The Rey Rivera Case

US journalist Rey Rivera was found dead in 2006. He left behind (encrypted?) computer printouts. What these mean is completely unclear.

German version

After the machine translation of my article about the solution of the second Zodiac Killer cryptogram worked quite well, I’ll try it again today in German.

The case of the Zodiac Killer shows that unsolved criminal cases in which an unsolved encryption plays a role are particularly exciting. At any rate, such stories are very popular with my readers.

In total, depending on how you count, I know of just under ten unsolved crimes involving unsolved encryption. In addition to the Zodiac Killer, they include the Debosnys cryptograms, the Ricky McCormick encrypted notes, the Paul Rubin case, the YOGTZE case, the Somerton man, the Ohio cryptogram, and the Lelele cryptogram. The Bruno Borges case can also be classified under this heading. The particularly tricky cryptogram of the Riverbank Ripper, on the other hand, was an April Fool’s joke.

The Rey Rivera case

Thanks to Google, I recently came across another story that may have both an unsolved crime and an unsolved scramble: the death of business journalist and video producer Rey Rivera (1973-2006).

Rivera lived with his wife in Baltimore on the East Coast of the United States. On May 16, 2006, he received a call from a client and subsequently left his home. After that, he remained missing. Since the police did not immediately assume foul play, friends and family members set out to find Rivera.

Quelle/Source: Mystery on the Rooftop

Sure enough, after a few days, Rivera’s in-laws discovered the missing man’s car in downtown Baltimore. It was parked on the side of the road, just a few meters from the entrance to a public parking garage.

Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons

Rivera’s relatives now also searched the parking garage. Next to it was the 80-meter-high Hotel Belvedere (shown in the picture), including a much lower annex. Rivera’s friends discovered a hole in the flat roof from the parking garage. They informed the police and sure enough: Rivera’s body was found under the hole, in an unused seminar room of the hotel. The police assumed that Rivera had jumped from the main building of the hotel to take his own life and had penetrated the roof in the process.

However, this explanation is still in doubt today. Thus, it could never be clarified from where Rivera jumped in the first place. As you can see in this picture, the flat roof of the main hotel building would be a possibility. However, Rivera, who was wearing flip-flops, would have had to take quite a run-up to cover the horizontal distance to the point of impact.

Physically, it seems more likely that Rivera jumped from a ledge a few stories below. However, this is only accessible via the private apartments and offices located on that floor, to which Rivera did not have access.

Also unusual is that there are no witnesses who saw the thirty-three-year-old before or during his alleged suicidal act.

There is a 2018 book about the Rivera case, An Unexplained Death: A True Story of a Body at the Belvedere by Mikita Brottman.

The Rivera case hit the headlines again in 2020 when the U.S. television series Unsolved Mysteries (Netflix) featured it in an episode.

The Rivera cryptograms

Of particular interest to this blog is that Rivera left a computer printout, the meaning of which is completely unclear. The three sheets are said to have been printed out on the day of the disappearance. On it are the names of Hollywood celebrities, movie titles, Masonic quotes, and a few other things. Unfortunately, only two photos of this printout are known, neither of which are satisfactory. They were shown in the said Netflix documentary. Here is one of them (unfortunately out of focus and therefore hard to read).

Quelle/Source: Mystery on the Rooftop

The second photo shows a close-up of a section of the first sheet of the printout. On it are mainly personal names. The last names are unfortunately blacked out:

Quelle/Source: Mystery on the Rooftop

An article on the portal Bustle presents seven possible explanations for this three-page text, which were discussed on Reddit. Of course, I especially like hypothesis number 5, according to which it is supposed to be a coded message. The Bustle article states:

Redditor quartzlizard theorized that the entire note was actually written to spell out the world “HELP,” while others put forth the idea that it’s written in a code like Gematria. Vrontasaurus wasn’t convinced, however, writing in a Google Doc that there are too many meanings when you plug phrases into an online Gematria decoder like gematrix.org. “I’m not saying that Rey *didn’t* encode all or parts of the note in Gematria, but I think this is an unhelpful avenue to explore without having further information,” the user wrote in part.

Unfortunately, with the two scans available, it is quite difficult to say anything about the contents of the computer printout and a possible encryption. Does any reader know more about this cryptogram? Is there a transcription? Can anything be said about the content with the information known so far?
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Further reading: Alessio Vinci’s death and the cryptogram he left behind

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