A man who got away with robbing a bank finally confessed his crime to his family while lying on his deathbed.
"Thomas Randele", whose real name was actually Theodore Conrad, stole $215,000, which is the modern-day equivalent of $1.7 million, from the bank he used to work at back in the '60s and managed to run from the authorities for over 50 years before finally coming clean.
In March 2021, 52 years after committing the crime, he finally confessed to his wife, Kathy, and daughter, Ashley that he had been on the run from the police and had been using a fake identity to do so.
"We were watching TV and he said, 'You know, ladies, when I moved here, I changed my name,'" Ashley said as per an interview with Business Insider. "'And the authorities are probably still looking for me. I don't want you to be blindsided.'"
Of course, this came as a shock to the two women who would have never suspected that their husband and father would be involved in such a massive case.
At the time, her father asked her not to dig any deeper into the case, but naturally, she had a lot of questions. Three years later, she has now dedicated a six-part podcast titled 'Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad' which tells the story of the notorious heist.
"It doesn't make me love him any less," Ashley said, stating that just because he may have committed a crime, he was still a great figure in her life.
"When you Google Thomas Randele or Ted Conrad, all you see is a vault teller who stole money and a fugitive who was caught after dying," she said. "But he was an amazing husband and father."
While the 38-year-old said that she did not "condone what [her] dad did", she hoped she could "protect" her dad's legacy by showing the human side of a man who, she said, "was boring in all the right ways."
"But, when you're 20, you can make some choices that you don't think all the way through," she added.
So what did Theodore do with the money?
Well, according to Ashley, by the time he came to marrying her mother, most of the money was gone. Her dad had made some pretty bad investments at a young age, and none of them ever paid off.
"I found out that he had made some investments that went wrong," she said, adding that he had also got himself into debt but this was most likely related to medical bills the family had to pay after her mom developed cancer.
After giving himself a fresh start, he settled down in life.
"I never heard him raise his voice," Ashley said. "He was just so kind, soft-spoken, and charismatic. The moment he walked into a room, you knew he was there."
In 2021, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer and made the subsequent confession while undergoing chemotherapy, and tragically just five weeks later, he passed away.
While his wife was planning on telling the authorities, it seems as though there was a tip-off given to them and they ended up paying the family a visit.
"They said, 'We need to talk to you about your husband and your father,'" Kathy explained to the outlet. "They said, 'You are not in trouble — but we do need to have a conversation.'"
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