Pete Elliott’s comment—”Everything in real life doesn’t always end like in the movies”—applies here in a very specific way. Thomas Crown, in the 1968 film, escapes cleanly. He is not caught. He is perhaps outfoxed, perhaps not, but he retains his dignity and his autonomy and his cool. The film is satisfying in the way that entertainments about stylish criminals are often satisfying: the world bends around the protagonist’s cleverness, and the ending is appropriately ambiguous.
Ted Conrad’s ending was not ambiguous and was not satisfying in the movie sense. He died in a hospital or at home in Lynnfield from lung cancer at seventy-one. He was identified posthumously from an obituary listing a birthday two years off from his real one. His daughter launched a podcast to tell the story of who he was. His wife declined interview requests and grieved privately.
The money is unaccounted for. The case is closed. The father made lunch every day.
These things are all true simultaneously, and they resist the tidiness of a single framing. The story of Ted Conrad and Thomas Randele is not a triumph, not a tragedy in the classical sense, not a cautionary tale about the wages of crime, and not a vindication of a man who made one terrible choice and then lived decently ever after. It is all of those things imperfectly, simultaneously, in the way that real lives are imperfect and simultaneous.
Ashley Randele has said she does not want the world to forget who her father was. What she wants remembered is not the paper bag or the Friday afternoon or the federal warrant. What she wants remembered is the lunch.