On the morning of December 1, 1948, the body of a man was found propped against the seawall at Somerton Park beach in Adelaide, South Australia. He was well-dressed, physically fit, and appeared to be in his early forties. He carried no identification. The labels had been carefully removed from all of his clothing. His dental records matched no one in Australian files. His fingerprints were not on record anywhere in the world. He was, in every administrative sense, nobody.
The autopsy deepened the mystery. The cause of death was consistent with poisoning, but no specific toxin was identified. The pathologist noted an enlarged spleen, congestion of the liver, and blood in the stomach—findings suggestive of digitalis or a similar cardiac glycoside, but no definitive chemical was isolated. A half-smoked cigarette rested on his collar, as though he had fallen asleep smoking and never woken.
Then the details accumulated. A small piece of paper was found rolled tightly inside a concealed pocket in the man's trousers. On it were the printed words "Tamam Shud"—Persian for "it is finished" or "the end"—torn from the final page of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The book from which the page had been torn was eventually located: it had been tossed into the back seat of an unlocked car parked near the beach. On the back cover, someone had penciled a sequence of five lines of seemingly random letters, and a telephone number. The number belonged to a woman named Jessica Thomson, who lived a few hundred meters from where the body was found. She denied knowing the dead man, but her reaction when shown a plaster cast of his face suggested otherwise.
For 73 years, the case resisted every attempt at identification. Theories multiplied: the man was a Soviet spy, an intelligence operative, a romantic suicide, a victim of espionage-related assassination. The coded letters on the back of the Rubaiyat were subjected to cryptographic analysis without yielding a consensus reading.
In 2022, Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide, who had investigated the case for over a decade, announced that DNA analysis had identified the Somerton Man as Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer born in Melbourne in 1905. The identification was achieved through genealogical DNA matching—comparing DNA extracted from hairs embedded in the plaster death mask with genetic profiles in public genealogy databases.
Webb's identity, once established, raised immediate questions. Why would an electrical engineer from Melbourne be found dead on a beach in Adelaide with all identifying marks removed from his clothing? What was his connection to Jessica Thomson? Why was he carrying a torn page from a Persian poem about the transience of life? The identification answered the question of who. It did not touch the questions of why or how. In some respects, knowing the man's name makes the surrounding circumstances more perplexing, not less—because Carl Webb, by all available records, was an ordinary man. And ordinary men do not usually end up as one of the twentieth century's most elaborate mysteries.