He was a young man who did something impulsive in the way that young men sometimes do impulsive things. The scale of the impulse was unusual. The consequences were permanent. But the act itself—the paper bag, the Friday exit—was the kind of thing that a twenty-year-old convinced of his own cleverness might do, particularly one who had a specific model for it and had been rehearsing the idea in conversation for more than a year.
What he could not have done, at twenty, is fully imagine what the life he was choosing actually looked like. A fifty-two-year performance. A name he would carry until he died and then a few months beyond. Friends and a wife and a daughter who would grieve him without knowing who they were grieving, until the end, and then would have to grieve him again differently. A federal investigation that would outlast two generations of investigators and his own death.
Russell Metcalf, who knew Conrad as a twenty-year-old, said something that captures this gap precisely: “It wasn’t about the money. He always wanted to impress people.” The desire to impress is a twenty-year-old’s desire. The desire to be like Steve McQueen—cool, self-possessed, untouchable—is a young man’s desire. The execution was brilliant in some ways and completely heedless in others, as acts of self-invention by twenty-year-olds often are.
The person who walked out of the bank on July 11, 1969 was not the person who made his daughter’s lunch for thirty years. The twenty-year-old chose the exit, and the middle-aged father lived in the consequences of it. Both were Ted Conrad and Thomas Randele. Neither fully account for the other.