He did not return.
The bank did not discover the loss until Monday. Conrad had not shown up for his shift. When the vault was checked and reconciled, the $215,000 gap was found. A missing-person report became a theft investigation within hours.
The money, in 1969 dollars, was a very large sum. The U.S. Marshals Service would later describe it as one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland history. Adjusted for inflation, various subsequent accounts have placed the 2021 equivalent at between $1.6 million and $1.89 million, depending on the index and comparison year used.
A warrant was issued. In September 1969, a federal grand jury indicted Conrad on charges of embezzlement and falsifying bank records. He was now not merely a missing person and a theft suspect but a federal fugitive with an indictment behind him.
By September 1969, he had been gone for two months. He was twenty years old. He had $215,000 in cash. And the world he had known in Cleveland was receding behind him.
—
## The Letters: Washington and Los Angeles
Conrad did not vanish without leaving a trace of his early movements. He wrote letters to his girlfriend in the weeks after the theft, and those letters—which survived and eventually became part of the investigative record—placed him in Washington, D.C., and then Los Angeles.
The letters are significant in several ways. They establish his approximate route: east first, then west, the classic American pattern of a young man in flight. They also establish that he was in contact with someone who knew him, that he was not entirely severed from his former life in those first weeks, and that he had some emotional connection he felt compelled to maintain even while fleeing.