My Story: Teddy J. Conrad

Cleveland Plain Dealer

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1200216634105730.xml&coll=2

Lakewood Class of '67 grad Ted Conrad, $215,000 still missing
Sunday, January 13, 2008

Jim Nichols
Plain Dealer Reporter

Lakewood- Theodore J. Conrad skipped the 40th reunion of his Lakewood High School class last Aug. 25.

That raised no eyebrows among the classmates who gathered at the suburb's Around the Corner Saloon on that warm, overcast Saturday evening.

No one expected to see Ted Conrad there, or at the Class of 1967's 10th reunion, or at its 25th.

It's not that he was an outcast in school: Conrad had plenty of friends, a bright mind and an IQ of 135. He made outstanding grades and had enough charm and affability to gain election to the Lakewood High student council.

Yet, not long after graduation, on his 20th birthday, Conrad turned his back on the Class of '67, on Lakewood and on all those friends he'd made. Everyone quickly found out why - especially the FBI.

On Friday, July 11, 1969, the young vault teller at Society National Bank's Public Square headquarters left work at quitting time with a paper bag, a smile and a wave.

On Monday, Conrad failed to show for work, for the first time in seven model-employee months on the job, and no one from the bank could reach him at home.

By then, Conrad, and the $215,000 he'd purportedly stuffed in that bag, had vanished like a puff of smoke from one of his Marlboro cigarettes.

Almost 39 years later, federal agents are still looking.

"It remains a mystery," said FBI agent Scott Wilson. "Certainly, he has covered his tracks quite well."

Federal agents from just about all of the FBI's 56 field offices around the country have helped investigate the case, and they've compiled enough interview notes and documentation to fill 20 binders. Still, the feds admit they've never even come close.

"He left town and hasn't been seen since," said Bill Edwards, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Cleveland.

The missing loot, adjusted for inflation, would equate to $1.23 million in today's dollars.


A quiet life, then just gone

Ted Conrad never made much of a splash in Cleveland until he left. Four days after he vanished, his photograph appeared on the front page of the old Cleveland Press, along with a 4-inch story about the bank's belated discovery of his apparent caper.

Before that, Conrad had lived what seemed to be a good but low-impact life.

He was born in Denver, and his father's Navy career kept the Conrad family bouncing around the country for most of Ted's childhood until his parents divorced during their son's elementary-school years. Conrad and his sister lived with their mom, who married Raymond Marsh, a father of two boys. They settled on Bonnieview Avenue in western Lakewood.

Ted was in the German club and was on the student council at Lakewood High, but school records indicate no other involvement. He worked at a Lakewood restaurant, then at a drugstore.

Classmate Jim Bartholomew of Westlake was student council president in their senior year. He recalled that Conrad didn't have a circle of close friends but "was a well-liked guy - quiet, but articulate."

Kathy Berkshire, who now heads the Lakewood Chamber of Commerce, remembers Conrad as a guy who was popular but kept a low profile.

"He was a really nice guy," said Berkshire, who shared a locker with a girl Conrad dated. "He was very clean-cut, very polite. He seemed like he had goals - like when he graduated, he wanted to accomplish things."

Conrad's first post-high school accomplishment was being elected freshman class president at New England College, a small liberal-arts school near Concord, N.H. His father, a retired Navy captain, was an assistant professor of political science there.

For reasons that are unclear, Conrad returned here after only one semester and enrolled in evening classes at Cuyahoga Community College.


Rising star, or schemer?

At the beginning of 1969, Conrad also took a job at the Public Square headquarters of Society National Bank.

Officials there told the FBI and newspaper reporters that they were impressed by his National Honor Society credentials, potential and excellent references from prominent Clevelanders. Every performance review hailed Conrad as "well above average." The young man was headed for the fast track, one banker said then.

Conrad worked in a cash vault, packaging money to be delivered to Society branches around town. It was a position for a trusted employee.

But by then, Conrad was inexplicably fascinated with deception. Several of his friends later told investigators that Conrad was nearly obsessed with the 1968 Steve McQueen film "The Thomas Crown Affair" and saw it over and over. In the movie, McQueen plays a bored high-society millionaire who orchestrates a $2.6 million bank robbery for sport - to pit his wits against investigators'.

Conrad began to fancy himself debonair, his friends told the FBI. He'd show off his fluent French and his billiards prowess, which one friend described as "tournament-quality." He drove a two-seat MG sports car and proclaimed his love for Porsches and Calvert gin.

And he may have been calculating his perfect crime. Retired Deputy U.S. Marshal John "Pete" Elliott, who dogged the case for decades, believes Conrad "had every intent of doing this, probably, from the first day he walked into the bank. It was premeditated - not a spur-of-the-moment act."


No idle boast

Conrad even joked to co-workers about how vulnerable the bank would be to a heist.

"He was clowning around and told people in the bank, 'I could do this and nobody would know it until it was over,' " said Elliott, whose son now heads the U.S. Marshals Service in Cleveland.

Conrad's chance came that second week of July: His supervisor was hospitalized for surgery, and he was left largely unsupervised.

Conrad returned from lunch that Friday, conspicuously carrying the paper bag and its contents - a fifth of Canadian Club whiskey and a carton of smokes - into the vault with him. No one thought twice when he signed out for the weekend carrying the same bag - filled, authorities believe, with $50 and $100 bills.

At 7:26 p.m., outside Conrad's Clifton Boulevard apartment, he waved goodbye to his landlady and climbed into a cab. He got out 26 minutes later at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. There, he called his girlfriend and told her he was going to Erie, Pa., for a rock concert.

The next week, the story made the papers. But it was eclipsed by the buildup to Apollo 11's first-ever moon mission, El Salvador's invasion of Honduras and Broadway Joe Namath's declaration that he'd retire rather than lose a showdown with NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle over Namath's ownership of a shady nightclub.

To Conrad's classmates, the news "was kind of a shock to the system," said Bartholomew. "He was the kind of guy everyone thought would be successful - but not as a bank robber."

The next time Conrad's girlfriend, Kathleen Einhouse, heard from him was on July 17, in a letter postmarked from National Airport in Washington, D.C. She got another letter on July 22 from Englewood, Calif., home of Los Angeles International Airport.

Those letters implicate Conrad, said Edwards, of the U.S. attorney's office.

A federal grand jury indicted Conrad on charges of embezzling and falsifying bank records in December 1969. That stopped the clock on the statute of limitations, Edwards said. Conrad faces about 10 years in prison on each charge.

Elliott and the FBI squabbled over manhunt jurisdiction, and each agency pursued leads. Elliott pulled fingerprints from documents Conrad had handled at the high school, bank and college and turned a dossier over to Interpol, the global police agency.

Periodically, federal authorities would get court orders permitting them to comb the telephone records of Conrad's friends and family, to little avail. FBI agents showed up at high school reunions.

Elliott followed leads from Melbourne, Australia, to Medford, Ore. Nothing flushed Conrad, who said in one intercepted communiqué to a friend late in 1969 that he had "undergone a drastic change in appearance."

Eighteen years after his retirement, Elliott still keeps computerized case files at his fingertips and admits Conrad grates at him.

"One of the reasons I stayed after this guy is that some people thought he was some kind of hero or Robin Hood. He's not," said Elliot, now 71.

"He was nothing but a thief - a young, smart-assed thief who managed to elude law enforcement for all these years. Hopefully, we can bring him to justice soon."