Cleveland, OH – On Friday July 11, 1969, Theodore John Conrad
walked into his job at the Society National Bank at 127 Public Square in
Cleveland as an ordinary bank teller. He walked out at the end of the
day with $215,000 (equivalent to over $1.7 million in 2021) in a paper
bag and vanished. Conrad, age twenty, pulled off one of the biggest bank
robberies in Cleveland, Ohio history. It was not until the following
Monday morning when Conrad failed to report to work, that the bank
checked their vault only to find the missing money along with their
missing employee. From there Conrad, and the money he stole, had a
two-day head start on law enforcement.
A year before the Cleveland bank robbery, Conrad
became obsessed with the 1968 Steve McQueen film “The Thomas Crown
Affair.” The movie was based on the bank robbery for sport by a
millionaire businessman, and Conrad saw it more than a half dozen times.
From there he bragged to his friends about how easy it would be to take
money from the bank and even told them he planned to do so.
The fugitive investigation into Theodore ‘Ted’
Conrad has perplexed many investigators over the past 50 years. Conrad
has been featured on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.
Investigators chased leads across the country, including Washington
D.C., Inglewood, California, western Texas, Oregon, and Honolulu,
Hawaii.
The case remained cold until this past week when
United States Marshals from Cleveland, Ohio travelled to Boston,
Massachusetts and positively identified Thomas Randele of Lynnfield,
Massachusetts as the fictitious name of Theodore J. Conrad. He had been
living an unassuming life in the Boston suburb since 1970. Ironically,
he moved to Boston near the location where the original Thomas Crown
Affair movie was filmed.
United States Marshals investigators from
Cleveland were able match documents that Conrad completed in the 1960s
with documents Randele completed, including documents from when Randele
filed for Bankruptcy in Boston Federal Court in 2014. Additional
investigative information led Marshals to positively identifying Thomas
Randele as Theodore J. Conrad.
Thomas Randele died of lung cancer in May of 2021
in Lynnfield, Massachusetts using a date of birth as July 10, 1947. His
real date of birth was July 10, 1949, and Conrad would have been 71 at
the time of his death.
Peter J. Elliott, United States Marshal for
Northern Ohio, stated “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. 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. We were able to match some of
the documents that my father uncovered from Conrad’s college days in the
1960s with documents from Randele that led to his identification. 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.
Additional information about the U.S. Marshals Service can be found
at http://www.usmarshals.gov.
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America’s
First Federal Law Enforcement Agency