'My father told me he'd been a fugitive for 50 years on his deathbed'

Thomas Randele made a life-altering confession to his daughter Ashley as he lay dying from lung cancer in March 2021.

Ashley, always by her father's bedside, was naturally stunned to discover that her father had been a fugitive for over 50 years, and his real name was actually Theodore Conrad.

Over 50 years prior, when Thomas was 20 years old, he robbed an Ohio bank of $215,000, thus beginning his life on the run.

Ashley says her father told her not to look into the case, but the revelation could not just be left alone.

She told CNN: "I’m alone in my childhood bedroom, and I Googled ‘Ted Conrad missing,’ and the first thing that came up said something like, ‘Vault teller robs bank.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is my dad. And there were hundreds and hundreds of articles about him."

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Back in Cleveland, Ohio, Theodore Conrad was an elusive bank robber, but nearly 700 miles away in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, Thomas Randele was a car salesman and devoted husband and father.

Thomas had clearly always been interested in true crime; so interested, in fact, that he pulled off one of the largest heists in Ohio history inspired by his favorite movie, The Thomas Crown Affair. When he left that life of crime behind, Ashley said her father got his kick by spending hours watching NCIS and other crime shows.

After falling down the online rabbit hole learning all about her father's criminal past, Ashley went back to him. She told CNN: "I told him, ‘I looked you up. And there are a million articles about you. And they’re also still looking for you, in case you didn’t know. And we have to tell Mom.'"

A day or so later, Ashley broke the news to her mother, Kathy. She said: “She was reading through the articles online, and she just kept saying, ‘Oh my God! Oh, my God!,’ for like 10 minutes. She’d known him for the better part of 40 years, and to learn this massive secret — I can’t imagine how traumatizing that was for her.”

On July 11, 1969, a then Theodore Conrad showed up for work as a teller at Society National Bank in Cleveland. To celebrate his birthday that weekend, and the fact that it was a Friday, he bought a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes during his break.

Clearly not satisfied with these gifts to himself, he then went into the vault and quietly stuffed $215,000 into a paper bag, leaving his old life behind him. The bank didn't even notice the robbery until Monday, giving Theodore a two-day head start over the authorities.

A few days later, he sent two letters from Washington DC and LA to his then-girlfriend, saying how much he loved and missed her. This was the only evidence authorities had to go off before the case went cold. There were no other traces of Theodore Conrad.

While Theodore Conrad's image was being plastered on TV on episodes of America's Most Wanted, the new and improved Thomas Randele was building a new life in Lynnfield, Massachusetts.

Living in the city in which The Thomas Crown Affair is set, and named after the main character of the movie, Thomas Randele became a doting husband and father.

He drove his daughter to and from her soccer games, and chaperoned her school field trips, but never without a baseball cap and beard to cover his face. He took his family on vacations in the summer, but never out of the country.

Unsurpringly, Thomas' confession turned his family's lives upside down. They knew he only had a few months left to live, and so kept his secret. Ashley couldn't bare to see her dying, 71-year-old father hauled off to prison.

She said: "The first thing Mom and I said to him was, ‘We love you so much. And finding this out does not change that we love you. But we do need to talk about it.' I wasn’t able to be angry with him at the time, because that just felt sort of unfair. I was trying to get as much information out of him as possible, just because you want to know … I was able to be angry after he passed.”

Thomas Randele died two months after his confession, in May 2021, leaving his daughter wondering: 'is my surname even really my name anymore?'

She said: “That was hard, that my name isn’t mine. It’s on my birth certificate. It is a real name. But that his name was fake. For a moment, I did think about changing my name.”

In a pact with her mother, Ashley kept her father's secret for one year so she could grieve his loss before sharing it with investigators. But federal authorities beat her to it.

US Marshals showed up unannounced at the Randeles' door in November 2021, seven months before Ashley planned to reveal her father's secret.

After he died of lung cancer, someone sent Thomas' obituary to a crime reporter in Ohio explaining that it was likely Theodore Conrad. The obituary showed the same birthday as Theodore Conrad, just two years older, and listed his parents’ names, but with Randele added to the end.

The US Marshals then travelled to Massachusetts to confirm his identity. When they introduced themselves to Ashley as federal marshals from Ohio, she said her face probably gave away eveything they needed to know.