A bank robber who disappeared after stealing $250,000 from an Ohio bank was identified last week as a man who lived in a suburb of Boston.
Experts were able to identify Theodore Conrad, who worked at the Society National Bank in Cleveland in 1969, as the since-deceased Thomas Randele by comparing his signature from the 1960s to a bankruptcy case in 2014. John Elliott, a U.S. Marshal from Cleveland, was tasked with investigating Conrad’s alleged robbery of his place of employment decades ago, and his son, Peter Elliott, took over the case after his death.
“My father never stopped searching for Conrad and always wanted closure up until his death in 2020,” Elliott said in a Friday news release from the U.S. Marshals Service. “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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In 1969, Conrad, then 20, walked out the door of the bank where he worked with $215,000 in a paper bag, according to the news release. It took bank employees two days to realize that a crime, allegedly inspired by The Thomas Crown Affair, an obsession of Conrad’s, had occurred, the U.S. Marshals said.
“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,” the statement read. “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.”
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Conrad’s story went unsolved for 52 years and was featured on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.
Randele died of lung cancer this May in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, using a date of birth of July 10, 1947, despite his real date of birth being July 10, 1949, according to the news release. Conrad would have been 71 at the time of his death.
