Ashley Randele’s initial response was disbelief. Her father was not, by her description, someone who seemed to be managing a secret. He was calm. He was present. He did not look over his shoulder. “He was a very calm, nonchalant guy,” she said, “not somebody who was ever looking over his shoulder.” The disclosure seemed impossible on its face. She thought he was joking.
“Until I very quickly realized that he was not joking.”
That night, after the conversation, she searched the name Theodore Conrad online. She found 1969 news coverage of the bank theft. The story matched what her father had told her. The young man in the photographs from 1969—twenty years old, dark-haired, the kind of face that looks familiar in old photographs even when you’ve never seen it—was her father.
“I looked him up. Shocked is an understatement,” she said later. “It was crazy and also a little scary.”
The next morning, she told her father what she had found. She told him that it did not change how she felt about him.
Then there was the harder conversation: telling her mother.
Thomas Randele, in the weeks after his disclosure to Ashley, could not bring himself to tell his wife. The confession had come out in a private, sideways moment with his daughter. Telling Kathy required a different kind of direct acknowledgment. He could not do it.
Ashley did it for him. She searched her father’s birth name and let her mother read what came up. She walked her through the information the same way she had processed it herself—the search, the results, the verification of what her father had said.