Ashley Randele enjoyed a particularly close relationship with her late father, who treated his only child more like a confidante than a daughter.
“I think he would tell me things because he either thought that I could handle it better than my mom or that I just have this terrible gift of being able to compartmentalize things and put it on a shelf and tuck it away," Randele told the podcast “Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad," in an episode that dropped Monday.
But even with that level of trust in his daughter, she said the man she knew as car salesman Tom Randele waited until his dying days to reveal a shocking truth: that he wasn't Tom Randele but Ted Conrad, who pulled off one of the nation's greatest unsolved bank heists.
Before dying of lung cancer in May 2021, he admitted to his daughter that he'd been using the fake birthdate of July 10, 1947, when he was really Conrad, born July 10, 1949.
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Conrad was working as a vault teller at Society National Bank in Cleveland when he nonchalantly went home from work on Friday, July 11, 1969, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. It wouldn't be until Monday morning when bank managers realized $215,000 — about $1.8 million in today's value — was missing, as was Conrad, the marshals service said.
He departed Cleveland with the cash and started a new, fake life, leaving behind all of his friends and family. Conrad would assume a new identity and live in of Lynnfield, Massachusetts, where Ashley Randele knew him as a doting father who was partial to double-pleated khaki pants and golf shirts.
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