Whether there were any other contacts—any phone calls, any messages, any attempts to reach family members or friends in Ohio during the decades that followed—is not established in the public record. Ashley’s description of her father’s general bearing does not suggest a man who was actively suppressing ongoing connections to his past. It suggests a man who had largely completed the work of becoming someone else and who had done it thoroughly enough that the someone else felt real and stable.
The three siblings in Ohio, and the divorced parents—the people who had known Ted Conrad from childhood—lost him entirely. His nephew Matt Boettger’s statement that his mother “was relieved to learn he had lived a happy life” implies that the family had spent the intervening decades with no information at all—not a letter, not an anonymous phone call, not a card at Christmas with no return address. He was simply gone, and the family had absorbed the loss in whatever way families absorb disappearances that are never explained.
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## On Being Twenty
The age at which Theodore Conrad stole $215,000 from the Society National Bank is not incidental to understanding the case.
Twenty years old is a very specific developmental moment. The psychology of the twenty-year-old is oriented differently from the psychology of the forty-year-old or the sixty-year-old. Risk assessment is different; the concept of future consequences is more abstract; the gap between an imagined action and its real-world weight is wider. A twenty-year-old who has watched The Thomas Crown Affair six times, who has been bragging to his friends about how easy bank theft would be, who has a supervisor absent for surgery on a Friday afternoon—this is not a person doing actuarial calculations about the value of fifty years of freedom against the excitement of a criminal act.