“Tamam Shud”, which in Persian means “it’s over” or “finished”, are two words that have echoed for 74 years in the annals of popular history in the city of Adelaide, Australia, being one of the biggest mysteries that the context
Belonging to the poetry book Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, a mixed celebration about melancholy, life and its brevity , the word cut from a copy of the book was found on November 30, 1948, in a dead man’s pants pocket on the sand of Somerton Beach in Adelaide.
Everything could indicate that it did not pass of a suicide, particularly the imperturbable manner of the man’s expressions, but when the body arrived at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and was inspected by physician John Barley Bennett, a series of anomalies changed the entire context of the investigation.
Without any type identification, the stranger was called by the police as The Somerton Man, and the years that cradled the unusual aura of mystery only created questions: Why was he killed? Who killed him? Who was he? Why has no family member ever contacted him? Was it some kind of spy? Was it file burning?
This amount of unanswered questions in the face of an extremely confusing case, never left the popular consciousness, nor the mind of Professor Derek Abbott, from the School of Electrical Engineering and the University of Adelaide – and it may have been worth it, as today the case took an unexpected turn.
The family tree
After decades of unraveling the mysterious case that haunts Australia, Abbott claims the man found on Somerton Beach was Carl ” Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker, born in Melbourne, the coastal capital of Victoria, southeastern Australia, in mid-1905.
With the help of American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, a DNA sequencing present in the body of Somerton Man, exhumed last May at the request of the two researchers and Forensic Science AS to the South Australian Police.
For years, they used strands of the man’s hair trapped in a plaster mask made by the police in the late 1940s, in order to be able to build a complex family tree of some 4,000 names that led to Webb, whose date of death had not yet been registered.
In an interview with CNN, Abbott said the research was so thorough that his team even investigated cold cases that could be considered distant, such as the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937 and the accident of Northwest Flight 422, the year the man was found in Somerton.
One answer, a thousand questions
The investigation even found a connection with the name “T . Keane” printed on the Somerton Man’s tie, which may have belonged to his brother-in-law, named Thomas Kean, who lived just a 20-minute drive from him in Victoria.
Abbott also speculates that the reason Webb was in Adelaide on the day of his death is because he was separated. of his wife and moved to South Australia, so possibly he went to track her down.
On July 23 of that year, the team compared the DNA obtained from the cadaver’s hair with tests of DNA made by distant relatives of Webb through popular genealogical databases such as Ancestry.com.
They found a paternal and maternal cousin, indicating a triangulation of two different parts and totally distant from the family tree, which is considered very convincing. Abbott has tracked down and talked to the living relatives, but they all belong to a generation far removed from Webb, so much so that none of them knew him and they didn’t have pictures of him in family albums, not even the old ones.
Despite the amount of discoveries made by the research team, Police South Australia and Science Forensics South Australia have yet to verify the research. And even though some answers were obtained with the latest developments in the case, more questions were added to the file about the mystery.
But as Abbott himself made clear, the discovery is just the beginning of everything, and it served to show that no case is forever inconclusive.
