The Taman Shud case

I came across a very interesting article on mandatory today about unsolved mysteries. The so called Taman Shud Case got my attention and boy does it make for some interesting reading. I always thought I was good at solving riddles and problems but this has me stumped. Dead bodies are discovered every day, but few capture the imagination quite as much as the unidentified corpse known as the Somerton Man. On 1st December 1948, a Caucasian man in his mid-40s was found dead on Somerton Beach in Australia. Coroners could discern no cause of death.The man discovered that day was in peak physical condition and as dressed very well, but all of the labels on his clothing had been removed. In his pocket was a train ticket for a ride he obviously missed on account of his being dead and all.

Although investigators believed that the man must have been poisoned, no traces of any foreign agent was discovered during an autopsy. Some still maintain that the Somerton Man died of some type of undetectable poisoning because there was no other explanation for his death. A month later police discovered a brown suit case at Adelaide Railway station that might have belonged to the mysterious Somerton Man. The brown suitcase had its label removed just like the unidentified man’s clothing and inside were clothes that had also had the labels removed.

Inside the bag was a stenciling brush, an electrician’s screwdriver, and a pair of scissors normally used for stenciling. Unfortunately, the suitcase proved to be another dead end. The really big twist came when a tiny piece of paper was found in a secret pocket sewn within the man’s pants. On the paper was printed “Tamam Shud,”which translates in Persian to “finished.” This discovery led to a media blitz in an attempt to find the book the page was torn from. The campaign was successful as a man stepped forward with a rare first edition copy of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat,which he said he found in the back seat of his car the night before the unidentified man’s body was found. In that book were written four lines of a mysterious cipher that has yet to be cracked.

Also written in the book was the phone number of a former nurse who, while serving in World War II, gave a copy of The Rubaiyat to an army officer named Alfred Boxall. Boxall's copy of The Rubaiyat was still intact, though, and both parties denied any connection to the unidentified dead man. How insane is that?