Zodiac code key sent to Vallejo PD 8/10/69

RE: Zodiac code key sent to Vallejo PD 8/10/69

I have long heard about, and read about this "code key" sent to Vallejo PD in August 1969. It was addressed to a Sergeant at Vallejo PD. A long time ago, maybe almost a year (so long ago I had forgotten about it), i sent the FBI a FOI request for this code key, and today, after forgetting about it and figuring I would never get it, it arrived in my mailbox! So here it is.

It consists of 5 pages, although 2 of the pages are blank and only have a number written on top of the blank pages ( I assume these were not written by the author, and instead are some kind of FBI or VALLEJO reference #)I will include those blank pages here too. It seems that the pages were deliberately deleted by the FBI,as not to release info that they do not want made public.(I will also include an explanation of that too)













My first thoughts:

*The handwriting does not look exactly like Zodiac's known writing, but this could be another disguised writing by him, or maybe it is more like his normal everyday printing

*The envelope has a FDR stamp as did Zodiac's letters from July-November 1969

* I would like to know the name of the Sergeant that the writer sent the code key, and why he was chosen. Also, I would love to know what was on the two redacted pages.

I look forward to hearing opinions on this letter. Over at Zk.com, they had a good discussion going about this key code:
http://zodiackiller.21.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=235&highlight=&sid=dfa9f46ad32c8488212a3880b315f9fd

It was sent to Sgt. Lynch.

This was posted at Zodiackiller.com back in the late 1990s.

Alan_Cabal wrote:

It was sent to Sgt. Lynch.

This was posted at Zodiackiller.com back in the late 1990s.

Thanks

I was under the impression this had never been seen until now.

Can you give me a link to where it was posted at ZK?

The only post I see there is called "Searching" for this key code. It is discussed, but nobody had it.

Yes, Morf, the FDR stamp! I mean, there are 50 or so stamps that can be used at any time - weird that Zodiac and the "concerned citizen" share the same stamp.

The writer does a 3 stroke "K".

Something in this writing looks similar to some other writing I have seen in the case, maybe the more blocky writing?

A "slip of the tongue"? Huh? It strikes me as odd a real person wouldn't want the credit for solving it. And the language has some word play in it.

Not sure on this one. Good job though Morf!

AK Wilks wrote:

I was under the impression this had never been seen until now.

Can you give me a link to where it was posted at ZK?

The only post I see there is called "Searching" for this key code. It is discussed, but nobody had it.

Yes, Morf, the FDR stamp! I mean, there are 50 or so stamps that can be used at any time - weird that Zodiac and the "concerned citizen" share the same stamp.

The writer does a 3 stroke "K".

Something in this writing looks similar to some other writing I have seen in the case, maybe the more blocky writing?

A "slip of the tongue"? Huh? It strikes me as odd a real person wouldn't want the credit for solving it. And the language has some word play in it.

Not sure on this one. Good job though Morf!

Yes, I agree, this letter was never posted anywhere before, maybe the discussion about it, but not the letter itself. This would be available on any number of internet searches, and others who have been researching this case would have seen it before. Sounds familiar...a while back we posted a never before seen letter, and someone who will remain nameless claimed he had posted that letter years ago...again, that was absolutely untrue. Not that I want credit for getting any of these letters, but let's just be honest about when the letters were first available, no matter who supplied them and when.

I also know that this letter was not ever shown on ZK.com, because there was a thread about this cipher key on there, and on Aug 22,2007, a user member there named AVENGERGT, stated he was having trouble getting this letter under the FOIA, and that he was going to reach out directly to Vallejo PD for it.
Tom's response wasnt "Dont bother I have a copy of it" or "its on the old archived message board", instead his response was "AvengerGT, I wish you the best. However, if they actually provide you with anything, I shall eat my hat. And my keyboard, mouse and speakers. And my monitor. And the computer desk"

Jake Wark wrote:
"A little-known letter containing a key to the cryptogram was sent anonymously to the Vallejo Police on August 10, one day after the Harden solution was made public. It was postmarked San Francisco, and the typewritten address was to a VPD sergeant.
The key was handwritten on a sheet of white paper, and was accompanied by a short typewritten note on a 3x5 index card expressing hope that "the enclosed key will prove beneficial to you in connection with the cipher letter writer." It was signed " concerned citizen." The key was described in an FBI report as "generally valid" and "substantially accurate", but this is unsurprising since the author probably read the decryption in the newspaper and simply made his own key letter by letter. One useful palmprint was found on the envelope, but it was never matched to any individual."

https://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com/t799-possible-unknown-zodiac-letter#16834

Morf13 this is a link to this very document i was asking about.
I see you finally got it Thanks for sharing it with us.
Dennis

Stratcat wrote:

https://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com/t799-possible-unknown-zodiac-letter#16834

Morf13 this is a link to this very document i was asking about.
I see you finally got it Thanks for sharing it with us.
Dennis

No problem

Wonderful Morf!!! This is great to see. Much appreciated.

Morf = "Tom's response wasnt "Dont bother I have a copy of it" or "its on the old archived message board", instead his response was "AvengerGT, I wish you the best. However, if they actually provide you with anything, I shall eat my hat. And my keyboard, mouse and speakers. And my monitor. And the computer desk"

Maybe someone can send Tom a bottle of A-1 sauce. It really makes everything taste better.

Thank you, morf!

I have wanted to see this one for years, so it is wonderful that you were able to get a copy of it!

What is the reason for the exemption for the deleted pages listed on Form OPCA-16a?

The anonymous writer claims "working puzzles criptograms and word puzzles is one of my pleasures" yet the word "cryptogram" is spelled wrong!  Hmmm...

Ricardo wrote:

Thank you, morf!

I have wanted to see this one for years, so it is wonderful that you were able to get a copy of it!

What is the reason for the exemption for the deleted pages listed on Form OPCA-16a?

The anonymous writer claims "working puzzles criptograms and word puzzles is one of my pleasures" yet the word "cryptogram" is spelled wrong!  Hmmm...

Something of interest is in one of those deleted pages. And you are right, a person into cryptograms should likely know how to spell it.

Nice find, guys! Thanks!

Auth

morf13 wrote:

I also know that this letter was not ever shown on ZK.com, because there was a thread about this cipher key on there, and on Aug 22,2007, a user member there named AVENGERGT, stated he was having trouble getting this letter under the FOIA, and that he was going to reach out directly to Vallejo PD for it.
Tom's response wasnt "Dont bother I have a copy of it" or "its on the old archived message board", instead his response was "AvengerGT, I wish you the best. However, if they actually provide you with anything, I shall eat my hat. And my keyboard, mouse and speakers. And my monitor. And the computer desk"

Not everyone is so fascinated with letters that probably weren't from the Zodiac.

Nonetheless, it wasn't on a message board. It was on the main site in late 1998 and got quickly replaced by the many copies of authenticated never-seen Zodiac letters he dug up.

I attribute the rest of his comments to be along the lines of "good luck, it aint' that easy, kid."

Flame away.

Deleted by AK.

Deleted.

This person was NOT Alan Cabal.

Alan Cabal is a living person and a writer. This person was using his name and identity.

He is banned.

I'm inclined to believe this was the work of Z for several reasons. The note is typed on 3 by 5 card; the three-stroke k; it's signed a concerned citizen; the person doesn't want his name in the papers; and, most of all, why would the concerned citizen send the code key without the solution? Surely if you have figured out the code key, you know the solution. So why wouldn't that have been sent? Only the author of the cipher, it seems to me, would send a key but not the solution ("Why spoil the game").

Sorry, I will address this in a PM

rand wrote:

I'm inclined to believe this was the work of Z for several reasons. The note is typed on 3 by 5 card; the three-stroke k; it's signed a concerned citizen; the person doesn't want his name in the papers; and, most of all, why would the concerned citizen send the code key without the solution? Surely if you have figured out the code key, you know the solution. So why wouldn't that have been sent? Only the author of the cipher, it seems to me, would send a key but not the solution ("Why spoil the game").

I agree this could very well be Zodiac.

Also, Zodiac signed one of the 1974 letters "A Citizen".

The FDR stamp was the exact same stamp Z was using in this time period.

Perhaps the two pages deleted by the FBI contained the solution? Or something else pointing to this being Zodiac? They thought it might well have been Zodiac, they dusted it for prints, getting a partial palm print.

Also, strange that the writer wants no credit, and the word play is odd, "slip of the tongue".

Check this out. I got this from the MB site ZKF.

It states that the code key has some alternative translations, and they sent this key to Donald Harden.

Could any of these alternative translations help us decipher the last 18?

I will have to examine this over the next few days, hopefully some of other code people can as well.

Of course this may help to prove me right or wrong about the Kite - Wilks solution to the unsolved 18, but so be it, if this is a clue we need to explore it, either way and where ever it may lead. Of course if this is Zodiac, it could be him leading us down a false path and away from the real solution. Maybe he had second thoughts about his name in there.

But regardless of whether this is from the Zodiac or a real amateur codebreaker, maybe there is something in these alternative translations that can shed a new light on the unsolved 18?





Harden Key



"Concerned Citizen" Key

THANKS MORF/AKWILKS !!!

Theforeigner wrote:

THANKS MORF/AKWILKS !!!

Agree !!!

Looking at the "Concerned Citizen" Key I notice that the cross-hair symbol is not Z-like. The pen stroke appears to start at 11 o'clock, not Z's usual 1 o'clock. Pity. I was hoping it'd match.

I like the misspellings, FRD stamp and "slip of the tongue" thing though. ...Great stuff guys

Theforeigner/Rufus - No problem. Also check out the envelope I got for the Atlanta possible Zodiac letter. Morf got this code key, long a desired object for Z researchers, and I sent it out to other Zodiac sites. MB gave us a nice credit and thank you at zkf.

Also at zkf, I think Bullit noted that the "u" in the code key is lower case, when every other letter is capitalized, a trait he associates with Zodiac.

Also Smithy, smart guy knowledgable about codes and usually quite skeptical of everything, leans towards this being from Zodiac. He notes that the right hand column in the key is strange.

Smithy: That column on the right.....

Keys for the 408 I've seen, and my own, look pretty much like this one:
http://www.scn.org/anon/dossiers/zodiac/zodiac.htm

This key's odd. It has at least one error (the backward J equivalence, I suspect there are more), as well as being strange - IMO - in the way it lists the substitutions, altogether. The order of substitutions for each character, IE the order in which they were actually substituted, is also not what I'd expect, what I personally would write, or what I'm used to seeing from other peoples keys.

I's not a "complete" key on the left, either, in that it misses out some characters from the straight alphabetic set; all the triangles save one, N and E on the "E" line, backward Q on the "M" line, ILN on the "T" line, etc. There is that triangle (dotted) included in the "S" - but that's the only one. And then on the right we have another list of "substitutes", which are both confused and confusing. The triangles aren't filled, there's an odd "K-L-M" start to the thing which matches nothing I can immediately see, it's almost a circular device, indeed; there seems to be no attempt to list elements there as a strict homophonic key. It's whacked.

I think if you were to derive a key from the Harden solution - which when published was the cipher with the substitutions written above them, no? - I don't think you'd write it out like this. It doesn't work as a derivative IMO. Similarly, if you "cracked" the 408 independently, I don't see this being the key you'd generate, although on that I may be very wrong.

At least, I think the key is as idiosynchratic as some of the treatment of the sequence of character substitutions, and the non-homophonic substitutions themselves, in the 408 cipher, and that intrigues me greatly. I can see if you generated a key like this, used a similar right hand column liberally when encoding a message, perhaps became confused about the part each should be playing in that process.....

Second opinions, please!

AK = So could this right hand column contain the alternate translations that the police sent to Harden?

rand wrote:

AH HA! I've got it!

If Z correctly spelled DANGEROUS, then the E actually stands for an S.
If Z correctly spelled SLOW, then the triangle actually stands for an I
If the hand drawn crosshair at the end of the 408 message is actually another character, then we have an additional D

Making these three substitutions with the last 18 characters plus the handwritten crosshair at the end, I get:

ROBERT DE PEW: IT IS ME, TH

The point is this: Z said his identity was in the 408 and that LE would know his identity AFTER they cracked the code. The problem is that, rather than assuming that Z could spell words like DANGEROUS and SLOW, the translaters assumed that Z mispelled them. Sure, Z mispelled words, but always phonetically, e.g., clew, cid, etc. This was intentional in my and others' view. I can very easily see Z spelling DePugh as DE PEW. But he didn't mispell words wrong like SLOI for SLOW or DANGEROUE for DANGEROUS. So if these words are spelled correctly (and why assume that they are not?), then the coded symbols have additional letters attached to them: viz., the E stands for E AND S, the triangle stands for I and W. The other problem is that translaters assumed, incorrectly I believe, that the drawn crosshair symbol at the end of the 408 was not to be included in the translation. But what if it is? Then you have an extra D (and why assume that Z could end the message with exactly 17 letters per each line?).
What I get is a message that fits precisely what one might expect TH to have said if he were, in fact, Z:
ROBERT DE PEW: IT IS ME, TH

This new key is consistent with my observations above.

While it's spectacular to see as I have always wanted to compare it to the Harden's solution, I now don't consider it to be from Zodiac.

Seeing that FDR stamp certainly raises an eyebrow, but...it was the standard stamp of the time. While many others were available, it appears that was the general stamp that would have been sold.

Also, while there may be errors, I don't feel Zodiac would have supplied so much of a solution. Just my thoughts.

AK wrote: "But regardless of whether this is from the Zodiac or a real amateur codebreaker, maybe there is something in these alternative translations that can shed a new light on the unsolved 18?" ....this I VERY much agree with.