CNN –
Thomas Randele died of lung cancer and had a secret.
In March 2021, as his daughter lay at his bedside in suburban Boston after his first chemotherapy session, he made a startling confession: He was a refugee and had been for more than five decades. More than 50 years earlier, when he was 20, he had robbed an Ohio bank of $215,000. And his real name was not Thomas Randele, but Theodore Conrad.
He begged his daughter not to get involved in the case. But after that bombshell revelation, Ashley Randele didn’t sleep much that night. So she did what most curious people would do.
“I’m alone in my childhood bedroom and I Googled ‘Ted Conrad missing’ and the first thing that came up was something like ‘Vault cashier robs bank.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s my dad,'” she told CNN. “And there were hundreds and hundreds of articles about him.”
With each click, her father’s dark past unfolded before her eyes.
In Lynnfield, Massachusetts, Thomas Randele was a car salesman and country club golf pro who adored his wife and only child. He doted on his daughter and showed up to her soccer games in khakis and fast cars. Ironically, he also donated to local police charities and spent hours watching “NCIS” and other crime shows, his daughter said.
But back in Cleveland he was Ted Conrad, an elusive bank robber. He was barely into his teens when he pulled off one of the biggest robberies in Ohio history – now worth the equivalent of $1.7 million – inspired by his favorite film, “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
Conrad’s boyish face was featured on wanted posters and aired on episodes of “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries.” And a father-son pair of U.S. Marshals in Cleveland had made it their life’s mission to catch him.
“I told him, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ And there are a million articles about you. And they’re still looking for you, too, in case you didn’t know. And we have to tell mom,” said Ashley Randele, 38, co-host of a new podcast about who her father was and what drove him to rob a bank.
About a day after her father’s shocking revelation, Ashley told CNN she pulled her mother Kathy aside and told her.
“She was reading through the articles online and kept saying, ‘Oh my God!’ “Oh my God!” for like 10 minutes,” Ashley Randele said. (Kathy Randele declined comment to CNN.) “She knew him for almost 40 years, and to learn this huge secret – I can’t imagine how traumatic that was for her.”
Conrad’s disappearance puzzled investigators for five decades.
Some compared it to the 1971 case of hijacker DB Cooper, who jumped out of a plane with $200,000 in cash and disappeared over the vast wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, never to be seen again.
Conrad’s robbery also sounded like a story from a movie. On July 11, 1969, he appeared as a teller at Society National Bank in Cleveland. It was a Friday and his birthday weekend, so he bought a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes on his break. At the end of the day, he went into the vault, quietly stuffed $215,000 into a paper bag and left his old life.
It wasn’t until Monday that the bank found out about the robbery, giving him a two-day head start.
Days later, Conrad sent his then-girlfriend two letters – from Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles – telling her how much he loved and missed her. Then the case went cold. The authorities could find no trace of him.
Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media/Getty Images
Theodore “Ted” Conrad was a humble bank teller when he walked out of an Ohio bank with more than $200,000.
A week after his disappearance, Apollo 11 put the first people on the moon. The historic mission made headlines and the press soon forgot about the mysterious Cleveland bank robber. Months turned into years and then decades.
But the investigators didn’t give up. They received tips about alleged sightings in various states, including California, Hawaii, Texas and Oregon. The clues all turned out to be false. Frustrated, federal officials spotlighted his case on true-crime shows such as “America’s Most Wanted.”
Meanwhile, the former Ted Conrad was building a new life for himself as Randele in Massachusetts. Ironically, he chose to settle in a suburb north of Boston, the city where his favorite film was set and filmed.
According to authorities, Conrad was obsessed with “The Thomas Crown Affair,” the 1968 Steve McQueen film about a dashing millionaire businessman who robs a Boston bank for fun. (The film was remade in the 1990s with Pierce Brosnan.) His friends in Ohio told investigators that he had seen the film several times before the robbery.
He even bragged about getting a job as a vault cashier without being fingerprinted and about how easy it was to steal money from the bank, investigators said.
Ashley Randele believes her father loved the film so much that he chose his new first name, Thomas, as a tribute to the main character.
She said her father didn’t exactly live in hiding. He drove her to school every day and picked her up on his days off. Sometimes, she said, he accompanied her on school trips.
But after his confession, little things started to make sense, she said. Her father, clean-shaven as a young man, always wore a beard and rarely took off his baseball cap in public.
And he never left the country. Ashley said she and her mother once begged him to go to France with them, but he declined, saying he wasn’t a fan of traveling abroad.
“He always said there were so many interesting things to see in the United States. He didn’t have to leave the country,” Randele said.
Now she realizes that he didn’t have a passport because of his false identity.
She began searching for answers about her father’s dark past
His confession turned the Randele family on its head.
Ashley said she and her mother knew her father likely only had a few months to live, so they decided not to share his secret with authorities. The last thing she wanted, she said, was for her sick, 71-year-old father to be sent to prison.
“The first thing Mom and I said to him was, ‘We love you so much.’ And finding that out doesn’t change the fact that we love you. But we have to talk about it,” she said.
Ken Blaze/AP
Photos, a driver’s license, the original arrest warrant and other items from Conrad’s 1969 robbery are on display at the Carl B. Stokes U.S. Courthouse in Cleveland on December 16, 2021.
“I couldn’t be angry with him at the time because it felt kind of unfair. I tried to get as much information out of him as I could, just because you want to know… I could be angry after he died.”
Ashley Randele said she once told her father she would keep her last name after she married so it wouldn’t die out with him.
But after his confession, she asked herself: Was it even her name anymore?
“It was hard that my name wasn’t mine. It’s on my birth certificate. It’s a real name. But that his name was wrong,” she said. “For a moment I thought about changing my name.”
Her father died in May 2021, two months after his confession.
In her new podcast, premiering Monday, titled “Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad,” Randele discusses her struggles caring for a dying father while dealing with the confusion of unknowingly living a life full of lies.
The suburban Boston woman, who works in retail and customer service, said she believes there was more to her father’s brazen robbery than just his love of movies. So she decided to look for answers.
Eventually, she tracked down some of her father’s old friends and girlfriends who shared stories about him and helped her fill in some of the gaps from his younger years.
Working on the podcast, she said, uncovered some answers, allowed her to grieve and helped her reconcile the secret bank robber in Ohio with the doting husband and father she knew in Massachusetts. For example, her father’s friends told her that he spoke French fluently, which surprised her because she had trouble with French homework as a child and he offered her no help.
“I wanted the world to know who my father was. And I also wanted to know about Ted Conrad, the bank robber, and Tom Randele, my father,” she told CNN. “I wanted to know – where do they overlap?”
Ashley Randele said she and her mother agreed to mourn the man they lost for a year before revealing his secret to investigators.
She said they agreed to notify police in June 2022. But the federal authorities got ahead of them.
In November 2021, U.S. marshals showed up unannounced at the Randeles’ doorstep in Lynnfield. The marshals assured her and her mother that no charges would be filed against them, Ashley Randele said.
02:38 – Source: CNN
How the father-son duo helped solve the mystery of the 1969 bank robbery
It turns out that investigators got their first big break in the case after Randele died of lung cancer in May. Someone sent his obituary to a crime reporter in Ohio with a note that the deceased was likely Conrad, Ashley Randele said.
The obituary listed her father’s birth date as July 10, 1947 – the same birthday as Conrad’s but two years older, U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott told CNN. The obituary also lists the names of Conrad’s parents, but with Randele at the end, Elliott said.
Investigators began digging and unearthed a 2014 bankruptcy filing by Randele in a federal court in Boston. The handwriting matched that on a 1967 college application that Conrad filled out, Elliott said.
Investigators then traveled from Cleveland to Lynnfield to confirm Conrad’s identity. Among them was Elliott, whose father, John Elliott, spent much of his law enforcement career searching for Conrad before he died in 2020.
The younger Elliott, a U.S. Marshal in Ohio like his father, finally had an answer to the questions that had eluded his father for decades. In the podcast, Elliott describes the case as “an elegantly simple but infinitely complex” mystery.
Elliott said his father wasted years chasing false leads across the country and missed his son’s baseball games, and he was angry that Conrad stole money he would have earned for many years as a federal agent.
“Some people portrayed Conrad as Robin Hood. And my father just called him a thief,” he said.
But this day in November 2021 brought a little closure. When Elliott knocked on her door and introduced himself as a federal marshal from Ohio, Ashley Randele said the look on her face probably told investigators everything they needed to know.
“I think you know why we’re here,” she said Elliott told her.