“Here Lies The Unknown Man Found at Somerton Beach”

ON A WINTER DAY, a man was seemingly asleep on Somerton Beach with his head resting on a rock. His legs were crossed, and his arms were stretched out. Later that day, people discovered that he was dead.

People in the neighborhood claimed to have seen the man earlier that day. Some remembered seeing him wandering around the beach the night before. Some even claimed to have seen a well-dressed man carrying a guy on his shoulder.

The police began the investigation, but no wallet or identification was found. All the labels on his clothes were removed except for a piece of note sewn into his pocket. It was the last sentence from a Persian poetry book, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám:

“It’s finished.”

The medical examiners didn’t believe he died from natural causes. They suspected poison, but no trace of toxin was found in his system.

It was during the Cold War, and the beach where his body was found was near a military site and a uranium mine. Many speculated him to be a Russian spy. For months, his pictures had been posted in the newspapers, but nobody came forward.

One day, a man came to the police station with a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. He said that he found the book in his unlocked car. The last page was missing an edge, matching the note found in the Somerton man’s pocket.

On the back was a phone number and a code.

WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
           x
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

The phone number led to a woman named Jessica Thompson, who claimed to know nothing about the man’s identity or why her phone number was on the back of the poetry book.

She once owned a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, which she had gifted to an old friend named Alf Boxall, an Australian Army lieutenant she met during World War II. At first, they suspected Boxall was the Somerton man, but he was, in fact, alive and had no connection to the unknown man.

As for the code, no one truly decoded its meaning. Detectives working on the case thought it was a shorthand rather than an encrypted message. ITTMTSAMSTGAB would mean, “It’s time to move to South Australia Moseley Street,” where the woman lived.

Many years later, Jessica’s children revealed that they had suspected their mother knew the Somerton man’s true identity and that she might have been a spy because she worked with immigrants and never told them where she learned Russian. Their late brother, Robin, could be the man’s son. Later, DNA analysis revealed the Somerton man had a rare genetic disorder, which matched a physical detail in Robin’s photography.

Boxall, to whom Jessica gave her book, had served in a special operations unit, though he insisted that he wasn’t in any secret tasks when he met Jessica.

The Somberton man was buried with no confirmed identity, and his real identity remains a mystery. On his tombstone, it says, “Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton Beach.”