FBI asks public for help breaking encrypted notes

[Adventure]

Our member Puzzelguy shared this article with me and asked to post it.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110329/ts_yblog_thelookout/fbi-asks-public-for-help-breaking-encrypted-notes-tied-to-1999-murder

The FBI asks public for help breaking encrypted notes tied to 1999 murder.

In what seems like a throwback to the still-unsolved Zodiac killings that terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, the FBI has sent out a public appeal for amateur sleuths to help solve a key cryptographic clue in a 1999 murder case.

On June 30, 1999, police officers in St. Louis, Missouri found the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick, who'd been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues investigators recovered from the scene were two encrypted notes stuffed into the victim's pockets.

"Despite extensive work by our Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), as well as help from the American Cryptogram Association, the meanings of those two coded notes remain a mystery to this day, and Ricky McCormick's murderer has yet to face justice," the FBI said in a press release today. CRRU chief Dan Olson added, "We are really good at what we do, but we could use some help with this one ... Maybe someone with a fresh set of eyes might come up with a brilliant new idea."

The notes and details can be found here:

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032911

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032911/image/gallery

[Mistery]

Hehe, I saw that, too, in the news and started to do some playing around with it. I was also thinking about maybe posting about it here

[Adventure]

I made a word document for it, but I didn't really played with it yet.
I noticed that certain letter combination appear very often. Maybe those stand for one specific letter?

D-W-M-Y could simply mean Day Week Month Year
Don't know about the rest of this part of the note.
MIL XDRLX
or is that D an O?

[maxhug77]

Yes I have also seen those notes. Thought I'd have a play around with it and was thinking a sort of substitution cipher. But then who am I, when the Top mastermind cryptologists have tried to crack it for many years and failed. Also the pros have prob had a criminologist to do a profile on the killer as well as the victim to see if they could find any key to solving the code. God damn I sound so professional. LMAO!! Any ways post if anyone has any outrageous ideas into a possible solution.



Let's chat

[Mistery]

Yup, my idea was also that D-W-M-Y could be Day Week Month and Year.

Otherwise, there are some endings that re-occur. On the other hand there are very similar words with letters swapped - that confuses me
Was too busy with work and family to go deeper into it since my last post though.

[old biker]

why must it be a code ,can't it be a phonetic translation from one foreighn language to another ?

[Mistery]

It doesn't have to be a code of course, nobody knows. But the FBI checked out the man who was killed, and I assume that they figured that this man only spoke English. And apparently he was using code writings since his childhood.
But indeed the patterns of the writing are strange. Usually used analysis didn't bring results, so the FBI hopes for fresh ideas. When I have more time I'll play around with it, because it's fascinating to me to examine such code/secret writings.

[old biker]

if its code ,why are the numbers not coded ?

its defintly no antwerp dialect

sorry...

btw
hi

[Mistery]

Hmmm, well, as long as nobody has an idea of e.g. "72 what", the numbers don't have to be coded, lol
I had the feeling that on the paper that has "note" at the top, the numbers could be measures (like for a recipe), but on the other paper, I had the feeling that the numbers could be part of addresses or refer to book pages, lol. No particular reason, just my feeling
I also find the second marked part/section on the "note" page very odd

Okay, then we can exclude plain Antwerp dialect, plain English, German, French, Italian, Latin, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese...

Hi old biker
(not funny ???? Did you forget the "2" in the hug smiley? )