On June 30th, 1999, a woman was driving alone down a rural road near West Alton, Missouri, when something at the edge of a cornfield caught her eye. She pulled over. A man was lying face down in the dirt, fully dressed, in the middle of a hot Missouri summer. He had been there for days. His name was Ricky McCormick, he was 41 years old, and he lived fifteen miles away. He had no car. There was no bus service to that road. Nobody had reported him missing. And nobody could explain how he got there.

Investigators from the Major Case Squad in St. Louis worked every angle they could find. The medical examiner could not confirm a cause of death, though a head injury was suspected. What they did know was that Ricky had last been seen three days earlier at an Amoco gas station in St. Louis, and between that sighting and that cornfield, there was nothing. No witnesses, no trail, no explanation for the fifteen miles between those two points. That detail alone told investigators something. Either the people close enough to notice his absence were too afraid to call, or the people who knew what happened were not about to pick up the phone. Ricky McCormick was the kind of man who was easy to overlook. And someone had counted on that.

2 suspects emerged. His former boss, a man named Baha Hamdallah, had a reputation for being volatile and things had not ended well between him and Ricky. A second name surfaced in December of that year when word got back to investigators that a local drug dealer named Gregory Knox had told someone he killed a man from that Amoco station. Both men stayed on the radar for years. Neither was ever charged.

When investigators searched Ricky's clothing they found two small folded pieces of paper in his pants pocket. Handwritten, thirty lines across two pages, capital letters and numbers and dashes and parentheses arranged in patterns that repeated with the precision of a system someone had built deliberately. The notes went to the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, the people who handle coded messages for the most complex investigations in the country. They worked it for years. They could not crack it.

The case went cold. Twelve years passed.

In March of 2011, the FBI officially ruled Ricky's death a homicide and released photographs of both notes to the public, asking for help. The response was enormous. Mathematicians, amateur codebreakers, and puzzle solvers from around the world sent in theories. The American Cryptogram Association, one of the oldest codebreaking organizations in the country, took a run at it and hit the same wall. People who knew Ricky said he had been writing notes like this since childhood, pages of the same strange symbols, and everyone around him thought it was just something he did.

Here is what made the notes so confounding. Ricky McCormick could barely write his own name. His mother confirmed it. He had dropped out of high school and spent his adult life getting by on disability and whatever work he could find. And yet the system inside those notes was sophisticated enough to defeat every codebreaker who examined them for more than twenty-five years. Maybe he was smarter than anyone around him ever knew. Maybe those two pieces of paper contain the name of whoever drove him out to that field. As of today, nobody has been able to read them.

Ricky McCormick's murder remains officially unsolved. The notes remain uncracked. The FBI has never closed the case.

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