They had one daughter, Ashley.
Ashley Randele grew up in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, with what she described as a thoroughly normal suburban childhood. Her father made her lunch. He drove her to school. He came home from work in time to take photographs with her before her senior prom. He showed up, consistently, in the ways that matter to a child.
She was, later, explicit about this: whatever else was true of her father, whatever he had been before she was born, the father she experienced was a present and devoted one. “He was still my dad and I love him,” she said after learning everything. “He’s still my favourite person in the world.”
The family’s financial situation was not, by later evidence, comfortable. In 2014, the Randeles filed for bankruptcy protection in federal court in Boston. Court records from the filing showed approximately $160,000 in credit card debt and few significant assets. The $215,000 in 1969 cash—whatever had become of it—had not produced a comfortable retirement. The Marshals Service would later note that investigators were looking into whether Conrad had lost the stolen money through bad investments in the early years. No definitive answer has emerged.
The bankruptcy filing was publicly accessible. It contained Thomas Randele’s signature. It contained the couple’s financial information. It existed in federal court records, a searchable document in the legal infrastructure of a country that maintains extensive databases of public filings.
It would eventually become one of two critical pieces of evidence that identified a dead man as a fifty-two-year fugitive.