Two Pages in a Dead Man's Pocket: The Code the FBI Published Because It Could Not Read It
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.
None of that explained the field. It lay roughly fifteen miles from his last known address. McCormick had no car and did not drive. No bus line ran anywhere near the spot. It is not a place a sick man walks to, and it is not a place anyone reaches by accident. Investigators concluded that he had either died elsewhere or had been brought there by someone else. The autopsy settled nothing. The body was too far gone, and no cause of death was ever determined.
Then the deputies emptied his pockets. In his trousers were two sheets of paper, folded, covered in handwriting. They were not a letter. They were not a list, at least not one that anyone could read. Line after line ran in dense blocks of capital letters, broken by numbers, dashes, plus signs and parentheses that opened and closed around short groups as though marking something off. Certain letter clusters repeated. Nothing on either page formed a word in English or in any other language anyone recognised.
The pages went to the FBI, and there they stopped. The bureau's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, the small team that handles coded material seized in criminal cases, worked the notes and got nowhere. The American Cryptogram Association, a body of amateur and professional codebreakers with a long record of solving historical ciphers, was given the material and also failed. The investigation went cold. For twelve years the two sheets sat in an evidence file and the public knew nothing about them.
On 29 March 2011 the FBI did something it very rarely does. It published them. High-resolution scans of both notes went onto the bureau's website together with an open request for help from anyone at all. "Breaking the code could reveal the victim's whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide," said Dan Olson, the chief of the cryptanalysis unit. The bureau stated plainly that its own specialists had run out of ideas.
The response was immediate and enormous. Within days the FBI updated the page to acknowledge what it called an outpouring of responses, and asked that theories be submitted on a written form rather than by telephone or email, because the volume had become unmanageable. Thousands of people went at the two pages, professional cryptographers among them. Claimed solutions arrived by the hundred. Not one has ever been confirmed. More than a quarter of a century after the body was found, the notes remain on the unit's list of its most important unsolved cases.
The obvious question is what the pages were doing in his pocket at all. Here the record divides, and it divides sharply.
According to the account the FBI gave in 2011, relatives told investigators that McCormick had been writing this way since he was a boy, filling sheets with a notation of his own, and that none of them had ever been taught how to read it. That claim is the reason the bureau treated the pages as a cipher belonging to the victim rather than as something placed on him by another hand.
In 2012 members of his family said the opposite, in public. His mother, Frankie Sparks, told reporters: "The only thing he could write was his name. He didn't write in no code." A cousin, Charles McCormick, described a man who "couldn't spell anything, just scribble." The family also said that no official had ever told them the notes existed, and that they had learned of them from a television news broadcast twelve years after the death. Both versions cannot be true, and no document has been released that resolves which one is.
A second contradiction runs through the case, and it concerns the death itself. The FBI presented the material publicly under the heading of an open murder case. Yet the medical examiner never determined a cause of death, and the investigators at the time had no physical evidence of violence to work with. A homicide that cannot be demonstrated medically and a body found in a field fifteen miles from home are not the same order of fact, and this case has been carried in the record as both at once.
What is certain is small and stubborn. A man who could not drive was found in a place he could not have reached alone. He had been dead for days. Two pages of writing that nobody has been able to read were folded in his pocket, and whatever they say, if they say anything at all, they were the last thing he was carrying.
Conclusions and Open Questions
The first and most conventional theory is the one the FBI worked from: that the pages are a genuine cipher, that they encode ordinary information, and that the information concerns McCormick's movements and associations in the last days of his life. The strength of this reading is structural. The notes are not a random spill of characters. Letter groups repeat, the parentheses are used consistently, and the layout suggests a writer following a rule he had in his head. The weakness is time. A homemade system devised by a man with limited schooling should not survive fifteen years of assault by professional cryptanalysts and by thousands of amateurs with computers. Systems that simple usually fall in an afternoon.
A second theory, favoured by several cryptographers who studied the scans, holds that the pages are not encrypted at all in the technical sense but are a private shorthand: initials, abbreviated street names, fragments of telephone numbers, compressed by long habit into something only the writer could expand again. This fits the childhood-notation account, and it would explain the failure of cryptanalysis precisely, because there would be no algorithm to find. The key would have been a memory, and the memory died in the field. Its weakness is that the idea cannot be tested. It predicts nothing and can never be shown to be wrong, which in practice makes it a description of the failure rather than a solution to it.
A third possibility, rarely stated in print but implicit in what the family said, is that the writing carries no meaning at all. If McCormick's literacy was as limited as his mother described, the pages may be the appearance of writing rather than writing itself. This would account for the total resistance of the text to analysis better than any cipher theory does. Against it stands the plain fact that the sheets were folded and carried, which is what people do with documents that matter to them, and the judgement of the FBI, based on material it has never released, that the notes were his own and were meant to be read.
A fourth line, which has circulated widely online, holds that the notes are a ledger of some kind connected to criminal activity, and that they were the reason he was killed. It should be said clearly that no evidence for this has ever been published. Nobody has been charged in connection with McCormick's death, no suspect has been named by investigators, and the theory rests on nothing more than the presence of a coded page on a body. Anyone unnamed and uncharged is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and in this case there is not even an accusation on the record to weigh.
What remains unexplained is almost everything that matters. Nobody knows how Ricky McCormick reached that field. Nobody knows what killed him. Nobody knows whether the two pages in his pocket are a message, a memory aid or nothing at all. The FBI has kept the case open and the scans online, and the invitation it issued in 2011 still stands. It is an unusual position for a national police force to hold in public: the evidence is published, the problem is stated exactly, and the answer, if there is one, lies somewhere in the handwriting of a man who has now been dead for twenty-seven years.