Timeline of the Taman Shud Case

• 1944 February, Operation Venona targeting encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications began.
• 1947 April, Under Operation Venona, American cryptanalysts, at the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, crack messages transmitted from the Russian Embassy in Canberra to Moscow. They detected leaked intelligence information, and this results in a ban of US classified information in Australia during 1948.
• 1948 May, Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director General of MI5 flys to Australia and prime minister Ben Chifley is informed of the security breach.
• 1948 November 30th, the Somerton Man presumably arrives in Adelaide by train sometime between 8:30am 10:54am.
• 1948 November 30th, a suitcase allegedly belonging to the Somerton Man was checked into Adelaide Train Station cloak room sometime between 11.00am and 12noon. R. Craig issues the luggage receipt.
• 1948 November 30th, the Somerton Man buys a train ticket to Henley. The ticket is in his pocket. He doesn't take this train but instead takes a bus to Somerton.
• 1948 November 30th, sometime after 11:15am the Somerton Man buys a 7d bus ticket from conductor Arthur Holdernesse at some point between North Terrace and South Terrace. The bus is headed for Somerton.
• 1948 November 30th, an allegedly unrelated man in Glenelg finds a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam on the back seat of his car, parked in Jetty Rd, Glenelg.
• 1948 November 30th, at some point the Somerton Man eats a pasty.
• 1948 November 30th, in the evening John Lyons and his wife notice the man slumped lying adjacent to the steps in front of the crippled children's home. The Somerton Man raised his right arm and dropped it.
• 1948 November 30th, Gordon Strapps and Olive Neill notice the body somewhere between 7:30pm and 8pm.
• 1948 December 1st, estimated time of death of man 2:00am.
• 1948 December 1st, man found dead at 6.30am, Somerton Beach, Adelaide, by Lyons and two men with a horse. Constable John Moss arrives 6:45am. In an ambulance outside the Royal Adelaide Hospital at 9:40am the body was officially pronounced dead by Dr John Barclay Bennett and the body was then transferred to the city mortuary.
• 1948 December 2nd, the post-mortem is carried out at 7:30am at the City Mortuary by Dr John Dwyer, a government pathologist.
• 1948 December 2nd, Robert Cowan tests samples of the body for traces of poison. None detected.
• 1948 December 2nd, The Advertiser newspaper in an article "Body found on beach" suggests that "E. C. Johnson" is the deceased man.
• 1948 December 3rd, Police photographer Patrick Durham fingerprints the body and photographs the body.
• 1948 December 3rd, Johnson walks into a police station to prove he is alive. This possibility is thus eliminated.
• 1948 December 4th, Police announce that the Somerton Man's fingerprints were not on South Australian police records.
• 1948 December 5th, Police search military records in response to a reported sighting of a military man named 'Solomonson', resembling the Somerton Man, was sighted drinking at a hotel in Glenelg on November 30th, 1948.
• 1948 December 10th, the dead body was embalmed in formaldehyde to preserve it. This was a usual custom in those days.
• 1949 January, two people identified the body as that of 63 year old former wood cutter Robert Walsh. This possibility was ruled out as the dead body looked too young to be Walsh. Also Walsh was a Woodcutter and the hands of the Somerton man showed no signs of manual labor. Elizabeth Thompson,who had identified the body as Walsh, retracted her statement.
• 1949 January 14th, Adelaide Railway Station find a brown suitcase apparently belonging to the dead man.
• 1949 January 14th, police detectives Lionel Leane and Len Brown are assigned to the case.
• 1949 February, there were eight different possible identifications of the body, including a missing stablehand, a worker on a steamship, a Swedish man, and a man from Darwin.
• 1949 March 16th, in an effort to win back US support after the embarrassing Operation Venova revelation, prime minister Ben Chifley issues a directive to start an Australian security organization to investigate all suspect spies identified by Operation Venova. By August, this new organization is named ASIO.
• 1949 June 6th, the dead body of Clive Mangnoson is found 20 km away from Somerton by Neil McRae.
• 1949 June 7th, Paul Lawson makes a plaster cast of the head & shoulders of the Somerton Man.
• 1949 June, Sir John Cleland re-examined the body and noticed the dead man's shoe's were remarkably clean and polished, implying the man would not have walked on the beach much if at all. About this time Cleland found the piece of paper bearing the inscription "Tamám Shud" tightly concealed in the dead man's fob pocket.
• 1949 June 14th, the Somerton man is buried.
• 1949 June 17th, The coronial inquest commenced.
• 1949 June 21st, The coronial inquest ended inclusively with an adjournment sine die.
• 1949 July 22nd, a businessman hands in the copy of the Rubaiyat containing the secret code to the SA police and Jestin's phone number. Jestin's residence was only quarter of a mile away from where the dead body was found. The book contained one penciled telephone number plus a sequence of 50 letters presumed to be a secret code. The sequence is in 5 lines and contains 3 spaces. One line is possibly crossed out.
• 1949 July 25th, SA police test the "Tamám Shud" paper against the colour and texture of the paper in the book found in the car. They confirmed a match. A copy of the code is sent to Army Headquarters in Melbourne for an attempt at decryption.
• 1949 July 26th, Police trace the phone number in the book to Jestin, and they show her a plaster cast of the victim. She stated she was unable to tell if it was Alf Boxall or not.
• 1949 July 27th, Sydney detectives find and interview Alf Boxall.
• 1949 July 27th, police send the code to a Navy cracker.
• 1948 July 28th, Boxall's wife shows a Sydney reporter their copy of the Rubaiyat.
• 1958 March 14th, a second Coronial Inquest is held. No new findings. No new witnesses. Appears to have been a bureaucratic formality rather than an active inquest.
• 1959 November, E. B. Collins an inmate of Wanganui Prison, New Zealand, claimed the Somerton Man was Titus Kean. This is dismissed as Titus Kean was born in 1918, which would make him to young to be the Somerton Man.
• 1978 The ABC TV documentary show called Inside Story screened an episode of "The Somerton Beach Mystery" at 8pm, Thursday, August 24th, 1978 (Sydney time). The documentary was put together by Stuart Littlemore.
• 1986 The Somerton Man's brown suitcase was destroyed.
• 2009 March 19th, The Adelaide University project team, with an ABC film crew, all visit the SA Police Museum and examine the bust of the Somerton man closely, noting that hair is definitely embedded in the plaster cast and that the ears have an unusual ridge across them.
• 2009 March 19th, Dr Matthew Berryman notices rocks placed at the foot of the Somerton Man's grave in the Jewish tradition. This most likely indicates that a Jewish person recently visited the gravesite. The longshot possibility of a Jewish connection, if the man's name really was Solomonson, is unlikely as the body was uncircumcised.
• 2009 March 19th, Prof Derek Abbott checks Adelaide Uni/RAH Pathology Autopsy Reports of 1948 and 1949, finding that there is no entry for the Somerton Man. Also the Barr Smith Library's collection of Cleland's notes did not contain anything on the case.
• 2009 March 27th, ABC Stateline broadcast a story on the Somerton mystery. See video link here.
• 2000 March 31st, Andrew Turnbull and Denley Bihari give a seminar on the Somerton mystery at the University of Adelaide, proposing a number of code cracking approaches. The talk was attended by Gerry Feltus, Tony Elliot, and an ABC film crew.
• 2009 April 6th, Prof Derek Abbott puts out a world-search for an identical copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to that of the Somerton man, using the power of FaceBook. No one in 60 yrs has ever found or come forward with an identical edition of the book. To see the world-search go here.
• 2009 April 15th, Prof Derek Abbott finds that the Coroner's office has no autopsy report on the Somerton man.

See also

• Critical design review 2009: Who killed the Somerton man?
• Final report 2009: Who killed the Somerton man?
• List of people connected to the Taman Shud Case
• Cipher Cracking 2009
• List of facts on the Taman Shud Case that are often misreported
• List of facts we do know about the Somerton Man

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