A woman dished all on her father’s shocking deathbed confession … saying her life changed when she discovered he had been a wanted man for most of his life following an old bank heist.
TMZ.com
Ashley Randele came on “TMZ Live” Monday to tell her tale — sayingher father, Tom Randele, came clean with an estimated 6 weeks to live following a lung cancer diagnosis … suddenly off-loading the decades-long secret as they watched NCIS.
The 71-year-old explained to Ashley and her mom that he had to change his real name … and they ought to finally know in case it came up after his passing … because authorities “were probably still looking for him.”
Ashley says she pressed him for more info the next day after realizing it wasn’t a “terrible dad joke” — adding it was vital for her to know her dad’s real name: Ted Conrad.
Ignoring his pleas not to look into it, Ashley later found herself searching his name online … yielding various “vault teller robs bank” headlines … and recent articles stating the 50-year hunt was still active.
The revelation left her stunned … after all, she had just learned the man she always perceived as an average suburban dad stole $215,000 — the equivalent of $1.8M today — while working as a vault teller at the Society National Bank in Cleveland, Ohio, on Friday, July 11, 1969, as a 20-year-old college dropout.
He fled to Washington, D.C., that night … and when bank bosses discovered the theft on Monday, the FBI was called, and Conrad became a wanted man.
He ended up in Boston … assuming a new identity and resuming normalcy despite his picture plastered across headlines.
Whether the heist was worth it or not would have been a question for Ted, AKA, Tom … as Ashley says, most of the stolen money was blown on ritzy digs and at least one bad investment … reaching the point of her loaning her parents 10K before they filed for bankruptcy in 2014.
Ashley goes in depth about her story on her podcast, “Smoke Screen: My Fugitive Dad.”
TMZ.com
She adds to us her dad never Googled himself … refusing to believe that, after all this time, people cared about his crime. He passed away 2 months after his confession.
