Theodore John Conrad, officially dubbed one – of – America’s – most – wanted, who had stolen a hefty sum of $215,000 from the bank where he worked in 1969 and disappeared into thin air thereafter has now been located 52 years after the crime.
Theodore, then a 20-year-old bank teller, worked at the Society National Bank in Cleveland. He had stolen from the bank vault and walked out at the end of his workday on a Friday with a paperbag containing $215,000(worth around $1.7M today) and simply disappeared thereafter.
His crime was not discovered until he failed to show up for work the following week.
Since 1969 when he committed the crime, Theodore’s whereabout has been a mystery until this day. All efforts by the authorities to track him down have proved abortive including appeals on TV shows such as America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.
The U.S. Marshals would eventually resolve the crime this past week as it was revealed in a statement that Theodore John Conrad had been found.
He’d had a name change to Thomas Randele and had been residing at Lynnfield, Massachusetts, since 1970.
Authorities disclosed that Theodore was widely known to be obsessed with a film a year before he committed the crime. The film “The Thomas Crown Affair” which was released in 1968 was about a bank robbery for sport by a millionaire businessman. Theodore had boasted to friends how easy it would be to steal from the bank and also indicated he plans to do so.
The U.S. Marshals were able to finally track him down by matching documents he completed in the 1960s with recent files of Thomas Randele, including documents Randele used to file for bankruptcy in 2014.
The authorities discovered that Theodore had lived an unassuming life in the Boston suburbs for many years but died from lung cancer in May this year at the age of 71.
