My Fugitive Dad | 1. Becoming Thomas Crown

Speaker 2 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.
The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 2 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting Lisk, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

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Speaker 4 Okay, I guess if we're going to tell the story from the top, we kind of need to start with the movie.

Speaker 5 You got to give the people what they want.

Speaker 4 The Thomas Crown Affair was released in 1968. It was one of the most iconic heist films ever made.

Speaker 4 Go

Speaker 4 in the movie, Thomas Crown is a clever and charming businessman who pulls off an elaborate and inimitable robbery of a bank in Boston, Massachusetts. Go.

Speaker 4 Steve McQueen is the lead. His character is already rich.
He does it, seemingly, because he can.

Speaker 4 The getaway car, a wood-paneled station wagon, exits the Massachusetts turnpike, canvas sacks of money in the trunk. The driver drops them off in a trash can at the Cambridge Cemetery.

Speaker 4 A little while later, McQueen arrives in a black Rolls-Royce to pick up the sacks. He drives home.
His butler asks him about his day.

Speaker 4 Fine.

Speaker 6 Just fine.

Speaker 4 He tells him, go home early. Thank you, sir.
He walks into the ante-room, pours himself a drink, looking sharp with his crew cut of golden blonde hair and tailored suit.

Speaker 4 He catches himself in the mirror for a cheeky moment of primordial narcissism and toasts his own reflection.

Speaker 4 Then reclines on the couch, biting into a thick cigar, and is unable to control his laughter.

Speaker 4 He's done it.

Speaker 4 And that's really where the film starts as law enforcement and a special investigator/slash love interest played by Faye Dunaway are hot on his trail.

Speaker 4 It's one of those summer blockbusters that kids of the era must have flocked to. The flashy thrill of the chase and a leading man all the boys wanted to emulate.

Speaker 4 But there was only one young man.

Speaker 4 watching that film among the millions who must have seen it that summer in small towns and big cities across America, that took his obsessive admiration for Steve McQueen a bit too far.

Speaker 4 He was a kid from Cleveland, Ohio, named Ted Conrad.

Speaker 4 He loved the movie, went time and again to see it in the theater.

Speaker 4 He loved it so much that he tried to pull off his own heist.

Speaker 4 And the crazy thing is,

Speaker 4 he did it.

Speaker 4 He stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the story of a crime that impacted two families in profoundly different ways.
One desperate for the truth, and the other, unwittingly, living a lie.

Speaker 4 A cop with a life's mission to find answers, a family with no idea that they hold the key to solving the case, a key that once unlocked would transform their lives.

Speaker 4 It's been over half a century since Ted Conrad stole a fortune from Society National Bank.

Speaker 4 And the real story of what happened has remained a mystery until now.

Speaker 4 From Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Smokescreen, My Fugitive Dad. I'm Jonathan Hirsch.

Speaker 4 Chapter 1, Becoming Thomas Crown.

Speaker 4 I've covered some fascinating characters as a documentarian over the years.

Speaker 4 Cult leaders, dirty cops, corrupt politicians, but I have never been so consumed with the desire to know a complete stranger until I heard about Ted Conrad.

Speaker 4 Some call his crime the greatest cold case in Ohio state history. It's not that he stole the money, but more that for decades, there were no credible leads.

Speaker 4 The U.S. Marshals, the local police, FBI, all were on the hook to track down Ted.

Speaker 4 And for 52 years, there was a lot of smoke, but no fire.

Speaker 4 This case defined the career for the Deputy U.S. Marshal of Northern Ohio, John Elliott.

Speaker 7 What's it like to chase somebody for 50 years?

Speaker 1 Every once in a while, I think about it.

Speaker 4 We're going to get this guy one of these days.

Speaker 1 He's going to slip up and make a mistake.

Speaker 4 And you can see why. I mean, the crime itself was baffling.
Can you just walk out of a bank with all that money like that? It's like some sleight of hand, elegantly simple, but infinitely complex.

Speaker 4 It was one of those Reddit mysteries that people obsess about online. Like D.B.
Cooper, the man who skyjacked a plane and disappeared into thin air.

Speaker 9 He had talked about it with friends in the past about how easy it would be to, you know, take money and disappear. And

Speaker 9 that's what he did.

Speaker 4 That's Pete Elliott, by the way. His dad was John Elliott, the deputy U.S.
Marshal who spent his entire life chasing Ted Conrad.

Speaker 9 He walked in, put $215,000 in a paper bag.

Speaker 4 He had a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey with him.

Speaker 9 Put that on top of the bag.

Speaker 4 Had a quick chat with his boss, the manager of the bank, who wished him happy birthday.

Speaker 4 And unbelievably, in a moment that would live on as legend, he walked out the front door and disappeared in thin air.

Speaker 4 Never to be seen or heard from again.

Speaker 5 Ted Conrad walked out of the bank he worked at. He disappeared with a paper bag containing $215,000.

Speaker 10 This is Unsolved Mysteries of the World.

Speaker 7 I'm digging into the case files in search of any new clues that might help track down this notorious fugitive.

Speaker 4 And a big part of that obsession had to do with the myth that had been built up around Ted.

Speaker 4 Ted did seem to have that certain something.

Speaker 4 I tracked down friends who'd known him 50 years ago, and they said he was smart, good-looking, had this mischievous look in his eye, a playfulness in his smile, gave off that star quarterback vibe, but also a touch more sophistication, almost academic.

Speaker 4 The jock professor, if you will. He had a girlfriend, in fact, a few.

Speaker 4 But in the fallout of his disappearance, there was one detail that people fixated on in particular:

Speaker 4 His obsession with the movie, The Thomas Crown Affair.

Speaker 5 Let's start with the money.

Speaker 5 Well, I don't have it.

Speaker 5 What would you do if you did?

Speaker 4 People thought that Ted Conrad had stolen a page from a Hollywood script. A handsome, brash young man who made a decision that led to a life on the run.

Speaker 4 Without family or friends or recourse, just this big bag of money to keep him warm.

Speaker 9 He wanted to become Thomas Crown.

Speaker 4 What kind of person could pull off such an elaborate crime? He had the smarts to outfox law enforcement for the better part of half a century. But the most baffling mystery of all to me was why?

Speaker 4 Why did this young man choose a life like this and never look back?

Speaker 4 All of the articles about Ted made it seem like, just like Steve McQueen, he did it because he could.

Speaker 4 From the beginning, I was convinced there had to be more to the story than that.

Speaker 4 Bonneview Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio is mostly two and three-story wood-framed houses with wide steps leading up to front porches.

Speaker 4 Summers are blistering and muggy, but the long arms of trees shade the sidewalks. An occasional breeze off of Lake Erie brings respite from the heat.
Lakewood is a suburb of Cleveland.

Speaker 4 To this day, it has a small-town vibe. Nice place to raise a family.

Speaker 4 Walking south, you cross Detroit Avenue, one of the main drags.

Speaker 4 And then you pick your path, wending through the streets all built in the same style at the same time, whichever route leads you to Franklin Boulevard.

Speaker 4 And Lakewood High School.

Speaker 11 My name is Russ Metcalf. I live in the beautiful state of Texas, but when I was in high school, I lived in Lakewood, Ohio, and was very good friends with a guy by the name of Ted Conrad.

Speaker 4 The campus of Lakewood High spans an entire block, and if you walk through the halls, courtyards, clamoring noise of the high school, you'll get to the football field.

Speaker 4 And that's where, in their junior year, Ted and Russ became friends.

Speaker 11 Most of the kids I went to school with all grew up there. I didn't, neither did Ted.

Speaker 4 Russ remembers Ted as being like him at the time. Bit of an outsider, trying to feel at home in Lakewood.

Speaker 11 It was all the normal things you'd expect. I mean, it was a middle class to lower middle class community.
Steel workers and bus drivers and as well as corporate executives.

Speaker 4 Ted's dad was a teacher. His mom was a violinist.
When they divorced, his mom remarried. this guy named Raymond Marsh.

Speaker 11 It was a great town to grow up in. There was lots of things to do.
The biggest crime I can remember is when we would go out on Friday nights and toilet paper people's houses.

Speaker 4 Ted came back to Cleveland after a year at college, which is when Ted and his pal Russ would end up getting a job at a bank, two different banks down the street from each other.

Speaker 11 The good old days of recruiting, one of our friends from high school was working for an employment agency.

Speaker 11 And we were out having a beer someplace and he came over and says, hey, you guys looking for a job. And he had this big stack of cards at all these jobs.

Speaker 11 And the first one he came to was for a vault teller at what was called in the time Society National Bank.

Speaker 4 The vault teller.

Speaker 11 And Ted said, well, that sounds good. So Ted went and interviewed and got the job right off.

Speaker 4 Not long after that, Russ's friend got him a job at another bank nearby. Russ looks back at that period of his life fondly.
He and Ted were on top of the world.

Speaker 4 They'd play golf together, go out to parties, and double date. Ted was dating a girl at the time named Kathy Einhaus.

Speaker 12 Friday night was like our night to sit and sip champagne and eat shrimp. And we had a really good time together.
We laughed a lot.

Speaker 4 But little did Russ and Kathy know back then that Ted was probably already plotting his way out.

Speaker 11 Ted

Speaker 11 would talk about

Speaker 11 how lax the security was.

Speaker 11 I mean, he said they didn't even fingerprint me when I came to work for this.

Speaker 12 Actually, my sister and I went to the bank one day. We were going to meet him for lunch, and he said, do you want to see where I work? And we said, sure.

Speaker 12 And he said, come around to the back of the bank. And we did.
He opened the store and we came in and we were like, whoa, we're

Speaker 12 in this big room of money. I know he didn't want anyone to see us there.

Speaker 12 We went into the vault and we were sitting there and we were holding armloads of money and there was nobody in there but the three of us. So it wasn't like we were there for any long period of time.

Speaker 12 And then he kind of ushered us out and then we went around to the front of the bank and met him for lunch.

Speaker 4 Russ and Kathy confirmed that the Thomas Crown affair loomed large in Ted's life at the time.

Speaker 11 I probably didn't see the Thomas Crown affair with Ted

Speaker 11 until after he'd seen it five times.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I went with him to see it and right after he did light a cigar.

Speaker 11 He thought it was charming and it made him look charming. He loved Steve.

Speaker 4 You do live very well, don't you?

Speaker 4 No complaints.

Speaker 11 Well, we both love Stephen Queen, but he just, he thought it was really cool that here this guy could be so,

Speaker 11 pardon the words, suave and debonair. And he was brilliant, and yet he was crafty enough that he could pull off a bank heist and never get caught.

Speaker 11 That's one of the things, I guess, that caused Ted to start talking about the bank and what they can get away with. I can't believe what I could get away with.

Speaker 4 Russ struggles still to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Ted.

Speaker 4 Go.

Speaker 4 Go.

Speaker 4 In the film, Thomas Crown employed a strategically positioned team to execute his grand heist. The getaway driver never saw Crown's face.

Speaker 4 He wasn't there when they entered the bank, when they liquidated the vaults and walked calmly and quickly out the front door. Ted Conrad worked at the bank.
He pulled off the crime by himself.

Speaker 4 But he was thinking about and planning how to pull off the heist for months. That's what Kathy, his girlfriend at the time, told me.

Speaker 12 You know, it was not an obsession, but there was a group of us one night and we were all sitting around, just sitting around and talking.

Speaker 12 And he mentioned that it would be easy to walk out of the bank with a bunch of money. And we were just throwing around ideas about, you know, how you could get a fake birth certificate.

Speaker 12 And he and I actually went to the Bureau of Vital Statistics and got my little brother's birth certificate. They didn't ask me for identification or anything.

Speaker 12 I just said I need this birth certificate and gave my mother's maiden name and they gave it to me. They didn't even ask who I was.

Speaker 11 It just,

Speaker 11 it was one of those things. I just, it's been a part of my life ever since.
And

Speaker 11 there hasn't been a day gone by that I didn't think about him.

Speaker 11 Because I mean,

Speaker 11 I mean, it's 52 years and I

Speaker 11 still kept thinking I was going to run into him or I would see him or I would talk to him.

Speaker 4 According to Russ, he and Ted were inseparable. And since Ted was turning 20 that final week they saw each other, they made plans to go out.

Speaker 4 They went just north of downtown to a little restaurant on the lake that used to be located at Burke Lakefront Airport, a small landing strip that runs alongside the water.

Speaker 11 I had a great time,

Speaker 11 and we talked about everything. We talked about plans.
My fiancé and I were planning our wedding, and Ted, of course, was going to be my best man.

Speaker 4 The night wore on. It was a celebration.

Speaker 11 When the check came, and we both worked, we both had money, I reached to get the check, and he wouldn't let me pay it. I said, Ted, it's your birthday.
He says, no, no, no.

Speaker 11 He says, I don't know how many times I can, you know, he says, I haven't taken you out to dinner much.

Speaker 4 It was a peculiar thing to say, coming from Ted, that is.

Speaker 11 And it was really strange because Ted never picked up a check. He was one of those guys that he's happy.

Speaker 11 I mean, he wouldn't feel bad about treating you, but he was happy enough to let somebody else pick up the check.

Speaker 4 Everyone stumbled home. A great night.

Speaker 4 The next day would be their last as friends.

Speaker 4 But at the time, Russ had no idea.

Speaker 4 In the morning, a few hours before he disappeared with the money, Ted called him up.

Speaker 11 He said, you up for lunch? I said, sure.

Speaker 4 They decided to meet at a restaurant halfway between the two banks where they worked.

Speaker 11 The best grilled hamburgers I've ever had. Place called the Flaming Embers.

Speaker 4 They had an hour-long lunch break and were at the restaurant for maybe 40 minutes. They made plans to play golf the next day at Rocky River Park.

Speaker 11 He said, I got to go to the liquor store. I said, what for? He says, oh, he says, we may get together this weekend, so I want to get some southern comfort, and I need to get a carton of cigarettes.

Speaker 11 And I said, Okay.

Speaker 4 And again,

Speaker 4 Ted offered to pick up the check.

Speaker 11 And I'm going, Ted, this is getting ridiculous. He says, Nah, nah, he says, I owe it to you.
So he went his way, and I went my way.

Speaker 11 And then that night was when he disappeared.

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Speaker 3 Just make sure I'm just going to

Speaker 9 be your copies. These look like records.

Speaker 4 Let's start with the investigation into that day.

Speaker 4 I'm sitting in the sprawling corner office of Pete Elliott. Remember, he's the one whose dad, John, spent the better part of his career trying to find Ted Conrad.

Speaker 4 Pete pulled out boxes, dragged them onto the floor around his desk, and we sat across from each other looking at them. It's a cloudy spring day in Cleveland.

Speaker 4 From Pete's office, you can see downtown, where Society National Bank used to be.

Speaker 4 Where all of this started.

Speaker 9 Can you hang on one second?

Speaker 9 Yeah, hang on, Jonathan. Pete Elliott.

Speaker 4 We comb through some of the boxes. Feels like we're looking at old family photos no one's gotten around to organizing.
All right, thank you.

Speaker 4 The story of Ted and his disappearance seemed, at first, impossible to penetrate. Like those cross sections of the earth, each clue is another layer, but no end in sight.

Speaker 4 And sitting there with Pete in his office, I felt awash in all those details. I watched Pete as he brought me artifacts and documents to discuss.

Speaker 9 How about the tape? You got the tape?

Speaker 4 I've got the tape. Yeah, in this box.

Speaker 4 He has this stern look on his face while he does it. Maybe he's lost interest in this case decades ago, or maybe it's all he thinks about.
He's the kind of guy who doesn't let on very much.

Speaker 4 He reminded me of my Midwestern uncles.

Speaker 4 I knew from the beginning that the story of Ted Conrad wasn't just about a young man who stole money from his employer. It was also a story about Pete, Pete, and his dad, John.

Speaker 9 Well, that's all he did was talk about Conrad.

Speaker 4 John was the deputy U.S. Marshal first assigned to Ted's case in 1969.

Speaker 4 John Elliott was obsessed with solving the Conrad case. Ted was practically his nemesis for over 40 years.

Speaker 9 It was his like lifelong mission to, you know, he made an enemy with Conrad right away, right? And sometimes you need that in your life, that other thing to motivate you.

Speaker 4 People talked about Ted's crime in this way, they made it sound like he was some kind of miracle. Like when someone sees the Virgin Mary in a cupcake or something like that.
Ted Conrad was a magician.

Speaker 4 But I still couldn't shake the sense that despite how well executed the crime appeared to have been, he was practically a teenager from suburban Cleveland, not a criminal mastermind.

Speaker 4 Or was he?

Speaker 4 Ted's every move leading up to the day had been scrutinized.

Speaker 4 Every relative or friend of his had been interviewed again and again, trying to find some clue as to where he disappeared to and how he was able to walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Speaker 9 From everything that we know, the investigation is right here at Society National Bank. And Conrad was working there.

Speaker 4 Ted Conrad went into work.

Speaker 9 In the morning, you know, he was driven to work by his girlfriend because his car had broken down. And that was July 11th, 1969.

Speaker 4 A couple of hours later, Ted gave his girlfriend, Kathy Einhouse, a call and said, this is a big day. At around 2.30 in the afternoon, Ted called Kathy again and stated he might rob the bank today.

Speaker 4 She didn't believe him.

Speaker 4 Just before the end of the workday at 4:30, he got ready to leave.

Speaker 4 He was seen carrying a medium-sized paper sack, a cigarette carton on top of the sack,

Speaker 4 stuffed underneath the carton of smokes, $215,000,

Speaker 4 the equivalent of $1.8 million today.

Speaker 4 And in a puff of smoke, Ted walked out the front door of Society National Bank and was never seen again.

Speaker 4 And from that moment on, he would drift further and further from his life in Cleveland, transform into something else, something different than the kid Russ knew.

Speaker 4 A myth.

Speaker 4 The vault teller from Cleveland who liked fast cars. The kid from Lakewood.
Ted Conrad.

Speaker 9 The landlady where he was residing at the time Conrad was residing saw Conrad get into a yellow cab wearing a brown suit and carrying extra clothes.

Speaker 4 Rapid Station, please.

Speaker 4 Ted booked a cab to Rapid Station, the train stop in downtown. He had two suitcases with him.
In the cab, he changed his destination. Actually, the airport.

Speaker 4 He asked the driver to take him to Hopkins Airport, told the driver he's heading to Denver. Which airline? The cabby asked.
Drop me off at the main terminal, Conrad said.

Speaker 4 A flight was booked from Cleveland to Washington National Airport, Northwest Flight 382, under the name C. Singletary.

Speaker 4 A man matching the description of Ted was seen on board. And as far as we know, incredibly, Ted Conrad never returned to Cleveland, never spoke to his mom or dad or his friends ever again.

Speaker 4 Nobody suspected the money was missing until Monday morning when Ted didn't show up for work.

Speaker 9 Obviously, he had a whole plan in place, or somebody had a whole plan in place for him. There's still a lot of things that, you know, still some questions that I have.

Speaker 4 That night, Russ was at his girlfriend Christine's house. According to Russ, Ted called him.
Russ still lived with his parents at the time, so his mom answered the phone.

Speaker 4 Then Ted called Christine's, but they didn't answer. He tried to reach his girlfriend, too.

Speaker 12 He called me that evening and said, Do you want to come over? And I have something to show you. And I said, no.

Speaker 12 I said, I'm going out with a friend. I said, you know, I said, I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Speaker 4 On Saturday morning, Russ drove over to Ted's house as planned.

Speaker 11 I pulled up, I walked upstairs to his apartment, knocked on the door, and knocked on the door, and nobody was there. And I looked in the back where the parking was, and his car wasn't there.

Speaker 4 He didn't think much of it at the time. Maybe Ted had forgotten about golf.
Russ went about his weekend, wasn't concerned. The car, it turns out, was parked just up the street.

Speaker 4 And by now, Ted was states away.

Speaker 11 And I didn't realize it until probably a few days later. When we parted, he said goodbye.
He didn't say, I'll see you tomorrow. He didn't say, have a good afternoon.
He just said, bye, Russ.

Speaker 11 And, you know, after the fact, thinking about it, it's like, I wonder if he was trying to tell me something. I wonder if he was, you know, if there was something that he just,

Speaker 11 I just, it was hard for me to understand the way he was.

Speaker 4 That Monday morning, the bank did an audit of their funds, and surprise, surprise, the money was missing.

Speaker 9 Well, originally, it was an FBI case, so the FBI, because it was a bank robbery, quote unquote, they would have been involved initially in it.

Speaker 4 So, after the bank administrators found out that a substantial portion of the company's funds had gone missing, they contacted the feds. And it didn't take long to put two and two together.

Speaker 4 The guy in charge of the vault, he didn't show up for work.

Speaker 9 When there's a warrant that's issued, it comes to U.S. Marshal's service.

Speaker 4 A warrant was issued for Ted Conrad's arrest. The formal charge is bank embezzlement, since he didn't technically rob the bank.
From the very beginning, Pete's dad, John Elliott, was working the case.

Speaker 4 That included digging into Ted's background, interviewing his friends. calling around to see if anyone might have known about his whereabouts or plans, which of course led them in short order to Russ.

Speaker 4 On Monday morning, Russ got a call from another friend.

Speaker 11 He also worked in the bank with Ted and we partied together a few times. And I got a call

Speaker 11 at my bank, at my desk, and he said, Russ, have you seen Ted?

Speaker 11 I said, and I told him, I said, no, we had lunch Friday. We were supposed to play golf Saturday.
He never showed up.

Speaker 4 A couple of hours later, that friend called him back.

Speaker 11 And I said, what's going on? He says, Ted hasn't shown up. He hasn't called in and there's a shortage.
I think he actually said there's money missing. But I said, really?

Speaker 11 And he said, yeah. He says, I'll get back to you.

Speaker 4 Russ carried on with his day, but no doubt by then, he had started to wonder if.

Speaker 4 After all the times Ted talked about how easy it'd be to steal from the bank,

Speaker 4 if he'd actually, this time,

Speaker 4 crossed the Rubicon.

Speaker 4 Three hours later, he got another call. It was the attorney's office at Russ's bank.

Speaker 11 One of the attorneys said, Russ, come over to my office. And I walked in and there were two guys in suits sitting at his desk.
And I looked at him and I still don't know why I did it.

Speaker 11 I said, you guys must be from the FBI. How much did he get?

Speaker 4 It was still a joke to Russ. Maybe it hadn't fully set in yet what was going on.
But to the FBI, there there was nothing funny about it.

Speaker 11 They said, well, we can't discuss that, but do you happen to know where Ted is? And then we got in this whole thing about,

Speaker 11 you know, where would he go?

Speaker 4 The next day, Ted Conrad sent a letter to his girlfriend, Kathy Einhouse. It had been shipped from the Washington National Airport station.

Speaker 4 He asked her to burn the letters so the authorities wouldn't find them, and thankfully, she didn't.

Speaker 4 On July 17th, 1969, six days after Ted disappeared with the money, he wrote a second letter to his girlfriend Kathy. About a week after that, a search warrant is issued for Ted's apartment and car.

Speaker 4 Inside, the feds found two Society National canvas bank bags and a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey. In the next two weeks, Ted would reach out to people he knew two more times.

Speaker 4 before his trail went cold. Ted left behind a lot.
A girlfriend, a job, brothers and sisters, a mother, a stepfather, a group of friends. The rest has become the stuff of legend.

Speaker 8 So where is Teddy Conrad today?

Speaker 8 Who knows? The Conrad Trail is cold as Marshals look to generate some kind of heat.

Speaker 7 However, he might be found, U.S. Marshals aren't giving up on the hunt for the kid who turned the Thomas Crown affair into his real life.

Speaker 4 And this unbelievable story was one that I was about to, in a way, become a part of myself.

Speaker 4 Because it turns out that while Pete's dad, John Elliott, had been turning over every stone, following every blind lead to a dead end, Ted Conrad was hiding in plain sight.

Speaker 13 Happy birthday to you.

Speaker 13 Happy birthday to you.

Speaker 13 Happy birthday, dear pumpkinhead.

Speaker 13 Happy birthday to you.

Speaker 4 It's the late winter, 2023. I'm at a storage facility outside of Linfield, Massachusetts, 10-minute drive from Ted's house.

Speaker 4 I'm here with someone who is, like me, aching to tell Ted's story, to understand it, to make sense of what he left behind.

Speaker 4 Still bleary-eyed from the red-eye I took to Boston, I watched the aluminum roll-top doors draw slowly down and the beige winter light of the North Shore disappear with it.

Speaker 4 When I first came to this town, In search of Ted, I remember driving around Linfield, scanning the street, almost as if I'd find something along the way.

Speaker 4 I went to Ted's old house, to the golf course where he used to play. Nothing.

Speaker 4 At last, a close friend of Ted's called me. I pulled over to the side of the road.
He wouldn't talk for all the reasons I'd heard. We respect the family's privacy, etc.

Speaker 4 But he also said, there's another reason.

Speaker 4 I just miss him so much.

Speaker 4 And this little recognition washed over me like a tiny wave that made me aware of the bigger waves farther out to sea. There was more to the story of Ted.

Speaker 5 He is in

Speaker 5 khakis, and you can see in the photo that they have at least a double pleat in the front because he loved a pleated pant, and then one of his either Land Rover or golf shirts.

Speaker 4 More than anyone, this person. holds the key to the mystery.

Speaker 4 And I'm thinking to myself, how amazing it is, how little we can confidently say about this man after all these years, how little we can confidently say about anybody.

Speaker 5 I thought I knew my dad, but that was before I found out he'd been a fugitive for decades.

Speaker 4 You should probably introduce yourself.

Speaker 5 Uh, yeah, I'm Ashley. I'm actually Ted's daughter.

Speaker 4 But you weren't always aware of that.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 4 Could you have ever imagined your dad was a criminal mastermind?

Speaker 5 Absolutely not. He was always so relaxed and easygoing.
I never would have guessed how many secrets he had.

Speaker 4 You and your dad were unusually close, though, right? Like, you weren't just his only child. You were also sort of his confidant.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think he would tell me things because he either thought that I could handle it better than my mom, or that I just have this terrible gift of being able to compartmentalize things and put it on a shelf and tuck it away.

Speaker 5 Maybe he would give her 10% of a story, and then I might get 30%,

Speaker 5 but I would definitely get more than she did.

Speaker 4 But now at 38 years old, she found herself asking, what percentage of the story he told her was a lie? Was it all a lie?

Speaker 5 I deserve to know my father's name. I deserve to know my name.

Speaker 4 She also deserves to know why.

Speaker 4 Why did Ted take off with the money and leave his whole life behind?

Speaker 4 This burning question was how Ashley and I found ourselves on a journey in search of the real Ted.

Speaker 5 He wasn't a wise guy. I mean, he'd look you straight in the eyes.

Speaker 6 The only time I saw him list sad when it was saying that

Speaker 6 his parents were killed with his twin brothers at a car accident.

Speaker 4 He was Ohio's most infamous fugitive.

Speaker 9 Some people portrayed Conrad as a, you know, a Robin Hood, and my dad called him nothing but a, you know, a thief.

Speaker 4 He kept plenty of secrets.

Speaker 5 And he said, if I tell you,

Speaker 5 you have to promise

Speaker 5 you will not look into it. I don't want you looking into anything.
I don't want you telling anybody.

Speaker 4 Ted Conrad, it turns out, was a mystery even to those who knew him best.

Speaker 4 And we'll tell you at long last

Speaker 4 not only how he did it, but why.

Speaker 4 Smokescreen, My Fugitive Dad, is an original production of Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment. It was written and produced by me, Jonathan Hirsch.
Ashley Randall and I co-hosted it.

Speaker 4 Our editor is Catherine St. Louis.
She's also Neon Hum Media's executive editor. Our executive producers are Me and Ashley.
Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville.

Speaker 4 Theme and original music composed by Matt McGinley. We also use music by Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound.
Our associate producer is Anne Lim.

Speaker 4 Catherine Newhan is our fact checker. Our production manager is Samantha Allison.
Our lawyers are Rachel Goldberg and Allison Sherry.

Speaker 4 Special thanks to Joanna Clay, Shara Morris, Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasick, Devin Schwartz, Laura Ubate, Amy Eddings, Corinne and Weldon Pless,

Speaker 4 and the voice of young Ted Conrad, Johnny Boss.

Speaker 4 If you're enjoying the show, be sure to rate and review. It helps more people find it.
Thanks so much for listening.

Speaker 4 Hey, Ryan Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

Speaker 4 Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.
Yeah? Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

Speaker 5 Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for the first three months only.
Speeds low after 35GB of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 11 See Mintmobile.com.