Ricky McCormick
Ricky McCormick was a high school dropout who had held multiple addresses in the Greater St. Louis area, living intermittently with his elderly mother. According to a 1999 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, McCormick suffered from chronic heart and lung problems. He was not married, but had fathered at least four children. He had a criminal record, and had previously served 11 months of a three-year sentence for statutory rape. At the time of his death, he was 41 years old, unemployed, and receiving disability welfare payments.
McCormick's body was found on June 30, 1999 in a cornfield near West Alton, Missouri by a woman driving along a field road near Route 367. The reason he was 15 miles (24 km) away from his then-current address is another mystery, as he did not own a car and the area was not served by public transportation. Though the body had already somewhat decomposed, authorities used fingerprints to identify McCormick. There was no indication that anyone had a motive to kill McCormick and no one had reported him missing. As such, the authorities initially ruled out homicide; however, no cause of death was officially determined at the time. McCormick was last seen alive five days earlier, on June 25, 1999, getting a check-up at St. Louis' now-defunct Forest Park Hospital.
The two notes found in McCormick's pockets are written in an unknown code consisting of "a jumble of letters and numbers occasionally set off with parentheses" and are believed by the FBI to possibly lead to those responsible for the killing. Dan Olson, chief of the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, said, illustrating the significance of the notes, "Breaking the code could reveal the victim's whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide." 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. According to members of McCormick's family, Ricky had not used encrypted notes as a boy, and apparently no one in his family knows how to decipher the codes, either.
the two notes
