My father’s shocking deathbed confession made me question everything I thought I knew about our lives

Ashley Randele paints a simple picture of her childhood in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, an unassuming suburb of Boston, where she was raised by parents who were about ‘as ordinary’ as they come.

Her father, Tom Randele, who made a modest living selling cars, doted on his only child but there were no extravagant trips to Disney or flashy birthday parties.

He showed his love in subtler ways such as putting on silly voices when he read stories at bedtime or never missing the chance to drive her to school.

‘I don’t mean this in a bad way but he was just a typical, average, boring dad,’ Ashley, now 39, told the Daily Mail.

So, it would be an understatement to say Randele’s deathbed confession – that in his youth he had robbed a bank of the equivalent of $1.7million in today’s money and since lived his life on the run – came as a monumental shock.

The revelation made Ashley and her mother, Kathy, a housewife, question everything they knew about the life they’d shared with him.

At the same time, they were terrified that the law would finally track him down more than 50 years after he committed the crime, leaving them to deal with the fallout.

Ashley, who shared her story in the recent podcast My Fugitive Dad on Sony’s The Binge, said that she had rarely asked Randele about his past while growing up.

As far as she knew, his parents had died in a car accident in another state when he was 18. He had moved to Massachusetts soon afterwards because he needed a fresh start.

Pictured: Ashley Randele and her father, Tom, who died in May 2021. Tom made a deathbed confession that he was a fugitive who had robbed a bank at the age of 20

Pictured: Randele reading a story book to his only child, Ashley, when she was small. She described herself as a ‘Daddy’s girl’

‘I knew it would have been painful for him, so I didn’t ask for details,’ Ashley recalled. ‘But I was touched when he said my paternal grandmother was a talented musician like me.’

By contrast, Kathy, who married Randele in 1982, came from a big family so Ashley was able to spend time with relatives on her mother’s side. She said she ‘felt sorry’ for her father because he didn’t have siblings or cousins of his own.

She described herself as a ‘Daddy’s Girl’ who treasured the moments they spent together, especially because Randele worked long hours, making them ‘qualitative, not quantitative’.

‘He was extremely charismatic, and I never once heard him raise his voice,’ she said. ‘He lit up the room when he appeared and I was so proud to call him my father.’

Meanwhile, he tried to protect her from life’s harsh realities, especially when Kathy developed breast cancer in 1996 when Ashley was just 11. He took it upon himself to care for his wife, without disclosing the severity of the situation.

It was only once Kathy was beginning to recover that Randele — who had faced his own health challenges in middle age, including a quadruple heart bypass — told Ashley that they had paid out of pocket for her medical care because her experimental cancer drug was not covered by insurance.

Ashley accidentally discovered the family’s financial hardship in her early 20s when her father’s credit card was rejected at a store where she was buying a mattress for college.

She called the bank to inquire about the issue and heard an automatic message saying the balance was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debit.

‘I was horrified,’ she said. ‘But Dad told me to go ahead and buy the bed anyway because everybody needs something to sleep on.’

Soon after, the Ashley, who works in retail and fashion, loaned him $10,000 to help cover household bills. But it wasn’t enough to prevent Randele from filing for bankruptcy in 2014. Court records showed they had $160,000 in credit card debt and few assets.

The family struggled in the aftermath but eventually seemed to find an even keel — only for it to capsize again when Randele was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in early 2021 at the age of 71.

Pictured: Randele with his wife, Kathy, at their home in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, during their 41-year marriage. She didn’t know about his criminal past until a few weeks before his death

Pictured: Ashley was very close to her father who sold cars for a living. ‘He was extremely charismatic, and I never once heard him raise his voice,’ she says

Pictured: Ashley and her father when she was growing up in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, unaware that he was on the run for bank robbery

Doctors, who gave him just a few months to live, advised Ashley and Kathy to make him as comfortable as possible at home. 

‘Dad would lie on his favorite spot on the couch while we talked about old times,’ Ashley said.

The routine included watching TV shows together, including Randele’s favorite crime series, NCIS. Ashley can’t remember the exact episode they were watching when her father dropped his bombshell but the plot involved a character using an alias.

He waited until the commercial break before saying: ‘You know, ladies, when I moved here, I changed my name.’ Then he added, ‘The authorities are probably still looking for me, so I don’t want you to be blindsided.’

At first, she thought it was some terrible Dad joke. ‘I remember thinking: “We’re in an emotionally dark place right now but this isn’t funny.”’ she said.

When she asked him to elaborate, he refused and said it was time to move the conversation along.

Ashley couldn’t stop thinking about the strange announcement. She broached the subject when they were alone the next day, saying: ‘My legal name is Randele, but I deserve to know if it’s real.’

He clearly didn’t want to tell her but eventually gave in. His birth name was Theodore ‘Ted’ Conrad, he said, and made her promise not to look into it any further.

‘I’m a curious person and couldn’t leave it at that,’ Ashley told the Daily Mail. ‘Of course, I went to my computer and Googled the name.’

She stayed up into the early hours of the morning reading the results. Unbelievably, the internet had thrown out countless news stories about Conrad being the prime suspect in a bank heist in Cleveland, Ohio, in the summer of 1969.

At the time, the 20-year-old bank teller had made off with $215,000 in cash — the equivalent of more than $1.7million today — hidden in brown paper bags at the end of the working week.

Security was so lax that the robbery at the Society National Bank was only discovered the following Monday when the manager noticed the money missing from the vault.

Conrad, whose close friends told the media that he had once boasted about how easy it would be to steal from the bank, appeared on America’s Most Wanted. He was reportedly sighted as far away from Cleveland as Washington DC, Los Angeles and Hawaii.

Pictured: A 1969 newspaper article about the bank heist which names Ted Conrad — aka Tom Randele — as the chief suspect

Pictured: One of the ‘Wanted’ photographs released by US Marshals in 1969 during their hunt for Ted Conrad

Then, much to the frustration of the US marshals — particularly the deputy in charge of the case, John Elliott — the trail went cold.

Ashley, who recognized her dad in Conrad’s mugshots, challenged him the following morning. She prefaced the conversation with the fact that nothing in the way she felt about him had changed. ‘You’re my dad,’ she said. ‘I still love you.’

Randele seemed nervous but relieved. ‘In that moment, I saw him visibly relax,’ Ashley told the Daily Mail. ‘And it really was like a weight was lifted off him because he’s been carrying the secret for 50 years.’

Nevertheless, his first instinct was to ask her not to tell Kathy. But Ashley refused. She said that if he didn’t tell her mother, then she would – the burden was too big for her to carry alone.

That afternoon, Ashley led her mother to her computer to scroll through the articles. ‘All Mom said was: “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,’” she recalled.

Then, as with Ashley, Kathy told Randele that she only felt the same love for him and nothing had changed.

The mother and daughter chose not to interrogate him about the robbery in his dying weeks, not wanting to add to his stress.

‘Towards the end, I asked if he ever had any regrets,’ Ashley said. ‘And he said “None, because, if I hadn’t done the things I did, I wouldn’t be where I am, and I wouldn’t have you.”’

Ashley and Kathy decided to contact the authorities once they’d had time to mourn Randele’s death in May 2021. ‘We were navigating our grief and decided to wait until about a year,’ she said.

But someone beat them to it. Ashley doesn’t know the tipster’s identity only that they sent a message to a crime reporter in Cleveland who had written about the bank robbery over the years. As far as she knows, they person had read Randele’s obituary and connected the dots. The journalist raised the alarm.

The US Marshals knocked on their door in December 2021. John Elliott had died the previous year but his son, Peter Elliott, who had followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the agency, had taken over the case.

‘Peter could tell we were terrified but he treated us with kindness and respect. He said: “You are not in trouble. You’ve done nothing wrong — but we do need to have a conversation.’”

They pieced the jigsaw puzzle together over the following weeks. It turned out that  Conrad — aka Randele — had likely taken the money to help escape his unhappy living situation. His parents had divorced when he was a boy after his mother left his father for another man.

He later told friends in Cleveland that his stepfather beat him, and he was in an impossible situation. The answer, he decided, was to rob the bank where he worked to start a whole new life.

It was widely reported at the time that he had been inspired by the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair, about a suave businessman who got away with $2.6million and turned the heist into a game.

Pictured: Ashley, who says she and her mother were terrified when the US Marshals arrived at their door some 52 years after her father had robbed the bank

Pictured: Kathy, Ashley, and Tom Randele on an evening out. Ashley says her late father was a wonderful man with whom she spent quality time

Nobody knows for sure but it was claimed that he had watched the film at least six times and copied Steve McQueen’s character by driving sports cars and drinking high-end liquor.

‘People like to say that Dad renamed himself Tom after the hero of the film,’ Ashley said, adding, ‘I guess it makes a good story.’

As for the truth, it was established that Randele had moved to Boston in the early 1970s where he lived in a fancy part of the city. He was a golf pro but didn’t need to work full-time.

He soon blew through all the money. It had all but disappeared by the time he met Kathy in 1978. It turned out he had made a series of bad investments, including financing a friend’s restaurant that had failed.

If only Randele had been as good at managing his finances as he had been at robbing the bank and assuming a new identity. ‘He could definitely have done with some of that money later on,’ Ashley said, somewhat wryly.

But she maintained that her father was a good man who happened to make a bad choice in his youth.

‘I’m telling his story because I want people to know who Ted Conrad and Tom Randele really were,’ she said.