Category Archives: Ricky Mccormick

A journalist contacted me this week to ask me about poor Ricky McCormick’s cryptic writing. I hadn’t written anything about this since 2013 and 2016, and even the Riverfront Times’ 2012 “Code Dead” article was now only in the Wayback Machine. An update was long overdue…

“Meet Me In St Louis, Louis…

…Meet me at the fair“. Do you know the song?

All the pieces of Ricky McCormick’s life were held together by the gravitational pull of downtown St Louis. It was where he grew up and went to school (sometimes), it was where he worked (sometimes) and travelled around on the buses, it was how he talked, it was where he lived (and indeed died). In my mind, the puzzle of Ricky McCormick’s notes (here and here) is likely to be not so much a code-breaking one as a geographical and linguistic one.

If we could only find a way to meet him in St Louis, we might stand a chance of reading (or at least reading through) his notes. To be brutally honest, I doubt that decrypting these will throw much light on his life (never mind his death), but his notes remain a puzzle, and one with its own gravitational pull.

Ricky McCormick’s notes

The distinctive series of letters “WLDNCBE” appears eight times in his notes: but so too does the same series with an apostrophe, i.e. “WLD’S NCBE“:

So it seems likely that this “WLD’S NCBE” is the full version of the phrase, and “WLDNCBE” is the quick version. Both WLD and NCBE also occurs lots of other times, with the latter often preceded by a number:

“PRSEON” is another common pattern, which I’ve long suspected could mean “person”:

Even just “SE” is something that appears a lot more frequently than you might normally expect:

McCormick also seems to use “XL” as a common pattern, so perhaps this was a phrase he liked? And there’s one word in there that looks a lot like a jumbled version of “special”:

There’s also something that looks like “MR DE LUSE”, though who that was remains unknown:

If not at the fair, then where?

Looking at Ricky McCormick’s notes, you can see plenty of short number groups (71, 74, 75, 194, 26, 35, 651, 74, 29, 99.84.52, 3, 1/2), plenty of letters, and plenty of word-like letter structure. It might therefore seem reasonable to conjecture that these might possibly be references to places in and around St Louis, all rendered in his own idiosyncratic (and very possibly dyslexic) style, and so effectively a private language only readable by him.

But… American street addresses don’t in general work like this at all (and certainly not in downtown St Louis). So if these are addresses, I think it’s highly likely that they’re for a specific neighbourhood with lots of adjacent-numbered flats. The most famous high-density living area in St Louis was the post-war Pruitt-Igoe high-rises: yet the last was demolished in 1976 (the site remains largely vacant). In fact, you may have seen footage of this without realising it, because some appeared in the (1982) film Koyaanisqatsi. So I’m kind of out of ideas here as to where these even might be.

All in all, I suspect it will take someone with a grasp of the sociogeography of downtown St Louis far better than me (along with a far better grasp of McCormick’s spoken accent) to come up with any candidate places. I’ve trawled Google Maps plenty of times and yet my net has always come up empty.

What do you think, Nick?

Pfffft… even in 2013 I wrote that “quite unlike other cipher mysteries, I don’t actually want to read what was written on McCormick’s two notes“: and I am, alas, still bobbing along in that same boat.

Still, it was nice to have an excuse to put up a blog post with a picture of Judy Garland, eh?

Films and TV typically depict code-breakers as genius mathematicians running clever programmes on the fastest computers of their day – but for the kind of code-breaking I do, putting it into a computer is almost always the last step, not the first step.

In fact, there are close to a hundred things historical code-breakers like to try to work out first, such as:
* Who owns it?
* Who owned it in the past?
* Does it look genuine?
* Is there anything that might prove that it’s a fake?
* Was the code connected to any other documents?
* Are there references to the code in other documents?
* Is there any extra writing directly linked to the code?
* Do we know who the code-maker was?
* What was the code-maker’s situation?
* Who was supposed to be able to read the code?
* Are there any other documents written using the same letter shapes?
* Why was there any need for a code at all?
* Is it a code, or a cipher, or something in-between?
* Was each line of text written left-to-right or right-to-left?
* What language was the hidden message probably written in?
* Does the code’s text have any unusual features?
…and so on.

In short, if you ask your computer to work out what a message says in English when it’s actually written in German, it’s never going to find an answer, is it?

And the more that you can work out for certain before you try breaking the code, the greater the chance you will actually solve it.

Are Ricky McCormick’s Notes In Code?

Though I’ve covered Ricky McCormick’s mysterious notes here before, the short answer is…

No, they’re not.

When Ricky McCormick dropped out of school, he was barely able to read or write: the system had failed him completely – perhaps he was dyslexic, it’s hard to say. His parents “told investigators he sometimes jotted down nonsense he called writing“; that “the only thing he could write was his name“; and that Ricky “couldn’t spell anything, just scribble.”

The poor quality of the handwriting in his notes is completely consistent with the suggestion that he wrote them himself. And if he could barely write English, writing notes to himself in code seems extraordinarily unlikely.

So if you start off (as the Wikipedia “Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes” page does) by assuming that Ricky McCormick’s notes are encrypted, I believe you have already doomed your code-breaking attempts to failure.

Personally, I can’t come up with even a single reason why the FBI ever thought that they might be in code (in the sense of a cryptographic code).

But we still might be able to read them…

Reading Ricky McCormick’s Notes

I think the most likely explanation for the notes is that they are written in (what is effectively) his own private language – notes to himself that nobody else needed to be able to read.

I’ve marked up the top few lines of the second note so that you can see some of the groups of letters (such as “WLD” and “NCBE”) that occur again and again:-

One mystery is why the “SE” pair occurs so often: perhaps that was related to a speech quirk he had.

Also: the bottom line of the first note has a sequence that seems to say “(194 WLD’S NCBE)”. This makes it look as though both “WLD” and “NCBE” are nouns, and that (whatever they actually are) a “WLD” can own a “NCBE”… but that’s as far as I can go.

When we read these notes, I think we’re hearing inside Ricky McCormick’s head. But until we talk with the people who knew him, know his speech patterns, know his world… we’ll probably never make sense of them.