On this day in 1999, the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick was discovered in a field in St Charles County, Missouri, the victim of an apparent homicide. Very little evidence was collected, with the exception of two handwritten ciphers found crumbled up in his pocket. Believing the ciphers to be connected to his killer, investigators appealed to the public for help in decoding them, though they remain unsolved. Further confounding the mystery of the coded messages is that, according to his family, Ricky was illiterate and barely able to write his own name.
