Time fails to dim lure of code
And the couple see them one last time: waves of numbers settling into a tidal pool at the bottom of their dreams.
The numbers are a secret code, a cipher, and for 20 years Mike Timmerman has been trying to unravel the message inside those numbers. He was joined in the search by his wife, Margaret, when they married four years ago.
And a $20 million treasure is the lure.
For 180 years, the Beale Treasure, thought to consist of more than 2 tons of gold, silver and jewels, has remained hidden in the foothills of southern Virginia. The exact location is concealed inside a code, a single page of 520 numbers.
Hundreds, if not thousands, have tried to break the code — mathematicians, professional cryptographers and computer scientists, as well as psychics, dowsers and amateur detectives.
Among those who have tried, and failed, are Herbert Yardley, founder of the U.S. Cipher Bureau; William Friedman, the greatest cryptanalyst of the first half of the 20th century and the head of U.S. Signal Intelligence Service during World War II; and Carl Hammer, now in his 90s, the retired director of computer science for Sperry Univac.
Stumbled upon gold
The story began 40 years before the start of the Civil War when 30 men set out to hunt buffalo. Instead, according to legend, they stumbled upon veins of gold and silver in the Sawatch range of the Rocky Mountains, about 250 miles north of Santa Fe, N.M.
The men mined the ore for 18 months, then agreed that a few of them should haul it back East for safekeeping. Led by Thomas Jefferson Beale, the small band made two wagon trips east, one in 1819 and another in 1821. Each time, Beale stayed for the winter at the Washington Hotel in Buford's, Va. (now Montvale), 30 miles west of Lynchburg.
In the spring of 1822, Beale left the hotel and headed West. He entrusted a locked iron box to hotel owner Robert Morriss, telling him he would send instructions about the box should he not return for it.
Morriss never received the letter, and Beale never returned. Twenty-three years later, Morriss broke the lock on the box and found a letter addressed to him from Beale, along with three sheets of paper filled with numbers.
The letter said the three pages were codes, which, with the use of a written "key," would reveal three messages. Those messages were a description of the treasure, the names and addresses of all the men who had a claim to part of it, and its exact location. Presumably, the letter that never came from Beale would have included the key.
For 17 years, Morriss tried to break the codes. Then, nearing death, he passed on the contents to a friend whose name has been lost. It is known that the friend, consumed with finding a solution to the ciphers, bankrupted himself and alienated his family.
But before he died, he broke Cipher No. 2, the description of the treasure, by matching the numbers of the cipher against the sequentially numbered words of the Declaration of Independence.
The decoded message said: "I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles. ... The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold and thirty eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver ... The second ... consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold and twelve hundred and eighty eight of silver, also jewels obtained in St. Louis in exchange to save transportation and valued at thirteen thousand dollars. The above is securely packed in iron pots with iron covers (and) the vault is roughly lined with stone and the vessels rest on solid stone and are covered with others. ... "
Key document missing
The allure of the Beale ciphers lies in their formidable simplicity. They were apparently constructed as simple substitution ciphers, in which numbers replace letters. But in the case of the Beale ciphers, the key-document by which the scramble of numbers could be turned into plain English has never been found.
Because the Declaration of Independence was discovered to be the key to Cipher No. 2, many people think a related historical document or literary work could unlock the secrets of Cipher No. 1. Among the texts studied as possible keys are the U.S. Constitution, the speeches of Thomas Jefferson, the works of William Shakespeare, the books of the Old Testament and the poems of Francis Scott Key.
"I got copies of the Lynchburg Press from Dec. 7, 14, 21, and 28 of 1821, right around the time Beale would have been at the Washington Hotel," Mike Timmerman said. "I wanted to see if anything pertaining to Beale or his party was in the paper, and I thought maybe the key was hidden in there somewhere. So we went through each article and applied it to the code. It took us a whole year, but nothing turned up that fit."
One possibility is that Cipher No. 1 was created using a "one-off" key, that is a document — say, a letter or an essay — penned by Beale himself. If there is a unique key, and if the only copy has been lost or destroyed, then the remaining Beale ciphers may never be broken, the $20 million in gold, silver and jewels never found.
Surveyor's claims
Louis Matacia, a land surveyor by profession and a dowser by avocation, thinks he knows where the treasure is buried.
Matacia is an expert in dowsing, an ancient art in which the person holds a divining rod to locate underground targets such as water, oil and minerals. His divining rods have included everything from a wire coat hanger to specially designed aluminum angle rods.
Approaching a rocky outcrop in the Blue Ridge mountains near Goose Creek Valley, Matacia unsheathed a dowsing rod and held it gently in his right hand, pointing out from his chest. Suddenly the rod swung wildly to the left. He approached the same spot from the opposite direction. The rod swung dramatically to the right.
"Big treasure is like a bolt of lightning," he said matter-of-factly. "The force is so strong it just kicks out. Here it is, 27 feet down by my calculations."
Matacia thinks the hoard was buried in a cave under the granite outcropping, but he has not found the entrance, and digging straight through the rock, he said, "would take a large drill, at least 10 honest men and about $50,000."
Matacia is in no rush. The belief that he has found the treasure is perhaps more precious to him than the treasure itself.
"If I never dig it up, it's not the end of the world," he said. "There's a right time for that treasure to come out of the ground. And it's not now."