The ONLY Man Who Got Away With Everything transcript

November 12th, 2021, Cleveland, Ohio. The US Marshall Service closes one of the longest fugitive hunts in American history. No handcuffs, no perpwalk. Nobody gets read their rights. The man they'd been chasing since 1969 died 6 months earlier in his own bed under a name no investigator had ever connected to the case. 52 years, every FBI field office in the country, his face broadcast on national television twice. Two generations of the same Marshall family hunting one 20-year-old bank teller.

A kid who walked out a front door in Cleveland carrying a paper grocery bag full of cash and stopped existing. But here's what makes this unthinkable. He didn't flee to a jungle or a beach. He hid inside an ordinary American life in plain sight on television for half a century. Two questions. How does a 20-year-old beat the FBI for 52 years? And why give the win away at the very end? July 10th, 1969, Cleveland. Ted Conrad turns 20 today.

He works downtown at Society National Bank on Public Square, and his title is vault teller, which sounds like nothing and means everything. The vault teller counts the money, carries it, signs for it. He puts his hands on more cash in a week than most of the building sees in a year. You don't hand that job to a kid you're unsure about. You hand it to the kid everybody likes. Quick, funny, easy in a room. The one who makes a shift go fast.

That's him. That's the whole security system. A feeling people have about a nice young man. A year earlier in 1968, a movie comes out called The Thomas [music] Crown Affair. Steve McQueen plays a bored Boston millionaire who robs a bank for the sport of it and walks away clean, untouchable, gliding. By multiple accounts, Conrad watches it over and over, six times, maybe [music] more. And here's what nobody sitting next to him in that theater understands.

He isn't daydreaming. He's rehearsing because he talks. This is the part that should have stopped everything before it started. In the weeks before, according to friends interviewed decades later, Conrad tells people [music] flat out how easy it would be. The security is loose. He handles the money alone. He says some version of the same sentence more than once out loud in front of witnesses. I could walk out of this place with all of it and nobody would notice until Monday.

And everybody laughs. Of course they laugh. You've said something like it about your own job. It's the safest kind of joke because the person saying it never does it. Friday, July 11th, 1969. The last working day before the weekend. closing [music] time at Society National and Ted Conrad fills a paper grocery bag with cash. The figure reported ever since is around $215,000, roughly 1.8 [music] million in today's money.

By the marshall's later account, he lays a bottle of whiskey and some cigarettes on top. The way you'd cover groceries you didn't want a neighbor asking about. Then he picks up the bag and walks [music] out the front door. No weapon, no mask. The whole heist is a man carrying groceries, a kid in a shirt and tie, saying good night to people he will never see again, stepping onto a Cleveland sidewalk in the July [music] heat with more money in a paper bag than his co-workers will earn in a decade.

Now do the math with him because he already has. A 1969 [music] bank vault has no screen with a live balance on it. The cash [music] gets counted by human beings by hand when the doors open again, and the doors don't open until Monday morning. From the second that bag clears the doorway, he owns roughly 62 hours. Hour 12, Saturday dawn. Nothing happens. Hour 36, Sunday, nothing happens. Hour 62 runs out Monday morning, July 14th, when someone notices an empty cage where a teller should be.

Somebody calls his apartment and gets nothing. Somebody starts a count and the count comes up wrong and comes up wrong again. And by midm morning, [music] a bank manager on public square has to pick up a phone and say a number out loud. The FBI opens a file. A federal warrant issues for Theodore John Conrad, 20 years old, 5'10, last seen in a shirt and tie. By the time the first agent is assigned, the head start is already unmeasurable.

A greyhound out of Cleveland crosses half the country in 62 hours. How far does 62 hours take a kid with a paper bag? And what happens to him the day he learns he can never come home? He writes letters. That's the first thing that makes this different from every other bank theft you've heard about. In the weeks after he vanishes, Ted Conrad puts pen to paper and writes to his girlfriend back in Ohio. He tells her what he did.

He tells her he loves her. And then he tells her the plan. The federal statute of limitations on his crime runs 7 years. So he waits it out. 7 years of somewhere else. Then he comes home and [music] marries her. He never intended to disappear in his own head. 20 years old in a rented room in a city he doesn't know. He is doing arithmetic on his own future. 1976. He'll be 27. Young enough to start over. Young enough to still get the girl.

But letters have to be mailed. And the FBI knows who he loves. The first door agents knock on after a man vanishes [music] belongs to the person he left behind. They reach her within weeks and every page he [music] sends her goes straight into the case file where it will sit for the next 50 years. His plan in his own handwriting becomes the hunt's founding document. The postmarks drag agents from Washington to Los Angeles.

The girl he's coming home to marry is now on paper the government's best map of him. Meanwhile, the machine spins up. Every FBI field office in the country gets the flyer. Tips start coming in from coast to coast. And in Cleveland, the file lands on a desk. It will never really leave. His name is John Elliot, Deputy US Marshal. The Conrad case reaches him the year it opens. Pete Elliot, his son, who will one day carry this same case, [music] has described how strangely close the two families lived without knowing it.

The same family doctor, a neighborhood ice cream counter where Conrad worked. Before John Elliot ever hunts him, they've been in the same rooms breathing [music] the same Cleveland air. Remember both Elliots? The father is about to spend the rest of his life on this. The boy at his dinner table comes later. October 1969. A couple from Cleveland thinks they spot Conrad in a hotel bar in Honolulu. Investigators chase it across the island and the trail thins and goes quiet. 3 months in and the hunt has already come within one bar stool of ending.

He never learns how close that was. But one month before Honolulu, the ground has already moved under him. September 1969, Cleveland, a federal grand jury returns an indictment. And here the hinge turns. He isn't charged with bank robbery. And legally, he was never a robber at all. He's charged as an employee who took money he was trusted with, embezzlement, false entries. It sounds smaller. It isn't because an indictment stops the clock.

The statute of limitations does not keep running against a man who has already been charged. The 7-year countdown he's living inside, crossing days off toward 1976 is void from the moment the grand jury hands up his name. Come home in 1976, come home in 1996, come home at 80. The charge will still be standing there waiting. And an [music] indictment is not a secret. It's a public record with his name on it. The kind that makes the papers back home.

And a man whose entire plan is counting [music] days keeps count of his own case. So the homecoming dies and the wedding dies with it. The letters are federal evidence. Her mailbox is a watched box and the girl he was counting toward recedes [music] out of his story for good. He is not escaping anymore. He knows it. As of September 1969, he is serving. A sentence with no end date and no warden [music] except himself.

So how does a man cease to exist? Not in a movie. in real life with a face and a social security number and a mother. January 1970, Boston. A young man walks into a social security office and applies for a card. Name: Thomas Randall. Date of birth, July 10th, 1947. Read that date again. He was born on the 10th of July. He kept the day. He kept the month. He moved the year back exactly too. And he kept his parents' real names on the paperwork, too.

A man in the process of deleting his mother, his sister, his hometown, his [music] own face in every photograph anyone has of him sits down and keeps the day he was born. Those two years are going to matter. Remember [music] them. Here's why 1970 is the perfect seam. In 1970, identity in America runs on a stranger's [music] word. You walk into an office, you say who you are, and you get a number. The number gets you a driver's license.

The license gets you credit. The credit gets you a job, an apartment, a car loan, a life. Each document vouches for the next one. [music] And nothing underneath any of it ever gets checked because the databases that could catch the lie won't exist for decades. Thomas Randall is a real identity built by the system itself. Honestly, document by document on top of one lie. And of all the cities in America where a man could vanish, he picks Boston, the city where the Thomas Crown affair was filmed, he doesn't escape from the movie.

He escapes into it. The FBI is hunting a bank teller from Cleveland. But as of January 1970, that man doesn't exist. For the next half century, a marshall builds a file while a ghost builds a man. Which cracks first? The file or the lie? And what happens on the night one man's face airs on two channels at the same time? The file goes cold and for five decades the two lives run on parallel screens. Ohio. The binders multiply.

The photographs age on a wall and the bureau takes the case to national television twice. The kind of prime time manhunt segment that pulls tips from every state. Massachusetts. Thomas Randall takes a job at a country club, then moves into car sales and stays almost 40 years selling Volvos and Land Rovers to lawyers, to surgeons, and to police officers. A Saturday morning somewhere in those years. A forsome on the first tea, three cops, and a car salesman.

One of the detectives grins. Five bucks a hole, Tommy. Randall laughs, tees up his ball. You know, I don't gamble. hundreds of weekend rounds with police officers and he will not put $5 on a single one. A man carrying an active federal warrant does not create even one story about himself that involves money. 1982 he marries a woman named Kathy. A few years later, there's a daughter, Ashley. Now, every year the lie holds, there is more stacked on top of it to lose.

The kitchen table years into the marriage, Kathy spreads out brochures. France, the family trip. All he needs is a passport, and a passport means fingerprints on a federal form. 10 seconds of ink, and 1970 comes apart. He shrugs. You two go. Someone's got to stay with the cat. She files it away as one of Tommy's things for the rest of their 39 years together. A DNA kit under a Christmas tree stays wrapped. He never once types his own name into a search engine.

[music] Not in the entire life of the internet. He has a mother in Ohio, a sister he never calls. There are funerals he doesn't attend. Back in Cleveland, at another dinner table, that boy Pete grows up hearing one name over and over. Pass the potatoes and where the heck is Conrad. [music] In 1987, on a stage, John Elliot hands his son his deputies credentials. The family [music] business made official. One father is raising a hunter.

The other is raising a daughter who does not know her own last name. Then the scoreboard produces the single most insane image in this entire story. His face runs in local television commercials for the dealership. That's not a figure of speech. A federally indicted fugitive puts on a blazer, stands in a showroom under the lights, and asks the greater Boston area to come on down. Which means that at some point in those decades, a photograph of Ted Conrad, 20 years old, bank shirt, the kid who took the bag, is airing on a national manhunt broadcast.

While a photograph of Thomas Randall, heavier grayer, [music] talking about financing, is airing on a Boston station. Same man, two televisions at the same time. Every viewer flipping between those channels on the wrong night is one squint away from ending this. The tip line is printed right there on the screen. Agents run down calls from every state, one by one. Not one caller says, "That guy sells me my cars." That's the triumph.

Here's the doom writing inside it. Back in Cleveland, in one of John Elliot's binders, sits a page Ted Conrad filled out at 18. A college application from 1967 in his own hand. A face ages. Handwriting doesn't. The government already owns half of the evidence that ends [music] this story. It just needs him someday somewhere to write the other half. If you're enjoying this one, hit like. It tells me you want more stories about people who beat systems built to be unbeatable.

By 1990, John Elliot has been chasing Ted Conrad for 21 years. He retires. The file should die right here. It doesn't. What kind of man keeps hunting after the badge comes off? And what piece of paper is Ted Conrad about to hand the government himself? He goes back to it every week. An old man signs the visitor log at the federal courthouse in Cleveland, rides the elevator up, and pulls one of 20 binders off the shelf.

Binders he has read so many times the spines have gone soft. A deputy half his age leans in the doorway. Anything new, John? Not yet. Listen to that answer. Not no. Not yet. 15 years into retirement. A man who says not yet is still coming. The bureau moved on decades ago. The hunt has privatized down to one retired marshal and a stack of paper. And by now, the building he visits belongs to the family. In 2003, his son Pete is appointed US Marshall for the Northern District of Ohio.

We kept this case going because it was important to my father. Pete says the case passes through the family now like a debt and understand what the file is up against. Every tool America has built since 1969. Fingerprints, credit records, facial recognition, compares the present against a recorded past, and Conrad's past was welded shut in 1970. The machines can't touch him. Only his own hand can. 2014, a federal courthouse outside Boston.

Thomas and Kathy Randall file for bankruptcy. Around $160,000 of debt. A fugitive under active federal indictment sits across from a clerk of the United States government, signs his name onto a federal document, and slides it back across the counter. The clerk stamps it. Next case, remember the college application in the binder. The government has just collected its twin. Two samples of one hand, 47 years apart, sitting in two federal [music] buildings, waiting for someone to put them side by side.

That signature has a return date. bankruptcy, which answers the question you've been holding since the paper bag. Where's the money? Gone by the late '7s. Bad investments is the going theory, plus the ordinary bleed of an ordinary life. People get this [music] backwards. The money only ever had one job, and it did that job perfectly. It bought the exit. The room, the bus ticket, the first 6 months of being a stranger. everything after the house, the marriage, the daughter, 40 years of showroom handshakes.

He earned selling cars. By 2017, the case is 48 years old and still listed as active. A new age progressed photograph goes out. A computer's guess at what a missing 20-year-old's face would be doing at 68. And John Elliot, in his 80s now, sits for an interview and says the plainest thing [music] anybody says in this entire story. That warrant is mine. He hasn't had a good night's sleep, he says, since 1969. March 2020, John Elliot dies at 83.

At his own request, he is buried with his badge. Before the end, his son makes him a promise. I told him we were going to get Conrad. This is the moment the story turns inside out. The hunter dies 14 months before the hunted. The last man alive who chased Conrad from the beginning. [music] The one man who knew every page of that file by heart is gone. Pete wants it as badly as ever. A bedside promise doesn't expire. But wanting is not a lead.

What his father left him is a shelf of paper and 50 years of silence. A map of everywhere Conrad wasn't. The secret is now finally mathematically perfect. Because the one promise still standing has nothing left to pull on. Then why, one year later, does Ted Conrad destroy it himself? And what does a perfect fugitive owe the only two people who never knew his name? February 2021, Lynfield, Massachusetts. The diagnosis is lung cancer, and it's aggressive.

All those Marshals, all those databases, and the clock that finally starts running is set by a scan. No marshall did that. A cell did. Now he's holding a choice with no good side to it. Door one. He says nothing. He dies as Thomas Randall, a car salesman with a nice funeral. And the win is total, flawless, permanent, unbroken. But his daughter goes to her own grave, not knowing her actual last name. And half of her father stays a room she was never led into.

Door two. He opens his mouth and hands back the only thing he ever kept. March 2021. The living room. An NCIS rerun playing on the TV. His wife and daughter are in the room, and by his daughter's public account, he starts it almost like a joke. Ladies, just in case it ever comes up, he'd had to change his name. [laughter] Ashley laughs. Of course, she laughs. Dads say things. Then she goes and looks it up that night alone.

And the search results come back and something cold moves through her because there is a real 1969 bank case in Cleveland and there is a real missing 20-year-old and that in her own words is when she got scared. She goes back to him. She tells him she deserved to know her own name. The next day he tells her, "My name is Ted Conrad." Ashley later described her father as a cool as a cucumber guy his entire life. That day she said he looked scared.

Here's what he does not do, and it answers the question this entire video has been carrying. The state gets nothing. No call to the marshals, no letter to the bank, no lawyer quietly feeling out a deal. And there never will be. The government was never going to be in that room. He gives the truth to the two people who earned it and to nobody else on Earth. A man spending the last thing he owns on the only people he'd have spent it on.

May 2021, he dies at home. 71 years old. The world at his wake believes he's 73. And the line to get in wraps the building. Customers, [music] neighbors, golfing partners, people who bought three cars from him across 30 years and never once got a bad handshake. His wife's only public about him ever are four of them. A great man. Days later, an obituary runs in a Boston area, and it is the strangest artifact this case ever produces.

It's true. The birthday is his real day and month. His parents are listed under their real names. Ted Conrad's parents in print in a [music] newspaper in 2021. The obituary of a man who did not exist contains the biography of a man who did. Who wrote it that way and why those details survived has never been answered by anyone. It just sits there on the page, both men at once. Fall 2021. By the family's account, they intend to wait a year before saying anything to anyone.

They don't get a year. Someone, and to this day, nobody knows who, which Ashley has called the one piece of this story still unsolved, emails that obituary to a crime writer in Ohio named Jane Anne Turzilla, a woman who knows the Conrad case cold. She reads the parents' names. She stops. She forwards it to Marshall Pete Elliot. And then the manhunt ends the way it was always going to end on paper. Out of his father's file comes the college application Ted Conrad filled [music] out in 1967.

The page that has been waiting five decades for its twin. Out of a Boston courthouse comes the bankruptcy petition signed in 2014. Two documents 47 years apart from two different men who never lived in the same state. They put them side by side. Same hand, same loops, same slant, same signature a teenager made before any of this happened. And the date of birth on the obituary is July 10th, off by exactly 2 years. The one piece of himself he refused to erase is the piece that identifies him. 52 years, 20 binders, tips from every state, two television broadcasts, two generations, and it closes with a newspaper clipping and two signatures.

What exactly did the government win? And what did Ted Conrad get away with? The marshals drive to Lynfield and when the hunt that outlived its own hunter finally arrives at the family's front door, it arrives as a courtesy call. You are not in trouble, they tell them. We just need to have a conversation. There is no one left to arrest. A federal warrant is a piece of paper about a living man, and the living man is 6 months in the ground.

November 12th, 2021. Pete Elliot closes the file. his father opened in 1969 and signs it on behalf of John K. Elliot. A promise made at a bedside kept on a government form. That's the government's victory. A name half a year after the funeral, delivered by the fugitive's own confession, printed in his own obituary, proven by his own handwriting, and filed under a dead man's signature. Even the marshall's announcement concedes it.

The case perplexed investigators for 50 years. And Conrad, in Pete Elliot's own words, pretty much lived the life of a perfect fugitive about the word in the title only because you're already thinking of the other names. DB Cooper jumped out of a 727 with $200,000 and disappeared into legend. But part of that ransom turned up years later, rotting in a riverbank unspent. Whatever Cooper won, he never got to spend a night of it.

The men who emptied the Gardener Museum in 1990 were never caught either, and the frames still hang empty. But the investigators best candidates died broke as nobody's. Conrad's ledger reads differently. The crime worked. The life was real. A 39-year marriage, a daughter, a career, a country club, 40 years of being genuinely liked. Nobody ever put a hand on him, living or dead. [music] And the ending happened entirely on his terms. his timing, his room, his words, his people.

Everybody else got away with something. He is the only one who got away with everything. When Pete Elliot announced it, he said, "Everything in real life doesn't always end like in the movies." Conrad's did because he wrote the part, "The movie never shows." The Thomas Crown affair stops at the getaway in the sunshine with [music] the money. Conrad wrote the 50 years after the dealership, the mortgage, [music] the oil changes, the small talk with a cop on the fourth T. 50 years of Tuesdays played without one wrong note.

Which leaves the uncomfortable part? Somebody sold you a car once. Somebody taught you to golf or coached your kid or stood next to you at a wake and told a story about the deceased. How sure are you of their name? Because the FBI has surrendered like this before in writing on the [music] record to a man they simply could not reach. That's the story of the only gangster the FBI gave up trying to catch. Watch it next.