One of America’s most wanted fugitives, who walked out of a bank with a paper bag full of $215,000, was identified 52 years later.
Theodore John Conrad was a 20-year-old bank teller at the Society National Bank of Cleveland when he ransacked the safe and got lost.
The theft was not revealed until he was able to report the business on Monday, worth $1.7 million in cash today. The delay gave him a two-day early start in law enforcement.
It was in 1969 that it was still a mystery, despite several detectives trying to track it down and calling TV shows like America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.
But the US Marshals Service finally resolved the cold issue this week.
It was revealed in a statement that Conrad has lived under the name Thomas Rundle in Lynfield, Massachusetts, since 1970.
They said he lived a “modest life” in a Boston suburb for years, but died of lung cancer in May at the age of 71.
The marshal tracked him down by matching documents he completed in the 1960s with other documents Randley had recently filed, including his bankruptcy filing in 2014.
Conrad was obsessed with The Thomas Crown Affair that Steve McQueen wrote the year before he was robbed and bragged to his friends how easy it was to steal from his bank.
In its statement, the US Shipping Service said it had informed them that it was planning a burglary.
Thomas Randall’s obituary He said he worked as a professional golfer at a country club in Boston, eventually became their full-time manager, and even played on the professional tour in the winter.
He later said he moved on to his career in luxury car sales and worked for decades at dealerships including Range Rover and Volvo.
Field Marshal of Northern Ohio Peter G. Elliott was one of the investigators. He said he was relieved that the mystery had been resolved because his father worked on the case and “he never stopped looking for Conrad and always wanted to close it.”
“We were able to match some of the documents my father revealed about Conrad’s college days in the 1960s with Randelli’s documents that led to his identification,” he said.
“I hope my father rests a little easier today knowing that his investigation and the United States Marshal Service have put an end to this decades-old mystery. In real life, not everything always ends like it does in the movies.”
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