The content of the letters is described in available reporting as indicating stops in Washington and Los Angeles in his first week. He expressed, in at least one letter, regret about the theft. He had done something that could not be undone, and he knew it.
Whether the regret was genuine, or was the kind of statement a twenty-year-old makes to a girlfriend when he is frightened and running and trying to soften what he’s done, cannot be determined from this distance. What can be said is that the letters document a brief, fitful period of connection before Conrad went quiet and the trail went cold.
A credible sighting was reported in October 1969, when a Cleveland couple visiting Hawaii encountered a man they later believed resembled Conrad. This was the last reported sighting that investigators rated as significant. After that, the trail ended.
Conrad had apparently believed at some point that the statute of limitations would work in his favor—that if he waited long enough, roughly seven years, the criminal exposure would expire and he could return. Once he was formally indicted in federal court in September 1969, that calculation was no longer operative. Federal indictments carry no statute of limitations for the crime of bank theft as charged in his case. He could not come back.
He had, without quite intending it, committed himself to the rest of his life under a different name.
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## Building a New Identity: Boston, 1970
In early January 1970, Theodore Conrad walked into a Social Security Administration office in Boston, Massachusetts, and applied for a Social Security number.