FBI's Urgent 1969 Memo in the Zodiac Case: What the Fingerprints Didn't Match

# FBI's Urgent 1969 Memo in the Zodiac Case: What the Fingerprints Didn't Match

By DeClassX

In the fall of 1969, the Zodiac Killer was at the height of his terror campaign. He had already murdered at least five people across Northern California, taunted police with cryptic ciphers mailed to Bay Area newspapers, and was now escalating in a new direction: extortion. A declassified FBI teletype memo dated November 15, 1969 — marked urgent and sent directly from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's office to the Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco field office — pulls back the curtain on one largely overlooked thread of the federal investigation: a fingerprint comparison that went nowhere, in a case tied to the Vallejo Times Herald.

The memo is terse, bureaucratic, and heavily redacted — as so many documents from this era are. But what it reveals, and what it conspicuously cannot tell us, speaks volumes about both the state of forensic science in 1969 and the fundamental frustrations that have haunted the Zodiac investigation for more than five decades.

The document is a TELETYPE transmission, a technology that allowed field offices and FBI headquarters to communicate in near real-time before the age of email or secure digital networks. Marked URGENT — a designation that indicated the matter required immediate attention — it was addressed to SAC San Francisco under case file 9-2296, with the response originating from the Director's office under file 9-49911. The subject line reads: "UNSUB; VALLEJO TIMES HERALD, VALLEJO CALIFORNIA DASH VICTIM, EXTORTION." UNSUB is FBI shorthand for "unknown subject" — the Bureau's way of designating a case where the perpetrator has not yet been identified.

The Vallejo connection is significant. Vallejo, California was already deeply embedded in the Zodiac narrative by November 1969. Two of the killer's confirmed attacks — the December 1968 murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, and the July 1969 shooting of Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau — took place in or near the city. The Zodiac himself had called the Vallejo Police Department in the hours after the Ferrin-Mageau attack to taunt investigators. The Vallejo Times Herald was one of the three Bay Area newspapers that received the Zodiac's infamous trifurcated cipher letter in August 1969, in which he threatened to go on a killing rampage if the papers did not publish his coded message on their front pages. So when an extortion case surfaces involving the Vallejo Times Herald just months later, the implication — though never confirmed in this document — is that investigators were considering whether the Zodiac himself was behind the threat.

The operational heart of the memo concerns fingerprint evidence. The Director's office informs San Francisco that latent fingerprints and palm impressions previously reported in the captioned case — meaning the Vallejo extortion file — are "not identical" to the fingerprints of a redacted individual. The redaction, classified under exemption b7c (which covers law enforcement records that could identify a confidential source or unwarranted invasion of privacy), prevents us from knowing whose prints were being compared. A second key detail follows: the FBI did not have palm prints on file for another redacted subject, making a comparison with the latent palm prints gathered from the case impossible at that time.

This is a document about absence. The prints don't match. The palm prints aren't available. The suspect's identity is hidden behind black ink. What we are left with is a procedural dead end, communicated with the clipped efficiency of wartime-era bureaucracy.

Yet the distribution list at the bottom of the memo is anything but routine. Among the names who received routing copies: Clyde Tolson, Hoover's famously close associate and the Bureau's Associate Director; Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, the third-ranking official at the FBI at the time; and Mark Felt, who would later become famous as Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal. The presence of these names suggests that, at least for a moment in November 1969, the Zodiac case — or at least this extortion thread tied to it — had the attention of the FBI's senior leadership. That is not a trivial detail. The FBI's involvement in the Zodiac investigation has often been characterized as peripheral, with primary jurisdiction resting with local California law enforcement agencies. This routing list implies a higher level of institutional interest than has sometimes been acknowledged.

The memo also carries a small but telling timestamp detail. It was transmitted by teletype on November 15, 1969, received in the mail room and logged through the Teletype Unit, and then stamped again on November 18, 1969 — suggesting it moved through multiple layers of the Bureau's internal bureaucracy before landing in the hands of the agents who needed it. A final date stamp reads November 24, 1969. Nearly ten days passed between transmission and final filing. For an URGENT communication, that lag raises quiet questions about workflow, or perhaps about how urgently the urgency was ultimately treated.

The redactions throughout the document, applied under b7c exemption, are a persistent obstacle. The identity of the individual whose fingerprints were compared, the identity of the subject whose palm prints were unavailable, and likely other operational details have been withheld — either to protect a living person's privacy, to shield a confidential source, or because the relevant law enforcement proceeding was never fully closed. The Zodiac case, officially, remains open.

What this single page cannot tell us is whether the extortion case was ever solved, whether it was ever definitively linked to the Zodiac, or whether the unidentified subject in the redacted lines was ever identified and cleared. Those answers, if they exist, live in the pages that surround this one — and possibly in the portions of the file that have never been released.

What the memo does confirm is something researchers have long suspected: the Zodiac case generated a significant federal paper trail, much of it still hidden. For anyone piecing together the full scope of the investigation, documents like this one are not dead ends. They are signposts pointing toward records yet to surface — and questions that five decades of investigation have not yet put to rest.