Can You Figure It Out? (Chapter One)

Question

Once upon a time, there was a boy of only 13. His name was Constantine A. Sittine and he lived in the quiet suburbs in a small town in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a cold and stormy, winter night when he heard police sirens come to his house. He was in bed, but heard the front door being forced open. He ran to the top of the stairs and saw his father being handcuffed for a reason he knew not. He cried out to his father, but his father only turned his head and mouthed the words “ice cream”. As quick as the police officers had come in, they were gone again and the house was silent.

The weeks following, his father was sentenced to life in prison for a crime I will not disclose. Constantine was convinced that his father was framed, but his father pleaded the fifth. Sometime later, the boy received a letter from his father that he did not quite understand. It read:

Dear Constantine,

Capable pleased ozzies.

Soggy banks exile with jams.

Canvase plasmids Mary-Jane.

THEREFOR my son, it is important that You Understand good Values, unlike i have done.

Love,

Your father

He pondered his father’s letter over and over, in attempt to find a way to prove him innocent, but it was no luck. He was starting to think his father had gone mad, but decided to contact you (a detective) for help. Do you know how Constantine can prove his father’s innocence?

I’ll be impressed if you can decipher the meaning of my puzzle. (Please do not edit this post because the errors are intentional!) ;)

HINT:

If you take and unscramble ONLY the capital letters from the line under the yellow section, it will help you figure out the code.

ANOTHER HINT ALERT:

Take that unscrambled code and apply it to the three lines under the greeting of the letter. (each of the three lines will represent a new word)

Answer 1

Another partial answer continuing from the great work so far:

From M Oehm's answer we know

we can anagram the capitalized letters in the last paragraph of the letter to read

EVERY FOURTH

Then Dmihawk's answer shows us that

taking every fourth letter of the three-line "poem" in the letter gives us

APSZS GNXWJ VPMMJ

OP's comment on that answer tells us to

look at his previous cipher puzzle, which was a substitution cipher.

Using the same substitutions as in the answer to that puzzle,

APSZS GNXWJ VPMMJ
becomes
A?I?I UN?ER F?OOR

or, after adding some additional substitutions not in the previous puzzle,

ALIBI UNDER FLOOR

So Constantine's father wants him to

look underneath the floorboards of their house.

I suspect the specific spot will involve the "ice cream" clue we haven't yet used... maybe there's an ice cream stain on the floor somewhere?

Answer 2

Partial answer. Very partial. In fact, it's just a single finding, but it might be that starting point for others.

The last paragraph of the letter ...

... has several captial letters, some in unusual places. (Note that the pronoun I is written as a small i here.) These letters, THEREFOR Y U V, are an anagram of EVERY FOURTH.

I though that would be a good find, but I haven't been able to make anything useful with it.I suppose that the "fodder" for this instruction is the block-quoted text on yellow background. Taking every fourth letter or character, either of the whole message or of each line saparately didn't yield anything that looks as if it might lead somewhere.

(And there's the boy's name and the "Ice cream" / "I scream" hint. I hope the unintelligible fourth letters aren't a ciphertext for a keyed cipher such as Vigenère for which we have to find a key.)

Answer 3

Some ideas that may assist:

"Mary-Jane" is slang for Marijuana, which is illegal where Constantine lives: Nashville, Tennessee (even medicinally). This relates to North's statement about mass dealings in any drugs being a good way to get life in prison. I also note that there might be spelling mistakes in the blocked section as well: that "canvase" is misspelled (extra "e") and "ozzie" could have a missing capitalisation if it is supposed to refer to Australians (but it is also used uncapitalised depending on context).

The puzzle states that it was a "cold and stormy, winter night", making it strange if the father truly mouthed "ice cream".

Answer 4

Updated answer:

I was thinking, there two crimes that would land Constantine's father in jail for life time: 1) any crime that involves first degree murder or mass murder (including attempted murder) or involving mass physical injury or resulting death (like arson) or 2) mass dealings of any drugs of sort. It can also include repeated offenses, but it doesn't seem likely, since his father was most likely framed. If his father did take drugs than it would explain why he sounds crazy, but I'm guessing he wasn't arrested for that either.
Here's the other thing. If we take all the incorrect grammered words/spelling, we get EUVYI or EUVY Therefore is missing an E, u, v, and y are all incorrectly capitalized, and I is uncapitalized. Euvyi seems to be last name of a sort.... The ommitted I version is just if the OP didn't realize that the I was uncapitalized. It works out neatly, because Euvy is a city in France. Unfortunately, THEREFOR can be a variant spelling of THEREFORE so this may just be rubbish. THEREFOR might be a play on words of "there are four" or two words "there for".
Finally, the misppelled words may be an anagram of some sort. THEREFORYOUUNDERSTANDVALUESI maybe multiple words, or YOUUNDERSTANDVALUESI maybe a four lettered anagram.

Answer 5

Another thing that might help:

“Ice Cream” might not mean actual ice cream, but maybe “I scream” or something of the like because the father mouthed the words, so there is no definite translation to actual words.

EDIT:

Another thing based off North's ideas

Taking the misused capital letters, we get THEREFORYUVI which can be rearranged to "Four Thievery"

Not sure if this is helpful though :D

Answer 6

Building on the answers we have so far...

We know we need to analyse each of the three lines in the letter by using:

EVERY FOURTH

So if we take

Every fourth letter from the line (not counting spaces and ignoring the hyphen on the third line)

We get

APSZS GNXWJ VPMMJ

Following on from OP's clue

Using a substitution cipher on the text, the solution that looks like the most potentially viable is "DRAMA THINK GREEK" implying that we need to think about of the Greek tragedies. Unfortunately my history knowledge is very limited, but hopefully this might help someone else find the next step!

Edit: Corrected the cipher based on OP's comment