Thinking Sideways: The McCormick Cypher

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, thinking sideways. I don't understand you never know stories of things. We simply don't

know the answer too. Thanks for coming back, Steve, and we're going to give you a new story today, the story about a murder most foul. Our story begins or ends, if you want to look at it that way. On June three, the body of Ricky McCormick was found face down in a cornfield about twenty miles from his home in St. Louis, Missouri. Ricky had officially been missing for three days, though his family said they hadn't seen him

in five. But when his body was found, it was in a pretty extreme state of decomposition, to the point that the fingers out his hands were falling off. That's more than five days worth, I think. Well, yeah, where it was St. Louis, Missouri. It was in the summer. Maybe that's pretty human back there. But how old was Rickie? By the way, Ricky was forty one, Okay, okay, and he wasn't in the primest of health. Wasn't a healthy guy. But obviously they find him and he's pretty well decomposing,

which made it very difficult for an autopsy. The county corner or pathologist, whichever it is, decided that they would go ahead and do and do their best on his seventy two pound body or seventy pounds that remained and see what they could find. In the report, the pathologist eventually said that the cause of death was undetermined. They couldn't figure out why he died, so it wasn't anything obvious like a giant bullet hole or something correct. No

obvious sign of death or cause of death. Excuse. Maybe he just ate a little too much corn. He might have sat in the sod and popped in his stomach. Yeahst So that is the beginning, and then the mysteries begin. The first of which is nobody knows how Ricky got there. He didn't own a car. He's twenty miles away from where he lived, in a corn field, basically in a rural area, it sounds like, so we don't know how

he got there. Though the police investigated, no killer was ever identified because there was never any solid leads in the case. There just weren't any clues and the trail went completely cold. So the cornfield was it like a fully like a really developed cornfield with like six foot high cornstocks and all that, or that kind of cornfield, or I think it was next to a cornfield or just on the edge of because right off the road. Okay,

So so there wasn't the farmer that found him. It was just that somebody like just drove by and through the body out that kind of thing. Well, yeah, we're guessing that's what happened with the body. And we don't know if I remember the details correct, and motorists found him. But that's all that I can glean from exactly how he was found. The other details in this story take us an instance, So those little details seemed to get left behind. And does anybody have any idea what we're

talking about this? It's got corn in it, that is not it. The reason that we're talking about this is that twelve years after he was murdered, the FBI began to release information about the case and turned to the public to ask for help. The FBI, the knower's evolved plausible deniability. Don't know the answer to this case. Here's

what the problem is. When they found his body and they searched his pockets and they went through all of his belongings, the only thing they found on him were two notes in his pockets that contained over thirty lines of ciphered text encoded text. They've been working on it for twelve years. This is considered one of their top cases because it's so MYSTERI is for them that they

eventually turned around and they asked public for help. The FBI actually went ahead and set up a page on their website initially asking for information, but it got so much traffic. Now they actually have a dedicated site or dedicated page on their site where it has the copies of the notes, and you can go ahead and download them and read them and try to figure it out yourself. But let's we're getting we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's step back a little and let's talk about Ricky, because

he wasn't the best guy in the world. And I'd like to to give a little bit of history on him because that might help shed some light on this these weird notes, which then we'll go into. He had spent some time in prison, Louis didn't He he did. He'd spent some time in prison for sex abuse. Evidently he'd fathered four children with three or four different women, though he never really was evident involved with their lives, the children's or the women's after impregnation. One of those

ladies was actually fourteen when the child was conceived. He was an adult. What a classic. Yeah, he went from being homeless to living at his mom's. He could barely hold out a job. He wasn't the highest all of the social ladder and ladies and gentlemen. I preface this with this is a quote. This is directly what was said, is that his mother referred to him as retarded, not the sharpest stick of a dead His family, however, did like to say that he was street smart, but they

agreed that he was troubled. So not a not a guy that's really going to be able to compose an unbreakable cipher, you would think. I feel like that's exactly the kind of person he might have been a savant if it's possible. Yeah, Well, people who aren't thinking totally clearly often make mistakes and their ciphers making making them really undecipherable. Right, and that's the that's true. That is

a problem. Well, and it can it can also be to what the cipher was at letters numbers combination, both both letters and numbers. It was both. It could have you know, it's it's entirely possible it's not even a cipher message at all. Well, we'll get into that, because there is that possibility. And you, Devin bring up a good point is maybe it's he makes it harder because

of his mental state. Uh, he could barely read or write, or he was very poor at it his handwriting, which I'll bring up the notes here in a minute, and you guys can take a look at him, but his handwriting is very, very poor. It's very difficult to read.

But he supposedly, and there's some conjecture on this, supposedly, ever since he was a small child, had been making up codes of his own all the time, So he might have been doing this since he was a kid, so he had some crazy key built into his head, just a repetition, which make it even harder to crack, because well, the only person who knows the answer is

now dead. It is believed that they figured out the order of the notes because one of them does have P one in the upper right hand corner, which for you and I would indicate page one. It might not be that. It might be something other in another piece of code that we don't realize, but people have been using that as the basis of This is page one, and this is how we're going to go ahead and try and figure out the cipher. And there were two pages,

two pages. That is correct. Like I said, the FBI had been trying to crack this for a long time and gave up. And I've got some quotes directly from them. This is actually from Dan Olson. He's the chief of the FBI's cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit. Yeah really but hard to get on a name tag. But you know, it's it's kind of weird they lunged them together. Crypt analysis and racketeering one. Well, you know the mob he's ciphers all the time, they use codes. Well yeah, but

I mean, yeah, you know, I know, but still racking. Mean, cryptanalysis is kind of a thing, and the FBI does a lot of counter spi and so you know, you would think that they would be using cryptanalysis even more heavily for that kind of thing. Anyway, that's that's that's an aside. But yeah, anyway, who cares anyway, But here's what Dan Olsen says. He says, and I quote, we're really good at what we do, but we could use

some help on this one. Breaking this code could reveal the victims whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide. Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under these circumstances. Even if we found out that he was writing a grocery list or a love letter, we would still want to see how the code is solved. This is a cipher system we know nothing about. Maybe someone with a fresh set of eyes might come up with a brilliant new idea and

let me repeat that line. This is a cipher system we know nothing about. Essentially, it's a brand new cipher to the FBI. Based on the way it's organized and put together. It could be as what if you had said he could be a bit of a savant when it came to coast, slow and everything else, but super great at puzzles, he said. I was hearing the other day that people with as Berger's and autism are typically the ones that are savants with math. They're really good

with those. So there are relations in the brain of chemistry and function. So it could be right along the same line. So, um, I take it the FBI must have turned this stuff over to the n s A. I would imagine that a lot of inter inter governmental support that they would take it to the n s A before they would put it on the internet, you know, in years. I imagine that they went ahead and they pursued every avenue that is available to them. I don't imagine that they said, oh no, we're not talking to

those guys. We don't like those high you know, you never know about the gun man. You know, sometimes they don't like. They don't like each other. I feel like they like each other more than they like the public. Though. That's a good points, that's a good point. But yeah, I mean if if, if the if they sticked a bunch of craze supercomputers on that thing, and they weren't able to break it, then I don't know, man, it's

hard to say. But then again, a supercomputer only knows how to follow a formulas, whereas you and I can look at something and make that leap of not a leap of faith, but that leads to and suddenly it all falls into place, which computers aren't able to do. With this, I I have a strong feeling we gotta

break it tonight. Actually, from what I've gleaned from reading stuff from the FBI all these other news reports, it appears to be what's known as a simple substitution cipher, which, for those of you who don't know, is A is replaced with the letter B and B is replacedable the letter C or variant of that. It seems relatively basic from the outside, but there is some information, based on posts that I've read of people who are trying to crack it, that it could be a polygraphic substitution cipher.

And for what I can understand, a polygraphic substitution cipher is where it is actually letter pairs are taken and they replace other letter pairs. So th H now becomes b D, but t R would become c Q. If you know where I'm going with this, it's in total sequence two by two and that adds uh so much more variability because it's not twenty six letters, it's all these letter pairings. Plus you can from numbers in the mix, which Ricky did, So there's this huge number of possibilities.

Or again, as we said, it could be just something unique to him that only he understood. Then it could also be that it's just gibberish. Absolutely could and that's where the speculation comes in, Joe, and that's that's good timing on your part, is that the speculation is it's gibberish. It's this guy who was mentally unstable just writing garbage. It doesn't make sense to anybody because it didn't make sense to him in the state that he was when

he wrote it. There is also speculation that it could be a note sent of notes that he wrote at the time that he was with whoever killed him. So there's the possibility that cracking this code would shed light on how he died, or why he died, or who

killed him, basically helping solve the murder. It seems unlikely because, frankly, I mean, if you've got to write a note knowing that you're probably about to die, an you want to write a note incriminating Mr X over here air to your left, you got to really put it in an

unbreakable code. Are you just gonna write and play in English? Well, if he'd been doing codes his whole life and this was his code, it likely seemed incredibly simple to him that he would think, well, anybody could break this if they took the time, because I'm an idiot and I know how to do it. Absolutely not. But again it's like, why do you put it in code at all? Because either guys watching or he just did that all the time. That may have been his automatic way to write. He

may have just written down his grocery list. He wrote his grocery list out and somebody said, what the heck is, what's my grocery list? What do you mean can't you read that? It just may have been second nature to him. I said his English was bad, right then, maybe that was that was the way he compensated. It might have been some crazy phonetic in his brain, like a phonetic system.

I can if I piece these things together. We don't know if maybe he was dyslexic, so maybe that's how he wrote things, but then he broke it into a code. There's all these variables that simply not a clue exists too, not a single answer so far. Let me go ahead and pull up the note for you or Balta notes for you guys, so you can take a look at him right. So obviously as you can tell when you're looking at him, it's it's very scribbled, and it's it

is difficult to tell what's going on in there. It is, Yeah, did you as you look at it? And I can pull up if we want, but I don't know if it'll help. I do have a version that has it typed out in the actual text is type rather than handwritten. But it seems like and I said this before, it seems almost fonetic as you read it, it does a little bit like I can kind of like my brain can make sense of little snippets of it. Yeah, but

two three letter at a time. But the context, you can't put the whole thing together, and like there's an if there what appears to be a lose and also so it starts with an R. Yeah, it's interesting, it's very it seems so simple. But at the same when you look at it, and I think the handwriting is what makes it deceptive that way. Is it seems like it's written in a child's handwriting. Should be easy to figure out until it hits you in the head with rock and stumps you, which is exactly what it did

to everybody. Yeah, but it's it's like down here it says like half something please p L s E. Oh it looks like a P to me exactly. This is what makes this so difficult. And I mean, if we are staring at it and already beginning to argue after thirty seconds, imagine what these poor fools if the FBI were doing M for XDU. Yeah, maybe this piped out version would be more helpful. But I don't think there's

any chance of cracking us. I think it might. I think that it is going to be uncrackable because obviously the key went to went with Ricky two. His gray Uh. As of today, the murder is still unsolved. We still don't know exactly what happened. Yeah, it would be interesting, So I take it the FBI probably did other investigations beyond this. He must have talked to his family and friends and found out who he was associating with. Yes,

and and he did not associate with the best folks. Again, if he had a handicap of some kind, there's some kind of mental issue. He may have just not thought about it and didn't realize that he was getting himself into a bad situation, and somebody might have taken advantage

of it. It's it's difficult to say. So my twist on this is that his murderer was like, yeah, you can write all the notes you want if you write in the handwrite knees because he knew that that would be the only person that Yeah, because I'm gonna write a lot of her help And he's like, yeah, fine, go for do whatever you want. Man. Yeah, very well could have been it. I don't know. Well, right there

is that he had all this encrypted stuff round. You know, some of the some of his scumeback friends saw this names and said, what you know, they're like, you know, why are you encrypting this stuff while you know it's like this is like, you know, directions on how to find this buried treasure. You know, that's like you know, billions of dollars with a gold bullion, you know, and

everything like that. So they tortured him and tell you until you finally just you know, even though it was GIBBERISHU but I finally said, okay, you know you drive out here here here, twenty pass this with dirty paces this way. I was there, and they'd be like great, and they kill him and they'd up the body in the cornfield, and of course said when they when they get to the where the buried treasure is, well, jokes on them, and who knows that there's no answers. There is, however,

a bit of follow up mystery. Oh yeah, cool to this whole thing. And we've en countered this on stories before. And let me give you some of this follow up mystery or twists. Four years before Ricky died, so this is the police found the body of an alleged prostitute who was shot to death in a house near where Ricky was found, on the same stretch of road not too far away. In two thousand and one, road crews found the bodies of two nearly or two naked women

three hundred yards from where Ricky's body was found. It could be that there potentially could be some psychopath that's out there that's using that stretch of road to do their business and dump their their evidence or their bodies off of and Ricky might this. This may not have anything to do again, it might be just incidents that this happener. Might be a coincidence that he had these notes in his pocket and he just got caught up in something that somebody was doing that they had their

own compulsion for. But it could also mean that he was identifying who's who the killer was. He might have found out about it and they came after him and he wrote it down and they couldn't figure that wasn't they would have been. Yeah, to get back to what I was saying, it's like, you know, everybody, including the FBI, thinks that what is in this message is something of supreme value, which is why they're devoting huge resources to it.

So if you want to Ricky scumbag friends and and you find this coded message, you're gonna draw the same conclusion as the FBI, you're gonna think there's something of supreme value in here, and you're gonna torture Ricky until he tells you what is in the message. Now, if it's just gibberish, she'll just make something up. That's speculation. And he could have been tortured. Ye, he could have

been suffocated. There's no there's no way to know because of how the state of the body was very difficult to know. Yeah, that's where it is. Yeah, that's where the whole thing is. So there have been no good attempts. There is. There are all kinds of sights and again I've got the links to them and we'll be putting those up on the page. There are links to people who are trying to figure it out and there giveing

their theories and they're working it back and forth. But as of yet, nothing that is even close to being possibly viable. And so another story that I don't have an answer to, another unsolved mystery. Yeah, that's that's the thing about it is like you know, it's like you don't really know that there is an answer to it really may never be Well, if you folks want to go ahead and you want to check out the links you want to find these discussion boards in these places,

or just take a look at the notes themselves. You're more than welcome to do that. All of those will be available on the website. That website is thinking Sideways podcast dot com. If you think that you have an idea of how to break the cipher and you feel like telling us instead of the FBI, well you're more than welcome to do that. We promised to take credit

for it. You can send us an email at Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com and with that, we're going to get out of here and we look forward to talk to you next week. Yeah yeah, By everybody, By