A corpse discovered with over-developed athlete’s legs, strange, wedge-shaped feet,
a scrap of paper torn from a poetry book with a single phrase hidden in a secret pocket… who was
the man behind the most weird unsolved death ever? November 30th, 1948, Adelaide, Australia.
It was a clear, warm night, the first summer day of the southern summer.
John Bain Lyons and his wife decide to take the opportunity of nice weather and beautiful,
clear night sky to do some star gazing down by the beach. As the couple walk along the sand,
they spot a man up ahead of them- he's dressed in slacks, suit jacket, and a button up shirt
with a smart tie, but is laying in the sand with his head leaning against a sea wall.
The man lifts his right arm up and then lets it fall back to the ground.
Assuming they had stumbled across a drunk sleeping off a bender, the couple ignores him and
continues their pleasant stroll. Thirty minutes later, a second couple comes across the man.
As they walk along the sea wall they see the smartly dressed man done up in a suit,
with shoes spit polished to a perfect shine. The man isn't moving, and mosquitoes cover
his face. The boyfriend jokes, “He must be dead to the world not to notice them.”
He has no idea how right he is,
or that he's just stumbled across the most mysterious death in history.
The next morning a small crowd has gathered around the man, and it has become clear to all
that he is well and truly dead. The body is cold, and a half-smoked cigarette rests on his collar
as if it had fallen out of his mouth while being smoked. The police are immediately contacted,
and the body removed to Royal Adelaide Hospital for inspection.
The coroner suspects that the man was poisoned, leading to heart failure. Try as they might
though, the authorities can't identify the man. He carries no ID, no wallet, or cash.
His clothes have no name tag and all but one of the clothing designer's labels have been cut off.
Inside his pockets are tickets from Adelaide to the beach where he was found dead,
a pack of chewing gum, matches, two combs, and a pack of cigarettes with
seven cigarettes of a different, more expensive brand inside of it.
The police begin questioning locals, but nobody knows who the man is.
Meanwhile the coroner continues his own investigation, deducing that the
man had indeed been poisoned but not by food. Curiously, the man has unnaturally small pupils,
and his spleen was three times normal size. The liver is greatly distended with blood.
Despite being in his late 40s, the man has extremely well defined calf muscles,
clearly the legs of a very accomplished athlete. However, his toes are wedge-shaped, leading an
expert to suppose that the man had been in the habit of wearing high-heeled and pointed shoes.
Was the man a cross-dressing fitness enthusiast? Or perhaps a ballet dancer? Nobody knew.
Fingerprints were taken and shared throughout the entire english-speaking world,
and yet no identity for the mysterious corpse could be ascertained. His photos
were published in newspapers, and dozens of locals brought to the
morgue to identify the body- yet nobody recognized the mysterious, dead stranger.
As the investigation intensifies, a poison expert believes he knows how the man was killed-
but the poisons that may have been used are so deadly he refuses to name them out loud in court.
Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks instead writes the names of two poisons on a scrap sheet of paper:
digitalis and strophanthin. Both of these poisons are incredibly toxic
and have the added benefit of breaking down very quickly after death, leaving no trace behind for
police to discover. One of the poisons is so rare it can only be made from a combination of
the oil inside the seeds of specific plants in Africa, parts of a poisonous fish native to the
Benue river, and snake venom. The poison is used by one Somali tribe for hunting,
and has a terrifying reputation for its ability to kill an adult human in ten minutes or less.
Police are now broadening their investigation across Adelaide and checking with every hotel,
dry cleaner, lost property office and railway station
for lost or abandoned luggage- perhaps the victim left behind some personal belongings
that could shed light on the mystery. On January 12th, detectives at the main railway
station are given a brown suitcase that had been deposited there on November 30th.
The suitcase has no identifying characteristics- in fact it's clear that somebody went through
a lot of trouble to remove all labels and brand markings. Only a single label on a shirt remains,
with the name T. Keane written inside, but police quickly conclude that the name is a red herring,
meant to throw people off the trail of the owner's real identity. However, police do
find orange thread inside the suitcase that's identical to the thread used to repair a hole
in the dead man's trouser pocket. This suitcase and its strange contents belonged to the victim.
Other than three shirts, the suitcase also contains a stencil kit used to stencil
labels on cargo aboard merchant ships, a table knife missing part of its haft,
and a coat stitched in a style native to America, but not Australia.
Just when police thought the mystery couldn't possibly deepen,
a shocking new find on the corpse would open up a bevy of new questions.
The authorities brought in an expert pathologist to re-examine the corpse and its possessions in
the hopes of gathering more clues. While the new investigation into the body revealed nothing new,
a more thorough search of the man's clothing revealed a small pocket
sewn into the waistband of the man's trousers,
and inside it a tightly rolled up scrap of paper with the words, “Tamám Shud” written on it.
A reporter for the Adelaide Advertiser recognized the words as Persian and recommended the police
look into the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a book of Persian poetry from the twelfth century that had
been translated by Edward Fitzgerald and become quite popular in Australia during the war years.
The words are discovered to be the last words in the english translation of the book,
and mean “It is ended”. Despite a search of libraries, book sellers, and publishers though,
the police can't find a copy of the book with the same font as that on the scrap of paper.
By now the body had begun to decompose but police were reluctant to give up their only real leads,
so they had the body embalmed and buried in a plot specifically chosen
to be easier to exhume should the need arise.
A full eight months after the mysterious death, a man walked into the police station in Adelaide
with a rather mysterious tale. Shortly after the discovery of the unidentified body,
he and his brother in law went for a ride in a car that he kept parked just a few hundred
yards from the beach the dead man was found on. The duo spotted a copy of the Rubaiyat
lying on the floor of the rear seats, but each assumed that it belonged to the other.
Upon reading a newspaper account of the mysterious death, the man had a hunch and checked the book,
discovering to their surprise that the final words of the book had been torn out.
It was a perfect match to the scrap of paper found in the dead man's secret pocket.
But that wasn't the only secret the book held. Written on the back cover so lightly in pencil
as to be almost missed was a phone number, along with a few letters written in capitals.
The phone number is unlisted, but belongs to a young woman that police refused to identify
in order to protect her identity. The woman confirms that she once gifted the book in
question to a man during the war: Alfred Boxall. At last the police had a name,
and it took only days to find his home in Maroubra, New South Wales.
Mystery solved- except for one problem,
Boxall was still alive and still had the copy of the book that the nurse had gifted him.
The police are at a dead end again, and return to the nurse. The nurse tells the
police that sometime the year before some neighbors told her that a man had come by
and asked for her. When police showed her a cast they had made of the dead man's face,
the nurse looked as if she would faint, but denied she knew who
he was. Though police suspected the nurse knew more than she was telling,
they were once more at a dead end, until they took a closer look at the book found in the parked car.
Under a UV light police discover a jumble of letters and realize that they have a code of
some type on their hands. The code is published in the press and sent to Naval Intelligence and
the best code breakers in Australia. The Navy reports back that the code
seems to be unbreakable, there's simply not enough of it to make sense of it.
Police never did crack the code, and no further clues would be forthcoming in
the case of the world's most mysterious death. Amateur sleuths in modern times
would re-examine the case and suspect that the nurse and the dead man clearly knew each other,
given the intensity of her reaction to being presented a cast of the dead man's face.
The identity of the nurse, which the police had kept hidden, was finally revealed and
photos of the woman's son suggested a striking similarity to the dead man.
A second dead man would be found with a copy of the Rubaiyat in Australia- a Jewish immigrant
from Singapore named George Marshall. He was discovered with a copy of the book near him,
a seventh edition from a publisher in London. There was only one problem: the book was only ever
published in five editions, making this seventh edition publishing as fake as that linked to the
original dead body in 1948. Finally, a careful review of police files discovered that in 1959
a man gave a statement that on the night in question, he had seen one man carrying another man
on his shoulder near the water's edge, and very close to where the dead body was later discovered.
Recently DNA was successfully extracted from hairs found in the casting of the man's face made by
police. An investigation into possible relatives discovered that the man may have had a large group
of relatives living in the east coast of the United States, potentially making our mystery
man an American, and not Australian. However, no living relative has been confirmed as of yet.
What does any of this mean? Who was our mysterious dead stranger with unusually small pupils,
enlarged internal organs, well-defined athlete's legs, and a copy of a book that may have been part
of a secret code? Some have theorized that the man must have been a spy, given the location of
a top secret British rocketry base a few hundred miles away. Other theories posit that the man may
have been part of a very influential criminal underground network, and crossed the wrong
people. Whatever the truth may be, it seemed that it died on that summer night back in 1948.
Only adding to the mystery, flowers would be left on the dead man’s grave until 1978-
with nobody ever discovering how they were left there or who was responsible.
Now go check out Man From A Country That Doesn't Exist for more mystery,
or click this other link instead!