Ricky McCormick's notes

The first note is a plain sheet marked "P1" in a circle at the top right, with thirteen lines. The second is written on a printed page headed "NOTES", with eighteen lines enclosed in hand-drawn loops⁠[7]. The FBI described the notes as more than 30 lines in all, written up to three days before his death⁠[5]. The letters are capitals drawn in a consistent personal style, with some characters (a small reversed-looking n, a looped l-shape, an angle bracket) whose identity is a matter of interpretation⁠[7].

Short groups recur. In this project's transcription the group NCBE occurs about 18 times, WLD about 13 and PRSE 8, and most groups end in SE. Many lines are bracketed as if they were separate entries, and several contain numbers: (FLRSE PRSE ONDE 71 NCBE), (CDNSE PRSE ONSBE 74 NCBE), (PRTSE PRSE ONREDE 75 NCBE), (194 WLD'S NCBE), and on the second page 99.84.5 and 1/2⁠[7].

McCormick was a high-school dropout with chronic heart and lung problems who lived intermittently with his mother and received disability payments. He had a criminal record⁠[1]⁠[8]. In 2011 the FBI said he could read and write and that relatives had said he used such notes from boyhood, though it was not known whether anyone else could read his "secret language"⁠[5]. A year later his family told the Riverfront Times the opposite: his mother said "the only thing he could write was his name", a cousin said he "couldn't spell anything, just scribble", and the family said they learned of the notes only from the 2011 news coverage⁠[9].

The FBI's Dan Olson called it "a cipher system we know nothing about" and said the Bureau wanted to see how it was solved even if the notes proved to be a grocery list or a love letter⁠[5].

The CRRU and the American Cryptogram Association examined the notes before 2011 and failed to decipher them; their working has not been published⁠[5]⁠[4]. The 2011 appeal drew a large public response, and the FBI asked people to stop phoning and emailing and to use its web form⁠[6]. No proposed decipherment has been endorsed by the FBI, published in a peer-reviewed venue, or tied to a checkable fact about McCormick's last days.

Nothing systematic has been published on the notes' statistics either. The recurring groups and endings visible in a transcription are what any test would start from: a monoalphabetic substitution of English would not produce SE at the end of most groups, while a personal abbreviation system, in which NCBE or WLD stands for a word, would⁠[7].

A cipher. The FBI's working assumption in 2011 was that the notes encrypt information, perhaps about his movements, that could identify a killer⁠[4]⁠[5]. It predicts a consistent system that, once found, yields names, places or amounts.

Personal shorthand. The notes may be a private abbreviation system: lists, directions, figures or reminders in a code of the writer's own, with recurring words abbreviated. This fits the recurring groups and the bracketed entries with numbers, and the FBI's 2011 report that he had used such notes since boyhood⁠[5]⁠[7]. It predicts that the meaning is recoverable only with knowledge of his life.

Not writing in the ordinary sense. The family's 2012 account, that he could barely write, raises two other possibilities: that the notes imitate writing without carrying a message, or that someone else wrote them⁠[9]. The first predicts statistics closer to drawn patterns than to language; the second predicts that the handwriting does not match McCormick's.

The FBI's own case material (handwriting exemplars from McCormick, the original sheets, any notes found among his belongings) is the decisive evidence: a handwriting comparison would settle who wrote them, and other samples of the same system would allow it to be read as a code with known context. Without that, an independent transcription by several readers, published with the ambiguities marked, and a statistical comparison with language, shorthand and pseudo-writing would at least decide what kind of object the notes are.