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The boy watched as his father, John K. Elliott, sat in the kitchen area a single afternoon in 1970, shed in imagined.
“Can you go the mashed potatoes?” Peter J. Elliott requested his father, a U.S. marshal in Cleveland, Ohio, who was considering about the guy who experienced pulled off just one of the greatest financial institution robberies in the city’s background.
“When am I going to get Ted Conrad?” Mr. Elliott asked his son, a year following Theodore J. Conrad had walked off with $215,000 in cash, the equal of about $1.6 million currently.
On Friday, a lot more than 50 decades following the heist, the younger Mr. Elliott, now a U.S. marshal himself, had an reply for his father.
The U.S. Marshals Service announced that it had identified Mr. Conrad right after investigators pursued a lead and discovered that he had been residing underneath the fictitious identify Thomas Randele in Lynnfield, Mass., about 16 miles north of Boston, until eventually his loss of life from lung cancer in Might.
Investigators experienced chased sales opportunities throughout the region, to California, Hawaii, Texas and Oregon, in research of their fugitive. Mr. Conrad was showcased on numerous correct-crime exhibits, such as “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries.”
Investigators figured out that following the theft, Mr. Conrad fled to Washington, D.C., and then to Los Angeles, and finally went to Massachusetts in 1970, the place he recognized deep roots with his spouse and daughter. There, he was a golf professional, labored at a luxurious-car or truck dealership for 40 several years and relished watching “NCIS” and other legislation enforcement reveals on television, Mr. Elliott claimed.
Mr. Conrad was well liked in his group by law enforcement officers and other regulation enforcement officials.
“That’s likely why, you know, we did not capture up with him in the past mainly because he was a regulation-abiding citizen, and we didn’t have any fingerprints on file,” Mr. Elliott explained.
On his deathbed, Mr. Conrad told his loved ones the real truth, Mr. Elliott reported. He told them his authentic identify and what he had finished on July 11, 1969.
It was a Friday, and he went to operate at the Culture National Financial institution in Cleveland, the place he was a lender teller. At the end of the working day, he stuffed cash from the vault into a paper bag and left.
By Monday morning, as his co-staff opened the vault and puzzled in which their colleague was, Mr. Conrad experienced a two-working day head get started on the authorities.
Some of the details of the robbery, these as the denomination of the expenses and how Mr. Conrad was able to stroll out with no staying seen, were not right away obtainable. But Mr. Elliott reported there was not considerably stability at the bank, where by workers have been not even fingerprinted.
A yr before, Mr. Conrad experienced been obsessed with “The Thomas Crown Affair,” a 1968 Steve McQueen movie in which a bored billionaire robs a bank to amuse himself. Mr. Conrad had instructed buddies that he planned to rob a financial institution, bragging about how simple it would be, the U.S. Marshals Support explained.
“He was a darer, so to speak,” Mr. Elliott mentioned. “After seeing that motion picture, I believe that he believed, ‘Hey, what if I do this and get away with this?’ I truly consider it was a obstacle for him to be equipped to do it.”
Years later, the authorities would retrieve a letter that Mr. Conrad wrote in 1969 to his girlfriend. In it, he confessed to the criminal offense and expressed regret for committing it.
After Mr. Conrad confessed this 12 months, his household did not make contact with the authorities, Mr. Elliott stated. Only following the authorities noticed an obituary for Thomas Randele, 73, did they begin to piece together proof, which had been generally collected by Mr. Elliott’s father many years ago.
Mr. Elliott reported the Randele spouse and children would not be billed for failing to disclose Mr. Conrad’s confession to the authorities. Mr. Conrad experienced been indicted and there is no statute of limits on lender theft, so he would have continue to been arrested if the authorities experienced located him, Mr. Elliott said.
He declined to share what led investigators to the obituary. But when they observed it, they identified facts that mirrored that of Mr. Conrad’s authentic lifetime. Mr. Conrad’s true birth day was July 10, 1949. In the obituary, the start day detailed was July 10, 1947.
The 2nd clue was his parents’ names. They ended up just about exactly the exact same in the obituary. The obituary also provided his actual alma mater, New England School, and birthplace, Denver.
“When persons lie, they lie shut to home,” Mr. Elliott explained.
Then, the remaining clue that pieced it all alongside one another: a signature from a university software, which was first uncovered by Mr. Elliott’s father, which was comparable to a single that the authorities uncovered on a personal bankruptcy court document in 2014, scribbled with the identify Thomas Randele.
That was all Mr. Elliott necessary. He traveled to Lynnfield, knocked on the doorway and was greeted by Mr. Conrad’s family, who were amazed to see the officials.
“I experience terrible for them for the reason that of a father-partner that they truly never ever knew who he was, and also, you know, they are living below a fictitious title,” Mr. Elliott mentioned.
Kathy Randele, Mr. Conrad’s widow, said in an job interview on Saturday that “we’re continue to mourning his reduction, and he was a excellent father and a amazing father.” She declined further more comment.
The previous time Mr. Elliott and his father talked about the financial institution robbery case was in March 2020, when John K. Elliott was in hospice.
Mr. Elliott desired to cheer him up, so he attained for his iPad and performed “Lake Erie’s Coldest Cases,” a documentary sequence that showcased an episode on the circumstance and showed his father becoming interviewed.
“Hey, glance, you’re on Television set,” Mr. Elliott told his father, who smiled.
John K. Elliott died a couple of times later.
Potentially soon, Mr. Elliott stated, he will enjoy “The Thomas Crown Affair,” see Steve McQueen check out to get away with it, and consider of his father.
