A woman has detailed the incredible story of discovering her ‘boring’ father was actually an escaped bank robber – after he made the astonishing confession on his deathbed.
Before her father died in 2021, Ashley Randele, 38, said she trusted him more than anyone ‘in the world’.
‘Some women trust their mothers in this way. I counted on my father.’ Ashley wrote in a first person piece to Newsweek.
She grew up believing her father Thomas Randele was a model citizen and ‘typical suburban dad’ and was completely devastated when he was diagnosed with an aggressive and incurable form of lung cancer in 2021 aged just 71.
Ashley Randele pictured with Jon Walsh and Callahan Walsh from America’s Most Wanted where she opened up about her father’s mysterious past
Ted Conrad pulled off one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland, Ohio history in 1969, making off with $215,000 at the time – which would now equate to more than $1.8 million (pictured here in 2012)
But just six weeks before his death, the loving daughter found out something that completely changed her life.
Ashley explained that in the last few months of her father’s life, she simply spent time with her parents as her father became increasingly ill – and reflected on their routine of her father lying on the couch watching their favorite shows.
‘One day we were in the living room when out of the blue he said, “Ladies, if anything should ever come up once I’m gone, I don’t want you to be blindsided, but there’s something you gotta know enough… When I moved here, I had to change my name. The authorities might still be looking for me,” she shared.
Although she initially thought it was a ‘very weird dad joke’, Ashley and mum Kathy soon realized he wasn’t messing around.
It turns out that Ashley’s father was not Thomas Randele – but actually Ted Conrad.
Although Thomas begged his daughter not to Google his name, she looked him up later that evening and was completely shocked by what she found.
Thomas – then Ted Conrad – pulled off one of the biggest bank robberies in Cleveland, Ohio history in 1969, making off with $215,000 at the time – which would now equate to more than $1.8 million.
“He had been a wanted man all my life, married to my mother for almost 40 years and never told a soul,” she recalled in disbelief.
For 52 years, Ashley’s father had been a wanted fugitive, living in Boston, Massachusetts, under a new name he created six months after the robbery with his wife and daughter.
Before her father died in 2021, Ashley, 38, said she trusted him more than anyone ‘in the world’
It turns out Ashley’s father wasn’t Thomas Randele – but Ted Conrad, and his daughter Ashley described him as ‘a typical, suburban, boring but fantastically boring dad who was like everybody’s dad’
Society National Bank in Cleveland, where Conrad worked under the name Ted Conrad and eventually stole $215,000
‘Who is this person I’ve known all my life? I almost didn’t believe it. I thought, my life is a Lifetime movie,” she recalled in a 2023 interview with Messenger.
“It was shocking and it took me a few minutes for it to sink in,” she continued.
“In the best way, he’s the typical, suburban, boring but fantastically boring dad who was kind of everybody’s dad.”
Ashley told her father that she knew what he had done – and convinced him to share the real story of his early life.
“He told me he had the opposite childhood I’d had,” she explained. ‘I was an only child who never for a moment doubted that I was looked after and wanted. He grew up with an emotionally distant military father and a mother who was quite indifferent to him.’
Ashley’s father told her that after his parents divorced, his mother remarried a man who ‘tormented him’ and told him he was ‘good for nothing’.
He later enrolled at a college in New Hampshire to be close to his father, who was a professor there, but was told to leave by his father’s new wife.
Rejected, he went back to Cleveland, where he began working as a teller at Society National Bank – the bank he would later steal the money from.
According to his friends, he had often bragged about how easily he could run out of ‘any kind of money’.
One day after his 20th birthday in July 1969, Thomas went out at closing time on a Friday with a paper bag containing the money.
A newspaper clipping of Theodore John Conrad, who changed his name to Thomas Randele in 1970
For 52 years, Ashley’s father had been a wanted fugitive, living in Boston, Massachusetts under a new name he created six months after the robbery with his wife and daughter (pictured in 2018)
By the time the missing money was discovered Monday, Thomas had fled the state — reportedly cutting off contact with his entire family, including three siblings and his parents.
Thomas changed his name in 1970 and settled in Boston, where he met his wife Kathy, and the couple lived most of their lives in a cozy suburb with Ashley.
‘I do not condone what he did. But I can understand why he couldn’t bear to feel like his existence was a burden on his family,’ Ashley admitted. ‘Why keep going if neither of his parents wanted him? Why not take the money he would need to start over?’
Ashley and her mother originally wanted to wait a year before telling authorities about her father’s true identity so they could close the case — but someone got there first.
“Someone — we still don’t know who — called a crime reporter who called Pete Elliott, the U.S. Marshal whose father had been chasing mine since the theft in 1969,” she explained.
The marshal held a press conference announcing the 52-year-old case was closed – which Ashley said was as painful as losing her father again.
“The headlines made it seem like he did it because he was a rash kid who loved the movie The Thomas Crown Affair and wanted to be cool like Steve McQueen who orchestrated a heist and got away with it,” she said.
Ashley said stalking about her father’s secret life has helped her cope with his death, and she started a podcast called Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad and appeared on America’s Most Wanted to talk about him.
“I wanted the world to know the real him,” she explained.
‘Doing the show was a way to protect him in the best way I knew how and also make sense of the lies he told to the people he loved the most. I will never stop missing him.’
“But at least now I know the Ted he was and the Tom he became,” she said.