LYNNFIELD, Mass. — Officials with the U.S. Marshals Service on Friday identified a Lynnfield man who died in May as the robber responsible for one of the most notorious bank heists in Cleveland’s history, WFXT reported.
In the decades since 20-year-old Theodore “Ted” John Conrad walked out of his job at the Society National Bank in Cleveland with a paper bag filled with $215,000 -- equivalent to more than $1.7 million in 2021 -- the robbery has perplexed investigators. Over the years, the case was featured on shows including “America’s Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries.” Officials said they chased down leads from Honolulu, to Texas, to Washington, D.C., in hopes of finding Conrad.
The case broke this past week when marshals from Cleveland traveled to Boston and identified Thomas Randele as Conrad using documents he had completed in the 1960s and others he completed in 2014, according to officials and WFXT. U.S. marshals said Conrad died in May of lung cancer while using a birth date of July 10, 1947. His actual birthdate was July 10, 1949, officials said.
Feds say they have just solved a decades-old bank robbery involving an "unassuming" man from Lynnfield,inspired by a Steve McQueen movie. https://t.co/lEUi1KtsOu
— Boston 25 News (@boston25) November 12, 2021
A year before the bank heist, officials said Conrad became obsessed with the 1968 movie “The Thomas Crown Affair” starring Steve McQueen. In the film, McQueen played the movie’s titular character, a millionaire businessman who believed he had pulled off the perfect crime with a $2.6 million bank robbery.
Investigators said that Conrad watched the movie more than a half dozen times and that afterward, he bragged to friends that it would be easy to take money from the bank he worked at as a bank teller. Officials said he even told some friends that he planned to do as much.
It wasn’t until two days after Conrad walked away from Society National Bank with his stolen cash that he failed to report to work, according to U.S. Marshals. Bank officials then checked their vault and discovered the missing money, officials said.
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Authorities determined that in 1970, Conrad settled into an “unassuming life” in Lynnfield, not far from the area where the “The Thomas Crown Affair” was filmed, WFXT reported.
Peter Elliott, the U.S. marshal for northern Ohio, said in a statement Friday that he was familiar with the Conrad case through his father, John Elliott, who worked as a deputy U.S. marshal in Cleveland from 1969 until 1990.
“My father took an interest in this case early because Conrad lived and worked near us in the late 1960s,” he said. “My father never stopped searching for Conrad and always wanted closure up until his death in 2020.”
Elliott said that the documents which led to Conrad’s identification included some that his father uncovered in the 1960s.
“I hope my father is resting a little easier today knowing his investigation and his United States Marshals Service brought closure to this decades-long mystery,” he said. “Everything in real life doesn’t always end like in the movies.”
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