Sheriffs found two garbled hand-written notes – apparently written in secret code – in the victim's pockets, and these were handed over to the FBI for further investigation.
[3][4] Ricky McCormick was a high school dropout who had held multiple addresses in the Greater St. Louis area,[5] living intermittently with his elderly mother.
[7] McCormick's body was found on June 30, 1999, in a cornfield near West Alton, Missouri by a woman driving along a field road near Route 367.
[6] The two notes found in McCormick's pockets are written in an unknown code consisting of "a jumble of letters and numbers occasionally set off with parentheses" and are believed by the FBI to possibly lead to those responsible for the killing.
Dan Olson, chief of the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, said, illustrating the significance of the notes, "Breaking the code could reveal the victim's whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide.
They say they only told investigators he sometimes jotted down nonsense he called writing, and they seriously question McCormick's capacity to craft the notes found in his pockets.