The badly decomposed body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick was found in a field in St. Charles County, Missouri, on June 30, 1999. Ricky was an unemployed, high school dropout who suffered from chronic heart and lung problems. No one had reported Ricky missing and authorities were ultimately unable to determine his exact cause of death. There were no indications that he had been shot or stabbed.
Investigators were quickly perplexed by the fact that Ricky was found in a cornfield over 15 miles away from his home, as Ricky did not own a vehicle or drive, and public transport was not available in the area. The area was considered to be "a popular place to dump bodies." But how Ricky got in the cornfield would turn out to be only a small part of a larger mystery.
Ricky's body was also determined to be in a state of advanced decomposition, despite the opinion of medical examiners that he had died on June 27, 1999 (only three days prior). It's not impossible that his body would have decomposed rapidly considering the weather conditions of the area at that time; however, it does seem more likely that he was kept in a warmer environment, like a shed, for a while beforehand.
Most unusual, police found two handwritten notes in Ricky's pockets which appeared to contain sequences of very succinct, coded messages. The code consisted of "a jumble of letters and numbers occasionally set off with parentheses." Both the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) and the American Cryptogram Association have been unable to decipher the notes. Due to a lack of information regarding Ricky and his cause of death, police were unable to definitively conclude that he had been murdered, and the case faded away into obscurity for years.
However, in March 2011, authorities officially listed Ricky McCormick's death as a murder and the FBI made a plea to the public for help in decoding the notes. The code is still considered to be one of the top unsolved ciphers by CRRU. Authorities believe that the notes were written within the three days before Ricky's death and could potentially lead to those responsible for his death
His family strongly doubts that he had the capacity to generate the notes, and his mother has bluntly declared the following:
"The only thing [Ricky] could write was his name.... He didn't write in no code."
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The suspicious death of Ricky McCormick, and the public dissemination of his unbreakable code, remain complex mysteries with no leads nor answers. How did Ricky get so far away from his home? How was his body so badly decomposed within only three days of being deceased? What do the coded messages mean and who wrote them? And, most importantly, what happened to Ricky McCormick??
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