The Mysterious Death of Ricky McCormick

 

Ricky McCormick was a high school dropout who had multiple addresses all over the Missouri and Illinois areas. However, he lived part-time with his elderly mother. Ricky is said to have suffered chronic heart and lung problems, learning disabilities, and mental health issues. Ricky was not married but it is believed that he fathered at least four children.

It had been minutes before sunrise on June 15th, 1999 when Ricky entered a Greyhound bus terminal and walked up to the counter. He was purchasing a one-way ticket to Orlando Florida. He had made this trip a few times prior, but this trip to Florida would be his last. It is unclear who Ricky was meeting while he was staying in room 280 at the Econo Lodge. However, phone records reveal that he had spoken to several people in Orlando before his trip. There were also records of short phone calls between him and his girlfriend, Sandra Jones. Also, while he was in Orlando he made at least one phone call to the gas station where he worked.

Amoco Gas Station was owned by Juma Hamdallah (known as David Radigan) a Palestinian immigrant. He had employed his brother Baha “Bob” Hamdallah to manage the gas station. So, Baha was Ricky's boss.

Sandra had told the police that Ricky was going to Orlando, Florida to pick up marijuana for Baha. She also stated that after the last trip to Orlando, Ricky came back and was acting differently. He never discussed the events that happened in Orlando but Sandra assumed that something went wrong as he was acting very scared and sketchy upon his return. It was as if he could sense trouble around the corner but didn't know what direction it would come from.

Around 3pm, on June 22nd, 1999, Ricky went into the Barnes-Jewish Hospital emergency room complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. This was not unusual even though he didn't drink or do drugs. He did smoke about a pack of cigarettes a day and drank about a gallon if not more of coffee. The hospital kept him for a total of two days. He left the hospital on June 24th, with orders to return to the hospital for a follow-up, which he would never attend.

After leaving the hospital, he took a bus to his aunt Gloria's apartment. He visited with her for about an hour. Gloria told the police that her home was always a sanctuary for Ricky, he would come and talk to her about his problems. He was closer to Gloria than he was his own mother. However, on this day in question, Ricky didn't say much. It was late afternoon when Ricky waved off all offers to drive him somewhere. Then he left, and Gloria's last memory of him would be him walking down the street.

It was around 5pm, on the evening of June 25th, that Ricky entered a second hospital emergency room. This time he entered Forest Park Hospital which was located about 2 miles from Barnes-Jewish Hospital. This time Ricky was complaining about having trouble breathing after an afternoon of mowing the lawn. The doctor decided that this was simply an asthma flare-up and he was released at about 5:50pm. However, it is unclear at what time Ricky left the hospital, and some people believe he actually spent the night in the waiting room before he left in the morning.

Whatever the case, Ricky was talking to Sandra on the phone sometime around 11:30am on the morning of June 26th. He told her he was heading to the gas station for something to eat. It is unknown what all he did that day, but we do know that he was in the gas station on June 27th, as at least one employee witnessed this. He left that gas station with only hours left to live. His aunt Gloria believes that he was going to the local hospitals in search of a place to hideout.

On June 30th' 1999, Ricky was found dead in a West Alton, Missouri cornfield, near the road. The police had been well familiar with the area as it was known as a criminal dumping ground. The strange thing about it was that this area was around 20 miles from his home. Ricky didn't drive and no public transportation traveled to this area. Another strange thing was, although he had been only missing for three days, his body was rapidly decomposing. There was no reasonable explanation for this, as there wasn't much warm weather, at least not unreasonably high. It was suspected that Ricky was killed somewhere else and kept in an outbuilding or the trunk of a car before he was dumped. Medical examiners could not confirm a cause of death, but it is considered a homicide.

When you look into this case, you get more questions than you do answers. How did he get there? How did he die? And who is his killer? These are just some of the questions you have when researching this case. However, the most baffling question of all involves two notes that were found in Ricky's pants pocket. These weren't just ordinary notes, they were cryptic notes written in some sort of code. A code that the FBI is yet to have broken, and a code that is believed to be the key that will unlock the entire murder.

The note, which contains over 30 lines of coded text. This includes letters, numbers, and parentheses that were not announced to the public until 12 years after Ricky's murder. The FBI was hoping that someone might be able to decipher the code and therefore crack the case. According to Dan Olsen Chief of the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, says that the characters in the note are not random. The many E's that are found in the note represent something, they just don't know what.

Many rumors have circulated concerning the origins of the note. These theories have the FBI guessing as to which one is the most likely to be true. It should be a simple process of elimination but it seems that this case is more complex than that.

One of the most obvious theories is that Ricky's murderer penned the cryptic note. This could be one of two reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that the note contains information that details things about the murder that the FBI just doesn't know. The other suggestion is that the killer wrote the note as a red herring. To keep the police focused on the note instead of trying to catch them. However, taking in the complexity of the note, and how much time it took the writer to write it in this code means that the note must have some meaning, and therefore nothing slopped together in a hurry for some silly trick.

Another theory is that Ricky McCormick penned the note himself. Even Dan Olsen confirms that the notes format seems like something written to oneself than to someone else. But the question is could Ricky have written such a complex note that it would stump the FBI? Well, Ricky was known to tell tall tales, and he even displayed some bizarre behavior. However, he was also semi-literate and struggled with both learning disabilities and mental health issues. In fact, if you were to ask his own mother she would tell you that Ricky was “retarded”.

While several people believe that Ricky wrote the note in a shorthand that he developed over the years, the note may never be deciphered. His own personal shorthand would have been affected by both his learning disabilities and his mental health issues. Therefore anyone trying to solve this code would first have to learn his style of shorthand. However, there is confusion with his close family and friends as to whether Ricky was capable of writing any sort of note let alone a complex code. Some people close to Ricky believe that he couldn't read or write anything besides his own name. So, there would be no way for him to write a code so complex that even the FBI can't solve it. Others who were close to Ricky stated that he has been writing in his own secret language since he was a child. Therefore it's possible Ricky wrote this complex code. The problem is there are no samples of Ricky's handwriting so there is nothing to compare these notes to.

The third and final theory is that Ricky never wrote the note himself, but that he was delivering the notes to some criminal. However, for this theory to make sense, we would have to assume that the criminal he was delivering the note to was the person who killed Ricky. Therefore, the logical thing for the killer to do was to remove the notes out of Ricky's pocket before dumping his body.

Ricky also had a sketchy past, besides running drugs for Baha, he had gotten himself into some trouble for fathering two children with a 14-year-old girl. It is possible that whoever killed Ricky, did so for his participation in illegal activities.

The strange thing about this case is that not even two months after Ricky's body was found, Baha's brother Juma shot Baha at the gas station after they had an argument. Baha had survived and did not file any charges against his brother. However, police would find out that Baha was linked to black gang members in the St. Louis area, had narcotics use, and had an extensive collection of guns and knives.

On October 13th, 2000 Baha was managing Charlie's Food Market in Madison Illinois. He had gotten into an argument with a customer named Robert Steptoe. He allegedly shot the man in the face with a

9mm Glock pistol outside the store. He was convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to 38 years in prison. However, after a retrial, he walked out a free man on May 15th, 2008.

There was also a high-level drug dealer that was working out of Ricky's neighborhood. He was a suspect in multiple homicides in the area. In fact, there was a confidential informant who stated that this man killed a black man that worked at the gas station on Chouteau Avenue and that they dumped his body out near West Alton, but nothing has ever come out of that.

Investigators feel that the notes are the key to solving the case, however, they are yet to have solved the mysterious codes. This case is still open, and unsolved.