CLEVELAND, Ohio – Fifty-two years ago, a young teller left his job at Society National Bank on Public Square with $215,000 in stolen cash. Within hours, he vanished.
Theodore Conrad, just 20, had pulled off one of the biggest bank heists in Cleveland history. His disappearance became one of the city’s greatest mysteries.
Federal agents from across the country tried to track down the graduate of Lakewood High School, class of 1967. Some believed he had bolted for the beaches of California, hoping to ride waves and escape Cleveland winters. Others thought he had settled in Europe. The missing cash, adjusted for inflation, would be worth about $1.7 million today.
On Friday, U.S. Marshal Peter Elliott said his office solved the mystery his father, John, had investigated decades ago: Theodore Conrad died in a suburb north of Boston in May. He was 71.
He had changed his name, and became known to many as Thomas Randele. He also changed his lifestyle and the details of his past.
He had a family, became a local golf pro and sold luxury cars. He was a fixture in a small town. The stolen money didn’t last, as he had struggled financially in recent years, records show.
In his final days, as lung cancer drained him, he admitted to his lifelong secret.
“Oh my God, I always wondered what had happened to him,” said William O’Donnell, a classmate who shared an apartment in Lakewood with Conrad for less than a year.
“We weren’t real close. I had moved to Arizona before this all had happened, and my mother would send me news clippings about it. The FBI even came to my work and talked to me. But I didn’t know anything. I thought that a young kid with that kind of money would be in Europe.”
Instead, Peter Elliott said, Conrad quietly settled into suburban Boston without a trace of his past.
“He covered his trail really well,” Elliott said. “It’s really unbelievable that he lived the way he did for so many years. He was so good at it.”
A quiet life in Cleveland
Theodore Conrad’s years in Cleveland were unassuming. He was born in Denver, the son of a Navy officer who moved his family around the country. When Edward and Ruthabeth Conrad divorced in 1958, their son Ted settled in Lakewood with his mother and sister, according to the marshals’ files. His mother remarried, and the family lived on Bonnieview Avenue on the city’s West Side.
After graduating from Lakewood High, he went off to New England College, where his father taught political science. He became freshman class president. But after his first semester, he was back in Cleveland. He later attended classes at Cuyahoga Community College.
In January 1969, he went to work at Society National Bank on Public Square. The job required Conrad to work in the bank vault. When tellers and branches needed more cash, Conrad packaged and delivered it. He had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, records show.
“To all appearances, Conrad was that All-American boy whose character was not questioned and seemed to be a model of responsibility during a turbulent time,” says a summary report of investigators’ notes that was compiled by marshals.
The report suggests there was another side of Conrad. He was secretly enthralled with deception.
He shoplifted to prove that he could do it, according to the marshals’ report. He also became consumed with the 1968 film “The Thomas Crown Affair,” the Steve McQueen movie about a bank executive who pulled off a $2.6 million bank heist.
Conrad began mimicking McQueen’s character and his high-end lifestyle. He drove an MG sports car, drank expensive gin and showed off at golf and billiards, the marshals’ report and published reports say.
“He always thought of himself as being like Steve McQueen in that movie,” said O’Donnell, Conrad’s former classmate.
Conrad told his friends how easy it would be to take money from the bank, the report says. He said that if he grabbed the money from the bank on a Friday, he would have a two-day head-start before anyone would realize there had been a robbery.
And that’s what he did.
On Friday, July 11, 1969, with his supervisor away having surgery, Conrad called a friend and said he was planning on robbing the bank that day, according to published reports and the marshals’ report. The friend didn’t believe him.
Conrad had lunch that day with his best friend, Russell Metcalf.
“I had no idea,” Metcalf said Friday. “He always said the security was lax. He said it wouldn’t be hard.”
At 4:30 p.m., Conrad was seen leaving the bank carrying a paper bag that contained a carton of Marlboros and a bottle of Canadian Club Whiskey.
He also had cash, according to authorities. That was in the form of 1,500 $100 bills, 1,200 $50s and 250 $20s, the marshals’ report says. The marshals are convinced that Conrad carried the money out that day, though authorities never detailed how he pulled off the heist.
He left his apartment on Clifton Boulevard and grabbed a cab to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. By 8:30 p.m., he was gone.
The chase
Soon after the bank reported the missing cash and Conrad failed to report for work, the FBI and the U.S. marshals began looking into him and his past. FBI agents from across the country began tracking leads, and local agents began questioning people he knew.
John Elliott, a deputy marshal, also began investigating the fugitive. He grabbed Conrad’s college applications to compare them to any future writing investigators obtained. He talked with old friends, interviewed Conrad’s family and pulled documents.
Elliott even turned over some of his work to Interpol, the global police agency. He retired from the Marshals Service in 1990, but he refused to walk away from Conrad.
“One of the reasons I stayed after this guy is that some people thought he was some kind of a hero or Robin Hood. He’s not,” John Elliott told The Plain Dealer in 2008.
“He was nothing but a thief — a young, smart-a---d thief who managed to elude law enforcement for all these years. Hopefully, we can bring him to justice soon.”
In 2003, Peter Elliott, at 39, became one of the youngest U.S. marshals in the country. He talked with his father about Conrad often, and he kept the documents the older Elliott had collected over the years. In 2020, John Elliott died. He was 83.
In the past few weeks, Peter Elliott learned of a man named Thomas Randele in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. Before he died, Randele had admitted that he was Theodore Conrad.
Elliott would not say how he found out about Randele. He said he began pulling his father’s files, as well as updated memos and old paperwork.
This week, he drove to Boston and interviewed the family. It was unmistakable.
The young teller who engineered one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland and gained international attention for it lived the life of a suburban family man on the East Coast.
“I feel good for my father,” Peter Elliott said. “This was the No. 1 case in his life. We talked about it at the dinner table all the time when I was a kid. He always said he was going to find [Conrad]. I just wish he was still here to see this.”
The man known as Thomas Randele
After the heist, authorities believed that Conrad first bolted to California or Washington, D.C., based on what he told friends in phone calls and postmarked letters. They believed he later pinballed across the country. One local couple believed they recognized him in Hawaii, according to the marshals’ report.
Elliott said he found information that shows Conrad may have first moved to the Boston area in about 1970. It is unclear when Conrad changed his name and identity.
His obituary, in the name of Randele, indicates that he taught golf at a local country club and even spent his winters in Florida, playing on a pro tour.
It says he later sold luxury cars for nearly 40 years in the Boston area. He and his wife, Kathy, got married in 1982, and they had one child, a daughter. The couple met in the early 1970s.
“I’m still grieving the loss of my husband, who was a great man,” Kathy Randele said, declining further comment.
He had friends in law enforcement, and his wife worked for the town of Lynnfield, retiring in the planning department. Like his time in Cleveland, he lived a quiet life.
The obituary offers clues that Conrad did not stray far from his past: It says Randele attended New England College, a small, liberal arts school in Henniker, New Hampshire, which is where Conrad actually attended.
It also lists his parents as Edward and Ruthabeth Randele, with his mother’s maiden name as Krueger. Those are the first names of Conrad’s parents, including his mother’s maiden name.
Metcalf, Conrad’s best friend from Lakewood, said he had heard rumors about where Conrad might be. For years, he said, there had been a great deal of speculation by the FBI and the marshals that if Conrad would reach out to anyone, it would be Metcalf.
“Say what you will about him, but Ted was a good person,” Metcalf said. “I kept hoping that I would see him, but now I’ll have to wait.”
Metcalf said he won’t recall Conrad as a thief. He will remember him for an incident in the days before the heist, when a tornado tore through Lakewood Park on July 4. Metcalf’s siblings had been at the park.
Metcalf said Conrad got in his car and drove through the park and began looking for Metcalf’s family.
“That’s how I will always remember Ted,” Metcalf said.
In U.S. District Court in Cleveland, the charges of embezzling from Society National Bank and falsifying bank records remain on paper against Conrad.
They will soon be dropped.
“Conrad was quiet,” Elliott said. “He was friendly, and he was well-known in the community. He just wasn’t who he said he was.”