In March 2021, a dying man told his daughter the truth. He was sitting with her in Massachusetts, watching NCIS on television, when he mentioned, casually at first—apparently still not quite sure he could say it out loud—that the fugitive being hunted on the screen reminded him of his own situation. His daughter thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
The man’s name, as she had known it her whole life, was Thomas Randele. He was a former golf pro and car salesman, a devoted husband, the father who had made her lunch every day and left work early to photograph her before her senior prom. He was seventy-one years old and had just received his first round of chemotherapy for lung cancer. He was not going to survive it.
And he was, as he now told her, someone else entirely.
The person he described was Theodore John Conrad, known as Ted, born in Denver on July 10, 1949. On July 11, 1969—one day after his twentieth birthday—Ted Conrad had walked out of the Society National Bank in Cleveland, Ohio, with $215,000 in cash in a paper bag. He had then vanished. For fifty-two years, federal investigators had been looking for him. And for fifty-two years, he had been living in the Boston suburbs, in an unremarkable house, raising a daughter who had no idea.
“I wish there were a bigger word for shocked,” Ashley Randele would later say.
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## Cleveland, 1969: The City and the Young Man