TRUE IDENTITY

Dad Makes Deathbed Confession to Being Fugitive Bank Robber

He told his daughter he’d been living a lie for 52 years.

A woman discovered in the days before her car salesman father’s death that he was actually a bank robber who’d been on the run from the law for decades, she told a podcast this week. Ashley Randele says the father she knew as Tom Randele did not reveal that he was really Ted Conrad—the mastermind of one of America’s most notorious unsolved bank heists—until just before his death at the age of 71 from lung cancer in May 2021. “I thought I knew my dad but that was before I found out he’d been a fugitive for decades,” Ashley told podcast “Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad” in an episode released Monday. In 1969, Conrad swiped $215,000—worth around $1.8 million today—from the Society National Bank where he worked as a teller in Cleveland, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. He then fled with the money, leaving all his friends and family behind, and began a new life under a fake name.