed suicide by poison. He had a copy of the Rubayat by his side. In 2013 60 Minutes claimed the former nurse (who had somehow managed to get the police to respect her wishes to conceal her name) was Jessica Thomson, and that her daughter believed she may have been a Soviet spy who had a son with the man. This year a former UK detective said he believed the code may have referred – at least in part – to a British post-war aircraft.