Gatton Students Trying to Decode Notes in 1999 Murder Case

Three students at the Carol Martin Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science in Kentucky at WKU are trying to solve a 12-year-old murder case.

Daniel Dilger of Union, Luke Yap of Carrollton and Samantha McKean of Cecilia are working with Dr. Bruce Kessler, the Associate Dean of the Ogden College of Science & Engineering, to decrypt the notes released from the Ricky McCormick murder investigation.

In 1999, 41-year-old McCormick’s body was found in a field in St. Louis. Police found two encrypted notes in the victim’s pants pockets, which provide the only clues about the case.

The notes use a code based on numbers, letters and parentheses. The FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) and the American Cryptogram Association have been unable to solve the code.

The Gatton group’s research will help develop a cryptographic analysis infrastructure to potentially break the code.

“We’re in the stage of trying to get strategies together based on reading cipher codes,” Dr. Kessler said.

Very little is known about McCormick aside from him being a high school dropout.

“Part of what makes the project so difficult is that we don’t know anything about Ricky McCormick’s personal life,” Dilger said. “There isn’t any information available like his writing style or family history that could help us guess at what he was writing.”

Those who knew him said he used the code many other times throughout his life, but no one could ever understand what it meant.

“We’ve got to get inside this guy’s head and figure out his language,” Dr. Kessler said. “So little is known about him anyway and it’s as if he just floated on the fringe of society.”

Dr. Kessler said decoding the notes could introduce new ideas about the case. There’s a chance McCormick’s death wasn’t even a murder.

The students researching are currently working on computer programs that could help them generate more information about the code.

“Since McCormick wrote the notes by hand the cipher is probably simple, but we don’t know what technique he used,” Dilger said.

The group’s research will continue into the fall semester, and the students hope to present their findings in a report at the Kentucky Academy of Sciences.

Contact Bruce Kessler, (270) 745-4449.