Two Pages in a Dead Man's Pocket: The Code the FBI Published Because It Could Not Read It

2026-09-04 · Unsolved Ciphers · 7 min read

The field lay off Route 367 in St. Charles County, Missouri, a flat run of farmland outside West Alton where the Missouri river bends toward the Mississippi. On the last day of June 1999, in heat that had been building for a week, something in the rows drew attention. The sheriff's deputies who walked in found a man's body. It had been lying there long enough that the summer had done its work. There was no wallet, no papers, nothing at all to say who he was.

Fingerprints answered that. The dead man was Ricky C. McCormick, born on 14 June 1958, forty-one years old, of St. Louis. He had last been seen alive five days earlier, on 25 June, at Forest Park Hospital in the city, where he was a familiar patient. He had chronic heart and lung disease and lived on disability payments. He had four children and no settled address of his own. He had left school without finishing it. He had a criminal record, including a three-year sentence for statutory rape of which he served eleven months.

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