Episode 251: Somerton Man: Murder and Espionage Down Under
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On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we go to the land down under and explore the mysterious death of the Somerton Man. Also known as the Tamam Shud case, this unexplained death/murder refers to the final line of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. So what’s the story? On December 1st, 1948, an unidentified man was found on the Somerton Beach in Australia. There were no visible signs of death.
Upon closer examination, strange details came to light. He had no identification or hat (odd for the 1940s), and he was very smartly dressed. However, his suit and clothing had all tags removed from them, and they were sewn in a stitch that nobody in Australia had seen before. His shoes were perfectly polished in a way that would have been impossible for someone strolling on a beach. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen him there the night before, most likely very drunk, but in the morning, he was in the same spot and dead.
An international investigation took place to identify this man. His dental records, fingerprints, and photo were widely circulated in all English speaking countries, but nobody ever came forward to identify him or found a match in their databases. But this isn’t the strange part. The strange part involves evidence of a posion so potent that the chemist wouldn’t even say the name in court in case someone else wanted to try and use this lethal potion.
And that isn’t even the strangest strange part! A hidden pocket sewn in his pants contained a rolled up piece of paper that said Tamam Shud. A hunt went on for the book it came from, and it was found some weeks later in a man’s car. In the book was a phone number and a string of letters that statistically match the frequency of a coded message in English. The phone number belonged to a Jessica Thomson.
Who was she? Why did her daughter think she was a spy? What connection did she have to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? Why did she send another copy of the book to someone from special forces? What strange belongings were found in this man’s suitcase in a train station? Why did mysterious dead people in Australia have copies of this book that no publisher ever seemed to create? Listen, laugh, learn.
Good Article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-body-on-somerton-beach-50795611/
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