West Alton, Missouri · 1999 · Unsolved Mystery

In 1999, a Man Was Found Dead in a Missouri Field. The FBI Still Cannot Read the Notes in His Pockets

The Ricky McCormick cipher consists of two pages of strange letters, numbers and symbols found with a dead man in Missouri. More than two decades later, they remain one of the most haunting pieces of evidence in the case.

West Alton, Missouri. June 30, 1999.

A woman was driving along Route 367 when she noticed something on the ground.

Deputies were called to an isolated area near West Alton.

There, lying face down, they found the body of a man.

He was 41 years old.

His name was Ricky McCormick.

According to the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, McCormick had been missing for approximately three days before his body was discovered.

Investigators did not know why he was there.

They did not know exactly what had happened to him.

And they did not know what the pieces of paper inside his clothing meant.

The dead man carried two messages. Nobody could read them.

At first glance, the papers looked chaotic.

Rows of capital letters.

Numbers.

Parentheses.

Repeated combinations.

Symbols that appeared to follow rules known only to the person who wrote them.

Years later, those pages would become known as the Ricky McCormick cipher.

Ricky McCormick was not a professional cryptographer.

He was not known as a mathematician or intelligence officer.

Yet according to the FBI, his family said Ricky had been writing in his own coded style since he was a boy.

They had seen similar writing before.

But there was a problem.

Nobody in the family knew how to read it.

Ricky apparently never gave them the key.

The FBI later said investigators believed the two notes may have been written within three days of his death.

If that was correct, they might contain something far more important than random thoughts.

A location.

A name.

An appointment.

Perhaps even a record of where Ricky had been shortly before he died.

But without knowing how to read his writing, investigators could not know whether any of those possibilities were true.

The notes eventually reached specialists at the FBI Laboratory.

These were not ordinary detectives guessing at strange handwriting.

The FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit deals with coded messages.

Its examiners applied established methods of cryptanalysis to Ricky’s pages.

They studied repeated patterns.

They examined the numbers.

They looked at the recurring groups of letters.

They were joined in the effort by members of the American Cryptogram Association.

Still, the writing refused to give up its meaning.

This was not simply an internet puzzle.

Investigators believed understanding the pages might help establish where Ricky had been before his death.

That could change the entire investigation.

Yet the Ricky McCormick cipher remained unreadable.

Look closely at the second page.

Certain groups appear again and again.

Some sections are enclosed.

Numbers appear between groups of letters.

It looks organized.

Intentional.

Almost readable.

And yet every attempt to turn those patterns into a reliable message has failed publicly.

One possibility is that Ricky was using a personal shorthand rather than a conventional cipher.

That would explain why professional code breaking methods struggled.

A private system can depend on habits, abbreviations and associations that exist only in the writer’s mind.

Without another known example and its translation, the key may have died with Ricky.

Twelve years after Ricky’s death, the case took an unusual turn.

On March 29, 2011, the FBI publicly released the mysterious writing.

It asked ordinary people to look at the pages.

Code enthusiasts.

Linguists.

People who might recognize the writing style.

Anyone who might possess another example of Ricky’s private system.

The FBI’s message was remarkable.

Its own specialists had reached a wall.

A fresh pair of eyes might notice something they had missed.

The agency said even discovering that the pages contained something ordinary would matter.

Because first they had to understand the system.

Somewhere inside those strange lines might be an ordinary message. Or the clue investigators have been waiting for.

More than a thousand suggestions reportedly arrived soon after the public appeal.

But no verified solution emerged.

The coded pages are not the only unanswered question.

The circumstances of Ricky’s death have also been described differently at different stages of the investigation.

The Major Case Squad currently classifies its 1999 investigation as a suspicious death and lists the suspect as unknown.

Contemporary investigators were unable to establish a clear cause of death or prove that a crime had occurred.

Years later, however, the FBI publicly described Ricky as having been murdered and dumped in the field.

That difference makes the unresolved case even stranger.

What changed?

What did investigators learn later?

And why did the notes become important enough for federal code experts to ask the entire public for help?

There is still no publicly confirmed answer to the Ricky McCormick cipher.

More than twenty five years have passed since Ricky McCormick was found near West Alton.

His photograph is public.

The location is known.

The coded pages are available for anyone to examine.

Yet the central mystery remains exactly where it began.

On two pieces of paper.

In Ricky’s pocket.

Perhaps the notes contain nothing more than reminders written in a private shorthand.

Perhaps they record places Ricky intended to visit.

Perhaps they contain names.

Or perhaps the information investigators need has been sitting in plain sight since June 1999.

The frustrating part is that nobody can prove which possibility is correct.

The FBI has seen the pages. Professional code breakers have studied them. Thousands of people have tried. The Ricky McCormick cipher still refuses to explain itself.