The documents are not the work of a spy or a criminal mastermind. They are the scribblings of a man who, by all accounts, was an unemployed high school dropout with no known training in cryptography. And that is precisely what makes them so impenetrable.
The Man Behind the Code
To understand the puzzle, one must first understand the man. Ricky McCormick was not an obvious candidate for creating an unbreakable cipher. He lived a life on the margins, dealing with chronic health problems and struggling to find steady work. He had a criminal record, but for minor offenses. Nothing in his background suggested he was a member of a sophisticated criminal enterprise or possessed the kind of genius-level intellect required to design a code that could defy the world’s best codebreakers.
Yet, when the FBI released the ciphers to the public in 2011, twelve years after his death, they admitted they were at a dead end. They had exhausted every standard cryptographic technique. The head of the CRRU, Dan Olson, hoped that the power of the crowd might succeed where they had failed. He believed the notes were written just before McCormick’s death and could hold the key to identifying his killer. The public response was massive, but to this day, no one has presented a verifiable decryption.
A Look at the Linguistic Labyrinth
So, what does this infamous code look like? It’s a chaotic jumble of capital letters, numbers, and parentheses that defies easy categorization. There are no clear spaces between many of the “words”, and letter frequency—the first tool in any cryptanalyst’s kit—doesn’t match English or any other known language. A typical line from Note 1 reads:
MNDRSE-N-S-M-IK-SE-99-10-17) / (AL-PRPPIT X L VSN N V PRPPIT) / (YLSE-N-S-M-IK-SE-2-4-99-12-2) / (D-W-L-3-1-99-T-L-V-S-N-V-R-PRPPIT)
At first glance, it looks like it could be a simple substitution cipher, where each letter stands for another. But that theory quickly falls apart. The string “PRPPIT” appears multiple times, but so do single letters like ‘X’, ‘L’, and ‘V’. The letter ‘E’ appears frequently, but not with the consistency you’d expect from the most common letter in English. The structure is maddeningly inconsistent, which has led to three dominant theories about its origin.
Theory 1: A Complex, Home-Brewed Cipher
The first possibility is that McCormick, despite his background, was a cryptographic savant. He could have invented his own complex system, perhaps a polyalphabetic cipher (where a letter can be enciphered differently depending on its position) or a homophonic cipher (where a single letter, like ‘E’, can be represented by multiple different symbols to flatten frequency distribution).
This theory suggests the notes are a deliberate encryption of an English message. The numbers could be part of a key, indicate word length, or have some other function within the system. While not impossible, it feels improbable. Creating such a robust system from scratch without any formal knowledge is a monumental task. For it to be so effective as to stump the FBI for over 20 years seems to stretch credulity. It would mean that a high school dropout from St. Louis accidentally or intentionally created one of the most secure ciphers in modern history.
Theory 2: A Forgotten Form of Shorthand
A more plausible theory is that the notes are not a cipher at all, but a form of personal shorthand. Many people develop their own idiosyncratic ways of taking notes quickly, using phonetic abbreviations, symbols for common words, and a logic that is unique to them. The McCormick notes could be a phonetic representation of spoken language, where `MNDRSE` might stand for “Monday” or a phrase like “My new direction is..”.
This would explain the lack of clear word breaks and the strange combinations of letters. It’s a system designed for speed and personal recall, not for secrecy. The problem with this theory is that even personalized shorthand systems usually have an internal logic that can be reverse-engineered with enough data. Analysts would expect to see patterns emerge, but the McCormick notes offer very few. If it’s shorthand, it’s a system so deeply personalized and inconsistent that it’s functionally unbreakable without its creator.
Theory 3: The Language of One—Idioglossia
This leads us to the most compelling, and perhaps most tragic, explanation: idioglossia. An idioglossia is a private language, invented and understood by only one person or a small, intimate group. It’s not an encryption of a known language; it is its own language, complete with a unique (if rudimentary) grammar and vocabulary. According to McCormick’s family, he had been scribbling in this strange “code” since he was a boy.
If this is true, then the FBI’s cryptanalysts were doomed from the start. They were trying to unlock a door with the wrong set of keys. They assumed the underlying text was English, but they were actually looking at a language no one else on Earth had ever spoken or written. The notes weren’t encrypted; they were composed in “Ricky-speak”.
This theory elegantly explains every bizarre feature of the notes: the lack of standard linguistic patterns, the failure of cryptographic analysis, and the deep personalization of the script. It means the challenge is not one of cryptography, but of deciphering an unknown language from an incredibly small sample text—a task that is virtually impossible without a Rosetta Stone to provide a translation.
An Uncrackable Legacy
Ricky McCormick’s notes could be anything: a diary of his final days, a list of people who wronged him, the name of his killer, or simply a rambling collection of thoughts that made sense only to him. Was he documenting a threat, or just writing a grocery list in his own private language?
The tragic reality is that the key to understanding these notes almost certainly died with him in that Missouri cornfield. The McCormick ciphers have become a modern legend in the worlds of linguistics and cryptography—a haunting reminder that sometimes the most profound codes aren’t designed by spies, but are born from the unique, isolated landscape of a single human mind.