LYNNFIELD, MASS. (WHDH) - A man who successfully executed one of the largest bank robberies in Cleveland, Ohio history was identified as a man who moved to Massachusetts decades ago.
On July 11, 1969, 20-year-old Theodore John Conrad walked into his job as a bank teller at the Society National Bank in Cleveland and walked out with $215,000 — the equivalent of $1.7 million today, according to the US Marshal’s Office
It was not until the following Monday morning when Conrad failed to report to work, that the bank checked their vault only to find the missing money and Conrad nowhere to be found.
Those who knew Conrad said that a year before the robbery, he had become obsessed with the 1968 Steve McQueen film “The Thomas Crown Affair” in which a millionaire businessman robs a bank. He allegedly bragged to his friends about how easy it would be to take money from the bank and even told them he planned to do so.
Over the course of five decades, investigators followed leads across the country, including Washington D.C., Inglewood, California, western Texas, Oregon, and Honolulu, Hawaii.
This week, it was discovered that he had actually been living a modest life in Lynnfield, Massachusetts for more than 40 years under the name Thomas Randele.
Investigators were able to match documents he had filled out in the sixties as Conrad with documents Randele completed, including documents from when Randele filed for Bankruptcy in Boston Federal Court in 2014.
Randele died of lung cancer in May of 2021 at the age of 71.
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