MO MO - Ricky McCormick, 41, St Louis, 30 June 1999

[bessie]

even with his education level i still see, what i think is a little hidden insight just like the SE "could" be Latin i find this there is a HWY 2 that goes east west in the northern states, it starts in the the east, wait for it off of I-75, and PTE is if in this case he used it as slang for the word Poniente which is west in Spanish.
again shooting in the dark here.
NMNRCBRNSE PTE 2 PTE WSRC BRNSE

I don't know if it's Latin, but "PTE 2 PTE" is a key phrase. In fact, that whole line is noteworthy, IMHO.

 

[bessie]

Rats! I have to dash off to work. I know y'all will have this all figured out by the time I get home.

Have a good one.

 

[DOC OZ]

I don't know if it's Latin, but "PTE 2 PTE" is a key phrase. In fact, that whole line is noteworthy, IMHO.

Let me correct myself PTE is not Latin SE is though i said it in a earlier post, it stands for to location or a locale.

 

[JustToSeeYouSmile]

hash function?

 

[Whitehat]

Hello everyone,

I'm back. Sorry I had to step away for a day. As for standard analysis, I can say that I've gone through about everything there is to go through. I wanted to reply to those who believed that certain characters may denote spaces. I can rule that out. I did a pass at the full text with a software designed just for that purpose (oddly enough run in patristocrat mode).

I still believe that formatting is the key. Looking into his life and his daily habits, the things he surrounded himself with each day would give clues to uncoded items that follow the same formatting. If the FBI hasn't cracked this in 12 years, then I doubt that any software of analysis is going to turn up anything. It may just be a matter of thinking outside the box and it seems to me that formatting in this writing is intentional. Find what it matches, and you have the entire cipher key laid out in front of you.

 

[websurfer]

Looks like a language all his own.
what catches my attention is the use of
( and )
obviously the top right is a date.... page one.

I even watched:
Dragnet 1967
Season 1:episode 13
entitled
The Bookie for clues...
I am thinking?
So the FBI has all his stuff from where he lived right?
And no clues from other notes or written things there?
Surely he had some clues in his apartment/house..
surely those are not the first notes he wrote?
very un crackable this one...:crazy:

 

[websurfer]

Hello everyone,

I'm back. Sorry I had to step away for a day. As for standard analysis, I can say that I've gone through about everything there is to go through. I wanted to reply to those who believed that certain characters may denote spaces. I can rule that out. I did a pass at the full text with a software designed just for that purpose (oddly enough run in patristocrat mode).

I still believe that formatting is the key. Looking into his life and his daily habits, the things he surrounded himself with each day would give clues to uncoded items that follow the same formatting. If the FBI hasn't cracked this in 12 years, then I doubt that any software of analysis is going to turn up anything. It may just be a matter of thinking outside the box and it seems to me that formatting in this writing is intentional. Find what it matches, and you have the entire cipher key laid out in front of you.

First of all
he is not a ROCKET SCIENTIST
so I would knock off the logical code useage.
He is a BOOKIE, so natually one must think as does a BOOKIE.I am not one but see tv shows and movies about them.
Usually the BOOKIES use numbers for letters right?
I watched the DRAGNET BOOKIE episode on HULU for free..
for some understanding of this.
Ok but still, there had to be notes at his house/apartment?
something to go on?

He may have stashed some writings someplace?
It seems he has little education, so he may be using a mix of PHONICS?
Sounding out his spelling?
What do You think of that idea?
:innocent:

 

[websurfer]

Ricky was African American ,His picture in in a link of the first page.

So does the FBI think Rickys code is more widespread in human trafficing than Ricky's case itself would lead us to believe?

I know ,I have to have facts to work right. Why the need to crack it?

Right I agree with you.
we have no clues really.
I was wondering where he went to school, and if they have looked back into his writings from school?
he had to write stuff there to learn to spell even if it is awful right? records?
tests?
etc...

 

[carbuff]

Another off the wall idea I had -- I haven't tried applying any of this yet. I'm good at puzzles but not encryption...but when I was a kid, I got into the code stuff quite a bit. When my brother and I were around 10, we (along with all our friends ) got one of those "secret decoder" rings in a box of cornflakes. We used it to exchange notes with our friends about top secret things we didn't want our parents to know about, like getting together to play in the old shed that was considered too dangerous. The ring didn't do anything sophisticated, just a rotating substitution cypher. There was a code that you put at the front of the text so your friend knew which setting to use.

We wrote everything in pig latin first, then encrypted it, so everything ended in the same two letters. Our mother, who is very smart despite only finishing 8th grade, figured it out in nothing flat. So then we went to variations of it. If I recall correctly, the one we eventually came up with that she couldn't figure out was encrypting first, then applying the pig latin, and then breaking it up into arbitrary "words" of varying lengths to make it look like real words, but the spaces didn't mean anything.

I'm wondering whether some similar sort of evolution might apply here. The fact that he started doing this when he was 10 and continued to use suggests that it started as something fairly basic, but he continued to use and work on. If as we suspect he also used abbreviations, shorthand notations, and phonetic spellings as it evolved, it would become a private language, not just an encryption.

 

[carbuff]

<snipped to quote just the relevant part>

I also had one other thought when I read the note. If the guy got killed he may have been into something illegal then when I read this section : 74SPRKSE29KENOSOLE is see 74 Speakers 29 Consoles. Although if i read the first part of that I would guess it said 26 Miles and I dont know how that would fit in with a inventory list.

First of all, welcome.

Your interpretation of those lines would fit with meeting someone to transfer a load of fenced goods.

 

[Moggie]

BloodShotEyes, I agree the numbers in those three lines could correspond to highways, and it does look like directions. But if NCBE stands for North, continue bearing East, how do we explain the many other instances of NCBE throughout the cipher?

What about the letters preceding the "hwy numbers"? Thoughts?

FLRSE PRSE ONDE 71 NCBE
CDNSE PRSE ONSE 74 NCBE
PRTSE PRSE ONREDE 75 NCBE

I think the three sets of different three letters at the beginning of those three lines (FLR, CDN, PRT) are significant. Any ideas about what they mean? I've googled them, but couldn't find any correlation.

My first thought was Florida, Canada, Briton on your earlier post you had the last letters as BRTSE.

 

[sfbaynancydrew]

First of all
he is not a ROCKET SCIENTIST
so I would knock off the logical code useage.
He is a BOOKIE, so natually one must think as does a BOOKIE.I am not one but see tv shows and movies about them.
Usually the BOOKIES use numbers for letters right?

I was thinking this last night. I had read that he ran numbers for horse racing. Could NCBE be an abbreviation for a horse's name?

And the lines with the 71, 74, 75...I'm thinking they might be bets with symbols for what the people wanted to do.

SE might be something "put" and prse might be a bet. because he then says things like se prse on de71 for example. Could that be a horse's number? Could ncbe be a code for a bet?

I bet these are his bookie numbers encoded because what he was doing was illegal and it helped him keep track of it all without worrying about tipping off LE should lose the list.

 

[Whitehat]

First of all
he is not a ROCKET SCIENTIST
so I would knock off the logical code useage.
He is a BOOKIE, so natually one must think as does a BOOKIE.I am not one but see tv shows and movies about them.
Usually the BOOKIES use numbers for letters right?
I watched the DRAGNET BOOKIE episode on HULU for free..
for some understanding of this.
Ok but still, there had to be notes at his house/apartment?
something to go on?

He may have stashed some writings someplace?
It seems he has little education, so he may be using a mix of PHONICS?
Sounding out his spelling?
What do You think of that idea?
:innocent:

I'm not suggesting that the man was a rocket scientist. I'm suggesting that there is some logical order to what the man wrote. Obviously, if there are repeating sequences and items concatenated with a dash then there is formatting. My point is, as many others have stated, that this man used his own proprietary coding system. It's defied all cracking attempts. That means that we're probably not going to get anything at all out of trying to rearrange letters, positions, transposition, etc.. as I have software to do all of that and it's all come back as nothing. The only thing we have to go on are the facts such as the obvious formatting and order to the sequences. As for phonics, I don't think that is viable at all. African American Vernacular English is one thing, but have you actually attempted to sound out the lettering at all? I just don't think that jives.

Out of curiosity, where did you get your information that the man was a bookie?

 

[carbuff]

If it's true that he's a bookie, or a fence, or involved in other illegal activity, then it would make sense that his notes are in some kind of code.

 

[QueenD]

It just amazes me that since this man has been doing this since childhood days that he never told another family member how to decode these messages.

You would think you would at least want your child to know.

Did I read he had 4-children?

 

[A_News_Junkie]

Just wanted to extend a warm hearty welcome to all new members - and great minds (we love brains around here!) and to thank Doc OZ for your service!
:wagon::Welcome1::Welcome1::welcome3::welcome2::welcome5::welcome4: ..................... That ought to cover it for awhile!

So, since that one article:
http://www.stltoday.com/news/article_bcc02074-5b1a-11e0-b199-0017a4a78c22.html
States: "Authorities said he had a criminal record and was convicted on a charge of statutory rape. He was sentenced to three years but served 11 months, they said." <---------- we can go back to: https://www.courts.mo.gov/casenet/cases/header.do and find a middle initial and see what cases (people involved, etc) are his and also the surrounding area.

Also wanted to make sure nobody missed link from Wiki article:
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/forensics/vernon_geberth/12.html

(the video link - I am not finding and not liking that site either)

 

[LadyBug99]

Another off the wall idea I had -- I haven't tried applying any of this yet. I'm good at puzzles but not encryption...but when I was a kid, I got into the code stuff quite a bit. When my brother and I were around 10, we (along with all our friends ) got one of those "secret decoder" rings in a box of cornflakes. We used it to exchange notes with our friends about top secret things we didn't want our parents to know about, like getting together to play in the old shed that was considered too dangerous. The ring didn't do anything sophisticated, just a rotating substitution cypher. There was a code that you put at the front of the text so your friend knew which setting to use.

We wrote everything in pig latin first, then encrypted it, so everything ended in the same two letters. Our mother, who is very smart despite only finishing 8th grade, figured it out in nothing flat. So then we went to variations of it. If I recall correctly, the one we eventually came up with that she couldn't figure out was encrypting first, then applying the pig latin, and then breaking it up into arbitrary "words" of varying lengths to make it look like real words, but the spaces didn't mean anything.

I'm wondering whether some similar sort of evolution might apply here. The fact that he started doing this when he was 10 and continued to use suggests that it started as something fairly basic, but he continued to use and work on. If as we suspect he also used abbreviations, shorthand notations, and phonetic spellings as it evolved, it would become a private language, not just an encryption.

I have to agree with you. I think this really is his private language and obviously cannot be cracked using any conventional methods. He had been working on and using it for years. It may hold information if he was using it to hide any illegal activity and perhaps that is why the FBI is still interested. JMO

 

[Frances]

New person here to posting, been 'round awhile reading. The slang cracks me up! I am a noob I guess.

I read through this thread and one post, couldn't find it again, a poster mentioned they were good at word searches. Could this be a word search type puzzle? Anyone tried to type it out and line the lines up differently to see if they can find a trail of words, sentences ect. There are so many ways to line up the words, and they could go in so many directions, but somewhere maybe starting somewhere in the puzzle a trail could be followed that would make sense. Am I making a lick of sense to anyone?

The work you all do on this site is more than fantastic. I love reading here and watching all that is accomplished. Bravo!

I hope y'all can solve this.

Oh, another thing that is driving me nuts, if this person did these codes all his life, why on earth aren't there more to compare? Notes somewhere? Something? Makes no sense to me.

 

[wfgodot]

Welcome to WS, Frances!

 

[Whitehat]

I just wanted to add something that may be obvious, but it doesn't seem like anyone has pointed it out yet. So here goes Captain obvious! On the notes page, at the bottom right, there is a 1/2. I'm taking that to mean it's a fraction. One-half. Also on that page is the 99.84.5, and then it appears to be ZUNE, BUT, I'm beginning to think that it was actually a 2. I don't think spacing is intentional in this. I think that it was written in a manner that suggests that RM was concentrating while copying something. I think this is actually 99.84.52. If I think about how I write when I'm trying to copy things that don't really mean much to me, it has a certain rhythm to it.

As an example, if I have to sit down and write out a bunch of serial numbers for inventory, there are pieces of that system that are familiar and the same. I recognize things in patterns. I usually copy 4 numbers or letters at a time because it's just easier and seems faster. I think the formatting that we see on the paper may not be organization beyond that of his thought process at the time of writing it. I'm guessing that he had a key of some sort that he was consulting in order to produce the writing. It doesn't really seem consistent with fluid writing.

Now, here's the kicker. If these were found in his pockets, there is no way that they would have avoided folding lines, or wrinkles, etc. Looking at the lettering, I see no evidence of this. Also, the NOTES page looks curiously like a file page that an investigating FBI agent might copy the information to. I think it is possible that these are not the original writings, and that they were copied to save the integrity of the writing. I could certainly be wrong here, but I would like to know for a FACT that these are exactly what was found on the body, and not something jotted down by an investigator after the fact.