The body of a 41-year old Missouri man named Ricky McCormick was discovered lying in a cornfield with two handwritten notes stuffed in his pockets containing a cryptic code. In the over 20 years since his mysterious death, the FBI has never deciphered the “dead man‘s riddle” found with McCormick‘s body despite enlisting the help of expert cryptographers and codebreakers.
The messages scrawled across two pages torn from a notebook remain an enduring unsolved puzzle – one the FBI believes could help finally crack what really happened to Ricky McCormick before his corpse turned up dumped in a field back in 1999. But understanding the secrets behind these codes first requires unraveling the mystery of who Ricky McCormick was in life during his final days.
Profile of an Enigma
According to relatives, Ricky maintained regular contact with family over the years but often kept to himself beyond a tight inner circle of friends. His mother Winograd described Ricky as pleasant but forgetful at times. He would laugh at his own jokes and talk to himself even as a child. Although his mental faculties were intact enough to carry on normal conversation and relationships, records indicate Ricky only made it through 9th grade before dropping out of school.
As an adult, Ricky floated between jobs such as handling car deliveries at auto auctions and working at a liquor store before getting fired for stealing beer. Money troubles and minor run ins with the law were a recurring theme throughout his life. At one point Ricky even tried his hand at being a nightclub MC. But what he really longed for most was becoming a famous radio DJ.
Sadly, Ricky’s big dreams stood Hindered by bouts of pain and health issues matching his enigmatic personality. During childhood he was plagued by bouts of unexplained seizures, weakness and tiring easily. In his adult years, breathing troubles landed him in the emergency room on more than one occasion. According to hospital records, Ricky made at least 9 visits citing chest tightness, congestion and difficulty inhaling during the 3 years prior to the discovery of his body in mid 1999.
Despite battery after battery of tests, doctors could never pinpoint an exact cause of McCormick’s respiratory flare ups. Broken ribs from an accident years earlier didn’t fully explain the sporadic nature of symptoms. Treating physicians continually suspected anxiety played a driving factor given the increase in breathing attacks during times of stress. They weren’t far off the mark in that assessment based on how the final weeks of Ricky’s life played out.
The Final Days
On June 21, 1999 Ricky McCormick once again checked into Barnes-Jewish Hospital with nagging breathing difficulties keeping him up at night accompanied by a persisting cough. After a round of standard tests came back negative, doctors chalked up the episode as another anxiety spell and didn’t anticipate holding McCormick long in the hospital since he appeared otherwise healthy. But nurses later found Ricky wandering the halls in an agitated state around 4:00 AM insisting people outside were “after him”.
For reasons unknown, McCormick felt unsafe leaving the hospital grounds. He spent the entire night camped out on a lobby couch with eyes glued to the front entrance like he expected an intruder to storm the doors. The following morning, hospital staff discovered an exhausted Ricky still dressed in his street clothes in the same exact position. When pressured to provide a local contact, the only person McCormick could produce was an on-and-off girlfriend named Sandra Jones.
After giving Sandra a call, Ricky finally agreed to be discharged from the hospital since nurses determined his vitals checked out and any breathing episodes stemmed from growing anxiety. Sandra Jones later informed police Ricky claimed plans to pick up an unspecified check after taking the bus to a nearby gas station. That was the last conversation he had with any loved one. His girlfriend pleaded for McCormick to call her later that night after he got home safe. That call never came.
In just over 72 hours on June 30th, Ricky McCormick’s corpse was discovered nearly 30 miles from the hospital off a one-lane road – dumped on private farmland known to locals as the perfect spot for hiding dead bodies no one wants found. Who brought him there after picking him up at a gas station days earlier appearing fearful for his life? And how did such an innocuous man with grand radio dreams end up scrawling coded messages before turning up in a abandoned field likely murdered by unknown hands?
Mysterious Cause of Death
Due to the suspicious nature of Ricky McCormick’s demise, investigators initially pursued it as a criminal homicide. However, an autopsy revealed no clear trauma that led medical examiners to positively declare his cause of death a homicide. McCormick’s long history of lung and breathing issues pointed more towards another severe episode. When no signs of strangulation, stabbing wounds or blunt force appeared, examiners felt comfortable amending their stance to list his manner of passing as “undetermined” while citing natural causes on account of a chronic lung condition.
While the apparent cause itself no longer pointed to a clear murder, the fact McCormick wound up 30 miles from his intended whereabouts in an isolated field known as a mob dumping ground still screamed foul play. The medical ruling did little to explain why a man with no car or money called his girlfriend from a payphone saying he planned to grab a check before vanishing off the face of the earth and dying mysteriously an entire county away.
Even more chilling, investigators uncovered two handwritten notes stuffed in Ricky McCormick’s pants pockets scrawled with seemingly coded language including a blend of letters, numbers and odd symbols. Given McCormick’s limited education, detectives considered it unlikely he devised such complex encryption himself in his final terrified hours.
So who did write those coded notes found on McCormick’s corpse? And what secrets lie buried in their cryptic message?
Cracking the Code
The crux of understanding Ricky McCormick’s bizarre death lies rooted in deciphering the two coded documents discovered with his body all those years ago that continue to confound both professional and amateur sleuths alike. But what is a cipher exactly? And why can’t law enforcement crack the code hidden inside?
Understanding Ciphers
In the world of cryptography, ciphers work by disguising messages using techniques that make the original text unreadable without special knowledge or an encryption key to decipher them. A basic cipher might substitute each letter of the alphabet with a different letter, number or symbol using a standard pattern. For instance A = *, B = #, C = $ and so on. As long as both sender and receiver have the same cipher “key”, the message can be encrypted into secret code on side, then decrypted on the other end.
More complex ciphers build on this concept incorporating additional shifts, misdirection and sophistication designed expressly to thwart outside decryption attempts. The FBI suspects McCormick’s notes closely fit the mold of a sophisticated ciphered code message based on letter frequency analysis and contextual clues.
The notes themselves consist primarily of groupings of letters often bracketed by parentheses and interspersed with numbers and symbolic characters such as triangles or circles. While short words like “MANN” do appear, there exists no discernible larger English word patterns. One sleuth compared it to reading alien language. What precisely does it all mean?
The Failed Codecracking Attempts
In the 12 years following Ricky McCormick’s death, both local county police and later the FBI flew largely blind on decoding McCormick’s vexing notes that today reside as evidence under seal at FBI headquarters in Virginia. However, in March 2021 the case attracted renewed public interest after the chief of the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit published an appeal for help cracking the 20 year old cold case cipher.
In the absence of new leads, Agent Dan Olson hopes casting a wider net to engage armchair sleuths and cryptography fanatics alike may provide fresh perspectives on finally unraveling the encrypted messages he believes were not written solely by McCormick himself.
Olson described his Crypto unit’s code breaking process on this case, stating “We looked at it every which way. I don’t want to say we tossed it into a computer…but we tried a lot on this case, nobody got anywhere with it.”
The FBI isn’t alone hitting dead ends. Over the years, even professional cryptanalysts with backgrounds in mathematics, linguistics and computer science have fared little better deciphering McCormick’s notes. Nobody can determine if it follows recognizable encryption standards, or might be an entirely randomized made up language known only to its author. Without a clear pattern or guiding cipher key, the contents remain ephemeral as smoke.
What Might The Cipher Reveal?
Assuming the coded messages discovered in 1999 hold an decipherable meaning, plenty of theories persist on what secrets they could contain. Proposed ideas span the range of everything from criminal hit orders, illicit transactions, mental patient ramblings or just hastily scrawled letter nonsense from a frightened man aware time was running short.
Of course any number of explanations remain plausible about the notes without deciphering them given the limited ground truth known decades later. However, the prime curiosity driving the FBI’s latest public outreach stems from analysis suggesting McCormick himself did not create such complex encryption scribbled out in his final terrified moments of life.
If Ricky merely copied down notes for survival before his death unknowing of their meaning, the original author’s identity persists as a central figure to unmask for investigators. Agent Olson floated ideas from McCormick picking up coded communication off a police scanner to acting as unwitting drug mule for a larger criminal conspiracy. But as of now, the “why” and the “who” behind the codes stay locked inside a factual black box until patterns emerge breaking the cipher wall.
Amateur Sleuths and the Long Tail of Cold Cases
While efforts stalled for many years in making progress toward identifying Ricky McCormick’s killer, the FBI’s 2021 public callout generated renewed examined online from the public. This appeal to crowdsource opinions on cracking cold cases has helped advance other persistent unsolved mysteries stuck for decades without resolution.
Another recent high profile example involves infamous skyjacker DB Cooper whose 1971 plane hijacking and escape by parachute with $200,000 in ransom money remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in the United States. After drawing a blank for over 45 years, the FBI revived appeals for tips through public outreach efforts in 2016, leading to a flood of theories on everything from Cooper’s secret identity to potential landing zones matching weather and terrain analyses.
While the McCormick cipher lacks the romantic flair of D.B. Cooper‘s parachute vanishing act, the cryptographic challenge persistence over 20 years still generates the same level of enduring public intrigue and determination to find answers. Message board threads dissecting the codes fill up daily alongside detailed theories on what information the notes could reveal if deciphered.
In 2021, communications theory graduate Sarah Hyndman reviewed the codes on her “Secret Symbols” blog, noting similarities to concept-based writing systems among mental health patients where significance imbues into seemingly arbitrary markings [1]. However she still believes enough cohesive structure underlies the notes to suggest communicative intent and encourage further crowd analysis.
This drive to reexamine details echo cases like the Keddie Murders mystery that went cold following the 1981 killing of four people in Northern California until amateur internet sleuths kickstarted new momentum leading to a recent arrest [2]. Such examples highlight the compounding probability over time of fresh perspectives eventually shedding new light on truth by iterating publicly over details and unexplored leads.
Solving the Human Mystery
While the ciphers’ meaning persists locked away without a guiding key, the person central to unlocking this mystery also remains equally obscured in history. piecing together scattered remembrances from family and acquaintances, a portrait emerges of a troubled yet still vibrant man seeking joy where he found it while coping with a lifetime of setbacks and deteriorating mental and physical health.
Maybe in those final terrified hours, Ricky himself searched for fleeting comfort and security in a hospital lobby couch having nowhere else to turn before circumstances delivered him into the clutches of a darker demise. Or perhaps Ricky stumbled blindly into a web of intrigue far beyond his control at the hands of cunning conspirators.
Today the FBI still seeks answers not only decrypt the hidden messages discovered two decades ago, but to grant a semblance of justice and closure to family members like Ricky’s mother Winograd still grieving her son’s un avenged death. While the encoded ciphers drew initial focus, penetrating deeper into the human mystery of who Ricky McCormick really was as a person suffers equally from obscured visibility.
Ricky‘s scattered puzzle pieces don‘t easily fit together into a unified whole. Wild imaginations wrestling with sanity. Breathing troubles with no identifiable cause. Cryptic notes containing deep secrets tempting discovery against impossible odds. By peering through lenses seeking patterns while admitting where vision blurs contours yet unknown, leads surface over time through persistence.
Understanding ciphers doesn’t just require finding the right key — it comes from empathy exploring all the locked chambers still hidden from view. Something in Ricky‘s coded messages or the faded hospital lobby traces he left last may yet crack this aging cold case. Until then, freshly curious eyes continue searching through the haze, hoping lighthouses shine guiding McCormick and perhaps even ourselves through the fog toward clarity.
[[1]: https://secretsymbols.wordpress.com/2021/10/17/ricky-mccormicks-mysterious-notes/ "Sarah Hyndman’s Cipher Review"] [[2]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-18/how-an-internet-cold-case-community-solved-a-25-year-old-murder-mystery "Keddie Murders Background"]