Plan B Forum

A lifelong fan of codes, Ricky McCormick wrote out two pages of letters, numbers and symbols and stuck them in his pocket.




His body was found in a Missouri cornfield in the summer of 1999, those two sheets of paper still in his pants.

ALPONTE GLSE - SE ERTE, one line read.

The FBI has been working trying to break the code on and off since 2001.

Is that a coded plea for help? A reminder to pick up the laundry from the cleaners? The beginnings of a commentary on the weather in St. Louis?

If you know, the FBI's top code-breaking unit wants your help in breaking McCormick's code — one that has baffled government cryptologists for more than a decade — and perhaps solving his murder.

Dan Olson, chief of the FBI Laboratory's Cryptanalysis & Racketeering Records Unit, said the papers found on the body of 41-year-old McCormick could be the key in figuring out why he was murdered.

But none of their cryptologists has been able to break the code created by McCormick, a high school dropout, even after years of work, Olson said.

So the FBI is turning to the public for help, hoping that someone out there recognises the code used by McCormick on the two papers posted by the agency.

Police said McCormick had experimented with codes and ciphers for much of his life.

"We asked the family, and they said he did it quite often," said Lt. Craig McGuire of the St. Charles County Sheriff's Department. "Nobody really knows what it means. It's kind of like private diary writing."

Officials said that what would help the most would be someone who has a sample of McCormick's coded system or even something similar to it so they can run a comparison.

The FBI has been trying to break the code on and off since 2001, Olson said. They have tried just about all of the standard routes of cryptanalysis that the top experts use, he said, so the FBI didn't bother asking for help from the government's chief code-breaking agency, the National Security Agency, and its high-powered computers in the Maryland suburbs just outside the capital.

"The answer is going to come from a non-cryptological source," Olson said.

McCormick's decomposing body was found on June 30, 1999, in a cornfield near West Alton, Mo., by county sheriff's officers.

He had last been seen five days before his body was found and he had never been reported missing.

Since the FBI first made its plea for help last week, more than 1000 tips have come in — so many by mail and phone that the FBI established a web page to help handle the flood.

But nothing so far has given agents the breakthrough they need to figure out what McCormick was writing.

There is the possibility that no one will ever be able to break McCormick's code.

The FBI is still working on breaking the code created by the Zodiac killer, a serial killer who operated in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"We are really good at what we do, but we could use some help with this one," Olson said.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/rickys-kill ... 1d6r6.html

loCAtek wrote:You ask me, it's a lot of anachronisms for whole phrases, like NSFW is short for 'not safe for work'.

bigskygal wrote:Interesting story.

I did some research, as I was curious about the case. There isn't a lot available in terms of details, but I find it interesting that his death wasn't ruled a homicide for many years, and why it came to be ruled a homicide is not included in the information I could find online - at the FBI site and several others.

Here is the wiki entry on Mr. McCormick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_McCo ... rder_notes

It notes that he suffered from chronic heart/lung problems. He was 41 at time of death. I'd really like to know how they determined it was murder.

Both the FBI and investigators with the St. Charles County sheriff's office believe forty one year-old Ricky McCormick was murdered, but the medical examiner ruled the man's death "suspicious." McCormick's body was already decomposing when it was discovered and made work difficult for the ME; however, investigators were intrigued by an injury to McCormick's head.