A 20 year old bank teller stole $215,000 in cash and vanished without a trace. Five decades later on his deathbed, he told his daughter and made her promise never to look up his real name. Two years after he died, she launched a podcast that told his entire secret to the world.
– Theodore "Ted" Conrad worked as a vault teller at Society National Bank in Cleveland, Ohio, starting in 1969.
– On July 11, 1969, he finished his shift, stuffed $215,000 in cash into a paper bag, and walked out. He was never seen as Ted Conrad again.
– The sum would be worth roughly $1.8 MILLION today. Investigators chased leads across the country for decades; his case was featured on "America's Most Wanted" and "Unsolved Mysteries."
– Conrad resurfaced under a new identity, Thomas Randele, in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, sold luxury cars, married, and raised a daughter, Ashley, who knew nothing of his past.
– In March 2021, dying of lung cancer, he told Ashley he'd had to change his name decades earlier, and that authorities were "probably still looking" for him.
– He agreed to give her his real name on one condition: she had to promise never to look into it.
– She agreed. She broke that promise within hours, searching his name that same night and finding hundreds of articles about a bank teller wanted since 1969.
– Conrad died two months later, at 71, having evaded capture for 52 years. He was never arrested.
– In late 2023, Ashley released everything she'd found in a podcast called "Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad," turning her father's private confession into a full public investigation.
He asked her to keep his secret buried forever. Two years later, she turned it into a podcast instead.