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## The Society National Bank and How the Vault Worked
To understand what Conrad actually did on July 11, 1969, it helps to understand the physical and procedural realities of a bank cash vault in that era.
Society National Bank occupied prominent real estate at 127 Public Square in downtown Cleveland. It was one of the city’s major financial institutions—the kind of bank with multiple branches scattered across the metropolitan area and a central headquarters operation that serviced them. The cash vault at a central bank in 1969 was not a safe in the conventional sense; it was a room, sometimes a large one, where currency was sorted, counted, packaged, and prepared for delivery to branch locations.
A vault teller in 1969 had direct, routine access to substantial amounts of cash. The job required handling money all day. Conrad had been doing it since January 1969—six months of daily, unsupervised access to currency in large denominations. He knew the rhythms of the counting. He knew when the room was busiest, when supervisors were most attentive, and when the quiet moments occurred. He knew what a normal afternoon looked like and how much deviation from normal would attract attention.
The bank did not fingerprint employees in 1969. This detail would matter enormously to investigators later. A fugitive leaves traces: fingerprints on surfaces, financial records, documentation trails. A fugitive who has never been fingerprinted is invisible in one of the most basic forensic databases. The FBI’s fingerprint matching systems, however sophisticated by the standards of their era, could not identify someone who had never entered those systems. Conrad had never been arrested. He had never served in the military. He had no prints on file anywhere.