Early on the morning of 1 December 1948, a man was found lying on the sand at Somerton Park beach, south of Adelaide, propped against the sea wall with his legs crossed. He was dead.

Some people had seen him there the evening before and assumed he was drunk or asleep. One witness thought they saw him raise his arm.

He was well dressed, in a suit and tie and polished shoes, fit and in his forties. In his pockets were an unused train ticket, a bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum, cigarettes and matches.

What was missing was anything that told you who he was. No wallet. No identification. And on his clothes, almost every label had been removed.

A death without a cause

The post-mortem found that his organs were congested, which pointed to poisoning. But no poison was ever found. In the 1940s, there were substances that would have been almost impossible to detect, and the pathologist strongly suspected one had been used. He couldn't prove it.

So the man was not only unnamed. Nobody could say how he had died, or whether it was suicide, murder or something else.

Tamám shud

Weeks later, examining his clothes again, investigators found a tiny pocket sewn inside the waistband of his trousers. Inside was a tightly rolled scrap of paper with two printed words: Tamám shud.

The phrase comes from Persian, and it means "ended" or "finished". It is the final phrase of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a collection of poems that was hugely popular in English translation — poems about the shortness of life and the pleasures of the moment.

In 1949, after the story appeared in the newspapers, a man came forward with a copy of the Rubáiyát. He said he had found it in the back of his car, parked near the beach, around the time of the death. The last page was torn out. The torn edge matched the scrap.

In the back of the book were faint pencil marks: a phone number, and five lines of capital letters.

The phone number belonged to a nurse who lived a few hundred metres from where the man was found. When shown a plaster bust of him, she reportedly appeared shaken. She said she did not know him.

A suitcase left at Adelaide railway station the day before the death was also linked to him. It, too, had labels removed.

Seventy-four years

The man was buried in 1949 under a headstone that read "Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton Beach". For decades, people left flowers. Theories multiplied: a spy, a jilted lover, a smuggler.

In 2021, his body was exhumed. Using DNA from strands of hair caught in the plaster bust, the researcher Derek Abbott and the forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick built a family tree. In July 2022, they announced a name: Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne, born in 1905.