Structure Before Meaning: A Reproducible Audit of the Ricky McCormick Notes

This preprint examines the organisation and possible functions of the two notes associated with Ricky McCormick. Fourteen exploratory Python scripts are audited against a frozen working transcription, and four supplied substantive output logs reproduce byte for byte. An independent implementation recovers three parallel constructions in N1, a local number/group alternation in N2, recurring endings and a cross-note bigram under explicit parsing rules. These observations motivate a private structured-notation account and form, register, financial and operational interpretations. The full hypothesis register also retains competing phonetic, classical-cipher and prison-note explanations, together with police-facing and protective-record contextual possibilities. Each hypothesis is presented with its observational basis, additional assumptions, limitations, evidence needs and possible disconfirmation. Document function is assessed separately from any proposed connection to the death. The study documents transcription uncertainty, revises unsupported exclusions and separates descriptive patterns from statistical and semantic claims. No plaintext, key, authorship attribution or cause-of-death conclusion is claimed. The deposit includes the 21-page paper, its editable Markdown source, frozen inputs, preserved original scripts and narrative, regenerated logs, an independent auditor, sensitivity probes and SHA-256 manifests. The accompanying analyses can be reproduced without a language model or network access.