On June 30, 1999, a woman driving past a cornfield near West Alton, Missouri, noticed something in the remote field.
It was the body of a man.
He had been dead for days.
His name was Ricky McCormick, a 41-year-old Black man from Missouri whose life, at first glance, seemed unlikely to draw national attention. He had little money. He could not read or write well. He had never married, though he had children. He had served time in prison. He was often unemployed, living partly on disability, and sometimes stayed with his elderly mother.
No one had reported him missing.
The medical examiner ruled his death “undetermined,” and for a while, it looked as if Ricky McCormick might become exactly what so many forgotten people become after death: a name in a file, a body in a field, a question no one pressed too hard to answer.
But tucked inside the pocket of his blue jeans were two pages of strange, coded notes.
And those notes changed everything.
The Code No One Could Crack
Some 30 lines of cryptic writing were found in McCormick’s pockets. The notes were filled with letters, numbers, parentheses, repeated combinations and patterns that seemed to suggest they meant something.
The FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit studied them. Computers searched for patterns. Experts tried to crack them.
They couldn't.
That was remarkable. The unit had tackled codes ranging from criminal communications to encrypted messages created by spies. Yet McCormick’s pages resisted their efforts.
“Nobody can figure out what any of these codes mean,” a member of the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department said. “It reads like somebody writing a private diary.”
Members of McCormick’s family couldn't explain the notes either.
The mystery was made stranger by what investigators knew about McCormick himself. He had difficulty reading and writing, which raised an obvious question: Had he really created a cipher complicated enough to frustrate professional cryptanalysts?
Some people who saw the notes dismissed them as meaningless scribbles.
The FBI did not.
“We look at a lot of things that are gibberish, arbitrary strikes on a keyboard,” FBI cryptanalyst Dan Olson said. “This is not that case.”
Investigators reportedly brought in 15 to 20 experts and used computer programs to search for recognizable patterns. Still, the meaning of the pages remained elusive.
“Standard routes of cryptanalysis seem to have hit brick walls,” the FBI said.
What Was Ricky McCormick Trying to Say?
That question has kept McCormick’s case alive long after his death.
Were the notes a private shorthand that only he understood? Were they connected somehow to the circumstances surrounding his death? Did they contain names, places or information that might explain why he ended up in that Missouri cornfield?
Or was their meaning something entirely different?
Without knowing what the pages say, even the significance of the code remains a mystery.
And that may be the most unsettling part of Ricky McCormick’s story.
A man whose death might otherwise have quietly disappeared into an old case file left behind two pages of writing that some of the country's most experienced codebreakers could not decipher.
More than two decades later, the riddle remains.
More Unsolved Mysteries from Bob Cyphers
Ricky McCormick’s strange and unsettling case is one of the mysteries explored in Bob Cyphers’s 25 Frozen, 1 Thawed: Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest.
An Edward R. Murrow and Emmy Award–winning journalist, Cyphers spent his career writing and reporting for newspapers, radio and television stations across America. In 25 Frozen, 1 Thawed, he revisits murders, disappearances and mysteries that continue to trouble families and communities long after the headlines have faded.
For readers drawn to cold cases, unanswered questions and the human stories behind them, explore 25 Frozen, 1 Thawed from Genius Books.