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BOSTON - JUNE 16: Wanted posters display alien fugitives arrested during Operation FLASH (Fellow Law-enforcement Agencies Securing the Homeland) during a news conference June 16, 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts. Operation FLASH, a week-long effort, netted 189 alien fugitives in New England, most with criminal convictions for violent crime.
A Boston man's life story recently made headlines after he passed away with a buried secret.
According to reports, Thomas Randele from Boston, Massachusetts, led a double life that his wife and children only heard of during his deathbed confession.
His friends from his hometown described him as a true gentleman, and they don't have any negative things to say about him.
Thomas Randele led a double life
What Randele's family didn't know was that he wasn't the person whom he said he was. He was born Ted Conrad and he was forced to change his identity and social security number after he robbed a bank in Cleveland in 1969.
At the time, Conrad was working at the bank in Cleveland as a teller, and he noticed that they lacked security. So, he asked his friend if he would be open to the idea of robbing the bank; eventually, and they did the crime.
Conrad managed to steal over $200,000 from the bank before he went into hiding. After he faced his indictment, he decided to travel across the country for fear that he would be sent to jail.
Years later, he found himself starting his new life in Boston. His family and friends never suspected that he was carrying such a huge secret.
But John Elliott, a deputy US marshal, has been looking for Conrad for the most part of his life. Before he passed away, Elliott passed the task of tracking down the fugitive to his son, Pete Elliott.
And after almost 20 years of hunting for Conrad, they finally tracked him in Boston.
Fugitive man's pal says he wanted to impress people
Conrad's friend, Russell Metcalf, who helped him rob the bank said that they did what they did not because of the money. It seemed as though Conrad wanted to impress people.
Investigators, on the other hand, are convinced that Conrad robbed the bank because he was inspired by the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair.
When Conrad's friends found out about what he did, they said that they still couldn't believe it.
"The only way it makes sense is that at that age he was just a kid, and it was a challenge kind of thing. If he would have told us way back when I don't think we would have believed him because he wasn't that kind of guy. The man was different than the kid," Matt Kaplan, Randele's former colleague, said via the Huffington Post.
Boston man dies after being a fugitive for 40 years
Conrad or Randele, as he was known during the better part of his life, died when he was 71 following his battle with lung cancer. He was so loved by his family and friends that so many people wanted to pay their last respects to him, according to the Portland Press Herald.
The Cleveland bank wasn't able to pursue a case against Conrad because they had no idea where he was. And the robbery didn't also make headlines because everyone was focused on Apollo 11's historic flight to the moon that same week, according to the Associated Press.
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