Season 06 Episode 22: To Morn Names (Pt. 3 of 3)

Starring Olivier nominated actor and former Blue Peter legend Peter Duncan, When Darkness Falls is a spine chilling ghost story that delivers a twisted, terrifying and thrilling tale that the Guardian said will leave you cowering in your seat. Catch the brand new UK tour of When Darkness Falls from September fifteenth in a town near you. Select nights will also feature myself delivering a live episode of Unexplained. For more details or to book tickets, visit When Darkness Falls dot

co dot uk. If you dare you're listening to Unexplained Season six, episode twenty two to Mourn Names, Part three of three, with the discovery of the small slip of paper bearing the enigmatic words tamam should by pathologist Professor John clelland Detective Lionel Lean's team down at the Adelaide Detective's Office finally have a serious clue to get their teeth into. Sadly, nobody, however, has the faintest idea what

it means. Weeks go by as they try in vain to uncover the meaning of the words, until one afternoon Frank Kennedy, a journalist at the Adelaide Advertiser, gets wind of the strange discovery and has an instant jolt of recognition. He races to the phone and calls Detective Len Brown to let him know where he's seen the phrase before.

In a volume of poetry, The Rubayat of Omar Khayam, the Rubayat is a series of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayam, a mathematician and astronomer who lived in Persia in the eleventh and twelfth century CE, which were loosely compiled and translated by the poet Edward Fitzgerald. First published in eighteen fifty nine, the book initially failed to sell until a fashion for Orientalism in the English speaking world saw its

popularity increase markedly. The Rubayat became even more popular during the First and Second World War, offering solace to many with its themes of accepting fate and embracing the virtues of living life by the day. Detective Brown grabs the slipper paper and heads straight out to a nearby bookstore. He runs his fingers across the spines in the poetry section until finally he comes across a Collins Press first

edition at the Rubaiyat. He pulls it from the shelf and rifles through the pages, turning over the last one to discover right there, staring back at him in bold type, the words tamam should Holding the page up to the light, he pulls out the torn piece of paper from his pocket and holds it over the words on the page. It's a perfect match. Later, after consulting with the librarian, Detective Brown and the rest of the team learned that the phrase its Persian its English translation meaning to end

or finish. They go into overdrive, contacting all bookshops and libraries in the hope of finding the original item from which the slip had been torn, but the search comes to yet another dead end back at the Morgue. Despite the continuing of the embalming process, the dead man's body is beginning to disintegrate, and in the absence of a positive identification, the police are left with little option but

to finally lay him to rest. Local taxidermist Paul Lawson is brought in to make a cast of the upper torso and head should anyone turn up later wanting to id the body before it is dressed and prepared for burial. On the morning of June fourteenth, nineteen forty nine, the nameless man is transported by Hearst from the funeral parlor of F. T. Elliot and Sons in Hindmarsh and delivered to the West Terrace Cemetery. It is hard to escape the stark somberness of the occasion, laying to rest a

body for which there is no identity. This unnamed man, with no apparent friends or family to claim him as their own, those who'd spent over six months trying to decipher his riddle are united in a peculiar sadness as his body is lowered into the ground. The case touched the public's hearts to such an extent that a local bookmaker covered the cost to grant the man a proper funeral, and a few days later, a small headstone is placed at the top of his grave, a gift from a

local stonemason. It reads, here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton Beach first of December nineteen forty eight. An inquest is held into the man's death shortly after, concluding that he'd most likely died from unnatural causes, which appears to draw a final line of sorts under the investigation. The man's bust is placed on display at the South

Australian Museum for anyone caring to examine it. And although the detectives continue their hopeful search for the vital Rubayat, it's hard for them not to suspect that they'd come to the end of the road. That is, until something extraordinary comes to light. Late one Friday evening in July. Ronald France This is reading the newspaper at his home on Jetty Road in Glenelg when he comes across a story about a local police search for a book with

a partially torn off back page. Remembering a road trip he and his wife had taken with her brother and his wife the previous year, Roland gets up and heads out to his hillman Minx parked up on the street

just by his house. He opens the door and reaches over to the glove compartment, pulling out the book from inside that his brother in law had placed there when they'd return from their trip, The Rubayat of Omar k i Am, it says on the front Rowland flicks immediately to the back page and is astonished to find a large chunk of it is missing, ripped out from the middle. What's more, there appears to be something written inside the

back that looks suspiciously like a phone number. As it will transpire, Roland's brother in law had found it under the seat and had placed it in the glove box, thinking erroneously that it was Roland's. The next morning, Roland arrives at the Adelaide detective's office and is introduced to a beaming detective lion Or Lean. Roland hands the book to Lean, who wastes no time in comparing the strip

to the back page, finding it an exact match. After confirming Roland's story and subsequently clearing him of any involvement in the man's death, the team immediately get to work analyzing the book, placing the inside of the back cover under ultra violet light. They're amazed to find not one,

but two phone numbers in dent onto the card. Underneath those numbers, they find something very peculiar, indeed, five rows of letters written out in an unrecognizable sequence W R G O A B A B D M L I A O I W T b I M P A n E T P M l I A B O A I a QC and I T T M T S A M S T q a B. The second line seems to have been crossed out, and there is an X written over the O in the fourth. It looks like a foreign language, suggests one of the officers. No,

it doesn't, says another. It looks like a code. The numbers, at least are more easily deciphered. One is discovered to belong to a bank, but the second is found to be residential and tracked to a property in Moseley Street in Glenelk, which incredibly runs directly off Jetty Road, right next to where Rowland Francis kept its car. A short time later, Detective Errol Caney, who'd been tasked with tracing the phone number, makes its way up the porch steps

of the requisite home, in Moseley Street. It's a pleasant tree lined street, just one back from the beach front and barely fifteen minutes walk from where the unknown Man's body had been found the previous year. On that bright December morning of nineteen forty eight, Caney can barely contain as nervous excitement as he knocks on the door, Hearing movement from insight, He catches sight of someone approaching, and moments later is greeted at the door by a young,

confident woman with wavy, brown shoulder length hair. She shields her eyes from the light to get a better fix on Caney as he introduces himself, before he suggests politely that perhaps they better go inside to talk. The woman, who introduces herself as Jessica Thompson, is completely dumbfounded as to why her number might have been written in the back of the dead man's rubayat, but is happy to

answer Caney's questions. She goes on to explain that she's lived in Glenelg for the past few years, working as a nurse in the city. She had moved here after completing her training in Sydney and lived alone with her husband, Prestige, who was presently out of town along with their three year old son Robin. After a lull in the conversation, Kaney asks again if she can't think of anything that might be of significance to the case, and then finally

something occurs to her. There was a soldier a few years back, she says, whom she'd met a couple of times during the war while out with friends back when she was a trainee in Sydney. She'd given him a copy of the Rubayat shortly before he'd been due to ship out again. The man had later tried to contact her after the war had finished, but she'd written back to him letting him know that she was married and that it would be best if they no longer spoke.

The man's name, she says, was Alfred Boxall, and she also gives an address whether police might find him. Kainey reads out the strange sequence of letters found at the back of the book and asks if Jessica has any idea what it might mean, but she is as stumped as anyone. Kiney thanks Jessica for her time and suggests they arrange a date for her to come down to the station to make a formal statement. And take a look at the cast of the man as he turns to go. Kiney asks if Jessica ever went by any

other names. She replied, yes, people often used to call me Jestin. Back at Anger Street, Detective Lean asks all personnel to find out what they can about Alfred Boxall. Best Fiends is a new, fun packed, free to download mobile game with thousands of exciting levels for new adventures every time you play with its band of cute creature hero match and solve thousands of fun puzzles as you take down your sluggy enemies and blast your way to the top of Mount Boom, having scraped it all the

way to level forty two. I'm still sticking with Edward the Mosquito for my own personal favorite creature, but I've still got a soft spot for Howie the Lizard. Best Fiends is great to play in your downtime or on a commute while listening to your favorite podcast, and with offline play, you'll never be stranded without fun even if

you lose your Internet connection. Look out for brand new events and challenges all year round, so you've always got a chance to earn exclusive in game items, characters, and rewards. Download your new favorite Getaway Best Fiends for free today on the App Store or Google Play. You'll even get five dollars worth of in game rewards when you reach level five. That's Friends without the Art, Best Fiends with boxalls.

Linked to the Rubaiyat and Jessica's rejection of him, Lean is beginning to think they might finally have their man, and that perhaps it had all been a case of suicide after all. On the afternoon of July twenty sixth, nineteen forty nine, seven months since the body of the unknown man was found, detectives Lean and Caney accompanied Jessica Thompson to the South Australia Museum to view the bust. The men watch with bated breath as Jessica approaches it.

For a moment, Lean is certain he discerns a glimmer of recognition on her face, before she quickly averts her eyes to the floor, where they stay for the remainder of their conversation. She seems momentarily unsteady on her feet too, almost as if she might faint, but when Lean asks if she's okay, she insists she is. He asks her to confirm whether she has seen the man before there is the briefest of pauses before she answers, I have not,

she says. Three days later, after tracking Alfred Boxall's last known address to a property in the beachside suburb of Maruber in Sydney, the man is found alive and well, working maintenance at a bus depot in near by Randwick.

When Boxall is later interviewed at his home by the Sydney's CIB, he confirms Jessica's story about the night at the Clifton Gardens Hotel when she'd given him a copy of the Rubayat, and even shows them the original book to prove it, pointing out the inscription in the front, signed by Jesstin, before carefully returning it back to his bookshelf. He apologizes for their wasted journey. There is no luck with the possible code either, not even when it's offered

to the country's finest naval intelligence officers to crack. With nothing left to lose, Detective Lean releases it to the press in a move that, over the next seventy years will see a vast army of amateur sleuths try their luck at trying to break it. To this day, nobody has been able to offer a satisfactory answer as to

what it means. Many things will come to light further down the line that had the detectives known may have proved significant, one piece of information being that Alfred Boxall's wartime Engineer's unit had and merely been a glorified home guard,

but were also involved in intelligence gathering. One other being that Jessica Thompson, as she is alleged to have told her daughter shortly before dying in two thousand and seven, had indeed known the unidentified man, and so too had others who she allegedly described as being of an authority

above the beliefs. Time has done little to damp an interest in the unknown man found dead on Somerton Beach in December nineteen forty eight, with speculation as to what he was doing that evening in a quiet Adelaide suburb

as rife today as it ever was. Was he the mysterious Ray Clark, a secret agent and cohort of Jessica Thompson's perhaps who could no longer be trusted, or worse, having served his purpose, was no longer of use, or was he merely a passing acquaintance of Thompson, destroyed by an unrequited love, or was he simply one of many people who'd been forced to leave their wars, guard, homes, and families behind on the other side of the world, finding any job they could in the hope of building

a better future for their loved ones, A man whose heart had unexpectedly given out as he took a moment to enjoy the sunset and to think upon the day when they might all be finally reunited. Although it's the failure to conclusively identify the summiton Man as he came to be known that has given his existence more visibility than most, it has certainly not been on his terms.

Whether or not he cared himself for posterity. His fate is one that will surely haunt many of us, the sadness of a life destined to be forgotten, an affirmation of a degree of meaningless to profound to comprehend, even if in reality it is a fate that may well

befall us all. The notion of individuality may seem peculiar to an omnipotent godhead observing our insignificant speck of rock from outside our universe, seeing the rapidity with which we come and go, watching as the busy minute shapes scurry about the globe while hundreds of years tick by, seeming to them like nanoseconds, watching on as points of mass emerge and structures rise and fall, noticing with amusement, perhaps how with such predictable regularity, lights begin to flicker and

turn on as the great shadow of night curls around the planet. From this perspective, divided we were considered significant enough to even warrant observation, we would appear to them, how many of us might regard a colony of ants, for example, or a slide of bacteria, singular components of an irrelevant species that jostles, evolves, lives, and dies, each of us completely interchangeable and indistinguishable from each other, appearing merely to be fulfilling the objectives of some sort of

hive mind. How shocking it might be to them, then, to move in closer and discover a very different world, indeed, a world of fierce uniqueness and breadth of individuality, full of all the many ways we might distinguish ourselves from each other. It is this world that begins with our names. In the Arthur Miller play, the Crucible of fictionalized account of the Salem Which trials and an allegory of the communist paranoia that gripped the US in the nineteen fifties.

Lead character John Proctor finds himself forced to confess to witchcraft to avoid execution. However, such a confession comes at a cost. Not only will it condemn other prisoners to their deaths, but with his name written in ink and pin to the local church door, he and his family will forever be marked by his confessed sins. In the play's climactic scene, Procter changes its mind and rips up the confession. In answer to why he'd done so, he cries out, because it is my name, because I cannot

have another in my life. I have given you my soul, leave me my name. What then, is in a name? Certainly, as Shakespeare would have us believe in Romeo and Juliet, it is not hand nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to us. We rarely choose them for ourselves. Sometimes we don't even like them. And yet for most of us, for better or worse, it is our name that will remain on the administrative records certificates, censuses, gravestones,

and social media accounts long after we have gone. For all that we attempt to project ourselves into collective spaces, be it through written, audio, or visual means, it is the simple magic of our names that serve as the primary trigger from which we are conjured up and held in the minds of others. How in our absence we might remain something solid and real. A name, then has power.

It is where we begin and end. It is quite odd, then, to think how few of us take the root of the eponymous ladybird in Greta Gerwig's brilliant twenty seventeen film and choose our own name for ourselves. For many, a name you don't like might be an annoyance, but it can at least be a source of pride, a connection

with one's family or tribe. We will often take for granted that we have a name at all, But what a luxury it is when you consider the millions of German Jews with names of so called non Jewish origin, forced by law on first of January nineteen thirty nine to adopt the name Israel or Sarah to make it clear to authorities who was Jewish or not, or the hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children abducted from their homes in Africa, enslaved, an amised, and stripped of

their identities, often only granted a name in their newly forced places of residence to make it easier for administrative purposes or as a mark of a master's ownership. Given the horrific experience of victims of the Holocaust or slavery, a given name can then be a complicated and wholly unwelcome signifier that you exist, and one that can bury

the truth of who you truly are underneath. When Muhammad Ali became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world in February nineteen sixty four, he did so under a different name, Cassius Clay. When he decided to change it, many people in the Western worlds predominantly white media refused to recognize it, but Ali would not be refused. He told them, Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn't choose it, and I don't want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name.

It means beloved of God, and I insist people use it when people speak to me. Perhaps this concept of individuality is just an additional layer of sophistication in what is nothing but part of a genetically driven strategy to heighten the illusion of self that keeps us fighting to live. We might also argue that to do away with such ideas of individual self is where true liberty lies. That only when we learn to shed our egos and stop laboring under the delusion of separateness and our desire to

be noticed, we might finally be free. Until that day comes, it is hard to argue with Gerwig's lady Bert Hard to fail to understand the torment of Margaret Atwood's handmaiden offered, or indeed to fail to understand the shedding of names such as Alice Fay Williams for the luminescence of a fiene schaccur. Instead. David Lytton, whose body was found on Saddleworth More in twenty fifteen, and with whomse name this

story began, had in fact been born David Loutenburg. At some point later in his life he decided to change his name to Lytton, which, as long as the records exist to show it, will perhaps stand as a more

truthful mark of whom he considered himself to be. Consider too our propensity for social media to so often operate not as a tool with which to explore each other, but a means with which to validate ourselves, not only a way of saying who we are, but, in the way of old school graffiti, a way of saying we were here, that we did exist. If all this life, the universe, and everything is meaningless, perhaps at the very least we can say that we were here, material and

extant in our own right. What's in a name might just be the beginning of the truth that your entire existence is founded on. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via Patreon To receive access to add three episodes, Just go to patron dot com forward slash Unexplained pod to sign up. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase Amazon, Barnes

and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at

Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Podcast