On the 30th June 1999, a badly decomposed body was found in a corn field in Missouri, through finger prints police were able to confirm it was the body of 41 year old Ricky McCormick, although there was a small suspicion that he had been murdered, due to the decomposition and the wobbly timeline around his date of death, the case fell cold.

To start with, Ricky's case wasn't well known, it got a small mention in a local newspaper - his family were told that no clues had been found in connection to his death, but behind the scenes police had found something, two handwritten notes that appeared to be in code or a cipher.

They handed them to the FBI who spent 12 years trying to crack the cipher in hopes it would give the answers around Ricky's potential murder, when they failed to crack they code, they made the notes public in March 2011 and suddenly, Ricky's death was thrown into the spotlight, amateur codebreakers around the world took the chance to beat the FBI to cracking the notes left - but to this day they have never been solved.

But, were they ever meant to be solved? Are they even a cipher at all?

To view copies of the notes left, head over to my instagram.

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