Obviously, you can never really know your parents as the people they truly are. They’re your mom and dad, meaning there’s always going to be a barrier of sorts there, no matter how close you are as a family. Still, no one could have prepared Ashley Randele for finding out the truth of her dad’s secret criminal life, which Tom Randele only confessed to his daughter on his deathbed.
Tom Randele died from lung cancer in 2021.
As far as his daughter Ashley knew, her dad was a longtime car salesman — that’s how he made his living. Or so she thought.
She was close to her dad, who was 71 when he passed away. Maybe that’s why she was even more shocked when he told her that not only was his real name Ted Conrad, not Tom Randele, but that he had a whole other life she never knew about.
He made her promise not to do her own research or tell anyone.
While it’s clear Ashley Randele broke that promise, she was eager to hear what her dad had to say. Speaking on the “Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad” podcast, Ashley recalled the conversation they shared.
“He said, ‘If I tell you, you have to promise you will not look into it. I don’t want you looking into anything. I don’t want you telling anybody,’” she shared.
That’s when her dad told her that he was involved in one of the biggest unsolved bank heists in America in 1969.
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Ooh, this is juicy!
Basically, Tom Randele — sorry, Ted Conrad — was working as a bank teller at Society. National Bank in Cleveland, Ohio in July 1969. While there, he had access to the vaults, and it wasn’t long before managers noticed that $215,000 was missing.
To avoid getting caught, Conrad fled to Lynnfield, Massachusetts, where he met his wife and became a dad. He also changed his name to complete new new life.
He was never caught, which is pretty amazing.
Ashley Randele was too curious not to look into things.
She said in the podcast that she managed to track down her dad’s friends and old girlfriends in Cleveland to find out more.
“I’m alone in my childhood bedroom, and I Googled ‘Ted Conrad missing,’ and the first thing that came up said something like, ‘Vault teller robs bank’,” she told CNN.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is my dad, and there were hundreds and hundreds of articles about him.”
It wasn’t long before police came knocking.
Ashley and her mom planned to tell authorities themselves what they discovered, but someone else had already sent her dad’s obituary in, having made the connection between Tom Randele and Ted Conrad.
However, authorities assured her that, given the circumstances, no charges would be filed.
Ashley, however, is still surprised at what she learned. “He was always so relaxed and easy-going. I would never have guessed how many secrets he had,” she said.
