For more than 50 years, a man in the US kept a secret that not even his family knew until just before his death – he was a fugitive wanted over a bank robbery.
For more than 50 years, a man in the US kept a secret that not even his family knew until just before his death – he was a fugitive wanted over a bank robbery. J ust before Thomas Randele died, his wife of nearly 40 years asked his golfing friends and his co-workers from the dealerships where he sold cars to come to their home. They gathered to say goodbye to a man they called one of the nicest people they had ever known – a devoted family man who gushed about his daughter, a golfer who never bent the rules, a friend to so many that a line stretched outside the funeral home a week later. By the time of their final visit last May at Randele’s house in suburban Boston, the cancer in his lungs had taken away his voice. So they all left without knowing that their friend who they had spent countless hours swapping stories with never told them his biggest secret of all. For the past 50 years, he was a fugitive wanted over one of the largest bank robberies in Cleveland’s history, living in Boston under a new name he created six months after the heist in the summer of 1969. Not even his wife or daughter knew until he told them in what authorities described as a deathbed confession. How he was able to leave behind one family and create a new life – while evading a father and son from the US Marshals Service who never gave up their hunt – is just now being pieced together. Ted Conrad quickly worked out that security was fairly loose at the Society National Bank in Cleveland after he started as a teller in January 1969. He told his friends it would be easy to rob the place, said Russell Metcalf, his best friend from high school. A day after his 20th birthday that July, Conrad walked out with 215,000 dollars from the vault, a haul worth 1.6 million dollars (£1.2 million) today.
