In December 1948, a well-dressed man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia, with no identification and no clear cause of death.

Hidden inside his pocket was a tiny scrap of paper reading “Tamám Shud,” a phrase meaning “ended” or “finished.” The paper had been torn from a copy of the classic Persian poetry book Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and inside that book investigators later discovered a mysterious coded message and a phone number.

For decades, the case—now known as the Somerton Man—became one of the world’s most famous unsolved mysteries.

Was the man a Cold War spy? Was it suicide? Or was there a hidden personal story behind his death?

In 2022, researchers led by Derek Abbott used forensic genealogy to identify the mysterious man as Carl Charles Webb, a Melbourne engineer who had seemingly vani ...