The Sikikey Letter
A handwritten note found in connection with the Steven Avery case bears a signature no investigator has fully decoded. Hidden inside its eleven strokes may be five Armanen runes — a system weaponized by the SS and kept alive in Aryan Nations prison gangs.
The Letter
"The most dangerous messages are the ones that look like noise." — fictional forensic linguist, undated
It arrived the way all confessions arrive — sideways, in disguise, dressed as something else entirely. A piece of notebook paper. Folded twice. A few dozen words in shaky cursive that told investigators almost nothing they could use in court and everything they had missed about the nature of the man who wrote it.
The letter was brief. Three lines of information, clinical in their specificity — Body was burnt up in alunamon smelter, 3 AM Friday morn — and then a signature. Not a name in the conventional sense. A word, or a word-like thing: SIKIKEY.
Investigators working the Avery case treated the signature as an alias, a prison handle, the kind of truncated identity that inmates construct from necessity and superstition. It may well have been all of those things. But aliases, particularly those chosen by men with a certain kind of interior architecture, are rarely random. They are chosen for the same reason a magician chooses a stage name: because the letters mean something, and the meaning is not meant for everyone to find.
Below is the letter as received, with its significant elements highlighted. The colors correspond to the runic analysis that follows.
alunamon SMelter, 3 A M
Fridy Morn.
Siiey
Note on methodology: The runic mapping proposed here is hypothetical — a theoretical framework grounded in your documented research on Armanen rune systems and their use in prison gang communication. It has not been verified by law enforcement. Each rune correspondence is drawn from the Armanen Futharkh as documented by Guido von List (1902) and as applied in SS branding and post-war Aryan Nations usage.
Sikikey Decoded
"He didn't sign his name. He signed his doctrine." — fictional profiler's case notes
The word SIKIKEY contains seven characters. In conventional reading it means nothing — no dictionary entry, no common name, no obvious derivation in any Western language. This is, from a cryptographic standpoint, the first tell. Meaningless words chosen as signatures by men with a demonstrated capacity for symbolic thinking are rarely meaningless. They are compressed.
Applied to the Armanen system — the 18-rune framework devised by Austrian mystic Guido von List in 1902, subsequently institutionalized by Heinrich Himmler's SS and later transmitted through post-war prison gang networks including the Aryan Nations and Wotansvolk — SIKIKEY resolves as follows:
| Letter | Armanen Rune | Glyph | Meaning | SS Application |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | Sig (Sol) | ᛋ | Victory — solar power | The SS double lightning bolt; "Sieg Heil" |
| I | Is | ᛁ | The ego; consciousness; the self | Hidden stave in all SS bind runes; the structural backbone |
| K | Othala + Issa BIND RUNE |
ᛟ+ᛁ | Othala (ᛟ) rotated 90° on its side, with Issa (ᛁ) as a downward stave piercing through its loop. Blood & Soil bound to the ego-self. | Othala: SS 7th Division insignia; Blut und Boden (Blood & Soil); Aryan Nations primary symbol. Issa: structural binding stave of all SS bind runes. |
| I | Is | ᛁ | The ego repeated — emphasis of self-consciousness | Doubled stave — binding reinforcement |
| K | Othala + Issa BIND RUNE · MIRRORED |
ᛟ+ᛁ | Second identical Othala+Issa bind construction — the symmetrical mirror of position 3. Twin pillars of the ancestral-self, flanking the central Issa stave. | Symmetrical bind = sealed internal circuit. The two K-positions create twin Othala columns, reinforcing the closed runic architecture. |
| E | Othala rotated NO ISSA · OPEN LOOP |
ᛟ° | Othala (ᛟ) rotated 90° WITHOUT the Issa stave. The loop is open — incomplete, transitional. Ancestry unbound, the becoming-state before the circuit closes on death. | The open Othala = the unbound state. SS used Othala to signify racial land and kinship; here without the binding stave it represents transition toward the closing Yr. |
| Y | Yr-Analog PITCHFORK / TINE FORM |
A runic form with three tines (pitchfork) or inverted central tine. Found across multiple futhark systems. In certain Elder Futhark variants, Y is the functional analog of Z — the closing character may encode the Z of ZODIAC. | Replaced the cross on SS death certificates (Yr as death rune). Bifurcated descending stroke mirrors Algiz-inverted/Yr. The circuit closes: Sig (Victory) opens; Yr/Z closes. |
Read as a runic sentence rather than an alias, SIKIKEY proposes: Victory — Self — Generation — Self — Sacrifice — Death — Victory. This is not a random alias. It is a creed. A personal doctrine compressed into seven characters in the same way that S.B.T.C. in the JonBenét Ramsey ransom note encodes Victory–Birth–Sacrifice–Eternity using the same Armanen system.
The signature doesn't identify the author. It consecrates the act.
The structural frame is significant: Sig opens and Sig closes. In runic bind craft, this is known as a "closed circuit" — a symbol designed to contain and amplify its own energy. The Is runes appear twice, serving as the vertical stave that would bind all elements in a physical bind rune design. Tyr at the center — the war god, sacrifice — is the ideological load-bearing element. Death (Yr) immediately precedes the closing Victory. The sequence reads as a ritualistic statement about the relationship between death and triumph: the act of killing closes with a claim of victory.
Cross-case parallel: In the JonBenét Ramsey note, the word "Victory!" immediately precedes the S.B.T.C. signature — a deliberate placement your research identifies as mapping the Sig rune to its SS meaning. In the Sikikey letter, Victory opens and closes the signature itself. The structure differs; the doctrine is identical.
Runes Rising
The following animation demonstrates how the theorized Armanen runes emerge from the letters of the Sikikey signature — ascending from the handwritten page toward the viewer, as if the hidden system is surfacing for the first time.
Hover a rune to reveal its meaning — Fictional Demonstration
Prison Transmission
"The Armanen runes didn't die with the SS. They went underground — into the cellblocks, the tattoo parlors, the coded letters that passed between men who believed they carried secret fire." — fictional documentary, undated
The pathway from Himmler's Wewelsburg Castle to an American maximum security prison runs through a series of post-war ideological handoffs that are well-documented in the academic literature on far-right movements, even if their forensic implications have been largely ignored.
When the SS was dismantled in 1945, its symbolic vocabulary did not disappear. It emigrated — into fringe publishing houses, into correspondence networks, eventually into the prison system, where the Aryan Nations and affiliated groups systematized runic symbolism as a form of coded communication, tattoo taxonomy, and identity maintenance. By the 1980s, a man entering the federal prison system with the right background could encounter a fully operational symbolic language — one with roots in von List's 1902 "revelation" and branches in every cellblock.
Edward Wayne Edwards entered and exited the American penal system multiple times between the 1950s and the early 1960s, including time in Deer Lodge Federal Penitentiary in Montana — a facility with a documented history of gang activity and white supremacist organizing. He ran the leather shop. He was, by all accounts, a man who learned things wherever he went and retained them with the precision of someone who understood that information was a form of power that could not be confiscated at sentencing.
The Sikikey letter, if the runic interpretation is correct, suggests not merely a passing familiarity with the Armanen system but a structured, intentional application of it — the kind of application that suggests formal initiation or sustained self-education. Von List's system is not intuitive. Its correspondence between Latin letters and Armanen glyphs is not publicly obvious. It requires study.
A man who had spent time in a penitentiary with active Aryan Nations organization, who demonstrated throughout his documented life a drive toward intellectual self-improvement and a specific interest in systems of hidden meaning, and who chose to sign a note disclosing evidence of a violent crime with a seven-character runic sentence — that is not a random signature. That is a statement of affiliation.
Historical note: The Aryan Nations' use of Armanen runes as a prison communication system is documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI's domestic terrorism monitoring. Runic tattoos, coded correspondence, and runic graffiti in cellblocks have been recorded as far back as the 1970s. The system is not widely known outside these contexts — which is precisely the point.
The alunamon smelter detail in the letter body is, separately, significant: it indicates a knowledge of industrial geography and access to an environment capable of destroying forensic evidence at extreme temperature. This is not the vocabulary of impulse. It is the vocabulary of prior planning — the same operational care visible in the construction of the signature itself.
The Signature
"He wanted to be found eventually. He wanted someone smart enough to deserve finding him." — fictional profiler, undated case notes
Consider the structure of the letter as a whole. The body provides actionable information — location, method, time. It is, in forensic terms, a confession. The kind of confession a certain profile of offender produces not from guilt but from the compulsion to be acknowledged, to have the full scope of their intelligence recognized by someone capable of appreciating it.
And then the signature. Seven characters that, in standard reading, identify nobody. That is the mechanism: the body of the letter incriminates; the signature establishes intellectual distance. Any investigator who cannot read the signature is not sophisticated enough to deserve the confession. Any investigator who can read it has already proven themselves worthy of the game.
This is the same structure visible in the Zodiac letters — plain-language content designed to produce specific outcomes (panic, investigation, media coverage) accompanied by cryptographic elements that most investigators could not decode. The ciphers were not practical. They did not contain evidence. They contained the killer's self-concept — his understanding of his own superiority — compressed into a form that would persist in the record regardless of what happened to him.
If the runic reading is correct, the Sikikey signature does something structurally unusual: it opens and closes on the same rune (Sig — Victory), creating what runic practitioners call a closed circuit or binding sigil. The information trapped inside this circuit — Self, Generation, Sacrifice, Death — is a private theology. It describes what the act meant to the person who performed it.
Not all of this is provable. The mapping between Latin letters and Armanen glyphs is non-standard — it requires a specific key that may vary by practitioner and by the particular transmission lineage through which the system was received. But the pattern is consistent with the S.B.T.C. analysis, consistent with the documented use of runic acrostics in Aryan Nations correspondence, and consistent with the broader behavioral profile of a narcissistic offender who views every communication as an opportunity to encode dominance.
Seven letters. Five runes. One closed circuit.
The signature was never meant to identify him.
It was meant to outlast him.
The handwriting itself repays attention. The letterforms in SIKIKEY show a specific quality of deliberateness absent from the letter body — particularly in the S, which carries an angular quality more consistent with a conscious approximation of the Sig rune's diagonal geometry than with the rounded S of natural cursive. The K strokes are unusually rigid and symmetrical. The Y descends with a controlled, bifurcated stroke that mirrors the Yr rune's inverted-Man form.
These are not proof. They are indicators. The difference between an indicator and a coincidence is the existence of a coherent explanatory framework — and the Armanen system, transmitted through Aryan Nations networks and available to any man who spent meaningful time in the relevant institutions, provides exactly that.
Research note — next steps: The most productive path from here is an independent forensic document examiner's analysis of the Sikikey letterforms against a reference set of confirmed Armanen runic handwriting samples from prison correspondence archives. The angular geometry of the S and Y and the bifurcated Y descent are the three strongest candidates for formal allographic comparison.
The letter told investigators where to look for a body. The signature told a different audience — one he assumed did not yet exist — who had put it there and what it had meant to do so.
Both audiences were addressed. Only one, so far, has answered.
THIS IS A THEORETICAL ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK. All connections drawn between the Sikikey letter, Armanen runic systems, Edward Wayne Edwards, and the Steven Avery case are hypothetical interpretations based on publicly available information and the researcher's documented theoretical framework. None of these connections have been confirmed or endorsed by law enforcement agencies. The runic interpretations presented here are speculative. The fictional narrative framing is a presentational device and does not assert factual claims beyond what is documented in the research. The Sikikey letter image is publicly circulated source material.