FBI wants help to crack code, solve murder

The FBI has asked for help to decipher a note, shown, found in the pocket of a Ricky McCormick, 41, found dumped in a Missouri field on June 30, 1999. Investigators hope the note will help solve his murder.

The FBI has asked for help to decipher a note found in the pocket of Ricky McCormick, discovered slain in a St. Louis field 12 years ago.

Investigators have tried to decode the two-page note since the body of 41-year-old McCormick was found. But it's still not known what it says, and experts say it could help solve the case.

"We are really good at what we do, but we could use some help with this one," said Dan Olson, chief of the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, in a release.

"Breaking the code could reveal the victim's whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide."

His body was found dumped in a field by sheriff's officers on June 30, 1999. In his pant's pocket, investigators found the mysterious note filled with a series of letters, numbers and dashes. It's believed to have been written by the victim up to three days before his death.

Here’s my 2 cents guess, I guess this is a mildly interesting thread.

I don’t think they’re going to get much from this note.

Fellow was just confused, possibly rapid-cycling bipolar (overuse of parentheses that was in the other note). The parentheses help him feel organized, he is trying to organize his thoughts, but essentially has something like stack overflow/underflow is my theory. He starts writing a word then his mind gets ahead of itself letterwise and alphabetwise and can’t keep straight what letter he should write next to get his word out. He uses all the vowels, but not quite enough. I think his mind is going back and forth and is slightly off on the consanants and vowels and is skipping letters here and there. Kind of like:

BUILD 2 WEBSITES BY THURSDAY
becomes
BTN2CWBTVEDYTVSBIX

As he includes parentheses, indenting and makes sections, he’s feeling more organized and optimistic and starts writing uphill more, whereas his long paragraph in the other note they publicized the note starts downhill, i.e., feeling stressed or pessimistic. It’s quite possible he was just making notes which makes him feel better and after a few weeks or months he would not remember what his notes even said if asked to really read them back. He includes numbers as part of his ramblings, he’s referring to values or abbreviating and numbering items in lists. The boxes in this note are also organizing; he likes nice square boxes around this hierarchically organized memo, but he’s just not that organized a person, he can’t draw 90 degree corners with straight lines in a box shape, but that is what he would like to see.

I think the FBI is hoping for a contextual cue as to where he was when he died or the people he came in contact with the last week or two, but these are probably notes about things he was hoping to accomplish or musings, not something like “was at the 7-11 on saturday”. I doubt there are any references to the person who killed him unless it was some “arch-nemisis” in his mind who he might be mentioning in his notes regarding what he thought they should do or how they should change. Any other notes that he wrote throughout his life should be compared in the same analysis, though any common words will probably not be represented by same text string, but a string which is close or in a vague pattern in terms of the ASCII table. I would hope the FBI had done that type of crunching already, but perhaps they have not.

I would guess that a stranger who was just an angry person came into contact with him by chance and become annoyed and agitated at him.

Or I could be all wrong, since this is not my field and I’m just guessing. I would hope that experts would have thought along this vein as much as it is relevant.

If this is truly a cipher, I think it must be a fairly simple substituion cipher, at least for the first note, since there are so many repeating patterns. If the cipher included a shift, that wouldn’t happen.

For example, the phrase “NCBE” repeats throughout the note, and usually at the end of a line, often preceeded by “WLD”, and once, interestingly, by “WLD’S”. This leads me to believe that the “NCBE” might be a key thing that the note is referring to, possibly a unit of measure or an item that is being tallied, a word like “road”, or something of the sort.

The middle section is particularly interesting, because it has 3 lines which are nearly, but not quite identical, and so judging by what elements change, you can separate it into possible word breaks (which seem to match up with the spacing of how it was written):

(FLRSE PRSE ONDE 71 NCBE)
(CDNSE PRSE ONSE 74 NCBE)
(PRtSE PRSE ONREDE 75 NCBE)

Seems to fit the pattern of some sort of list, and I can’t shake the feeling that the repetitiveness of it, and the way it is written, seem like driving directions or something of the sort.

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