The cash he took—$215,000—would have been paper currency. A hundred thousand dollars in twenties is roughly a thousand bills, weighing a little over two pounds. Two hundred fifteen thousand dollars in a mixture of denominations is manageable in terms of volume. A paper bag, the kind used for grocery shopping or takeout food, could hold it. Conrad walked out with what appeared to be, to any casual observer, a paper bag.
He did not rush. He did not run. Available reporting describes him leaving at the end of his shift. The vault was reconciled against the prior week’s figures over the course of the following workday—a two-day gap between the moment the money left the building and the moment its absence was formally documented.
Two days is a long time to be gone.
—
## What Conrad Could Not Have Known
There are things that were probably true of Ted Conrad’s thinking in July 1969 that the available record suggests, though not with certainty.
He apparently believed the statute of limitations would eventually extinguish the criminal exposure. This is a credible belief for someone with no legal training in 1969. Statutes of limitations exist for most crimes. The logic—wait it out, come back—makes a kind of intuitive sense to someone who doesn’t understand the specific rules of federal criminal law as they applied to bank embezzlement and falsification of records.
What Conrad did not know, or did not fully reckon with, was that the federal indictment in September 1969 changed the nature of his exposure. Once indicted, the clock on any statute of limitations effectively stopped. A federal bank embezzlement warrant combined with an active indictment had no expiration date. The case would stay open until it was closed by resolution—his death, his capture, or his surrender. There was no seven-year window that would make him safe to return.