Jerry Healy, who talked with Randele daily for years, said he never suspected anything and described him as “gentle, polite, well-spoken.” None of this is the vocabulary of a man in whom colleagues sensed tension or evasiveness. He had, in the car business as in the golf world, built a reputation that rested on the experience of knowing him directly.
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## Lynnfield, Massachusetts
Lynnfield is a town of roughly twelve thousand residents located approximately sixteen miles north of Boston, in Essex County. It is the kind of suburb that formed in the postwar decades: residential streets lined with colonial revival houses on modest lots, a few commercial strips, the kind of local geography that is recognizable to anyone who grew up in a northeastern American suburb in the second half of the twentieth century.
It is not a wealthy town in the way that some Boston suburbs are wealthy. It is not Weston or Lincoln or Carlisle. It is comfortable working-class and lower-middle-class, the kind of place where a car salesman and a golf club manager could afford a house and raise a family without conspicuousness in either direction.
It is also, as has been noted, approximately sixteen miles from the city where The Thomas Crown Affair was filmed. Whether this proximity was a deliberate choice—a way of staying, as Peter Elliott suggested, connected to the world of the film that had inspired the escape—or whether it was the kind of biographical coincidence that becomes meaningful in retrospect is genuinely unknowable. Boston was a large metropolitan area with abundant entry-level employment in the early 1970s. A young man arriving with a new Social Security number and a need for work might have chosen the Boston area for entirely practical reasons and ended up in Lynnfield for equally practical ones—rent, employment, the accident of where he found a room.