The FBI Couldn't Crack the Code in a Dead Man's Pocket. They Asked the Internet for Help.

These are two pages of handwriting. Letters. Numbers. Parentheses. Lines crammed together, some with little circles drawn around groups of characters.

They were found in the pants pockets of a dead man in a Missouri cornfield in the summer of 1999.

The FBI has a unit dedicated to breaking codes. Some of the best code breakers in the country work there. They spent more than a decade trying to read these notes.

They couldn't.

So in 2011, the FBI did something it almost never does. It put the notes online and asked the public for help.

Thousands of people tried. Nobody has solved them.

And nobody knows how the man who carried them ended up dead in a field, fifteen miles from home, with no car to get there.

Ricky McCormick

Ricky C. McCormick was born on June 14, 1958. In the summer of 1999, he was forty-one years old and living in St. Louis, Missouri.

His life had not been easy. He had dropped out of high school. He was unemployed and received disability payments. He had chronic heart and lung problems. He was unmarried, with several children, and he lived on and off with his elderly mother.

He did not own a car.

On June 25, 1999, McCormick went for a checkup at Forest Park Hospital in St. Louis. That is the last time he is known to have been seen alive.

Nobody reported him missing.

The cornfield

Five days later, on June 30, 1999, a woman driving along a field road near Route 367, in St. Charles County north of St. Louis, near the small town of West Alton, saw something in a cornfield.

It was a man's body.

It had been there for several days in the Missouri summer heat and was partially decomposed. Police were able to identify him through his fingerprints. It was Ricky McCormick.

The location raised an immediate question. The field was about fifteen miles from where McCormick was living. He did not have a car. And there was no public transportation out to that area.

So how did he get there? And who, if anyone, brought him?

The notes

When sheriff's deputies searched his pockets, they found two handwritten notes.

They did not look like ordinary writing. They were lines of letters and numbers, run together, with parentheses here and there, and occasional little circles drawn around groups of characters. A few clusters almost look like English words or abbreviations. Most of it looks like nothing at all.

Whatever they were, they seemed to be written in some kind of code. And they had been in his pockets when he died.

The code breakers

The notes eventually went to the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit.

This unit specializes in breaking codes. Much of its work involves criminals, gangs, drug dealers and prison inmates who write in private codes to hide what they are planning. The FBI also brought in the American Cryptogram Association, a group of expert amateur code solvers.

Nobody could crack them.

To understand why that is unusual, it helps to know how code breaking works. Most homemade codes swap letters for other letters or symbols. That sounds secure, but it leaves patterns. In English, some letters, like E and T, show up far more often than others. Some short words, like "the" and "and," appear again and again. A trained code breaker counts how often each symbol appears, looks for repeated groups, and works backward from there. With enough text, most simple codes fall apart.

The McCormick notes are long enough that, if they were a simple code, experts would expect to make progress. They didn't. That suggests the notes are something less simple. A private shorthand. A mix of abbreviations and numbers. Or a system that only makes sense to the person who invented it.

Years went by. The notes stayed in the files. The case went cold.

Asking the public

On March 29, 2011, almost twelve years after McCormick died, the FBI went public.

It released images of the two notes and asked anyone with ideas to help. The chief of the code-breaking unit, Dan Olson, said that breaking the code could reveal where McCormick had been before he died.

The FBI also said it considered McCormick's death a possible homicide.

The response was enormous. Within days, the FBI described an "outpouring" of responses. It set up a web page just for people to post their theories. The volume was so large that the FBI asked people to stop calling in their ideas by phone.

Amateur code breakers, mathematicians and puzzle fans around the world went to work. Some thought the notes were lists of places. Some thought they were phone numbers, or bets, or drug deals, or directions. Some thought they were not a code at all.

Nobody produced a solution that the FBI accepted.

To this day, the McCormick notes are listed by the FBI as one of its top unsolved code cases.

What the family said

When the FBI released the notes in 2011, the public explanation was that McCormick had used coded notes like these since he was a boy.

But in 2012, his family told a St. Louis newspaper, the Riverfront Times, a different story.

They said they never knew Ricky to write in code. They said he sometimes scribbled things he called writing, but they doubted he could have written those notes at all. His mother said he could only write his name. A cousin said he "couldn't spell anything, just scribble."

The family also said they did not know about the notes at all until they saw them on the local news, twelve years after his death.

That raises one of the most important questions in the case. If Ricky McCormick could barely write, who wrote the notes in his pockets?

How did he die?

Here is another problem. Investigators never determined a cause of death.

The body had been in the heat too long. In July 1999, a local newspaper headline reported that the regional Major Case Squad had found no evidence of a crime.

But later, the FBI said it believed McCormick's death was a possible homicide. In public statements around the 2011 appeal, it said investigators suspected foul play.

Nobody has ever been charged. No suspect has ever been publicly named. No motive has ever been established.

The theories

So what are the possibilities?

The first is that McCormick wrote the notes himself, in a personal shorthand that only he could read. People with limited literacy sometimes develop their own systems of abbreviations and symbols. If so, the notes might be completely ordinary. Reminders. Lists. Addresses. And they may be unbreakable precisely because there is no system for anyone else to find.

The second is that someone else wrote them. If his family is right that he could barely write, the notes may have been given to him. Directions he was supposed to follow. Messages he was supposed to deliver. Information he was carrying for someone else. And if so, the person who wrote them might know how he got to that field.

The third is that the notes have nothing to do with his death at all. They might be something he picked up, or carried for reasons that had nothing to do with whatever happened that week in June.

And then there is the simplest question: how did a man with no car, and serious heart and lung problems, get to a cornfield fifteen miles from home, in an area with no buses? Whatever the notes say, someone may have driven him there.

What we still don't know

More than twenty-five years later, the case of Ricky McCormick is still unsolved.

We know he went to a hospital checkup on June 25, 1999. We know nobody reported him missing. We know he was found five days later in a cornfield he had no way to reach on his own. And we know that in his pockets were two pages that some of the best code breakers in the world have never been able to read.

The FBI still wants to know what the notes say. Because whatever they say, the people investigating believe it could explain where Ricky McCormick was in the last days of his life, and who he was with.

If you think you can read them, the images are still out there.

What do you think the notes say?