When the identification was made in 2021, Metcalf spoke to reporters. He said that he had believed Conrad’s boasts about the bank but that everyone else had dismissed them. “He bragged to his friends,” Metcalf told the Associated Press, though they hadn’t believed him. He also said, separately: “Ted was a good person.” He said he had hoped to see him again.
This is not the statement of someone who felt betrayed by a friend. It is the statement of someone who had been carrying an unresolved loss for fifty years and was now getting a partial answer. The partial answer—he lived as Thomas Randele, he raised a family, he died of lung cancer—was not the reunion Metcalf had apparently imagined. But it was an answer.
Conrad’s family in Cleveland had largely lost track of him as well. He had cut off contact with his family after the theft—with three siblings, with his divorced parents, with the network of Ohio relatives who had known him as a child. Some of them had presumed him dead. His nephew, Matt Boettger, said after the identification that his mother—Conrad’s sister—was “relieved to learn he had lived a happy life.” This is a remarkable response, given the circumstances. It is also a very human one. The alternative to the relief is the horror of a life truly wasted.
The Conrad who cut off his family in 1969 was twenty years old and frightened and running. Whether the eventual rebuilding of a life in Massachusetts made that severance worthwhile—whether fifty-two years as Thomas Randele was worth losing the people he had grown up with—is not a calculation that can be made from outside. It was not made from outside. It was made by a young man in July 1969, and he lived with the consequences of it until May 2021.