Taman Shud...can anyone decipher the code?

I recently came across this old mystery that apparently is still a big deal in Australia. It's the story of an unsolved case surrounding an unidentified man found dead on Somerton beach in Australia. The case has been the subject of intense speculation over the years regarding the identity of the victim, the events leading up to his death and the cause of death. It's pretty fascinating.


 Read The Full Story After The Jump↓↓↓
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In 1948, during the height of the Cold War, the body of a man (that dude above) was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. He had no identification, no possessions and he had no money, which is strange because this was before credit cards and he had purchased a train and a bus ticket to get to that beach. He was very well dressed, in his mid-forties and was in very good physical shape, despite not showing any signs of manual labor. The cause of death could not be determined, but the doctors assumed he had been poisoned by some unknown form, which was undetectable by them. They later found a suitcase which they traced to the man, but it did not contain any significant clues and the case appeared to go cold.  All they knew of the man was that he was healthy, well dressed, middle aged and appeared to have died from a mysterious poison on a popular beach in South Australia. They figured he could have been a suicide or something.

After awhile nobody ever claimed the body and police could not match the man's teeth with the known dental records for anyone, anywhere. Then a small piece of rolled up paper was found in a seam of the man’s pocket, which contained the words “Taman Shud.” The detectives were initially baffled with this clue until they received a tip from a journalist that the text comes from the last line of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and had been cut out of a copy of that book. The text translates into Persian as "the end" and the books contains a series of poems that talk about "live(ing) one's life to the fullest and having no regrets when it ends." The police then decided to ask for help from the public to find a copy of the book and a doctor came forward saying that a copy of that book had appeared in the backseat of his unlocked car the night before the man was found dead. When police looked at the book they found that it was the same copy that had the text removed and in the back they found coded markings which to this day have not been deciphered.

Also discovered inside the book was a telephone number that led police to a woman who said that she had given her copy of the book to a man named Alfred Boxall who was in the Australian military during World War II. This is where it starts to get interesting. Upon seeing a plaster cast of the dead man from the beach the woman identified him as being Boxall and this appeared to solve the case until years later Boxall was discovered alive with his copy of the book undamaged. When the police questioned Boxall he claimed to have no idea who the man on the beach was and said he had never even heard of the story. But detectives later discovered that Boxall was in the intelligence division of the military when the dead man was found on the beach. Also, on the inside cover of his copy of the Rubayait, the woman whose telephone number was in the copy of the man on the beach's book, had written out a verse to him and it roughly translated into saying that penitence will arrive. But penitence for what?

Years later, a reporter asked Alfred Boxall if he would like to comment on the conspiracy theories that had grown in that time around the case that believed the man on Somerton Beach was a communist spy and that he had either been killed or forced to commit suicide by the Australian Intelligence forces on that beach for reasons unkown. When asked this Boxall obviously showed signs of distress and would not comment on the suggestion.

The case has since gone cold, but the evidence that remains is intriguing. The man was middle aged but in good shape while not being a laborer, he had no possessions or any forms of identification. His teeth did not match the records for any known person. The only clue they were able to find was the torn out piece of paper from the book that lead to even greater mysteries with the woman and Alfred Boxall.

The man found on Somerton Beach and the woman whose phone number was in the book lived nearby. Where did he come from? Police only know of his whereabouts from the train station to the beach and they believe that he had taken an overnight train from either Sydney or Melbourne. But where was he from originally? Why did he choose to throw the book into an open car instead of discarding it in the trash? Unless he wanted to leave a trail. If there are two copies of the book, why does the woman only claim to have given one to one man (Boxall), while the dead man clearly has a copy of the same book with her phone number in it? And why did she write out a verse to Alfred Boxall saying that he will one day find penitence, while the dead man on the beach deliberately kept the text from the book that translates into "the end?"

The mystery goes on and on, but I think it's fairly certain to say that the man on the beach must have been working for either a clandestine organization or on a secret government operation, perhaps for a foreign government and that he was expecting to walk into his death when he got to the beach, but whether he was poisoned by his own hands or forced by others remains a mystery. Who was this man and who was he working for? Why did he make an attempt to leave a trail behind? What is his message? Most believe the answers can be found in the code, but no one has been able to decipher it.....