On December 1, 1948, a perfectly dressed man was found dead on an Adelaide beach — no ID, no cause of death, no name. Tucked in his secret fob pocket: a slip of paper bearing a Persian phrase meaning 'It is finished.' The cipher he left behind stumped code-breakers for 75 years.
ABC's definitive documentary — the beach, the body, the removed labels, and the torn page from a 12th-century Persian poem that started 75 years of obsession.
The complete case file: toxicology, the Rubaiyat connection, nurse Jessie Thomson's strange reaction when shown the body, and every major theory from Soviet spy to scorned lover.
A deep dive into the cryptic letter sequence found penciled in the back of the Rubaiyat and why no professional code-breaker has ever cracked it.
The go-to resource for cipher obsessives — exhaustive analysis of letter frequencies, acrostic theories, and whether the code is even a code at all.
In 2022 authorities finally exhumed the body for DNA testing — this episode covers exactly what they found and what the results mean for the 75-year-old mystery.
DNA genealogy pinpointed the man as Carl Webb, a Melbourne electrical engineer — yet there is still no answer on how he died, who poisoned him, or what the code says.