Dead On The Beach
A man is found dead on a beach in Australia in 1948. His spleen was three times its normal size and there was internal damage to various of his organs. However none of these things were necessarily fatal and cause of death was unclear.
Poisoning is suspected but his stomach only contained half a pastie. There was also no evidence of vomiting or convulsions. So it’s not just that the poison would have to have left no trace, it also left no understanding of the mechanism.
His dental records match no living person, all the labels have been cut off of his clothes and to this day we have no idea who he was. Witnesses suggest the man got a train and then a bus from Adelaide to the vicinity of the beach.
It then appears he walked to the beach although his shoes looked freshly polished and had no signs of the dust one would expect if this was the case. Retracing his steps investigators found a suitcase in the left luggage office of Adelaide station.
The suitcase contained several fresh changes of clothes but no socks all with the name T Keane sown in to them. No man by the name of T Keane has ever been identified in connection to this case.
A further investigation found that someone had sewn a tiny rolled up piece of paper into the hem of the dead man’s trousers. The rolled up piece of paper said “tamam shud.”Tamam shud are the final words of the poem “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” and mean “it is ended” in Persian.
Forensic investigation demonstrates that this piece of paper was cut from a very rare copy of the Rubiyat of which there were only known to be six copies in Australia. The copy from which these words were cut then turns up having been thrown into the back seat of a man’s car.
Police took out a court order to hide the man’s identity and would only reveal that he was a doctor. That copy had these words impressed into the back cover, as though they had been written on the sheet torn out. The copy also had a phone number in the front.
The phone number belonged to a woman named Jessica Thomson, who owned one of the other only six copies of the Rubiyat. Thompson had given her copy to a man, who may or may not have been a spy, called Alf Boxall.
Police therefore assumed Boxall to be the missing man but when they went to look for him they found him alive and well and his copy of the Rubiyat intact. In something like 70 years of trying police have been unable to find any link between the dead man and Boxall or Thomson.
However Thomson’s grandson was born with a rare genetic ear deformity which the missing man also had.
Story Credit: Reddit