Ricky McCormick’s death in a Missouri cornfield in 1999 might have faded into obscurity — if not for the coded notes found in his pocket that the FBI still can’t crack.
The 41-year-old’s remains turned up on June 30 in a St. Charles County field, badly decomposed. According to the Riverfront Times, portions of his fingers had rotted away before anyone found him. The medical examiner ruled his cause of death “undetermined,” and investigators believed his body had been left in the field after he died elsewhere.
The notes — about 30 rows of capital letters, numbers, dashes and parentheses broken into sections — baffled investigators. They were turned over to the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), the same team that once cracked coded messages used by Nazi spies.
According to ABC News, analysts tried every tool they had and even consulted outside experts, but no one could solve the system.
“We are really good at what we do,” Dan Olson, chief of the unit, told ABC News. “But we could use a little help on this one. Breaking the code could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide. Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”
In March 2011, the FBI released the notes to the public, calling them one of its top unsolved codes — by then, McCormick had been dead for more than a decade.
FBI
Copy of code found in Ricky McCormick’s pocket
According to the Riverfront Times, McCormick had long struggled with asthma and chest pains. Days before his death, he checked into Barnes-Jewish Hospital on June 22, 1999, and was discharged two days later. On June 25, he visited Forest Park Hospital with similar complaints. The next day, he phoned his girlfriend and said he was heading to the Amoco gas station near his apartment. A clerk there later told police that McCormick was last seen alive at the station on June 27 — the same day the medical examiner estimated he died.
Three days later, his body was found in the cornfield.
But McCormick’s family said the man could scarcely write. His mother, Frankie Sparks, told the Riverfront Times that police initially said the only thing in the pocket was an emergency-room ticket — and the family didn’t learn about the coded notes until they were shown publicly in 2011.
“Now, twelve years later, they come back with this chicken-scratch s—,” she said. “The only thing he could write was his name. He didn’t write in no code.” His cousin Charles agreed: “He couldn’t spell anything, just scribble.”
But according to CBS News, investigators believed McCormick had been using coded notes since he was a child, though family members said they never knew how to read them.
FBI
Copy of coded McCormick note
Olson, however, told the Riverfront Times he was certain McCormick wrote the notes himself. He believed they looked more like a personal to-do list than a message meant for someone else. In another statement reported by ABC News, Olson added: “Even if we found out he was writing a grocery list or a love letter, we would still want to see how the code is solved. This is a cipher system we know nothing about.”
Not all experts agree. Elonka Dunin, a St. Louis cryptographer who has studied some of the world’s most famous unsolved codes, told the Riverfront Times: “I don’t think McCormick wrote these notes. Perhaps he was a courier.”
Investigators also examined the people in McCormick’s orbit. The Riverfront Times reported that McCormick lived off disability checks and picked up odd jobs at the Amoco gas station, where he was last seen alive.
The station was owned by Baha “Bob” Hamdallah, a St. Louis businessman who later faced an unrelated murder charge in Illinois before being retried and released.
McCormick was also loosely connected to Gregory Knox, a drug trafficker with a reputation for violence. Neither man has ever been tied to McCormick’s death, but their backgrounds highlighted the risks in the circles McCormick moved in.
Today, the FBI still lists McCormick’s cipher as one of its top unsolved cases. The notes remain online, open to anyone who thinks they can see what professional codebreakers have missed. More than 25 years after McCormick’s body was discovered in the cornfield, the strange letters he carried — and the mystery of his death — remain unsolved.
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