The Dead Bloke, a Rubaiyat and a Code No One Can Crack
Category: Unsolved Mysteries 10th May 2026
Right, so here's one for people who like their mysteries with a side of paperwork. In 1948 a man turns up on Somerton Beach, near Adelaide. No ID, poshish clothes but a face no one recognised, and he's dead. Proper oddball case. The coroner couldn't say how he died. No water in his lungs, so he didn't drown. No obvious wounds. Smells like a spy story, doesn't it? Wrong sort of seaside for a film, but close enough.
Inside a hidden pocket of his trousers they find a tiny scrap of paper with two words printed in Persian: "Tamam Shud" - which means "ended" or "finished". Turns out it was torn from the last page of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Police track down the book. It was weirdly specific: someone had a secondhand copy, and tucked into it, on the back page, was a strange sequence of letters. People remember the start of it: WRGOABABDMLIAOI and then more, all jumbled together, no spaces like someone's keyboard had a small stroke.
So you've got a dead bloke, a literary suicide note clipped out in Persian and then a code. Proper dramatic. They also find a phone number in the book, leads to a lady named Jessica who says she doesn't know him, but later there's whispers about a connection. The nicest thing about mysteries like this is the gap where normal life used to be: a bloke sitting in a cafe, now replaced by a secret alphabet.
Cryptographers, hobbyists, retired spooks, armchair detectives and a bloke in his nan's living room have all had a go at that string of letters. Some think it's a cipher. Others reckon it's a personal shorthand, a lover's note or the back of someone's shopping list written in code to be dramatic. Nobody's cracked it in a way everyone agrees on. So the code sits there, smug as anything, like someone zipped up their trousers and put the rest of the story in a drawer labeled "Do Not Open".
I like that. It's properly human. Not every mystery needs a tidy ending. Sometimes life is just a bloke on a beach with a bit of poetry and a scribble that refuses to explain itself. Makes you feel better about losing your keys, doesn't it?