The Case of Ricky McCormick and the Unbreakable Code 

Ricky McCormick's body was found on June 30, 1999 near a West Alton, Missouri cornfield by a woman driving along a field road off Route 367. Although it had been just three days since he disappeared, the flesh on his outstretched hands was already rotted to the point that his fingertips, just below the top knuckles, had fallen off and lay next to him in the weeds.

Police immediately suspected foul play: The field was a popular place to dump bodies. And a post-murder disposal seemed the only logical explanation for how McCormick could have ended up in a cornfield nearly 20 miles from his home—he couldn’t drive and buses don’t run to empty cornfields. But there were other reasons, too. In 1993, he served 11 months in prison for a felony conviction of first-degree sexual abuse; more recently, he’d had ties to a local drug ring. With his spotty history, police reasoned, somebody must have wanted to kill him. Yet the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis found no evidence pointing to who might have killed him. And maybe McCormick hadn’t been murdered at all. The medical examiner couldn’t find any stab or gunshot wounds; maybe there was a head wound, but the body was too decomposed for anyone to be sure.

The news stories in 1999 did not mention anything about cipher messages, which were not announced until 12 years later when the FBI listed the death as a murder, and posted a notice for help on the main page of their website. Investigators believe the notes in McCormick’s pants pockets were written within the three days before his death.

The two notes are written in an unknown code. Attempts by both the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) and the American Cryptogram Association failed to decipher their meaning, and Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes are currently listed as one of CRRU’s top unsolved cases, with McCormick's killer yet to be identified.

In a 2012 interview by the Riverfront Times McCormick's family members say they never knew of Ricky to write in code. They say they only told investigators he sometimes jotted down nonsense he called writing, and they seriously question McCormick's capacity to craft the notes found in his pockets." His mother, Frankie Sparks, said "The only thing he could write was his name. ... He didn't write in no code." His father, Charles McCormick, said "Ricky couldn't spell anything, just scribble."

It turns out McCormick's riddle, allegedly written by a man who could hardly write his own name, has stumped the world's foremost code breakers. They remain so baffled, in fact, that McCormick's notes now rank third on the CRRU's list of top unsolved cases, behind only an unbroken cipher authored by the self-proclaimed Zodiac killer in 1969 and a secret threat letter written to an undisclosed public agency about 25 years ago.

Help break the code here: https://forms.fbi.gov/code