Imagine dying… and leaving the world a puzzle no one can solve.
December 1st, 1948. Somerton Beach, Adelaide. A man in a pinstripe suit sits against the seawall—dead. No wounds. No name. And in his pocket… a scrap of paper that says, “It is ended.” Every label was cut from his clothes. Every tooth perfect. Every trace of who he was—gone.
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| The Somerton Man’s grave site |
Welcome to True Crime Tales with Cosette. Tonight, in just three minutes: the Tamám Shud case—Australia’s most unbreakable mystery. It’s 6:30 a.m. when two horsemen spot him. Legs crossed, arm slumped—like he simply fell asleep watching the tide. But the autopsy tells a darker story: his spleen is triple the normal size, and his blood is thick with a poison no one can name. The coroner writes: “Death by digitalis—maybe. Or something we’ve never seen.” One cigarette rests on his collar—unlit, unsmoked. As if someone placed it there after he died.
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Four months later, a suitcase is found at Adelaide station—unclaimed. Inside: clothes with the name “Kean”—but no such person exists. Then the breakthrough: a doctor recognises the phrase “Tamám Shud”—Persian for “It is finished.” It’s torn from the final page of a rare poetry book, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Police place an ad. A man brings in the exact copy. Inside: an indented phone number… and a five-line cypher no supercomputer has ever cracked.
The number belongs to a nurse—known only as Jestyn. When shown a plaster cast of the dead man’s face, she nearly collapses. Detectives notice her teenage son has the exact same rare ear shape—cymba larger than cavum. A one-in-a-million trait. She swears she never met the man. But why did she give him her phone number in the book? 1948—peak Cold War. Soviet spies flood Australia. The man’s calf muscles are those of a ballet dancer, his shoes are American, and his tie is British. A secret pocket holds… nothing.
2022: DNA says he’s Carl Webb, a Melbourne electrician. But Webb never left Australia. So how did his DNA match a man who spoke five languages and carried no wallet? Webb’s family say he did vanish for months at a time. The cypher? Still unbroken. The book? Vanished from evidence. Jestyn took her secrets to the grave in 2007. South Australia Police keep the file open—case number 1/1948.
If Carl Webb wanted to disappear, he succeeded. But someone wrote that code. Someone placed that cigarette. Someone tore out “It is ended…"
…yet the story never ends.
