By James Aitchison

The final two words of Omar Khayyam’s famous poem The Rubaiyat are inextricably linked with Australia’s most bizarre murder investigation.  The Tamam Shud Case, often called the Somerton Man Mystery, presents a tangled thread of clues and coincidence running from South Australia to Singapore and on to Russia.  And, despite its title, it is anything but finished!

3 June 1945: A 34-year-old Singaporean man was found dead in Ashton Park, in the upper-class Sydney suburb of Mosman.  He was identified as Joseph (also known as George) Saul Haim Marshall, a member of a prominent Baghdadi Jewish family long domiciled in Singapore.  His brother, David Saul Marshall, was a successful barrister and later became the first Chief Minister of Singapore.  David Marshall played a major role in modern Singapore history and later served as an ambassador appointed by Lee Kuan Yew, the nation’s first prime minister.

On 20 May 1945, disturbed and reclusive, George Marshall took a lethal overdose of barbiturates, lay down in a secluded corner of the park, and died.  On his chest was an open copy of the famous Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.  The book-length poem was translated from Persian, but ends with the Persian words Tamam Shud, meaning “it is finished”.

Marshall’s inquest was held of 14 August 1945.  His death was ruled a suicide by poisoning.

25 August 1945:Eleven days later, Gwenneth Dorothy Graham, a 25-year old hairdresser and the key witness at Marshall’s inquest, was found dead in a King’s Cross flat. 

At Marshall’s inquest, she had told the court she had known Marshall for four years while he worked in Sydney.  In May 1945 he had returned from Perth and called her out of the blue.  They met for dinner five times but quarreled frequently.  After their last meeting Marshall had sent her a cheque for two hundred pounds (equivalent to eight months of the average male wage at that time) to set up her own hairdressing salon.  She described Marshall as “extremely temperamental, emotional, apt to take offence, and domineering”.

Gwenneth Graham was found naked, face down in a bath half-filled with water, with her wrists slit.  According to one newspaper, “Her wrists had been cut, and a safety razor was lying at the bottom of the bath”. 

Was her death merely a coincidence, or was her death linked with Marshall’s?

At Gwenneth Graham’s inquest, a man named Helmutt H. Hendon told how he met Graham in January 1944, just before being conscripted into the Army.  She had accepted his offer to move into his apartment at 4 Roslyn Road, Kings Cross, a Bohemian district of Sydney.  On the night of her death, the couple had gone to the cinema.  Returning home at about 11 pm, Hendon told police that she went to the bathroom saying she wanted a hot bath and to be left alone.  Later, when he did not hear any movement, he called to her from the bedroom.  Receiving no answer, he entered the bathroom and found her body face downwards in the bath.  A newspaper report stated, “Although the cuts on the woman’s wrists were deep, her death was caused by drowning”.

At the inquest, it emerged that George Marshall had warned Gwenneth about Hendon, calling him “evil and ruthless”.  Shortly before her apparent suicide, Gwenneth had confided in her mother just how true George Marshall’s warning had been.   

It seemed an improbable chain of events.  Questions were asked.  Why did a witness at Marshall’s inquest take her own life within a matter of days — and why did she stage her suicide having just brought her boyfriend home?  Or had Hendon in fact murdered her in order to steal the money George Marshall had given her? 

Was there a connection between Marshall’s death and Miss Graham’s which police were unable to establish?  And was Marshall’s death really a suicide, or had he been poisoned by a person or persons unknown?

….

1 December 1948: An unidentified man was found dead at 6.30 am on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.  The case became famous at the time because the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was reaching its peak, and the mysterious man was thought to have been a Russian spy.  Then there was the matter of the poison used to kill him — it was undetectable.  And, most intriguing of all, the man supposedly carried a secret code taken from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the same poem that had been found on George Marshall’s body.        

The victim soon became known as the “Somerton Man”.  His body was found lying on its back, his head resting against the sea wall, slightly inclined to the right.  He was thought to be aged around 40 to 45, was 180 centimetres tall, and had hazel eyes and fair to gingery coloured hair.  Curiously, his calf muscles were high on his legs, typical of a ballet dancer.  He was well dressed in a white shirt, a red and blue striped tie, brown trousers, socks and shoes.  Despite the warm night, he also wore a brown knitted pullover and a fashionable European grey and brown double-breasted coat.  He carried a packet of inexpensive Army Club cigarettes which also contained several sticks of Kensitas, a more expensive brand.         

Suspicions were aroused when police discovered that all the labels had been carefully removed from his clothes.  His shoes were remarkably clean and had been recently polished.  He carried no identification, his fingerprints did not exist in any police records, and his teeth did not match the dental records of any known person.

An autopsy revealed that the time of death was around 2 am on the morning he was found.  The pathologist, Dr Dwyer, noted that the victim’s heart was of normal size although his spleen was three times larger than normal.  However the man’s pharynx, stomach and kidneys were congested, while his liver contained an excessive amount of blood.  The undigested remains of a meat pie or pastry were present in his stomach.  The pathologist concluded, “I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural.”  He suggested that either a barbiturate or a soluble hypnotic were most likely used to poison the victim.

Soon various members of the public reported sightings of the deceased, with eight different positive identifications of the body, but all leads were to no avail.

17 June 1949: A second pathologist, Sir John Burton Cleland, re-examined the body, and suggested that the man might have died elsewhere and his body dumped on the beach.  The coroner stated, “I would be prepared to find that he died from poison, that the poison was probably a glucoside, and that it was not accidentally administered; but I cannot say whether it was administered by the deceased himself or by some other person.”  An expert pharmacologist testified that a particular poison was extremely toxic in a relatively small dose, and would have been extremely difficult to identify even if it had been suspected at the time the body was found.  The name of this poison was kept secret.

At around the time of this inquest, a dramatic new twist occurred.

A tiny piece of rolled-up paper was found sewn into the lining of the dead man’s coat.  The paper bore the printed words Tamam Shud.  The other side was blank.  Librarians identified the words as being from the last page of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.  Immediately an Australia-wide search commenced to find the book from which the paper had been torn, but failed.

Another breakthrough occurred when railway officials alerted police to an unclaimed suitcase left at Adelaide Station.  It seemed likely that the case belonged to the Somerton Man; it contained clothes with their labels neatly removed.  Also in the suitcase were a packet of yellow thread that could only have been purchased in the United States and some stenciling tools.  The most significant discovery was that of a shirt with “T. Keane” printed on the collar.  Did the Somerton Man at last have a name?  It seemed not.  Despite an Australia-wide search and help from the FBI, no such person as “T. Keane” was listed anywhere as missing.

July 1949: Just as police faced yet another blank wall, an Adelaide man who insisted on remaining anonymous turned up with a copy of the book of poems.  He had known nothing of the book’s connection to the case until he saw an article in the previous day’s newspaper.  Even more surprisingly, the man told police that he had found the book of poems in the back seat of his unlocked car in Glenelg, near Somerton Beach, on the night of 30 November 1948.

At last the police had something to work on.  The scrap of paper in the Somerton Man’s coat had indeed been torn from the book left in the unlocked car.

Not only that, in the back of the book were faint pencil markings: five lines of capital letters, with the second line crossed out.  Its similarity to the fourth line suggests a mistake.

WRGOABABD

MLIAOI

WTBIMPANETP

MLIABOAIAQC

ITTMTSAMSTGAB

Immediately the possibility of espionage seemed likely.  Were the letters some form of Cold War code?  Had the dead man been a Russian spy?  Did his presence in Adelaide have something to do with the city’s proximity to the top-secret Woomera rocket testing range?  If so, had he been murdered — and why? 

Also in the book was an unlisted telephone number of a former nurse who lived around 400 metres from where the body was found.  The woman’s name was not released; she was known only as Jestyn.  Confronted with a plaster cast of the Somerton’s Man face, a visibly agitated Jestyn denied knowing him.  One detective later described Jestyn as “evasive”.  He believed she knew a lot more than she let on.  He was firmly convinced she knew the identity of the man on Somerton Beach.  Later developments would prove him right.

Eventually, Jestyn made a startling admission.  She told police that during the war she had worked at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital and, in 1945, had given her copy of the Rubaiyat to a soldier called Alfred Boxall.  They met for a drink at the Marine Hotel at Clifton Gardens in Mosman, not far from where George Marshall lived.  Jestyn was single, while Boxall was 15 years older, married, and a lieutenant in the Army. 

For a while, police believed that Boxall was the Somerton Man, but found him alive with the book still in his possession — complete with the words Tamam Shud still intact on the last page.  Interestingly, Boxall had worked in an intelligence unit during the war — thus adding more credibility to the theory that the Somerton Man had been an enemy spy.

….

2007: Jestyn, now known to have been Miss Jessica Harkness, died.  Her married name was Mrs “Jo” Thomson, married to a soldier named Prosper Thomson.  With her death, it seemed that the mystery would never be solved. 

2013: The most important evidence now came to light.  In a television interview,Kate Thomson — the daughter of Jessica and Prosper Thomson — confirmed that her mother was the woman interviewed by the police, and that her mother had told her she had lied to them.  She said that her mother knew the identity of the Somerton Man and that his identity was also “known to a level higher than the police force”.  She suggested that her mother and the Somerton Man may both have been spies, noting that Jessica Thomson taught English to migrants, was interested in communism, and could speak Russian, although she had never disclosed to Kate where she had learned it or why.  Clearly, it could explain why she had nurtured a wartime relationship with intelligence officer Alf Boxall.

In the same programme, Roma Egan — the widow of Jessica Thomson’s son Robin — suggested that the Somerton Man was Robin’s father.  Both men shared the same unique ear characteristics.

May 2021: The body of the Somerton Man was exhumed.  Investigations are continuing, and even more candidates have been put forward to claim his identity.

….

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam describes life as a “chequer-board of Nights and Days” — a mysterious board game in which we have no control over our destinies.  It is a strangely prophetic description, and certainly many questions remain unanswered in the Tamam Shud Case.

Was the Somerton Man a Soviet spy from the East European Communist Bloc?  A spy who had to be eliminated using a deadly, undetectable poison?

Why was the piece of paper with Tamam Shud printed on it concealed in his coat lining?

Who had dumped the fateful copy of the Rubaiyat in an unlocked car — the murdered man himself, or his killer?

What did the mysterious code really mean?

Was the former nurse called Jestyn an active communist agent?

And what of George Marshall and Gwenneth Graham?  Were their suicides really murders?  Were their deaths somehow connected to the sinister case of a murdered spy?

Perhaps we shall never know.  After all, as one verse of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam states:

          “The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,

          Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

          Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

          Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”