Speaker 1: Hey guys, Steve, here, you are listening to one of
Speaker 1: our original twenty six episodes. If you listen to any
Speaker 1: of our new episodes, you're gonna notice that we're sounding
Speaker 1: a little different in these ones. Yeah, there's a reason
Speaker 1: for that. There is they've been remastered. They have been
Speaker 1: remastered because they had a really annoying hum. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean a huge thanks to listener James for doing almost
Speaker 1: all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice
Speaker 1: if you had listened to what we're calling the last
Speaker 1: twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the
Speaker 1: music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone
Speaker 1: back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a
Speaker 1: little different today than we do in what you're about
Speaker 1: to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, thinking sideways. I don't
Speaker 1: understand you never know stories of things. We simply don't
Speaker 1: know the answer too. Thanks for coming back, Steve, and
Speaker 1: we're going to give you a new story today, the
Speaker 1: story about a murder most foul. Our story begins or ends,
Speaker 1: if you want to look at it that way. On
Speaker 1: June three, the body of Ricky McCormick was found face
Speaker 1: down in a cornfield about twenty miles from his home
Speaker 1: in St. Louis, Missouri. Ricky had officially been missing for
Speaker 1: three days, though his family said they hadn't seen him
Speaker 1: in five. But when his body was found, it was
Speaker 1: in a pretty extreme state of decomposition, to the point
Speaker 1: that the fingers out his hands were falling off. That's
Speaker 1: more than five days worth, I think. Well, yeah, where
Speaker 1: it was St. Louis, Missouri. It was in the summer.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's pretty human back there. But how old was Rickie?
Speaker 1: By the way, Ricky was forty one, Okay, okay, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't in the primest of health. Wasn't a healthy guy.
Speaker 1: But obviously they find him and he's pretty well decomposing,
Speaker 1: which made it very difficult for an autopsy. The county
Speaker 1: corner or pathologist, whichever it is, decided that they would
Speaker 1: go ahead and do and do their best on his
Speaker 1: seventy two pound body or seventy pounds that remained and
Speaker 1: see what they could find. In the report, the pathologist
Speaker 1: eventually said that the cause of death was undetermined. They
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out why he died, so it wasn't anything
Speaker 1: obvious like a giant bullet hole or something correct. No
Speaker 1: obvious sign of death or cause of death. Excuse. Maybe
Speaker 1: he just ate a little too much corn. He might
Speaker 1: have sat in the sod and popped in his stomach.
Speaker 1: Yeahst So that is the beginning, and then the mysteries begin.
Speaker 1: The first of which is nobody knows how Ricky got there.
Speaker 1: He didn't own a car. He's twenty miles away from
Speaker 1: where he lived, in a corn field, basically in a
Speaker 1: rural area, it sounds like, so we don't know how
Speaker 1: he got there. Though the police investigated, no killer was
Speaker 1: ever identified because there was never any solid leads in
Speaker 1: the case. There just weren't any clues and the trail
Speaker 1: went completely cold. So the cornfield was it like a
Speaker 1: fully like a really developed cornfield with like six foot
Speaker 1: high cornstocks and all that, or that kind of cornfield,
Speaker 1: or I think it was next to a cornfield or
Speaker 1: just on the edge of because right off the road. Okay,
Speaker 1: So so there wasn't the farmer that found him. It
Speaker 1: was just that somebody like just drove by and through
Speaker 1: the body out that kind of thing. Well, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: guessing that's what happened with the body. And we don't
Speaker 1: know if I remember the details correct, and motorists found him.
Speaker 1: But that's all that I can glean from exactly how
Speaker 1: he was found. The other details in this story take
Speaker 1: us an instance, So those little details seemed to get
Speaker 1: left behind. And does anybody have any idea what we're
Speaker 1: talking about this? It's got corn in it, that is
Speaker 1: not it. The reason that we're talking about this is
Speaker 1: that twelve years after he was murdered, the FBI began
Speaker 1: to release information about the case and turned to the
Speaker 1: public to ask for help. The FBI, the knower's evolved
Speaker 1: plausible deniability. Don't know the answer to this case. Here's
Speaker 1: what the problem is. When they found his body and
Speaker 1: they searched his pockets and they went through all of
Speaker 1: his belongings, the only thing they found on him were
Speaker 1: two notes in his pockets that contained over thirty lines
Speaker 1: of ciphered text encoded text. They've been working on it
Speaker 1: for twelve years. This is considered one of their top
Speaker 1: cases because it's so MYSTERI is for them that they
Speaker 1: eventually turned around and they asked public for help. The
Speaker 1: FBI actually went ahead and set up a page on
Speaker 1: their website initially asking for information, but it got so
Speaker 1: much traffic. Now they actually have a dedicated site or
Speaker 1: dedicated page on their site where it has the copies
Speaker 1: of the notes, and you can go ahead and download
Speaker 1: them and read them and try to figure it out yourself.
Speaker 1: But let's we're getting we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's
Speaker 1: step back a little and let's talk about Ricky, because
Speaker 1: he wasn't the best guy in the world. And I'd
Speaker 1: like to to give a little bit of history on
Speaker 1: him because that might help shed some light on this
Speaker 1: these weird notes, which then we'll go into. He had
Speaker 1: spent some time in prison, Louis didn't He he did.
Speaker 1: He'd spent some time in prison for sex abuse. Evidently
Speaker 1: he'd fathered four children with three or four different women,
Speaker 1: though he never really was evident involved with their lives,
Speaker 1: the children's or the women's after impregnation. One of those
Speaker 1: ladies was actually fourteen when the child was conceived. He
Speaker 1: was an adult. What a classic. Yeah, he went from
Speaker 1: being homeless to living at his mom's. He could barely
Speaker 1: hold out a job. He wasn't the highest all of
Speaker 1: the social ladder and ladies and gentlemen. I preface this
Speaker 1: with this is a quote. This is directly what was said,
Speaker 1: is that his mother referred to him as retarded, not
Speaker 1: the sharpest stick of a dead His family, however, did
Speaker 1: like to say that he was street smart, but they
Speaker 1: agreed that he was troubled. So not a not a
Speaker 1: guy that's really going to be able to compose an
Speaker 1: unbreakable cipher, you would think. I feel like that's exactly
Speaker 1: the kind of person he might have been a savant
Speaker 1: if it's possible. Yeah, Well, people who aren't thinking totally
Speaker 1: clearly often make mistakes and their ciphers making making them
Speaker 1: really undecipherable. Right, and that's the that's true. That is
Speaker 1: a problem. Well, and it can it can also be
Speaker 1: to what the cipher was at letters numbers combination, both
Speaker 1: both letters and numbers. It was both. It could have
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's entirely possible it's not even a
Speaker 1: cipher message at all. Well, we'll get into that, because
Speaker 1: there is that possibility. And you, Devin bring up a
Speaker 1: good point is maybe it's he makes it harder because
Speaker 1: of his mental state. Uh, he could barely read or write,
Speaker 1: or he was very poor at it his handwriting, which
Speaker 1: I'll bring up the notes here in a minute, and
Speaker 1: you guys can take a look at him, but his
Speaker 1: handwriting is very, very poor. It's very difficult to read.
Speaker 1: But he supposedly, and there's some conjecture on this, supposedly,
Speaker 1: ever since he was a small child, had been making
Speaker 1: up codes of his own all the time, So he
Speaker 1: might have been doing this since he was a kid,
Speaker 1: so he had some crazy key built into his head,
Speaker 1: just a repetition, which make it even harder to crack,
Speaker 1: because well, the only person who knows the answer is
Speaker 1: now dead. It is believed that they figured out the
Speaker 1: order of the notes because one of them does have
Speaker 1: P one in the upper right hand corner, which for
Speaker 1: you and I would indicate page one. It might not
Speaker 1: be that. It might be something other in another piece
Speaker 1: of code that we don't realize, but people have been
Speaker 1: using that as the basis of This is page one,
Speaker 1: and this is how we're going to go ahead and
Speaker 1: try and figure out the cipher. And there were two pages,
Speaker 1: two pages. That is correct. Like I said, the FBI
Speaker 1: had been trying to crack this for a long time
Speaker 1: and gave up. And I've got some quotes directly from them.
Speaker 1: This is actually from Dan Olson. He's the chief of
Speaker 1: the FBI's cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit. Yeah really but
Speaker 1: hard to get on a name tag. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of weird they lunged them together. Crypt
Speaker 1: analysis and racketeering one. Well, you know the mob he's
Speaker 1: ciphers all the time, they use codes. Well yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you know, I know, but still racking. Mean,
Speaker 1: cryptanalysis is kind of a thing, and the FBI does
Speaker 1: a lot of counter spi and so you know, you
Speaker 1: would think that they would be using cryptanalysis even more
Speaker 1: heavily for that kind of thing. Anyway, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: an aside. But yeah, anyway, who cares anyway, But here's
Speaker 1: what Dan Olsen says. He says, and I quote, we're
Speaker 1: really good at what we do, but we could use
Speaker 1: some help on this one. Breaking this code could reveal
Speaker 1: the victims whereabouts before his death and could lead to
Speaker 1: the solution of a homicide. Not every cipher we get
Speaker 1: arrives at our door under these circumstances. Even if we
Speaker 1: found out that he was writing a grocery list or
Speaker 1: a love letter, we would still want to see how
Speaker 1: the code is solved. This is a cipher system we
Speaker 1: know nothing about. Maybe someone with a fresh set of
Speaker 1: eyes might come up with a brilliant new idea and
Speaker 1: let me repeat that line. This is a cipher system
Speaker 1: we know nothing about. Essentially, it's a brand new cipher
Speaker 1: to the FBI. Based on the way it's organized and
Speaker 1: put together. It could be as what if you had
Speaker 1: said he could be a bit of a savant when
Speaker 1: it came to coast, slow and everything else, but super
Speaker 1: great at puzzles, he said. I was hearing the other
Speaker 1: day that people with as Berger's and autism are typically
Speaker 1: the ones that are savants with math. They're really good
Speaker 1: with those. So there are relations in the brain of
Speaker 1: chemistry and function. So it could be right along the
Speaker 1: same line. So, um, I take it the FBI must
Speaker 1: have turned this stuff over to the n s A.
Speaker 1: I would imagine that a lot of inter inter governmental
Speaker 1: support that they would take it to the n s
Speaker 1: A before they would put it on the internet, you know,
Speaker 1: in years. I imagine that they went ahead and they
Speaker 1: pursued every avenue that is available to them. I don't
Speaker 1: imagine that they said, oh no, we're not talking to
Speaker 1: those guys. We don't like those high you know, you
Speaker 1: never know about the gun man. You know, sometimes they
Speaker 1: don't like. They don't like each other. I feel like
Speaker 1: they like each other more than they like the public. Though.
Speaker 1: That's a good points, that's a good point. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean if if, if the if they sticked a
Speaker 1: bunch of craze supercomputers on that thing, and they weren't
Speaker 1: able to break it, then I don't know, man, it's
Speaker 1: hard to say. But then again, a supercomputer only knows
Speaker 1: how to follow a formulas, whereas you and I can
Speaker 1: look at something and make that leap of not a
Speaker 1: leap of faith, but that leads to and suddenly it
Speaker 1: all falls into place, which computers aren't able to do.
Speaker 1: With this, I I have a strong feeling we gotta
Speaker 1: break it tonight. Actually, from what I've gleaned from reading
Speaker 1: stuff from the FBI all these other news reports, it
Speaker 1: appears to be what's known as a simple substitution cipher, which,
Speaker 1: for those of you who don't know, is A is
Speaker 1: replaced with the letter B and B is replacedable the
Speaker 1: letter C or variant of that. It seems relatively basic
Speaker 1: from the outside, but there is some information, based on
Speaker 1: posts that I've read of people who are trying to
Speaker 1: crack it, that it could be a polygraphic substitution cipher.
Speaker 1: And for what I can understand, a polygraphic substitution cipher
Speaker 1: is where it is actually letter pairs are taken and
Speaker 1: they replace other letter pairs. So th H now becomes
Speaker 1: b D, but t R would become c Q. If
Speaker 1: you know where I'm going with this, it's in total
Speaker 1: sequence two by two and that adds uh so much
Speaker 1: more variability because it's not twenty six letters, it's all
Speaker 1: these letter pairings. Plus you can from numbers in the mix,
Speaker 1: which Ricky did, So there's this huge number of possibilities.
Speaker 1: Or again, as we said, it could be just something
Speaker 1: unique to him that only he understood. Then it could
Speaker 1: also be that it's just gibberish. Absolutely could and that's
Speaker 1: where the speculation comes in, Joe, and that's that's good
Speaker 1: timing on your part, is that the speculation is it's gibberish.
Speaker 1: It's this guy who was mentally unstable just writing garbage.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make sense to anybody because it didn't make
Speaker 1: sense to him in the state that he was when
Speaker 1: he wrote it. There is also speculation that it could
Speaker 1: be a note sent of notes that he wrote at
Speaker 1: the time that he was with whoever killed him. So
Speaker 1: there's the possibility that cracking this code would shed light
Speaker 1: on how he died, or why he died, or who
Speaker 1: killed him, basically helping solve the murder. It seems unlikely because, frankly,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you've got to write a note knowing
Speaker 1: that you're probably about to die, an you want to
Speaker 1: write a note incriminating Mr X over here air to
Speaker 1: your left, you got to really put it in an
Speaker 1: unbreakable code. Are you just gonna write and play in English? Well,
Speaker 1: if he'd been doing codes his whole life and this
Speaker 1: was his code, it likely seemed incredibly simple to him
Speaker 1: that he would think, well, anybody could break this if
Speaker 1: they took the time, because I'm an idiot and I
Speaker 1: know how to do it. Absolutely not. But again it's like,
Speaker 1: why do you put it in code at all? Because
Speaker 1: either guys watching or he just did that all the time.
Speaker 1: That may have been his automatic way to write. He
Speaker 1: may have just written down his grocery list. He wrote
Speaker 1: his grocery list out and somebody said, what the heck is,
Speaker 1: what's my grocery list? What do you mean can't you
Speaker 1: read that? It just may have been second nature to him.
Speaker 1: I said his English was bad, right then, maybe that
Speaker 1: was that was the way he compensated. It might have
Speaker 1: been some crazy phonetic in his brain, like a phonetic system.
Speaker 1: I can if I piece these things together. We don't
Speaker 1: know if maybe he was dyslexic, so maybe that's how
Speaker 1: he wrote things, but then he broke it into a code.
Speaker 1: There's all these variables that simply not a clue exists too,
Speaker 1: not a single answer so far. Let me go ahead
Speaker 1: and pull up the note for you or Balta notes
Speaker 1: for you guys, so you can take a look at
Speaker 1: him right. So obviously as you can tell when you're
Speaker 1: looking at him, it's it's very scribbled, and it's it
Speaker 1: is difficult to tell what's going on in there. It is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: did you as you look at it? And I can
Speaker 1: pull up if we want, but I don't know if
Speaker 1: it'll help. I do have a version that has it
Speaker 1: typed out in the actual text is type rather than handwritten.
Speaker 1: But it seems like and I said this before, it
Speaker 1: seems almost fonetic as you read it, it does a
Speaker 1: little bit like I can kind of like my brain
Speaker 1: can make sense of little snippets of it. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: two three letter at a time. But the context, you
Speaker 1: can't put the whole thing together, and like there's an
Speaker 1: if there what appears to be a lose and also
Speaker 1: so it starts with an R. Yeah, it's interesting, it's
Speaker 1: very it seems so simple. But at the same when
Speaker 1: you look at it, and I think the handwriting is
Speaker 1: what makes it deceptive that way. Is it seems like
Speaker 1: it's written in a child's handwriting. Should be easy to
Speaker 1: figure out until it hits you in the head with
Speaker 1: rock and stumps you, which is exactly what it did
Speaker 1: to everybody. Yeah, but it's it's like down here it
Speaker 1: says like half something please p L s E. Oh
Speaker 1: it looks like a P to me exactly. This is
Speaker 1: what makes this so difficult. And I mean, if we
Speaker 1: are staring at it and already beginning to argue after
Speaker 1: thirty seconds, imagine what these poor fools if the FBI
Speaker 1: were doing M for XDU. Yeah, maybe this piped out
Speaker 1: version would be more helpful. But I don't think there's
Speaker 1: any chance of cracking us. I think it might. I
Speaker 1: think that it is going to be uncrackable because obviously
Speaker 1: the key went to went with Ricky two. His gray Uh.
Speaker 1: As of today, the murder is still unsolved. We still
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what happened. Yeah, it would be interesting,
Speaker 1: So I take it the FBI probably did other investigations
Speaker 1: beyond this. He must have talked to his family and
Speaker 1: friends and found out who he was associating with. Yes,
Speaker 1: and and he did not associate with the best folks. Again,
Speaker 1: if he had a handicap of some kind, there's some
Speaker 1: kind of mental issue. He may have just not thought
Speaker 1: about it and didn't realize that he was getting himself
Speaker 1: into a bad situation, and somebody might have taken advantage
Speaker 1: of it. It's it's difficult to say. So my twist
Speaker 1: on this is that his murderer was like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can write all the notes you want if you write
Speaker 1: in the handwrite knees because he knew that that would
Speaker 1: be the only person that Yeah, because I'm gonna write
Speaker 1: a lot of her help And he's like, yeah, fine,
Speaker 1: go for do whatever you want. Man. Yeah, very well
Speaker 1: could have been it. I don't know. Well, right there
Speaker 1: is that he had all this encrypted stuff round. You know,
Speaker 1: some of the some of his scumeback friends saw this
Speaker 1: names and said, what you know, they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: why are you encrypting this stuff while you know it's
Speaker 1: like this is like, you know, directions on how to
Speaker 1: find this buried treasure. You know, that's like you know,
Speaker 1: billions of dollars with a gold bullion, you know, and
Speaker 1: everything like that. So they tortured him and tell you
Speaker 1: until you finally just you know, even though it was
Speaker 1: GIBBERISHU but I finally said, okay, you know you drive
Speaker 1: out here here here, twenty pass this with dirty paces
Speaker 1: this way. I was there, and they'd be like great,
Speaker 1: and they kill him and they'd up the body in
Speaker 1: the cornfield, and of course said when they when they
Speaker 1: get to the where the buried treasure is, well, jokes
Speaker 1: on them, and who knows that there's no answers. There is, however,
Speaker 1: a bit of follow up mystery. Oh yeah, cool to
Speaker 1: this whole thing. And we've en countered this on stories before.
Speaker 1: And let me give you some of this follow up
Speaker 1: mystery or twists. Four years before Ricky died, so this
Speaker 1: is the police found the body of an alleged prostitute
Speaker 1: who was shot to death in a house near where
Speaker 1: Ricky was found, on the same stretch of road not
Speaker 1: too far away. In two thousand and one, road crews
Speaker 1: found the bodies of two nearly or two naked women
Speaker 1: three hundred yards from where Ricky's body was found. It
Speaker 1: could be that there potentially could be some psychopath that's
Speaker 1: out there that's using that stretch of road to do
Speaker 1: their business and dump their their evidence or their bodies
Speaker 1: off of and Ricky might this. This may not have
Speaker 1: anything to do again, it might be just incidents that
Speaker 1: this happener. Might be a coincidence that he had these
Speaker 1: notes in his pocket and he just got caught up
Speaker 1: in something that somebody was doing that they had their
Speaker 1: own compulsion for. But it could also mean that he
Speaker 1: was identifying who's who the killer was. He might have
Speaker 1: found out about it and they came after him and
Speaker 1: he wrote it down and they couldn't figure that wasn't
Speaker 1: they would have been. Yeah, to get back to what
Speaker 1: I was saying, it's like, you know, everybody, including the FBI,
Speaker 1: thinks that what is in this message is something of
Speaker 1: supreme value, which is why they're devoting huge resources to it.
Speaker 1: So if you want to Ricky scumbag friends and and
Speaker 1: you find this coded message, you're gonna draw the same
Speaker 1: conclusion as the FBI, you're gonna think there's something of
Speaker 1: supreme value in here, and you're gonna torture Ricky until
Speaker 1: he tells you what is in the message. Now, if
Speaker 1: it's just gibberish, she'll just make something up. That's speculation.
Speaker 1: And he could have been tortured. Ye, he could have
Speaker 1: been suffocated. There's no there's no way to know because
Speaker 1: of how the state of the body was very difficult
Speaker 1: to know. Yeah, that's where it is. Yeah, that's where
Speaker 1: the whole thing is. So there have been no good attempts.
Speaker 1: There is. There are all kinds of sights and again
Speaker 1: I've got the links to them and we'll be putting
Speaker 1: those up on the page. There are links to people
Speaker 1: who are trying to figure it out and there giveing
Speaker 1: their theories and they're working it back and forth. But
Speaker 1: as of yet, nothing that is even close to being
Speaker 1: possibly viable. And so another story that I don't have
Speaker 1: an answer to, another unsolved mystery. Yeah, that's that's the
Speaker 1: thing about it is like you know, it's like you
Speaker 1: don't really know that there is an answer to it
Speaker 1: really may never be Well, if you folks want to
Speaker 1: go ahead and you want to check out the links
Speaker 1: you want to find these discussion boards in these places,
Speaker 1: or just take a look at the notes themselves. You're
Speaker 1: more than welcome to do that. All of those will
Speaker 1: be available on the website. That website is thinking Sideways
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. If you think that you have an
Speaker 1: idea of how to break the cipher and you feel
Speaker 1: like telling us instead of the FBI, well you're more
Speaker 1: than welcome to do that. We promised to take credit
Speaker 1: for it. You can send us an email at Thinking
Speaker 1: Sideways podcast at gmail dot com and with that, we're
Speaker 1: going to get out of here and we look forward
Speaker 1: to talk to you next week. Yeah yeah, By everybody,
Speaker 1: By