Before her dad died, he confessed he was a fugitive bank thief on the lam for 52 years

As It Happens9:27Before her dad died, he confessed he was a fugitive bank thief with an assumed name

When Ashley Randele learned that her beloved father was a fugitive bank thief who changed his name and evaded authorities for more than 50 years, it rocked her to her very core.

"I wish there were a bigger word for shocked," the 38-year-old Boston woman told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "My dad is not somebody that you ever suspected would keep a secret — let alone a secret this big."

It turns out that Thomas Randele — suburban father, husband, car salesman and golfer — was, in fact, Theodore (Ted) Conrad — fugitive bank thief. 

Now, more than two years after her father died and about one year after his secret was revealed to the world, Randele is unravelling the tale in a new podcast, My Fugitive Dad.

"I was not going to let the world forget who my dad was, because my dad is the guy who made my lunch every day and drove me to school and made sure that he got out of work early enough to take pictures with me before my senior prom," she said.

"Everybody in the world is so much more than their worst day."

'He never looked back'

For her father, that day was July 11, 1969.

Conrad, then 20 years old, finished his shift as a teller at the Society National Bank in Cleveland, Ohio, filled a paper bag with $215,000 in cash — the equivalent of about $1.8 million US, or $2.4 million Cdn, today — and never came back again.

Authorities chased down leads all over the country, to no avail. His story was featured on America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.

Conrad, meanwhile, was living a quiet life outside Boston.

"He was never someone who seemed like they were looking over their shoulder, or was someone who didn't want his photo taken, right? Like, there were none of those signs," Randele said. "He never looked back."

That is, until he was diagnosed with lung cancer. 

In March 2021, after his first round of chemotherapy, he was watching NCIS on TV with his daughter when he made the stunning confession to her: He was a fugitive living under an assumed name. 

He was light on the details, but he gave her his birth name. Later that night, she Googled it.

"It honestly felt like something out of a Lifetime movie," Randele said.

"Who suspects that when they look up their parent's birth name, that they're going to find headlines that say, you know, 'Vault Teller Steals Money, Fugitive Still On The Run?'"

The next day, she told her father what she'd learned.

"I told him that I had looked him up and I knew what had happened in July of '69, but that did not change how I felt about him, and it didn't change how I looked at him," she said. "He was still my dad and I love him."

She says she could see the relief wash over his face. But the hard part was still to come. 

"I said, you know, 'We have to tell mom.'"

'He's still my favourite person in the world'

He couldn't bring himself to do it, she said, so she broke the news herself, Googling his original name and letting her mother see the results. 

"The three of us were able to have some really difficult, but good, conversations over the next few weeks," she said.

They both told him, repeatedly, that they still loved him, that he was a good father and husband.

"Not to say it's fine to, you know, commit a crime, but that in the grand scheme of things, this is not what we're harping on in the last weeks of your life," Randele said.

"One of the reasons, honestly, that I launched this podcast was to find out answers about who my dad was before he had me, and really why he did what he did. But it didn't change how I felt about him. He's still my favourite person in the world."

Thomas Randele died on May 18, 2021. Ashley Randele and her mother made a vow: They would wait one year, then tell the police what they knew.

They never got the chance. In November of that year, there was a knock at the door.

It was U.S. Marshall Peter J. Elliott, and he said: "I think you know why we're here."

Closing his father's case

For Elliott, cracking the case of the fugitive bank thief was about honouring his own father's legacy. 

John Elliott, who was also a U.S. Marshall, spent his entire career looking for Conrad —  starting when his son was seven years old.

"Conrad lived near us. Conrad had the same doctor as my dad did. And Conrad worked at the local ice cream store where my father used to take us as kids," Elliott told As It Happens in November 2021.

"So the only thing I heard since I was a kid is how much my father wanted to capture Theodore J. Conrad."

He never did. But decades later, his son received a tip that broke the case open — Thomas Randele's obituary.

The obit listed Randele's birthday as July 10, 1947. Conrad's was July 10, 1949. It listed his parents as Ed and Ruthabeth Krueger Randele. Conrad's parents were Ed and Ruthabeth Krueger Conrad.

Elliott and his colleagues then checked bank records in Boston, where Thomas Randele had filed for bankruptcy. The signature matched Conrad's.

It's still not clear how he spent all his stolen money. 

Why did he do it?

As for motivation, Elliot said Conrad was a huge fan of the 1968 heist movie The Thomas Crown Affair. 

"He watched that movie about 12 times, and I believe that's why he stole the money originally. And ironically, where he moved to was right in the location where the actual movie was filmed," Elliot said. "I believe that's probably why he took the first name of Tom."

But his daughter — who has been interviewing her father's old friends, ex-girlfriend, and surviving family members — believes there's more to it than that. 

"What we found out was that it really wasn't about the money. But for him, it was more about wanting to start over and leave his first life behind," she said, without elaborating. "He wasn't on the run so much as he was running away."

My Fugitive Dad, part of the investigative series Smoke Screen from Sony Music, launched Dec. 4.

Interview with Ashley Randele produced by Devin Nguyen. Interview with Peter J. Elliott produced by Chris Trowbridge.