On June 30, 1999, Ricky McCormick, a 41-year-old man, was found dead in a cornfield near West Alton, Missouri. His body was badly decomposed, and authorities couldn’t determine a cause of death. But what made the case truly bizarre were the two handwritten notes found in his pockets—written in an unbreakable code. McCormick was a high school dropout who struggled with literacy, yet the notes contained complex symbols, numbers, and letters that even the FBI’s best cryptographers couldn’t decipher