When he says “the signatures matched,” he is describing the judgment of someone who had spent years on this case, who knew Conrad’s biographical history in unusual detail, and who saw in the comparison something that went beyond general resemblance. It was enough to bring federal investigators to Massachusetts for confirmation, and it was enough to produce a closed case file in November 2021.
The irony of this—that a signature Conrad wrote as a twenty-year-old on a college application became the instrument of his posthumous identification—is not lost on the people who tell this story. Conrad had attended New England College for one semester, had left, and had apparently not imagined that the paperwork of that brief enrollment would persist as a potentially identifying document for fifty years.
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## The Bankruptcy as Evidence
The 2014 bankruptcy filing by Thomas and Kathy Randele in federal court in Massachusetts is significant for two reasons.
The first is what it reveals about the state of the couple’s finances. The filing listed approximately $160,000 in credit card debt and few significant assets. This is, on its face, not consistent with a person who had successfully laundered and invested $215,000 stolen in 1969. The 1969 money, if it had been invested in a diversified portfolio of index funds—a vehicle that wasn’t widely available to individual investors in that form until the 1980s—might have grown to a substantial sum by 2014. If it had been spent in the first years of the escape, it was long gone.