Dad Was Dying. His Shocking Confession Solved an Infamous Crime

How well can you really know someone?

If you'd asked me that a few years ago, I'd have said that everyone probably has a couple of people they know nearly as well as they know themselves.

For me, that would have included my Dad. But that's before I found out he was a fugitive who had been hiding in plain sight in our sleepy Massachusetts town.

My Dad and I were incredibly close. He worked long hours in the car business, but he always made time for me.

When I was little, he was the guy who killed the spiders in my room, the guy I could talk to when I was sad or scared. He made a point to drop me off at school, just to have that ten minutes with me, singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" together.

Once I grew up, he moved me into my first apartment on the Upper West Side, gave me advice on my career, and brought me ice cream when I was heartbroken. Some women rely on their mothers this way. I counted on my Dad.

He was the person I trusted most in the world.

All that changed in the Spring of 2021, when time started running out.

My Dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer and I moved home to care for him. I made sure he ate and was comfortable.

There was no cure. Losing him was inevitable. So spending all our time together, watching our favorite shows, with him lying on the couch, became our routine.

One day, we were in the living room, when he said out of the blue: "Ladies, just in case something ever comes up once I'm gone, I don't want you to be blindsided, but there's something you should probably know... When I moved here, I had to change my name. The authorities might still be looking for me."

In that moment, I thought he was telling a very weird Dad joke. That would have been classic Dad to try to lighten his death with something he thought was funny.

But overnight, it dawned on me that maybe he wasn't joking. Maybe my Dad had been keeping a terrible secret all this time. All of the 35 years I'd been his confidante.

So the next day, when it was just the two of us, I told him we needed to talk. He looked scared. Like he really didn't want to have this conversation. I told him, I am your daughter, and I deserve to know your name. I deserve to know my name.

He looked pained. He told me his name was Ted but wouldn't tell me his last name until I asked for it.

Finally, he said: "Conrad."

He made me promise not to look into it. And I said I wouldn't. I think he didn't want me to have to carry his secret as well, but deep down I knew that wasn't fair to me or to my Mum.

We had to know the truth.

Later that night, alone in my childhood bedroom, I Googled Ted Conrad. I nearly fell off my bed when I read that Ted Conrad was a vault teller who walked out of Society National Bank with a paper bag full of cash.

The amount? The equivalent of $1.8 million today. My Dad had been featured on "America's Most Wanted", and he was right: The U.S. Marshals were still looking for him.

He'd been a wanted man my whole life, married to my Mum for nearly 40 years, and never told a soul.

Thing is, I'd always been the one he told his secrets to, so it was particularly shocking to me.

I was the one he came to to borrow thousands of dollars when the family finances got tight. He told me—not my Mum—the truth about a heart episode he had while driving that left him in a ditch.

So with something this important, I couldn't believe he had hidden it from me.

The next day, I told my Dad I knew what had happened. That the crime he committed in 1969 didn't change how I felt about him. I loved him regardless but we had to be able to talk about this.

When he finally opened up about his life before becoming Tom Randele, it was like meeting him for the first time.

He told me that he had the opposite childhood I had had. I was an only child who never doubted for a moment that I was cared for and wanted. He grew up with an emotionally distant military father, and a mom who was fairly indifferent to him.

Eventually, his parents divorced. His mother had remarried a man who tormented him. His stepfather told him every day that he was "good for nothing." Nothing Ted did was right.

He was just a kid. How did that not break him completely? And his mother just turned a blind eye.

After high school, he enrolled in a college in New Hampshire where his father was a professor to be near him, but within a semester, his father's new French wife told him: "I don't want your kid around. We have our own life. Tell him to leave."

So my Dad's father asked him to quit school. After that, Ted went back home to Cleveland to face the rejection he'd tried to escape.

I cannot imagine that kind of betrayal from both of his parents. He told me he spiraled after that.

So when he landed a job at the local bank as the vault teller, he started daydreaming about starting over. In the years since his heist, people have speculated it was a rash decision to steal the money.

But in the course of reporting for my podcast "My Fugitive Dad", we discovered it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment crime. He planned it and even went with his girlfriend at the time to the social security office to see how hard it would be to get a new card and rename himself.

I don't condone what he did. But I can understand why he couldn't stand to feel like his existence was a burden to his family. Why stick around if neither of his parents wanted him? Why not take the money he needed to start over?

My Dad passed away about a month after he confessed to me. He seemed relieved to have finally unburdened himself. But I was devastated. It's like we ran out of time to make sense of things before he was gone.

Mum and I had decided that we would wait a year before letting the authorities know that they could close the case, but someone beat us to the punch.

Someone—we still don't know who—called a crime reporter who called Pete Elliott, the U.S. Marshal whose father had been chasing mine since the 1969 heist.

After that tip, U.S. Marshals unexpectedly showed up on our doorstep. My Dad had been gone less than six months.

Soon after, the Marshals held a press conference announcing the closing of the 52-year-old case. It made the national news, and brought reporters to our front yard in droves.

The headlines made it seem like he did it because he was some rash kid who loved the movie The Thomas Crown Affair, and wanted to be cool like Steve McQueen who'd orchestrated a robbery and gotten away with it.

The onslaught of headlines made me feel like I was losing Dad all over again. Back then, if you went online to look up the name I knew him by—"Tom Randele"—you'd get article after article about Theodore Conrad's crime.

It was as though my Dad was being erased by one day of his life back in July of 1969.

Until I met Jonathan Hirsch, my co-host for our podcast, "My Fugitive Dad," I had never spoken publicly about him or his past, but it was impossible for me to sit quietly and let my Dad be lost. I wanted the world to know the real him.

Making the show was a way of protecting him the best way I knew how and also making sense of the lies he told to the people he loved most. I'll never stop missing him.

But at least now, I know the Ted he was and the Tom he became.

Ashley Randele is a co-host of the "Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad" podcast. Listeners can subscribe on The Binge from Sony Music Entertainment, as well as all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

All views expressed are the author's own.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? Email the My Turn team at myturn@newsweek.com.