Shortly after he left, he telephoned Einhouse, a recording of which the FBI still has, though it offered few clues. The authorities recovered three letters Conrad sent to a girlfriend, Kathleen Einhouse, that put his location at Cleveland Airport, Washington DC, and then Los Angeles International Airport. “My theory was that he was going to go to the South Seas and sail the world,” he says. Like many of the class of ’67 of Lakewood High, Metcalf assumed Conrad had gone abroad. When he arrived, he was confronted by two FBI agents who wanted to know everything he could tell them about Ted Conrad. “For it was less about the money, than proving he could do it.”Īs it was, Conrad did not return to work, and two days later Metcalf got a call from someone at the Society National Bank, asking him to go to his own place of work straight away. “I still believe had he been able to speak to me or someone else, and showed us the money, he would have just put it back on Monday morning,” says Metcalf. The evening of the theft, says Metcalf, Conrad had called him at home but he was out, and he spoke to his mother. All he needed to do was to create a situation in which he was left alone in the vault, a breach of the bank’s rules. Metcalf, who spent time in the US Air Force, says Conrad often talked about how easy it would be to take money from the bank. His girlfriend at the time, was studying in the city of Bowling Green, a 100 miles west, and the pair would take road trips. Not to be outdone, Metcalf purchased an Austin-Healey Sprite. He bought a pair of expensive leather driving gloves. Ted loved the the movie, and he thought what a great life McQueen had.”Ĭonrad was so impressed by the film that he persuaded his grandmother to lend him the money for an MG Midget, painted bright red, with a black interior. “McQueen’s wearing a three-piece suit and he drives fast cars. He’s a racing car driver, and he was just cool,” he says. Metcalf says Conrad was much taken by the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair, starting Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. “At the time, he was probably the closest male friend I’d ever had.” I moved to Lakewood in my junior year but we met on the football field,” says Metcalf, who has retired from a career in financial services, and part-time acting. He moved to Lakewood in his sophomore year. “Ted was born in Colorado and he moved to Cleveland. Nobody more so than Russell Metcalf, who later left Lakewood and settled in Texas. Just as friends and relatives of “Thomas Randele” in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, have been trying to absorb their shock about a man universally described as kind and generous, so too have the people in Lakewood, who also knew him as a friendly, warm young man, and have for decades been wondering what became of him. Jordan to star in The Thomas Crown Affair remake