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## Who Ashley Knew
The Thomas Randele that Ashley grew up with was, by her account, not a man defined by what he had done in 1969. He was defined by what he did in Lynnfield in the decades after.
He was a car salesman. He was a golfer. He was a husband who had filed for bankruptcy with his wife and rebuilt from it. He was a father who made lunch and drove to school and stayed for prom photos.
When Ashley found the 1969 news coverage after the NCIS confession, the young man in those photographs must have been almost unrecognizable as her father—not because the face was different but because the context was so completely at odds with the man she knew. A twenty-year-old bank teller in Cleveland in 1969 who bragged about The Thomas Crown Affair and then did it and then vanished for fifty-two years is not a person who has any obvious connection to the suburban father who never seemed to be looking over his shoulder.
“My dad is not somebody that you ever suspected would keep a secret,” she said, “let alone a secret this big.”
The conversations that followed the NCIS disclosure, in the weeks before his death, gave Ashley some of what she needed. Her father explained what he could. He had never intended, apparently, for his life to become what it became—a permanent fugitive existence sustained by a single good performance across five decades. He had run away from something. He had built something in the place he ran to. The two things were connected by his identity, but they did not feel, to the people who knew Thomas Randele, like they were the same thing.