A fugitive who robbed a bank was on the run for 52 years. He told his family the truth, including his real name, shortly before he died.
- In 1969, Ted Conrad stole the equivalent of $1.7 million from the bank he worked at.
- He changed his name, dodged authorities for 52 years, and confessed to his family on his deathbed.
Thomas Randele was weeks away from death when he made a shocking disclosure in April 2021.
The retired car salesman told his wife, Kathy, and daughter, Ashley, that he'd been using a fake identity."We were watching TV and he said, 'You know, ladies, when I moved here, I changed my name,'" Ashley Randele told Business Insider. "'And the authorities are probably still looking for me. I don't want you to be blindsided.'"Randele said the 71-year-old refused to elaborate, but the following day, when she pressed him for his real name, he reluctantly revealed that it was Ted Conrad.Her subsequent discovery — that Conrad had been on the lam for 52 years after robbing a bank in 1969 — made her question everything she knew about him.Nearly three years later, she has released a six-part podcast, "Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad." It tells the story of the heist in which Conrad stole $215,000 in cash — the equivalent of $1.7 million today.
The series explores how he evaded US Marshals for more than five decades and hid his shady past from family and friends.
"It doesn't make me love him any less," Randele said, adding that though he committed a high-profile crime in his youth, it didn't define him."When you Google Thomas Randele or Ted Conrad, all you see is a vault teller who stole money and a fugitive who was caught after dying," she said. "But he was an amazing husband and father."Randele said that she hoped she could "protect" her dad's legacy by showing the human side of a man who, she said, "was boring in all the right ways.""I don't condone what he did," she said. "But, when you're 20, you can make some choices that you don't think all the way through."The podcast tells how Conrad took advantage of his job at the Society National Bank in Cleveland after accessing the vault.Security was so lax that he walked out of his workplace with bundles of money. He fled to Boston and began a new life. His mother, stepfather, and siblings didn't know whether he was alive.
Randele said that her father never had a lavish lifestyle
A team of US Marshals was assigned to the case, but every lead turned cold.
Randele said her father led a relatively modest lifestyle in spite of his illegal gains. Still, he could afford to work only part-time and pursue leisure activities such as golf.She said that by the time he married her mom, most of the money was gone. "I found out that he had made some investments that went wrong," she said, adding that a failed venture into the restaurant business had proven costly.In fact, the 38-year-old said, her dad got into debt. He worked "long hours" as a salesman but later declared bankruptcy. She said a major factor was the number of medical bills the family had to pay after her mom developed cancer.
Randele said that Conrad would lie about what happened to his parents. "He said that they had died in a car crash when he was 18," she went on.
He said that he'd moved states following the tragedy because, according to Randele, "It was just too difficult to be living where he was and he needed a fresh start."She said Conrad was a devoted father. "I never heard him raise his voice," she said. "He was just so kind, soft-spoken and charismatic. The moment he walked into a room, you knew he was there."He had some health problems in middle age and needed a quadruple heart bypass. He was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer in early 2021.
Conrad begged his daughter not to research his real name
Ironically, Conrad confessed to the alias while watching his favorite crime show, "NCIS." "It just came out of the blue one afternoon," Randele said.
He told her his birth name the following day. "He told me to promise not to look into it any further, but I had to Google it."She said the search results seemed "unbelievable" at first. But her father admitted to the robbery."I told him that I loved him and that it didn't change the way I felt about him," she said, adding that he seemed "relieved" to have shared the secret.
