“I was not going to let the world forget who my dad was,” she said, “because my dad is the guy who made my lunch every day.”
She also said, describing the moment she told him what she had found the morning after the confession: “I told him that I had looked him up and I knew what had happened in July of ’69, but that did not change how I felt about him.”
He was still her father. He had also stolen $215,000 from a bank when he was twenty and lied about who he was for the rest of his life. Both things were true simultaneously, and they remained true simultaneously, and figuring out how to hold both things at once was the work Ashley Randele took on after he died.
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## The Podcast and What Came After
In December 2023, Ashley Randele launched a podcast. It was called Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad, part of the Smoke Screen investigative series from Sony Music. The podcast’s stated purpose was twofold: to tell the full story of her father’s life, and to find out who he had been before she was born.
The second goal is the more revealing one. Everything that happened before 1982—before Ashley was born, before her parents married, before Thomas Randele had anyone depending on him to maintain the fiction—was territory she could only access by going backward. She interviewed her father’s old friends from his Cleveland years. She spoke to an ex-girlfriend. She tracked down surviving relatives. She tried to understand what had produced the twenty-year-old who put $215,000 in a paper bag and walked out of a bank on the day after his birthday.