The path from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles to Boston is established in broad outline and unestablished in detail. Whether Conrad drove, flew, or took other transportation; whether he stopped in other cities; whether he encountered anyone who might have identified him—none of this is part of the public record. The letters to his girlfriend established two waypoints. What happened between them is not known.
The inner experience of fifty-two years of maintaining a false identity is not recoverable. The conversations Conrad had with himself across those decades—whether the secret felt like a wound or whether it had healed over into something manageable—are not available from outside. Ashley’s description of a father who was not visibly anxious, who did not look over his shoulder, who was calm and present—this is the external report of someone who did not know there was an inside to report on. What was actually happening in Conrad’s mind, from July 1969 to March 2021, is not knowable.
The decision not to turn himself in at any point—not when the statute of limitations he had counted on turned out not to exist, not when he married and had a daughter, not when the case was featured on America’s Most Wanted, not when he filed for bankruptcy and signed his name on a public document in federal court—is a series of choices whose internal logic is not fully visible. He apparently came close, at the end, to something like disclosure—the NCIS conversation, the confession to his daughter. But the complete surrender that would have resolved the case differently, that would have allowed him to face consequences rather than dying with them unacknowledged publicly, did not happen.