Thursday 17 March 2016

Facts about Tamam Shud case

On 1 December 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on Somerton beach but his identity was unknown and the cause of his death was unknown too. Six weeks after his death, a brown suitcase apparently belongs to the Somerton man was retrieved from Adelaide Railway station's cloakroom, where it had been deposited around 11 am the day before his death. The brown suitcase label was removed just like the Somerton's man clothing. In the suitcase was items such as clothes which labels had been removed, a brush, a knife and a pair of scissors. Some of the items had markings like "Kean", "Keane" and "T.Keane" which nobody with that name was reported missing and the man's identity was not found in the belongings. 

Items that had been found in the brown suitcase which belongs to the Somerton's man

Investigators also found a small scrap of printed paper ripped out of a book which contained a Persian phrase "Tamam Shud" which means "The End". It was the final words of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a popular book at that time. 


Months later, the copy of the book had been found thrown into a carpark near the same beach where the Somerton man had been found dead. At the back of the book was written a local phone number "X3239" and several lines of chiper-like writings. The phone number belongs to a nurse name Jessica Ellen Thompson who lived not far from the beach. During the investigation had been done on her, she told the police that she had given a copy of the book to a man name Alfred Boxall. Police thought that Alfred Boxall was the dead man found at the beach. However, police found out that Alfred was still alive and live in Marouba. Thus, Alfred was not the dead man found on the beach. This leaves the police to a clueless investigation on the case. Thus making this an unsolved case of the unidentified man. 

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