Miami Herald

She was watching ‘NCIS’ with her dad — then he told her he was a fugitive

- BY JONATHAN EDWARDS The Washington Post

Ashley Randele promised her dying father that she wouldn’t investigat­e further after he confessed his secret. Hours earlier, Thomas Randele told her that he had changed his name more than a half-century earlier and that authoritie­s were probably still looking for him. But as that revelation kept her awake, she decided she had to know more.

Ashley got on her computer and typed in the name that he had given her, a name that she hadn’t heard in all of her 35 years, a stranger’s name.

She punched “Ted Conrad missing” into Google and hit enter.

“I was so shocked I nearly fell off the bed,” she told The Washington Post.

Article after article revealed that her father had told her only part of the story. More than a halfcentur­y before, he had pulled off one of the biggest bank heists in Ohio history and vanished, leaving authoritie­s unaware that he had married, had a daughter and created an unassuming suburban life despite being one of the mostwanted criminals in the country.

More than two years after her father’s bombshell confession, Ashley, now 38, is releasing “My Fugitive Dad,” a new season of the podcast series “Smoke Screen.” The six episodes reveal more about her father’s crime, the secret life that he led while eluding authoritie­s and her investigat­ion into both after he died of cancer.

“This is insane,” she remembered thinking when she learned about her dad’s secret life. “My life is a Lifetime movie.”

What she learned was that on July 11, 1969, Theodore “Ted” Conrad went to his job at Society National Bank in Cleveland. After working his shift, he packed a paper bag with $215,000 — the equivalent of about $1.8 million today — and left for the weekend, the U.S. Marshals Service said in a 2021 news release.

By the time his co-workers came to work Monday morning, noticed that money was missing and realized he hadn’t shown up for work, Conrad had an almost three-day head start on law enforcemen­t, the release said.

Investigat­ors learned that Conrad had become obsessed with the 1968 movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” in which Steve McQueen plays a rich businessma­n who hatches a caper to rob a bank because he’s bored. Conrad apparently watched the film at least a half-dozen times and bragged to friends about how he could easily steal money from the bank he worked at. He even told them his plan for doing it.

After the heist, federal investigat­ors checked out leads in D.C., Texas, California, Oregon and Hawaii. Conrad was featured on true-crime TV shows, including “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries.”

But no one caught Conrad as the months turned to years, and years became decades.

Meanwhile, Theodore Conrad became Thomas Randele, who settled into suburban life in Lynnfield, Mass. In making her podcast, Ashley learned that in the years right after the heist, the newly minted Randele had landed in Boston, renting a penthouse apartment on Beacon Street and not working much.

By the time Randele started dating Ashley’s mother, Kathy Mahan, in the late 1970s and traded a swanky city life for the suburbs, the money was gone, Ashley told The Post. Randele worked as a car salesman at various dealership­s in the area, building a loyal customer base. He hit the links every chance he got, honing his skills until he became a scratch golfer. He lived a life that was less “The Thomas Crown Affair” and more “Pleasantvi­lle.”

In February 2021, Randele was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer. He started chemothera­py about a month later, his daughter said. Randele and his family quickly realized he would live only months — a year at most.

Around his first round of chemo, which “hit him really hard,” the three Randeles were sitting on the couch watching “NCIS” when, “out of the blue,” Thomas Randele told his wife and daughter that he had changed his name decades earlier, and there was a good chance that law enforcemen­t was still looking for him.

At first, Ashley thought he was joking because he was “the king of dad jokes,” but she soon realized he was serious. Her father didn’t want to tell them his birth name, but Ashley pressed, saying she had a right to know. Begrudging­ly, he revealed that his name had been Ted Conrad.

Ashley promised her father that she wouldn’t ‘I was so shocked I nearly fell off the bed,’ Ashley Randele said upon learning what her father, Thomas Randele, did.

investigat­e his name change. But after going to her bedroom that night and struggling to sleep, she changed her mind. She got on her computer, started researchin­g and found a slew of results about a 20year-old bank teller who had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from a bank one Friday afternoon in 1969 and vanished into thin air.

Then she saw a photo of Conrad as a young man.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s my dad as a kid!’ ”

Ashley coupled the Conrad backstory with what she knew about her dad: that for decades he had lived an unassuming existence as a husband, father and car salesman. Then she put those two stories together.

“It was just so much all at once,” she said. “It didn’t feel real.”

The next day, Ashley confronted her father. She told him she knew about the bank heist and his life as a fugitive, but it didn’t change her love for him.

That being said, she put her foot down: He had to tell her mother the truth. When he would not do so directly, Ashley sat her mother down at a computer, entered the same search term she had used the night before and let the internet divulge her father’s dark secret.

“She just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over again,” Ashley said.

In May of that year, her father died. Ashley and her mother continued to process the bombshell revelation and mourn the loss of a father and husband. And they made a pact: They would posthumous­ly give up their father to federal authoritie­s a year after he died, allowing them to close a long-unsolved case.

But the U.S. Marshals beat them to the punch. Ashley said she’s still not sure what happened, but she knows someone tipped off a crime writer in Cleveland to Randele’s obituary, fingering him as Conrad, and the writer forwarded the informatio­n to the Marshals. Ashley said she still doesn’t know who the original tipster is but hopes to find out one day.

U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott and some of his deputies traveled to Lynnfield outside Boston and knocked on the Randeles’ door.

“You probably know why I’m here,” Ashley remembered him saying. “We should talk.”

Ashley said she decided to make a podcast about her father because she wanted people to know he was more than a “20-year-old kid” who made a dumb mistake. Yes, he was a criminal, but he ended up growing up into a “phenomenal” husband and father who dropped her off and picked her up at school, remembered the names of every friend she ever had and brought his wife flowers on a Wednesday just because he thought she should have some.

 ?? Courtesy of Ashley Randele ??
Courtesy of Ashley Randele

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