One of America's most wanted fugitives for 52 years who was inspired by movie identified

One of America’s Most Wanted fugitives credited with pulling off one of the largest bank robberies in the history of Cleveland, Ohio, had spent five decades living a quiet life in a Boston suburb, not far from where the movie investigators say inspired his notorious real-life heist was filmed.

Fifty-two years would pass before U.S. Marshals, who traveled from Cleveland to Boston, positively determined that Conrad had been living an "unassuming" life under the alias Thomas Randele in Lynnfield, Massachusetts since 1970. He died there of lung cancer in May of 2021 at the age of 71. 

A year before the Cleveland bank robbery, Conrad became obsessed with the 1968 Steve McQueen film "The Thomas Crown Affair," which featured a fictional millionaire businessman who decided to rob a bank for sport. Investigators say Conrad saw the movie more than a half dozen times and bragged to his friends about how easy it would be to take money from the bank and told them he planned to do so.