http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2012-06-14/news/ricky-mccormick-code-mysterious-death-st-louis/
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No flowers for Ricky McCormick
+ Ricky McCormick's remains
were well on their way toward fertilizing the soil when investigators
arrived to the scene in late June 1999. Filthy Lee blue jeans and a
stained white T-shirt clung to his scrawny five-foot-six-inch frame.
Although it had been just three days since he disappeared, the flesh on
his outstretched hands was already rotted to the point that his
fingertips, just below the top knuckles, had fallen off and lay next to
him in the weeds.
+ Today the field in West Alton offers no hint of its murderous
history. No marker or makeshift memorial stands in the place where
McCormick's body was found. The cycle of seasons erased long ago what
little impression he left behind.
+ A few miles south, no headstone identifies McCormick's final resting
place at Laurel Hill Memorial Gardens. If not for an entry in the
cemetery's log book, one would never know his bones are buried beneath
the grass designated as Space #2 in lot 11D. Here and there other graves
are decorated with red silk flowers and plastic green wreaths, but not
McCormick's. There is no sign anyone has ever visited his anonymous
plot.
+ It turns out McCormick's riddle, allegedly written by a man who could
hardly write his own name, has stumped the world's foremost code
breakers. They remain so baffled, in fact, that McCormick's notes now
rank third on the CRRU's list of top unsolved cases, behind only an
unbroken cipher authored by the self-proclaimed Zodiac killer in 1969
and a secret threat letter written to an undisclosed public agency about
25 years ago.
+ In March 2011, FBI officials made a rare and remarkable revelation,
seemingly out of the blue. Dan Olson, chief of the bureau's
Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) in Quantico,
Virginia, disclosed for the first time the existence of two pages of
handwritten encrypted notes found stuffed in a pocket of McCormick's
jeans. Unable to decipher the tangle of letters and numbers, the FBI
released copies to the public with a plea for assistance to hardcore
puzzle solvers and wannabe sleuths alike.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032911
http://forms.fbi.gov/code
http://forms.fbi.gov/code
The family discovers that the FBI had deceived them and hidden information:
+ In St. Louis, McCormick's family members say they have never
heard from police about the suspects in the death or other details of the
investigation into Ricky's death. They never heard about the encrypted
notes found in his pocket until the local evening news broadcast a
report on the codes.
"They told us the only thing in his pockets was the emergency-room
ticket," McCormick's mother, Frankie Sparks, says. "Now, twelve years
later, they come back with this chicken-scratch shit."
+ Contradicting the FBI's statements to the media, family members say
they never knew of Ricky to write in code. They say they only told
investigators he sometimes jotted down nonsense he called writing, and
they seriously question McCormick's capacity to craft the notes found in
his pockets.
"The only thing he could write was his name," Sparks says."He didn't write in no code." Charles McCormick recalls Ricky "couldn't spell anything, just scribble."
Ricky has always been for everyone an idiot (or worse):
+ Ricky McCormick always stood out as different from his peers.
+ His
mother, Frankie Sparks, describes him as "retarded." His cousin Charles
McCormick, who shared a brotherly relationship with Ricky for most of
his life, says Ricky would often talk "like he was in another world" and
suspects Ricky might have suffered from schizophrenia or bipolar
disorder.
"Ricky went to see a psychiatrist, and he said Ricky had a brick wall
in his mind," remembers Gloria McCormick, an aunt better known as
"Cookie" in whom Ricky often confided. "He said Ricky refused to break
that wall. He didn't like the life of living poor and had an active
imagination."
+ It's unclear whether McCormick ever received formal treatment for
mental illness, but family members recall Ricky's penchant for
concocting tall tales and his displays of unusual behavior. As a boy he
spent so much time at recess standing off by himself that his mother
would receive calls from school administrators asking if anything was
wrong.
+ Teachers shuffled McCormick along from grade to grade, but he could
hardly read or write when he dropped out of St. Louis' former Martin
Luther King High School on North Kingshighway.
+ McCormick subsisted on occasional odd jobs — floor mopper,
dishwasher, busboy, service-station attendant — and disability checks he
collected due to chronic heart problems. He preferred the graveyard
shift and developed a reputation as a night owl, heading out the door at
dusk and dragging himself home at dawn.
"I called him a vampire," Gloria McCormick says. "He slept all day, and then at night he rises."
+ As a teenager and later as an adult, he frequently hitched a ride or
caught a bus to distance himself from the street toughs who dealt drugs
and picked fights outside his now-bulldozed home near the present-day
intersection of Lindell Boulevard and North Sarah Street.
Criminal record
+ Eventually Ricky found trouble himself. In November 1992, St. Louis police arrested the 34-year-old McCormick for having fathered two children with a girl younger than fourteen years old. McCormick had been sleeping with the girl since she was eleven, according to court files, which protected the girl's identity. McCormick's mother and aunt knew the girl simply by her nickname, Pretty Baby.
+ While awaiting trial on the first-degree sexual-abuse charge,
McCormick's public defender noted she had reasonable cause to believe
McCormick was "suffering from some mental disease or defect" and
requested that the judge order a mental-health exam. Dr. Michael Armour,
a local psychologist, evaluated McCormick at the former St. Louis State
Hospital. Following Armour's report and a hearing, however, the court
certified McCormick was fit for trial. Six weeks later, on September 1,
1993, McCormick pleaded guilty to the crime. State inmate 503506 would
spend thirteen months behind bars in the Farmington Correctional Center
before being sent home a year early on conditional release.
+ McCormick's relationship with Pretty Baby reflected an obvious lapse of good judgment. It wouldn't be his last.
+ McCormick may have been regarded as something of a simpleton who,
despite some street smarts and his criminal record, was generally naïve
to the world. The same cannot be said for the men who ran the Amoco gas
station at 1401 Chouteau Avenue south of downtown St. Louis where he
worked.
+ Minutes before sunrise on June 15, 1999, about two weeks before his
death, Ricky McCormick walked up to the counter at the Greyhound bus
terminal downtown and purchased a one-way ticket to Orlando. It would
turn out to be the last of at least two brief trips to Florida he made
that year.
+ It's not clear whom McCormick met during his stay in Room 280 at the
Econo Lodge in Orlando. But phone records show he or his girlfriend,
Sandra Jones, made a flurry of calls to several people in central
Florida a couple of weeks ahead of his arrival. Jones and McCormick
exchanged a similar barrage of short phone calls during the two days
McCormick spent in Orlando, and he made at least one call to the St.
Louis gas station where he worked.
+ Jones would later tell police she suspected McCormick went to Florida
to pick up marijuana. According to a sheriff's department investigative
report, Jones' explanation went like this:
+ McCormick would accept offers to pick up and deliver packages for
money. He made trips to Florida before and on several occasions brought
marijuana into the apartment he shared with Jones in the Clinton-Peabody
housing project south of downtown. The drugs would usually be sealed in
zip-lock bags rolled together into bundles the size of baseballs.
McCormick told Jones he was holding the stashes of weed for Baha
Hamdallah, the police report states.
+ McCormick never liked to talk about his excursions to Orlando, but he
seemed different when he got back that last time, Jones told police. He
seemed scared.
+ Indeed, McCormick's already unsettled lifestyle seemed to become more
erratic after he came back, as if he sensed trouble around the corner
but didn't know where to turn. McCormick used much of his time during
his last days to seek out medical care or, perhaps more accurately, a
safe place to stay.
+ Around three o'clock the afternoon of June 22, 1999, McCormick walked
alone into Barnes-Jewish Hospital's emergency room complaining of chest
pains and shortness of breath. This was nothing new. McCormick had a
history of ER visits and had suffered from asthma and chest pains since
childhood. He told his doctors he didn't abuse drugs or alcohol, a
statement friends and family back up. It didn't help, however, that he
smoked at least a pack of cigarettes a day since he was about ten years
old and drank coffee by the gallon. By his own estimate, he told his
doctors he downed more than twenty caffeinated beverages a day.
+ Doctors ruled out a heart attack but admitted McCormick for
observation and kept him there for two days. Ricky left the hospital on
June 24 with orders to return for follow-up visits in the coming week.
He would never make it to those appointments.
+ McCormick took a bus to his aunt Gloria's apartment after leaving
Barnes-Jewish and visited with her for about an hour. Her home had
always been a sanctuary for him, and he maintained a closer relationship
with Gloria than with his own mother, who lived just around the corner.
"Everybody needs someone to talk to now and then," Gloria says. "Ricky would come visit and talk with me."
+ But he revealed little this time, chatting just a bit before getting
up to leave. It was late afternoon, and Ricky waved off offers to drive
him wherever he needed to go. Gloria's last image of Ricky is him
walking down the street.
+ Around 5 p.m. the next day, June 25, McCormick entered the emergency
room at Forest Park Hospital, less than two miles from Barnes-Jewish.
This time he complained that he was having trouble breathing following
an afternoon of mowing grass. Doctors diagnosed his wheezing as another
asthma flare-up. He was not admitted, however, and was officially
released at 5:50 p.m. It's not clear when he actually left the hospital.
+ Gloria says she heard McCormick spent that night in the waiting room
before leaving the next morning.
Jones told police that she talked with McCormick on the phone at
about 11:30 a.m. on June 26. He told her he was out of the hospital and
was on his way to the Amoco to get a bite to eat. At least one
gas-station employee told police he last saw McCormick there the next
day, on June 27.
+ McCormick left the gas station with at most hours left to live;
medical examiners determined he was definitely dead the same day.
+ On December 23, 1999, detective Jana Walters of the St. Charles
County Sheriff's Department received a call from Sgt. Ed Kuehner of the
St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department's homicide division. He had
information to share about Ricky McCormick's death and wanted to arrange
an inter-agency meeting.
+ Nine investigators gathered on the fourth floor of St. Louis' police
headquarters six days later. In addition to Walters and her partner,
detective Michael Yarbrough, Kuehner's gathering included members of St.
Louis' homicide and narcotics divisions, investigators with the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a special agent
from the FBI.
+ Walters and Yarbrough learned St. Louis police were investigating a
man named Gregory Lamar Knox, a major drug dealer who operated in and
around the housing complex where McCormick had lived, as a suspect in
several homicides, including "at least two murder-for-hire schemes."
According to police records, a confidential informant also told police
that Knox was responsible for the murder of a black man who worked at
the gas station on Chouteau Avenue and whose body was dumped near West
Alton. St. Louis police had also linked the Hamdallahs with alleged
"criminal activity and the possible association with Gregory Knox."
+ No arrests ever materialized. Yarbrough says that despite ongoing
suspicions, detectives never could substantiate claims from informants
suggesting a connection between the Hamdallahs and Knox or prove either
was responsible for McCormick's death.
+ At St. Charles County Sheriff's Department headquarters, detective Yarbrough has only seen about five unsolved murders since the 1960s, Yarbrough says: "I still have the same feeling that things don't add up," and "It's kind of like Humpty Dumpty. All the pieces are there, but
how do you put them back together?"
Bye from Spain.
JSP.
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