Cryptic notes are found in the pocket of a man found dead in a rural field
Ricky McCormick, age 41, male, Black, vanished from the St. Louis area in late June 1999 after a string of medical visits and small, ordinary touchpoints that would later feel like the last clicks of a door locking shut. Days earlier, McCormick had been in and out of hospitals complaining of chest pain and breathing trouble, and on June 26 called a girlfriend to say McCormick was heading to the Amoco gas station near the apartment. A clerk would later place McCormick there on June 27, 1999—the same day investigators believed death likely occurred.
On June 30, 1999, the mystery turned grimly physical. In the early afternoon, deputies responded to a report of a body in rural St. Charles County near West Alton—seen from the road by a passing driver—and found McCormick lying facedown in a field in the 14000 block of Highway 94 North. The remains were badly decomposed, and the setting itself carried an ugly reputation as a place where people had been left behind before. Investigators believed the body had likely been placed there after death, and the medical examiner ultimately ruled the cause of death undetermined, leaving detectives with a death they suspected was no accident but could not medically prove.
What made the case linger—and then erupt into national curiosity years later—was what was found in the pockets: two sheets filled with a strange tangle of letters, numbers, and symbols arranged in short, rigid lines. The writing looked deliberate, organized, and yet unreadable. Local investigators couldn’t make sense of it; the notes were eventually examined by the FBI’s cryptanalysis specialists, who treated the pages as potentially the one thread that could still lead back to where McCormick had been, who McCormick had met, and why the final trip ended in a cornfield far from home. Even after repeated efforts, including outreach to outside codebreakers, the messages remained locked, and in 2011 the FBI made a public appeal by releasing the notes in hopes that someone, somewhere, might recognize the system behind them.
As detectives worked the human side of the puzzle, the orbit around McCormick drew attention for reasons that felt less like clues and more like warning signs. McCormick had connections to the Amoco station where work and odd jobs overlapped with volatile people and rumors of violence; an earlier owner connected to the business had killed a neighbor years before and died in prison, and later figures tied to the station surfaced in police records and street talk as unpredictable and armed. Investigators also looked hard at Gregory Lamar Knox, a drug trafficker described in records as violent and suspected in multiple homicides; a confidential informant claimed Knox was responsible for the killing of a Black gas-station worker whose body was dumped near West Alton, a description that detectives treated seriously enough to prompt surveillance and follow-up. Knox was arrested in July 2000 and later pleaded guilty in January 2001 to federal drug and firearm charges, but that case did not resolve McCormick’s death, and no one has been charged for the homicide investigation itself.
Decades on, the story still reads like a locked-room mystery staged outdoors: a sudden disappearance, a body deposited in an exposed field, and a set of messages so stubbornly opaque that they have outlived the evidence that might have explained them. The coded pages remain the most infamous artifacts from the case, but they are also a kind of cruel countdown—proof that something was carried, or recorded, or remembered right up to the end, and yet still cannot be heard. Investigators continue to list suspects as unknown, and public attention keeps circling back to the same unanswered question: whether the key to who did this has been sitting in plain sight, written in McCormick’s pocket, for all these years.
