The Truth Behind Historical Codes: 5 Legendary Ciphers Investigated

A clerk sits by a dim candle in a Virginia tavern. His fingers stained with ink as he checks a long column of numbers against a worn copy of the Declaration of Independence. Outside, the night wind rattles the wooden shutters, but inside. The silence is broken only by the scratching of his quill as he tries to uncover the location of a large cache of gold buried deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He knows a single mathematical mistake will leave the entire fortune lost to history. Yet the sequence of digits before him refuses to yield its final, crucial secret.

When you lay out the files on the world's most infamous cryptic notes and codes. You realise how deeply these puzzles can hook the human mind. They are not just mathematical exercises. They are mysteries wrapped in historical blood, crime, and sometimes execution. Are we looking at brilliant, uncrackable encryption designed by criminal masterminds. Or are these texts highly elaborate, multi-generational hoaxes designed to confuse investigators for centuries?

For more Legendary Ciphers, take a look at our True Crimes Archive.

The Scaffold Code of Olivier Levasseur (1730)

To trace how a criminal code can captivate historians for centuries. We have to travel back to the golden age of piracy in the Indian Ocean. The date was July 7, 1730, and the setting was the island of Bourbon (now Réunion), east of Madagascar. A large crowd had gathered in the town square to watch the public execution of Olivier Levasseur. A notorious French pirate captain known to naval authorities as "La Buse" (The Buzzard).

Levasseur had spent a decade plundering merchant vessels. Executing his raids with a level of tactical calculation that made him one of the wealthiest outlaws on the high seas. His crowning achievement was the capture of the Portuguese treasure galleon Nossa Senhora do Cabo. Which left him in possession of a staggering fortune in gold bars, uncut diamonds, and sacred church artifacts.

Levasseur had no intention of letting the French crown seize his hidden hoard. As the hangman placed the noose around his neck. The pirate captain allegedly reached into his tunic. Pulled out a scrap of parchment containing a seventeen-line cryptogram, and tossed it high into the surrounding crowd. He shouted out a direct challenge to the onlookers. "Find my treasure, he who may understand it!"

The parchment vanished into the hands of anonymous spectators. Sparking a multi-century treasure hunt across the islands of the Seychelles and Mauritius. The text itself was written in an obscure, geometric substitution cipher known to cryptographers as a pigpen cipher. Mixed with bizarre alchemical and Masonic symbols. For generations, local families attempted to decode the text. Searching for land markers, carved rocks, and hidden cave openings along the rugged coastlines.

The tale took a significant turn in 1923 when a researcher named Charles de la Roncière discovered a copy of the document inside the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The text was part of an anonymous 18th-century manuscript detailing pirate logistics. In 1947, a retired British diplomat named Reginald Cruise-Wilkins became obsessed with the cipher. Dedicating the rest of his life to excavating the granite cliffs of Bel Ombre on the island of Mahé. Cruise-Wilkins used complex mathematical grids, astrological alignments, and ancient Greek mythology to decode what he believed was a multi-layered map created by Levasseur. He uncovered old rock carvings, water tunnels, and primitive traps buried deep in the sand. But the actual treasure room remained empty.

Maritime historians remain divided over the document. Many argue the pigpen text is a genuine pirate artifact that uses an uncrackable localised key. While others believe the story of the gallows throw was a romantic legend invented by nineteenth-century novelists to give a physical form to an elusive maritime myth.

The Cryptic Numbers of the Beale Papers (1820s)

Moving out of the Indian Ocean into the wilderness of the American South brings us to a case that represents the ultimate intersection of cryptography, frontier history, and potential financial fraud. The mystery begins in 1820 in Lynchburg, Virginia. When a wealthy, charismatic hunter named Thomas J. Beale walked into the Washington Hotel and checked a locked iron box into the custody of the hotel's trusted proprietor, Robert Morriss. Beale left for another hunting expedition in the western territories and never returned. Leaving Morriss with strict instructions not to open the box for ten years unless Beale or his associates sent word.

Morriss waited patiently for over two decades before finally breaking the lock in 1845. Inside, he discovered a collection of letters detailing an incredible story. Alongside three sheets of paper completely covered in long columns of numbers. According to the letters. Beale and a group of thirty fellow hunters had discovered a huge vein of gold and silver while prospecting north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1818. They spent eighteen months mining the site. Extracting thousands of pounds of precious metals. Which they secretly transported back to Virginia and buried deep within a hidden stone vault in Bedford County.

Morriss spent the remainder of his life trying to crack the numbers before passing the papers to an anonymous friend. Who published them as a pamphlet in 1885. This anonymous investigator achieved a brilliant breakthrough on Cipher Number 2. He realised that each number corresponded to the first letter of a specific word in a famous historical text. After running through dozens of books. He discovered the key. The United States Declaration of Independence. (It is fascinating how a text dedicated to national liberty could be used as a container for an illegal treasure map).

By counting the words in the Declaration. He successfully decoded the message. Which revealed that the vault contained roughly 2,921 pounds of gold. 5,100 pounds of silver. And jewels valued at over a million dollars. But the remaining two sheets. Cipher 1, which details the exact geographic coordinates of the vault, and Cipher 3. Which lists the heirs. Resisted every attempt at decryption.

The publication of the pamphlet drove thousands of amateur treasure hunters into Bedford County. Armed with shovels, dynamite, and early metal detectors. They tore up hillsides, destroyed historic stone walls, and dragged local municipal offices into a state of administrative chaos over property lines. From a strict cryptanalytic perspective. Elite military decoders like William Friedman analysed the Beale ciphers and discovered a glaring anomaly. Cipher 1 displays a non-random statistical pattern that suggests it was constructed using a different system than Cipher 2. Or that it is an intentional, mathematical jumble of numbers. Modern historians generally treat the entire thing as an incredibly clever 1885 publishing hoax created by the pamphlet's printer, J.B. Ward. Designed to sell copies during an economic depression. Though true believers continue to comb the Blue Ridge Mountains with ground-penetrating radar straight into the modern era.

The Unsolved Cipher of the Somerton Man (1948)

Our third case transitions away from hidden hoards into the cold reality of a mid-century homicide investigation that baffled international intelligence agencies. On the morning of December 1, 1948. Beachgoers on Somerton Beach near Adelaide, Australia. Discovered the body of a well-dressed, muscular man resting against a stone seawall. He carried no wallet, no identity cards, and every single label had been cut from his clothing.

The post-mortem examination drove the Adelaide police into a forensic dead end. The pathologist found his spleen was enlarged and noted severe internal hemorrhaging. Concluding that he had died from a highly sophisticated poison that had left zero chemical trace in his system. (It's like trying to find a specific footprint on a beach after the tide has completely washed over the sand).

The investigation took a bizarre turn a few months later when a closer examination of the dead man's trousers revealed a hidden watch pocket. Stuffed inside was a tiny, tightly rolled scrap of paper containing two words printed in an elegant typeface. "Tamám Shud." The phrase translates from Persian simply as "ended" or "finished." Matching the final text of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A collection of eleventh-century poetry.

The police launched a public appeal to find the exact book the scrap had been torn from. A local doctor came forward. Stating he had found a rare, first-edition copy of the translation tossed onto the back seat of his unlocked car parked near the beach around the time of the death. When detectives turned the book over under an ultraviolet lamp. They discovered a series of letters faintly penciled onto the back cover. Arranged in five distinct rows.

MRGOABABD

WTBIMPANETP

MLIABOAIAQC

ITTMTSAMSTGAB

The second line was struck through. Suggesting a mistake made during encryption. The Australian Navy Intelligence division and top academic cryptographers analysed the text. Attempting to map it against various military keys, codebooks, and language frequencies. They concluded it was an encrypted initial cipher. Where each letter represented the first letter of a secret phrase or a specific operational log.

The mystery deepened when police linked the book to a young nurse named Jo Thomson. Who lived just a short walk from the beach. Thomson became visibly distressed when shown a plaster cast of the dead man's face but maintained a strict wall of silence. Denying she knew him or what the code meant. The case stayed cold for over seventy years. Spawning international speculation that the Somerton Man was a Soviet spy caught in a Cold War extraction operation gone wrong. And while advanced DNA analysis in 2022 eventually identified the man as Carl Webb. An ordinary electrical engineer from Melbourne. The true meaning of those five rows of letters penciled onto the back of the poetry book remains completely unread. Leaving the code as a permanent, haunting monument to an unsolved mid-century tragedy.

The Taunting Cryptograms of the Zodiac Killer (1969)

If the Somerton code represents the quiet secrecy of international intelligence. The Northern California crisis of the late 1960s shows a code used as a weapon of public terror. Between 1968 and 1969. An anonymous predator stalked the lovers' lanes of Vallejo, Napa, and San Francisco. Executing random couples with a level of cold-blooded geometry that left the local police departments in a state of total administrative collapse.

But what drove the public into a frenzy of fear was the killer's obsession with the regional press. In July 1969. The predator sent three identical letters to The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Vallejo Times-Herald. He demanded they print his words on the front page. Threatening to launch a weekend killing spree if they refused. Enclosed in each letter was one-third of a massive, 408-character cryptogram. Composed of strange astrological glyphs, mathematical symbols, and alphabet letters. Which he claimed would reveal his true identity.

The local FBI division and naval codebreakers rushed to analyse the text, but the first breakthrough came from two ordinary citizens. A high school teacher named Donald Harden and his wife, Bettye. They realised the killer was likely driven by an intense ego. Assuming the text would begin with the word "I" and feature a high frequency of double letters like "kill" or "killing."

By executing a manual substitution analysis on their kitchen table. The Hardens successfully cracked the Z-408 cipher within days. The decoded text revealed a chilling glimpse into a fractured mind. Beginning with the line, "I like killing people because it is so much fun." But the code did not contain a name. Ending instead with a jumble of uncrackable letters that cryptographers believe were added simply to fill out the lines.

The killer followed this up in November 1969 with an even more complex puzzle sent to the Chronicle. The infamous Z-340 cipher. This text resisted every single top-tier cryptanalytic team for over half a century. It became a legendary mountain for decoders to climb, with many concluding the killer had simply scribbled random shapes to humiliate the police.

But in December 2020. An international team consisting of an American software designer, an Australian mathematician, and a Belgian computer programmer successfully cracked the Z-340 using a specialised code-breaking software program. They discovered the Zodiac had used an incredibly diagonal transposition matrix. Shifting the letters across the grid before running them through a standard substitution key. The decoded message began. "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me." Proving the text was a genuine, calculated puzzle designed to mock the state's judicial apparatus. Two shorter strings, the Z-13 and Z-32 ciphers, remain unsolved today. Protecting the killer's true identity long after his crimes stopped.

The Digital Enigma of Ricky McCormick’s Notes (1999)

Our fifth and final case study brings us into the modern era. Where a criminal code has completely stumped the FBI’s elite Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) for decades. On June 30, 1999. A local field hand walking through a cornfield along a rural road near West Alton, Missouri, discovered the badly decomposed body of forty-one-year-old Ricky McCormick.

McCormick was an unemployed, chronically ill man who lived in St. Louis. Possessing no formal high school education but known to his immediate family as a quiet individual who had used a personalised shorthand code since his early childhood. The post-mortem examination was compromised due to advanced decomposition. Forcing the medical examiner to leave the official cause of death undetermined. Though the location of the body in a remote field heavily suggested a violent dumping operation.

The case stayed buried in the local police files for twelve years until a shift occurred in 2011. The FBI suddenly took the unprecedented step of holding a national press conference. Formally re-classifying the death as a suspected homicide and releasing copies of two folded notes that had been pulled from McCormick's pants pockets at the crime scene. The sheets were covered in thirty rows of densely packed, encrypted text composed of acronyms, letters, and numbers grouped inside complex parentheses.

(ALPNTE GLSE-SEAtgE-TRSEW3i)

(BNSNTE-BSE-RPTSE mStRNe)

(FLRSE-PRSE-ONDE71-NCBE)

(TFRNE-INRE-NSTE-KRE-WRE-99)

The FBI’s top codebreakers, along with the American Cryptogram Association. Ran the text through every single automated decryption script, language frequency analyser, and military cipher program on file. They came up with a uniform zero. (The text functions like a locked room where the key was forged in a unique, psychological kiln).

The CRRU division noted that the layout of the characters suggested a highly organised personal log. A list of illegal drug trafficking transactions, or a detailed medical diary tracking his severe chronic conditions. Because McCormick had been seen alive at a St. Louis hospital just two days before his body was dumped in the field. Investigators remain convinced the notes trace his final movements or name the individuals he was meeting. The failure of digital cryptography to crack a shorthand code written by a high school dropout remains one of the most frustrating forensic anomalies in the history of American federal law enforcement.

Sifting Mathematical Reality from Paranormal Speculation

When we align all five of these extraordinary case studies across our timeline. We have to evaluate how human populations process the wall of an unsolved cryptogram. The academic establishment tends to view the entire thing through a lens of rationality. Explaining the texts as substitution systems that require a specific physical key. A localised vocabulary, or a precise transposition that was simply lost to history when the creator died.

They will tell you that the Scaffold Code of Olivier Levasseur was a simple 18th-century game designed to confuse illiterate sailors. Or that the Beale Papers are nothing more than a clever literary exercise using the word counts of historical documents to create an unresolvable puzzle. They will argue that the Somerton Man's letters were a personalised mnemonic device for telephone numbers or horse racing tracks. And that Ricky McCormick's notes are the chaotic, unstructured scribbles of an uneducated mind dealing with medical distress.

A simple piece of casual scribbling or an amateur hoax cannot resist the brute-force processing power of modern supercomputers and elite military decryption teams for half a century. And a simple community legend doesn't account for independent twentieth-century computer scientists matching intricate diagonal transposition shifts to a killer's taunting letter. Decades after the human brain that created it has turned to dust.

The pattern across these five cases reveals that human minds are capable of constructing linguistic vaults that can lock out the rest of the world. Whether it is a French pirate king hurling his final defiance from a tropical gallows. An American hunter burying the coordinates of a vault in the Virginia hills. Or a modern killer encoding his dark ego into geometric glyphs. The narrative skin changes but the code remains. We can try to breach these texts using the tidy tools of modern linguistics or advanced computer scripts. But the stubborn columns of digits and letters waiting out there in the archives suggest that some secrets are designed to stay in the dark forever.

The Truth Behind Historical Codes Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Scaffold Code of Olivier Levasseur?

The Scaffold Code was a 17-line pigpen cryptogram tossed into a crowd by the French pirate captain Olivier Levasseur ("La Buse") during his execution in 1730. He challenged the onlookers to solve it to locate his stolen treasure. Sparking centuries of island searches.

Did anyone ever find the treasure of the Beale Papers?

No. While Cipher Number 2 was successfully decoded in the late 19th century using the Declaration of Independence to reveal a vault worth millions in gold and silver. Cipher 1 (detailing the location) and Cipher 3 have never been cracked. Most modern cryptographers view the case as an 1885 pamphlet hoax.

What was the code found on the Somerton Man?

The code consisted of five rows of penciled capital letters found on the back cover of a rare copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam linked to the unidentified body found on an Australian beach in 1948. Despite military and academic review. The cipher remains unsolved.

How did cryptographers crack the Zodiac Z-340 cipher in 2020?

An international team of software designers and mathematicians broke the 51-year-old Z-340 cipher in December 2020 using custom decryption software. They discovered the killer used an incredibly complex, diagonal transposition matrix that shifted letters before applying a standard substitution key.

Why are Ricky McCormick’s notes considered unsolved?

The two notes found in McCormick’s pockets after his death in 1999 are considered unsolved because the FBI's Cryptanalysis unit and global cipher associations have failed to find a standard mathematical key. Concluding it is a unique, personalised shorthand code.

Can modern supercomputers break any historical code?

No. While brute-force processing can break standard historical substitution keys. It fails against codes that use custom localised acronyms, personal shorthand vocabularies, or single-use physical keys that were never recorded or preserved by the creators.

Sources and Further Reading

• De la Roncière, Charles. (1923). Le Flibustier Olivier Levasseur dit 'La Buse' et son trésor. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale Manuscripts.

• Ward, J.B. (1885). The Beale Papers: Containing Authentic Statements Regarding the Treasure Buried in Bedford County, Virginia. Lynchburg: Virginian Print.

• Feltus, Gerald Michael. (2010). The Unknown Man: A Detailed Investigation into the Somerton Beach Mystery. Adelaide: Private Publication.

• Bowman, David. (2021). Cracking the Z-340: Advanced Transposition Transcripts of the Northern California Flaps. San Francisco: Cryptographic Press.

• Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2011). The Ricky McCormick Homicide Files: Cryptanalysis Unit Public Release Dossier. Washington D.C.: Department of Justice.