McCormick Notes
Two handwritten notes found with Ricky McCormick in 1999. The FBI released them in 2011 seeking help; “unsolved” is not a declaration of mathematical unbreakability.
Undeciphered notes released by the FBI; no accepted public interpretation.
Interactive Exhibit
Paste a fragment of one of the McCormick notes (or use the loaded sample) and the widget will list bigrams (two-letter clusters) by frequency. Track B — pattern explorer, not a decoder.
Why This Matters
On 30 June 1999, Ricky McCormick — a 41-year-old man with limited literacy — was found dead in a field in St. Charles County, Missouri. In his pockets were two handwritten notes filled with apparent letter-clusters, numbers, parenthesised abbreviations, and what look like coded place names. After 12 years of in-house analysis, the FBI's CRRU publicly released the notes in 2011 and asked for help. They remain unsolved. The FBI list McCormick's notes as one of the bureau's top unsolved cryptograms.
The FBI reported that McCormick had used coded notes since childhood. The agency sought someone who might recognise the notation or provide context. The marks’ precise rules and meaning remain uncertain, so no invented quotation or particular algorithm is asserted here.
Repeated clusters and layout offer clues, but they do not establish a unique cipher type or underlying language. Personal shorthand is one possibility. A private notation is not thereby a one-time pad: that term has specific requirements of random, secret, non-reused key material.
The McCormick notes are a leading example used in arguments for crowdsourced cryptanalysis: the FBI explicitly opened them to the public hoping that someone — perhaps a relative, perhaps a stranger with the right insight — would recognise a personal pattern. They are also a sobering counterpoint to fictional 'genius detective' decipherments: a real intelligence agency, with full access to context and a 12-year head start, could not crack a barely-literate man's personal notes.
| Hall | Hall XII · Unsolved |
| Region | St. Louis, Missouri, USA |
| Era | Late 20th-c. United States · 1999 |
| Discipline | Personal/idiosyncratic cipher (suspected) |
| Track | B (cluster analyzer) |
| Modern echo | FBI public crowdsourcing of cryptanalysis |