“The three of us were able to have some really difficult, but good, conversations over the next few weeks,” Ashley said.
Thomas Randele—Ted Conrad—died on May 18, 2021, in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. He was seventy-one years old. His golf friends and dealership coworkers had come to his home to say goodbye before he died. A line stretched outside the funeral home at his service a week later.
Ashley and her mother made a decision after his death: they would wait approximately a year before contacting law enforcement to report what they had learned. They were grieving. They were processing. They were still figuring out what it meant that the man they had known and loved had been someone else for fifty-two years before he told them.
They never had to make the call.
—
## November 2021: The Door Knock
On a day in November 2021, approximately six months after Thomas Randele died, there was a knock at the door of the Randele family home in Lynnfield.
Ashley remembered that knock as “terrifying.”
U.S. Marshals Service investigators had traveled to Massachusetts the week before the official announcement. They had confirmed that Thomas Randele had lived in Lynnfield under what they now believed was a fictitious name. They had compared documents. They had reviewed the 2014 bankruptcy filing. They had compared signatures. They were not uncertain.
When they came to the door, Ashley and her mother already knew who they were and what they were there about. They confirmed what the investigators had concluded.