Investigators with the U.S. Marshals Service have finally tracked down a bank teller-turned-robber who vanished from Cleveland in 1969 with $215,000, although the man who pulled off the heist died this past May in a suburb north of Boston at the age of 71.
Theodore “Ted” Conrad got away with one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland history as he managed to elude authorities and stay under the radar for more than 52 years.
Ultimately, police missed their last chance to apprehend Conrad, discovering his whereabouts this past week — a mere six months after he was already dead.
Still, the U.S. Marshals Service for the Northern District of Ohio expressed resolve Friday in announcing that it had solved the decades-old mystery after learning Conrad had been living under an assumed name in the Boston area since 1970.
Investigators traveled there this past week and positively identified Conrad as Thomas Randele of Lynnfield, Massachusetts.
They compared and matched the man’s handwriting on public records, including paperwork signed by Conrad in his college days and bankruptcy documents that Randele filed in Boston Federal Court in 2014, according to a news release from the U.S. Marshals Service for the Northern District of Ohio.
Randele died of lung cancer in May this year in Lynnfield, Marshals said. He had used a date of birth as July 10, 1947, but his actual birthdate was July 10, 1949, meaning Conrad was 71.
Back in 1969, a 20-year-old Conrad worked as a teller at the Society National Bank at 127 Public Square in Cleveland. At the end of his shift on Friday, July 11, he walked away with $215,000 in a paper bag and was never seen again.
The value of the loot was the equivalent of $1.7 million in today’s dollars.
The heist wasn’t discovered until the following Monday after Conrad failed to show up at work. Soon, bank employees checked the vault to find the money was gone, too. By then, however, Conrad had a two-day headstart on the police. And it turned out to be enough to get away for the next five decades.
Through the years, the case was featured on fugitive TV shows such as “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries,” but Conrad seemed to have vanished into thin air. Investigators also chased leads across the country, including Washington, D.C., Inglewood, California, western Texas, Oregon and Honolulu, all to no avail.
Those who knew Conrad in 1969 told authorities he had become obsessed with the 1968 film “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Steve McQueen, whose character pulls off the perfect crime by orchestrating the theft of more than $2 million from a Boston bank.
Conrad reportedly went to see the movie more than half a dozen times and bragged to friends about a plan to pull off a similar caper himself.
“Everything in real life doesn't always end like in the movies."
In Friday’s news release, U.S. Marshal Peter J. Elliott, whose father had worked tirelessly to capture the fugitive, expressed satisfaction that there was finally some closure in the case.
“This is a case I know all too well. My father, John K. Elliott, was a dedicated career Deputy United States Marshal in Cleveland from 1969 until his retirement in 1990,” he said. “My father took an interest in this case early because Conrad lived and worked near us in the late 1960s. My father never stopped searching for Conrad and always wanted closure up until his death in 2020 ...
“I hope my father is resting a little easier today knowing his investigation and his United States Marshals Service brought closure to this decades-long mystery. Everything in real life doesn’t always end like in the movies.”
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