ABOUT US

 ...THE BACKGROUND TO THE 

SOMERTON MAN CASE...

The TAMAM SHUD case, also known as the "Somerton Man Mystery," involves the discovery of a man's body on Somerton Beach, South Australia on December 1, 1948, with no identification on the body and no obvious signs of injury or cause of death. It was later determined that the man had been poisoned. 

The case is known for the discovery of a book called the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" in the glove compartment of a car in the vicinity, which contained a code that used a British Intelligence concealment technique known as INK H that has never been fully deciphered and a telephone number that led to a one-time Australian Army Intelligence officer. 

Investigations also found that the man's body was found on the beach following the highest Spring tide of the year, but the body was not soaked as it should have been if it had been in the same location overnight. This has added to the mystery of the case. 

Despite extensive investigations, the case has never been solved and the identity of the Somerton Man and the circumstances of his death remain a mystery to this day.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

Our blog's journey began in 2013, inspired by a previous 3 year involvement with Professor Derek Abbot's Facebook page, 'The World Search For A Rare Copy of The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam'. I became a part of this vibrant community in late 2009 and had the privilege to engage in insightful discussions with leading researchers of the Somerton Man mystery. 

One of the most impactful exchanges was with ex-Detective Sergeant Gerry Feltus, who once handled the Somerton Man case file as a Cold Case. Gerry's integrity and meticulous attention to detail stood out; he is a true representation of an 'Old School' officer deserving of utmost respect. My gratitude extends to Gerry and to the members of the Inner Sanctum Facebook group that emerged from the original FB pages. 

I was also fortunate to have numerous discussions with the late Paul Lawson, another person of great integrity. Paul shared significant insights about his knowledge of the case and the creation of the plaster bust, which has been conveyed to SAPOL at their request for submission along with other material to the Coroner as part of the Inquest to be held sometime in 2025.

The original investigators from 1948 and beyond are held in high regard. Facing challenges that are difficult to imagine today, they undoubtedly did their level best under challenging circumstances to unravel the mystery.

On January 21st, 2013, our blog made its debut in the digital world. Over the years, we have been fortunate to welcome thousands of readers. By March 2024, we reached a significant milestone, surpassing 1 million page views and publishing 899 insightful posts. Our inaugural post explored 'micro writing', a claim and evidence that has remained strong.

As this is being written, we eagerly look forward to revealing even more substantial evidence. Five years ago, we shared the initial decoded words from a previously hidden code. Since then, further discoveries have come to light, including the finding of a coded name DANETTA in TIBOR KALDOR's last letter and elsewhere. Additionally, we have identified three different encryption methods, including the HILL CIPHER, MORBIT CIPHER, and more recently the NIHILIST CIPHER, a tool once used by Soviet agents during WW2. Amid the various theories surrounding the Somerton Man – from the 'rare' ear type and anodontia to the Love Child hypothesis and erroneous DNA connections – we remain committed to the pursuit of truth. Recently, the Carl 'Charles' Webb theory has surfaced, and although it awaits concrete proof, it is not a theory supported by this blog. Many thanks to all who visit these pages; your support and encouragement mean a great deal.

And with that, welcome to Tamamshud.blogspot.com, the premier destination for meticulous and evidence-based analysis of the enigmatic Somerton Man case. Our unwavering commitment to uncovering the truth has driven us to spend the past decade dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of this perplexing Australian cold case. With a strong and growing following, we are now have over1.1 million page visits since the inception of our journey.

Tamamshud.blogspot.com is a dedicated platform focused exclusively on unraveling the Somerton Man mystery. Based in Australia, our team comprises experienced researchers and professionals who have meticulously examined historical records, uncovered long-lost documents, conducted interviews with former internees, Coastwatchers, ex-KGB, and FBI personnel, and engaged in thorough investigative work to provide you with the most accurate and reliable information available. The blog's author shared a long-standing friendship with the late Mr. Paul Lawson, the man responsible for creating the plaster bust of the Somerton Man, and had numerous in-depth discussions with him about this pivotal aspect of the case.

Our dedication to accuracy and authenticity is what sets us apart. Throughout our twelve-year journey, we have consistently strived to substantiate every piece of information we present. We have an unwavering commitment to evidence-based reporting which has enabled us to achieve numerous breakthroughs—finding and deciphering concealed codes, identifying potential candidates, unraveling long-standing misconceptions, and exposing fake or altered content that has circulated online concerning the Somerton Man case.

When you visit us you're not just accessing a blog with original and substantiated information; you access a unique resource that goes far beyond speculation and gossip. Here, your constructive comments and questions are always welcome, while abusive or trolling behavior is never tolerated. As a consequence, the only comments posted here are meaningful ones. This is a safe space where you will never be subjected to any kind of abuse or stalking, and your personal details will never be disclosed without your explicit permission.

We invite you to join us on this journey to uncover the truth behind one of Australia's most enduring mysteries, with the assurance that every word you read here is based on factual, meticulously researched information. Welcome to the ultimate destination for Somerton Man enthusiasts and truth-seekers alike.

THE RECORD

Since 2013 this blog has set the pace for others to follow, we did that by a combination of reviewing and researching much of the good work previously carried out by the Adelaide University Facebook page and a small group known as "THE INNER SANCTUM". This group comprised of s number of well-known individual researchers in the Somerton Man case and we had input from Gerry Feltus. The real starting point for me was in 2009. As many followers would know, a number of other bloggers were not amused by the work that I and other members of the Inner Sanctum did and the information that we brought to the space. Notably the presence of micro writing which in the first instance was found on the 'Code Page', not within the letters but in the open spaces on the page.

Let's get to the list of things that emanated from this blog, they're not in any particular order:

1. Discovery of micro numbers and letters on the code page

2. Discovered that the number 70 was written onto the inscribed copy of the Rubaiyat by Alf Boxall AFTER the Stuart Littlemore interview in 1977/78.

3. Discovery of microcode within the letters of the Verse 70 inscription and the throughout the title page.

4. Discovery of microcode within the letters of the TAMAM SHUD torn slip

5. Discovery of the fact that no fingerprints were taken from any of the items in the suitcase nor from the copy of the Rubaiyat found after the inquest in 1949.

6. Discovery that the Fingerprint form that contained the fingerprints said to be those of the Somerton Man was not signed/certificated as it should have been.

7. Discovery that the right forefinger, index finger, and thumbprints showed signs of wear indicating that perhaps the owner of those prints had been using a small handheld tool such as an engraving tool.

8. Discovery, along with Clive Turner, (There are a number of trolls using that name since Clive stepped away from the Somerton Man case) of the Tibor Kaldor incident whereby he was found dead in room 3 of the Victoria Hotel in Hindley Street, Adelaide on the 14th November 1948.

9. Discovery of the new research area known as 'The Dunera Boys' of whom Tibor Kaldor was one. These men, some 2700 or so of them, were deported to Australia from the UK in 1940 and were interned here initially at the Hay Internment Camp in NSW and then later moved to various other locations including Tatura in Victoria and Loveday in South Australia.

10. Discovery that tools made by internees at various camps bore a resemblance to the tools found in the suitcase said to belong to the Somerton Man.

11. Discovery of the Hay Internment Camp banknotes which I was able to show contained micro-written letters and numbers across the whole of the design of the 3 denominations of those banknotes.

12. Discovery of an Acrostic code within the first paragraph of Tibor Kaldor's last letter. That particular paragraph was run through an online decoder and amongst a jumble of letters that were output, there was a single word, DANETTA. I was able to examine that code and the way in which it was formed. Essentially, it was based on 7 consecutive numbers that corresponded to the letters in the word DANETTA. 

13. This same codeword DANETTA was found using the same code technique described above, within Verse 70, within the code page (See below) and other documents/newspaper ads. My belief is that the word was used as an authenticator. That means that it was put in place to let the intended recipient know that this was a genuine message.

14. Discovery that the letters of the code page could well originally have been a 7 line code with each line beginning with the letter M. Interestingly when the code was arranged in that fashion as in 7 lines beginning with M, the Acrostic code name DANETTA was apparent.

15, Discovered that the 'Missing Man and Woman' on the aircraft that brought the Russian delegation via Darwin to the Lapstone Conference for December 1st. 1948 were in fact later found to be employees of the Russian Embassy in Canberra. (Sherbakov & Bogotyreva)

16. Discovered that Vitaly Pavlov, a known and trained Soviet assassin was present in Australia at the relevant times associated with the Somerton Man case.

17. Followed up and found the name of a man first nominated by John Ruffles as a likely candidate for the Somerton Man. He had been described in a book 'The Atom Spies' name by an Australian politician in the late 70s. The man concerned was Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov, a senior Russian diplomat based in New York. 

18. Discovered that Pavel was instructed to return to Moscow at the end of July 1948 aboard the POBEDA. Pavel's wife Vera, did not accompany him.

19. Discovered a photograph of Pavel, it is the only one ever found of this man, it was taken at La Guardia Airfield and he was in company with his boss, Novikov. 9A second photograph of the same event was later found, it shows the presence of a man with what appears to be a home movie camera. He may possibly have been an American agent.

20. Discovered that Pavel Fedosimov was named in Alexander Vassiliev's notes as having been recalled to Moscow as he was suspected of being about to betray the Mother Country.

21. Discovered that the POBEDA on which Pavel was a passenger was diverted from its original journey direct to Odesa and instead called into Alexandria and then Batumi before heading across the Black Sea to Odesa. It was on that final journey to Odessa that there was a huge explosion and fire on board the ship leaving 40 passengers and two crew dead. Amongst the dead was a high-ranking Chinese military officer who was in the process of defecting to Russia.

22. Later discovered that the Pobeda and the Derna crossed paths near Egypt, The Pobeda docked first at Alexandria and two weeks later (approximately) the Derna docked at Port Said on the Nile. This would have enabled a person to jump ship from the Pibeda and onboard the Derna, they could have reached Melbourne on the first Tuesday of November 1948, Melbourne Cup day.

23. Together with Dr John Luick we established that the Somerton Man was very probably placed on the beach at Somerton after the high tide at 4.34 am on the 1st December 1948. That in turn means that there would have been at least two people involved in moving the man to the position in which he was found.

24. Discovered the shoes worn by the man were very similar to a pair found in a catalog and bore the number 9048 as their model number which also appears on Gerry Feltus's book THE UNKNOWN MAN.

25. An entry in Paul Lawson's  diary mentions ' disposal of the original body'

26. Created photographic comparisons of the man's face showing significant differences between post-autopsy and pre-burial photos.

27. interviewed Paul Lawson regarding the making of the plaster bust. Paul used the post-autopsy images to aid in creating the facial features of the man. The actual face bore no resemblance to the original face.

28. Paul Lawson revealed that he learned from conversations that Alf Boxall and the nurse would meet in the grounds of RNSH.

29. Pal Lawson also revealed that he had used the post autopsy photographs to model the face on the plaster bust as the face on the body did not match.

30. Discovery of anamorphic writing on the edges of the Boxall Rubaiyat.

31. Discovery of anamorphic letters and numbers on the edges of the Code Page.

32. Discovery that another police photograph of the code page existed at the time of Stuart Littlemore’s 1976 documentary.

33. Discovery of evidence that the copy of the Rubaiyat found and handed in to Police in 1948 by the chemist was a Collin’s two edition version.

There are other things that have been found by this blog and as and when I get time I will add them to this list and then provide links to the relative posts.

From the outset, there has been a focus on the evidence in the case and whenever and wherever possible I set out to substantiate the vast majority of the 'finds' that have been made here.

About Us

Hi, my name is Gordon Cramer and I am the author and admin for this blog. The first post was published here in January 2013. that makes us the first ‘blog’ as opposed to a 'forum', which focused purely on the Somerton Man case. In our archive section, you’ll find references to just over 1000 posts, some of which have been superseded as new information has emerged and some posts were just in draft form. 

Other blogs and forums of note in this space include Big Footy, a well-run forum that started on December 10th, 2012, a month ahead of this blog. A forum that started a little later, Ciphermysteries, had posted on the SM case earlier but it was April 2014 when they posted their first dedicated page on the case. Others post infrequently on the subject including the tomsbytwo.com forum which according to the Internet Archive made its first appearance in September of 2013 but without any content showing for about a year according to the WayBack machine.

A Little About Me: 

By way of personal background, in my younger days, I was a Police officer for just a few years,1966 to 1969, spending time in Cumbria and Cheshire. Constable 1552/332 Cramer. It was a great experience and I learned a great deal.

Training in those days was at the No.1 Police District Training Centre at Bruche near Warrington. The district included Cumbria, Lancashire, Liverpool, Manchester, Cheshire, and several smaller Borough forces. In those days there were approximately 100,000 officers in the UK with the Metropolitan Police being the largest individual force. In Cheshire, we had under 2000 officers including those in admin. We weren’t an armed force, some were trained in the use of firearms but most were not. The ‘accompaniments’ we had consisted of handcuffs, a short staff  (truncheon), and the indispensable whistle.

During my service, I spent time on attachment to several departments including Scenes of Crime, Collator’s Office (this unit was the precursor to the Criminal Intelligence Department), and CID/plain clothes duties. My general duties days were unremarkable with a few highlights and memorable moments. Here’s a photo memory.:

The pic was taken at the presentation of the Royal Humane Society Awards, 1968 I think it was. It followed a rescue at sea incident off the coast of Cumbria in which a group of children on a school trip got caught in a rip. The four in the pic, that’s me far left, managed to get most of them back to safety very quickly but one young lad was swept out quite far and in fairly rough conditions close to a rocky headland. We all went after him but the officer you see receiving his award was just amazing, and, although we kept swimming, he soon left us behind. We each received the RHS award. but his was an exceptional and extraordinary act of bravery, he reached the boy and undoubtedly saved his life risking his own in the process. For his courage that day, he was awarded the British Empire Medal, which was well deserved, he was a very brave man.

There are categories of RHS awards from Gold, Silver and Bronze Medals to Testimonials, we each received Testimonials, I can’t recall whether they were on Vellum or Parchment. I must get a replacement, the original seems to have been lost in the intervening years of moving home and moving countries.

There are a couple of other instances that come to mind, one was when I had stopped a young man on his motorcycle after his description had been broadcast about an incident involving a handgun.  He was cooperative but produced the gun, and I took it off him. Amusingly in the report, the duty Sergeant noted that he had tested the gun and found it was loaded. What he didn’t say was that he tested it in a witness room by pointing it upwards and firing it at the ceiling! The resultant hole was quickly patched. For obvious reasons, news of this event was kept low profile :)

One more incident which, in hindsight was pretty scary. Answering a call to a ‘domestic’ incident in Hazel Grove, I arrived and found a man and wife in a full-scale shouting match in front of 2 children. The wife shouted that he had stolen property in the house so I asked him to show me what it was, he agreed and opened the door beneath a stairway, lifted the floorboards, and pulled out a chain saw which he promptly began to start. There were two options but only one really worth doing, getting the woman and her children to safety was the priority, and attempting to restrain the man was way too risky, he was a big bloke. I pushed the woman and the children out of the house to the sound of the chainsaw being cranked up. I slammed the front door behind me and called for urgent assistance. (We had Panda cars and small UHF radios, new innovations in those days) It was then that the wife said to me, ‘What about my son, he’s still in there’. I felt sick to the stomach. As others who have been in the job will appreciate, you have seconds to respond. I went back to the door, drew my staff, and put my boot to the door, it burst open and the man was standing there, chainsaw in hand but, thankfully, it was switched off. I handcuffed him and waited for the cavalry to arrive which they did within minutes. Got a mention in the Div Collator newsletter.

In those days, as many ex-UK coppers will attest, this was the nature of the job, medals and decorations were the exception and not the rule. You might get a handshake from the Chief Super or a mention of an incident in the daily collator's news update. Not much but it meant a lot at the time.

Incidents like these weren’t given publicity for reasons that I now see as obvious, they were difficult times, and publicity could inspire other perpetrators to do similar things. The illegal gun trade was just beginning and publicity was not what it needed. It would also be true to say that this was a time when the IRA was ramping up its campaigns, especially in places like Manchester. Cheadle Hulme where I was stationed, is just 10 miles from Manchester City center, and there were Shabeens scattered throughout the Greater Manchester area which doubled as clandestine meeting places, bomb threats were reasonably regular. About the latter, talk in the refs' room was that just maybe some of these ‘threats’ may have been the upper echelons testing how well and quickly a local, small force could respond.

As for me, I have good memories of those times, some great lifelong mates, with a host of lessons learned and built on that have not been forgotten.

Hats off to all those who have served in Police forces wherever they are in the world, it's a brotherhood of sorts and you are always made welcome should you drop in on a social visit, given, that is that there are no current emergencies underway!

Life after the job was varied, in later years I traveled a great deal, to Europe, SE Asia, America, and Central America, raising Venture capital for start-ups, and giving talks mostly on logistics and supply chain analysis and improvement to a wide audience from large businesses to small enterprises and to the Military. I headed a start up company called Intertrack, we developed a unique RF data system that backed up a small parts real time order picking system and won some major orders including one from IBM. We were going strong when our bank, State Bank of South Australia, went broke and took more 2000 businesses with them, we were one of them. The product itself was recognised as the Australian Computer Society’s 1989 System of the Year Award. That was a long time ago, around 1990.  These days I keep busy writing the blog, a couple of books underway and I am a would-be artist with a passion for Jazz.

If you're still awake after reading this, I hope you enjoy the blog!