Ricky McCormick’s death in a Missouri cornfield in 1999 might have faded into obscurity — if not for the coded notes found in his pocket that the FBI still can’t crack.

The 41-year-old’s remains turned up on June 30 in a St. Charles County field, badly decomposed. According to the Riverfront Times , portions of his fingers had rotted away before anyone found him. The medical examiner ruled his cause of death “undetermined,” and investigators believed his body had been left in the field after he died elsewhere.

The notes — about 30 rows of capital letters, numbers, dashes and parentheses broken into sections — baffled investigators. They were turned over to the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), the same team that once cracked coded messages used by Nazi spies.

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