In the morning, she told him what she had found and told him it had not changed how she felt about him.
He could not bring himself to have the same conversation with his wife.
—
## The Month Between Confession and Death
March 2021 to May 2021 is approximately nine weeks. In those nine weeks, Thomas Randele—Theodore Conrad—underwent additional chemotherapy, continued to decline from lung cancer, and had the conversations with his wife and daughter that were the only human resolution the case would ever have.
What exactly was said in those conversations is not fully documented in the public record. Ashley has described them as “really difficult, but good.” She said the three of them—Thomas, Kathy, and Ashley—were able to talk in ways that had not been possible before the disclosure. She said both she and her mother told him they still loved him, that he had been a good father and husband.
This is not a resolution in any legal or investigative sense. It is a family resolution—the kind that is personal and private and belongs to the people in the room. The Marshals Service was not part of those conversations. The Society National Bank that was robbed in 1969 was not represented. The Elliotts, father and son, who had spent their professional lives trying to find this man, did not know these conversations were happening.
Conrad died on May 18, 2021. He died with whatever peace or lack of it accompanies a life’s end in these circumstances. He had told the people closest to him who he was. He had, apparently, received from them the forgiveness or at least the sustained love that he had perhaps feared losing if he told them earlier. He died in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, the town where he had lived for fifty years.