On Friday, July 11, 1969, 20-year-old vault teller Ted Conrad walked out of Society National Bank in downtown Cleveland with over $215,000 tucked into a brown paper bag and fled. The FBI and US Marshals Service have been looking for him ever since.

It's one of those unsolved mysteries that every city has in spades.

When The Plain Dealer published a new article about the heist on Jan. 13, I printed it out and set it aside. The article, written by Jim Nichols, noted that every time Conrad's classmates from Lakewood High School gather for a reunion, the FBI is there. Nichols also printed the name of Conrad's ex-girlfriend, Kathleen Einhouse, but apparently hadn't contacted her. I thought that might be a way at fresh information, if I ever got around to writing an article myself.

On Monday, March 24, while cleaning my desk, I found the article again. Underneath it was an e-mail my editor, Frank Lewis, had sent me on Jan. 3, with a link to an article about the FBI reopening the D.B. Cooper case.

In 1971, Cooper hijacked a 727 and demanded $200,000 in cash, as well as two parachutes, for the safe return of the passengers and crew. Cooper got what he wanted and somewhere over the state of Washington, he bailed out the back of the plane with the loot. The FBI has been searching for the man - whose real name was most certainly not Cooper - ever since.

So the FBI reopened the D.B. Cooper case about 10 days before a new story on Ted Conrad suddenly appeared in the local daily. I saw The Plain Dealer article contained quotes from Scott Wilson, the FBI's Cleveland bureau spokesman. I wondered if the timing meant that the FBI thought that Conrad was Cooper.

When I called the FBI, I got Special Agent James Keesling, who said that he had recently transferred to Cleveland from the Washington office currently handling the Cooper investigation. It seemed like a weird coincidence. I asked him if the FBI thought the two crimes were connected. He said he'd get back to me.

My interest now thoroughly piqued, I searched Whitepages.com for Kathleen Einhouse's phone number. I got lucky - a "K. Einhouse" was listed in Lakewood. The woman who answered the phone was Kathleen's elderly mother.

"Ted sent letters to my daughter after he ran away," she said. "But the FBI took them." She promised to pass my cell phone number to her daughter the next time they talked.

Conrad had played it smart. He stole the money on a Friday, at closing time, giving him a full weekend to escape before a bank manager would notice. The FBI wasn't alerted until Tuesday. By then, Conrad was long gone.

His method was elegantly simple. July 10, the day before the heist, was Conrad's birthday. On Friday, he made a point to show everyone the bottle of Canadian Club whiskey he'd bought from the store across the street to celebrate. He carried it around in a brown paper bag all day. When he left the vault at the end of his shift, no one, not even the security guard, bothered to check his bag. If they had, they would have found a 10- to 12-inch stack of $100 bills.

In 1969, when $2,400 bought you a new Dodge, $215,000 was enough to retire on, if invested properly.

Bank managers were stunned. In eight months, Conrad had never missed a day. "An excellent employee, with excellent credentials," coworkers told reporters. "A lovely boy, a gentleman in every way," said his landlord, who claimed she saw Conrad get into a cab Friday night and wave to her as the car pulled away.

A follow-up story ran later that week, tucked in the Metro section, above a piece about Sam Sheppard's new wife passing her citizenship exam. It provided new details about Conrad's personal life. After graduating from Lakewood High School in 1967, Conrad attended New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. His father was a professor there. Conrad was voted freshman class president, but dropped out and came back to Ohio to be near his mother. She had remarried and lived in Lakewood, with his sister, two brothers and stepfather. Shortly after returning, Conrad got his own apartment on Clifton.

Tuesday, March 25

Kathleen Einhouse and I spoke for the first time at around 11 a.m. She was sitting on a beach in Ocean City, enjoying a short vacation with a friend. Her voice was kind and, it seemed to me, a little mischievous or playful.

"How did I meet Ted?" she asked, repeating my question. "Geez. Let's see. I was with two friends, driving down Detroit and there Ted was, walking on the sidewalk. I went to St. Augustine, so I didn't know him, but one of my friends did and she said, "Oh my God, that's Ted Conrad! I heard he just broke up with his girlfriend.' He was very handsome, you know? So we stopped. Anyway, he and I started dating. And we dated until he robbed the bank."

Kathleen paused, then said, "I have this tape you should see. It's pretty old. VHS. It's a news story about Ted. There's lots of stuff on it." She said she'd make a copy of it and send it to me. She also recommended I watch the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair, the one starring Steve McQueen. In the summer of '67, she said, Conrad had dragged her to see it twice and had even gone again without her. After each viewing, he would light a cigar and smoke it while he gushed about the film.

When she heard that Conrad had stolen the money, she wasn't surprised. He had told her he was going to do it - she just didn't think he was serious. "He liked to think that he could pull off a heist like Steve McQueen," she said. "He told us he was only going to take money that the bank was storing for some racetrack. He said the money coming in from the racetrack was not counted. The serial numbers weren't logged."

Kathleen revealed that she may have unwittingly helped Conrad obtain fake identification. "I had just gotten my Social Security card and I told him how easy it had been to get a copy of my birth certificate from the bureau of vital statistics. You just went in, looked in a book, pointed to the one you wanted and they gave you a copy. All you needed to get a Social Security card at the time was a copy of a birth certificate."

The weekend Conrad disappeared, he told Kathleen that he was going to see his mother perform in a concert; she was a musician with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He said he was going to stay in Erie. "But then he called me that night. He said, "Why don't you stop over?' Thank God I didn't."

Kathleen claims that before Conrad took off, he left clues in his apartment that would send the FBI on "a wild goose chase" - things like hair dye and notes about cities he was avoiding. He also left behind a piece of paper stuck to his TV set that said, "Rusty, here's your present." Conrad was going to miss his friend Rusty's wedding. Kathleen could not remember Rusty's last name.

Nor could she remember much about the letters Conrad sent after disappearing.

"It was just things about our life together. He said, "I blew it for $250,000.' And he called me once, too. He said he'd read that thing about his landlady saying he waved to her from the cab. He said, "I did not wave.' He said he'd been in a library and had researched statistics on how often the FBI caught the people they go after. He said, if you get enough head start, "They're not real good.'"

He stopped contacting her in the fall of '69; he might have realized that the feds were tapping her phone. She figures Conrad went to Canada, because he spoke fluent French. "He wasn't a stupid guy," she said. "He's probably on an island somewhere. I lived on St. Croix for awhile. Have you ever been on an island? You'd never find someone there. I know some people who have gone to St. Croix on vacation and just stayed. It's so unregulated."

CLEVELAND PRESS - July 15, 1969.

Kathleen also mentioned a book written about Conrad in the '70s, Move Over, Steve McQueen. A friend of hers happened upon it at a garage sale. "It's completely, totally inaccurate," she said. "At least the stuff about the girlfriend."

Later, I found the book for sale on eBay. The listing said the book was signed by the author, Jeff Keith: "To Josephine, to our West Virginia agent, with best wishes, Jeff."

Wednesday, March 26

Special Agent Keesling called me back early in the afternoon. Conrad was not considered a suspect in the D.B. Cooper case. The timing of The Plain Dealer article had been coincidence.

Damn.

Thursday, March 27

I called Kathleen again. She'd remembered a little more.

"The FBI almost got him in Hawaii, in 1969, I think," she said. "A couple from Ohio were on vacation and spotted him at a bar. I think the FBI found a pewter mug there that I had given Ted as a present. I think that's how they know it was him, for sure. It had his initials on it."

Kathleen also had found an old letter from a friend of Conrad's named Mike Murphy, who was visited by the FBI while stationed in Germany in 1969. She read the letter into the phone. ""If you happen to be thinking at this moment that they wanted to ask about Ted, you are correct. They took me outside, asked me a number of pertinent questions like, when did I last hear from him, did he ever mention anything about this to you? I finally got back inside to a cold pizza and warm beer.'"

After giving it some more thought, she felt that Conrad must have gotten a new identity worked out before leaving Lakewood and had probably found a name to use at the vital statistics office. Having recently written a story about a man in Eastlake who stole someone's identity in 1978, I knew one way such a thing could be done. I asked whether Ted had known of anyone about his age who had died.

"Actually, yes," she said. A friend of Kathleen's had a younger brother who died in an accident in Lakewood. The boy's name had been Tim Greenrod.

A search of Whitepages.com found no Tim Greenrod in the United States, let alone Ohio. If Conrad was using the name, he wasn't in the phone book.

I contacted a friend of mine named Mike Lewis, who runs Confidential Investigative Services, a local private-eye firm. He said he would run the information through a system that compiles names, phone numbers and addresses from various public records.

Friday, March 28

Lewis sent me an e-mail with the results of his search for Tim Greenrod. Someone using that name, with a birth date that matched the deceased, was associated with an address in Cleveland.

Later that afternoon, I pulled into a driveway on a rundown section of Linn Avenue, off Broadway. The house which someone using a dead boy's name once listed on some form was vacant, and neighbors told me that no one had lived there for a long time.

I returned home to find that my copy of Move Over, Steve McQueen had arrived. I scanned the author's bio: "Jeff Keith was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1949 ... By the age of ten he spoke French fluently."

That evening, I watched The Thomas Crown Affair, taking notes. The newer version of the movie, the one starring Pierce Brosnan, has Crown stealing priceless art, but this classic involves a well-staged bank heist. Crown hires patsies to rob the bank for him. And the first thing he does after the heist is light up a stogie. After depositing the $2.6 million in a Swiss bank account, Crown returns to the States and falls for the woman hired by the insurance company to catch him. He offers her a chance to go with him, but in the end leaves her behind. Thomas Crown. Ted Conrad. T.C.

Saturday, March 29

Another package arrived, this one containing a DVD copy of a news report Kathleen taped in 1986. It was about 20 minutes long and provided a few details that I had not found in newspaper articles. Most interesting were a few snippets from the letters Conrad mailed to Kathleen following the theft. "I do want to write, though I only ask that you burn my envelopes so the authorities don't get the postmarks!"

But the FBI intercepted the letters. One was dated July 15 and had been deposited at the Washington, DC airport. A second was dated July 17 and postmarked Inglewood, CA.

An FBI agent revealed that Conrad had been making audio recordings of his phone calls to Kathleen. The report also revealed that Conrad is left-handed, enjoys golfing and is an accomplished billiards player.

But it seems Conrad wasn't as smart as he thought he was. Further letters reference the statute of limitations for embezzlement - seven years. But the statute of limitations became meaningless when the federal government indicted him in absentia in December 1969.

"Maybe on that seventh year, we'll meet and fall in love," he wrote. "It's now seven days and only six years, 358 days to go!"

The report ended with a statement from Conrad's father. "This is the heartbreaker of my life."

Sunday, March 30

Billed as a novel, Move Over, Steve McQueen is about a young man named Ted Conrad in the late '60s. Worried about the draft, he enrolls at Cuyahoga Community College to avoid going to war. He takes a job at Aero Kit Inc., a Rocky River factory that produces rubber gaskets for the war machine. There, Conrad befriends an assortment of colorful characters and sort of falls for an older married woman. Eventually, he gets an interview at Society National Bank, and the president is so taken by him that Conrad is made vault teller.

In various places throughout the book, the writer drops French idioms or lapses into the language during conversations between Conrad and his mother.

A friend named "Russell Dunn" warns Conrad that his bank-theft plan might not work. "Don't you think someone's gonna see a paper bag and check it?"

"That's just it!" says Conrad. "I'm depending on everyone looking but no one seeing!"

PLAIN DEALER - July 16, 1969.

For a moment, I felt like I couldn't breathe. A strange idea occurred to me.

I ran "Jeff Keith" through a newspaper archive search. This headline came up: "How One Lawyer Tormented His Victims and the Justice System." The article began, "People will tell you Jeffrey Keith is the devil himself, but officially, he is inmate No. 182622 in 7 Delta Pod of the Cuyahoga County Jail."

In 1995, Keith was convicted of a litany of arson charges - he had terrorized his ex-girlfriend by hiring a man to torch cars and homes of just about anyone she knew - and was sentenced to 25-50 years in prison.

The article described Keith as a lawyer from Lakewood who didn't practice law and who had ran unsuccessfully for City Council four times, a clever sociopath who owned three properties and kept different women at each. One woman claimed Keith had locked her and her children in the house on weekends while he drove to Erie to visit his other girlfriend. She said that when Keith found out she was pregnant with his daughter, he talked her into an abortion because he only wanted a son.

He had donated $30,000 to a local Middle Eastern organization he belonged to, but got kicked out after he started dating the president's daughter. At about the same time, 46-year-old Keith started seeing a high school senior he met on a levy campaign in Parma.

When he was indicted on the arson charges, that high school senior told the police that Keith had a lot of money, but never worked. She claimed he had a safe-deposit box in which he kept gold teeth and coins, according to the article.

He was also in trouble for forging an old lady's will.

In 1996, Keith was indicted again, this time for plotting to kill a firefighter and the prosecutor who put him away. But those charges didn't stick. A woman named Barbara Loesser, who worked as a reporter for the Downtown Tab, contacted the prosecution's witnesses and - using the name Chris Lawrence - intimidated them until they recanted or changed their stories. Loesser was indicted for bribery, intimidation, obstructing justice and perjury. She too is now on the run and wanted by police.

Monday, March 31

I showed Ted Conrad's school photo and Jeff Keith's author headshot to my editor. He saw the resemblance (when you looked past Keith's '70s-era long hair and mustache). The art director agreed. I was convinced they were the same man.

I called the Trumbull Correction Institution where Keith is serving his sentence. I was told I could submit a request to meet with Keith, but it was up to him whether or not he would see me. I faxed a letter explaining that I had a copy of his book and wanted to talk to him about it.

Wednesday, April 2

There is an office at City Hall where the names of everyone born and everyone who has died in Cleveland are kept in large black binders, arranged by year. It's a weird, off-putting place. It feels a little like some modern-day re-invention of Greek mythology.

I was looking for proof that the real Jeff Keith had died and Ted Conrad had stolen his identity, like someone had apparently stolen Tim Greenrod's.

I quickly located the birth certificate for a "Jeff Keith" in 1949, the only "Jeff Keith" listed that year. I combed the dead files for the years immediately after 1949, hoping to find "Jeff Keith" again. I didn't. However, I did find a "Baby Boy Keith" who died in 1950, shortly after childbirth. That child's father had the same name as the father listed on Jeff Keith's certificate. But the mother's name was different.

Later that day, a spokesperson with the prison called to say that Keith had agreed to meet. A conference room had been reserved for the next day.

On the way home, I dialed a number that I had found for the "real" Jeff Keith's mother, based on information taken from his birth certificate.

An aged woman answered. I explained, as best I could, who I was and that I needed her to tell me if her son was the man who had written Move Over, Steve McQueen.

"No, that man is not my son," she said.

It was the answer I wanted, but I sensed something in her voice. "Ma'am, I'm real sorry. I know this is personal. But I really need to know if the man who wrote the book is your son."

There was a long pause. "He's my son," she said. "He is. But I don't want anything to do with him. I'd like to forget it."

My next call was to my editor.

"Jeff Keith is not Ted Conrad," I told him.

"Are you sure?"

"In order for it to work, he would have had to steal not only his name, but his mother's and sister's, too. I'm pretty sure."

"So how did he know so much about Ted?"

Good question.

Thursday, April 3

An eerie resemblance Conrad in 1969, Keith today.

"I knew Ted from Aero Kits," said Keith, the next day. We sat in a tiny room, with a prison official monitoring our conversation from the corner. Keith is a handsome man, with a high forehead below his smartly combed white hair. He made eye contact and spoke eloquently, slipping into French occasionally. "I was Ted's boss at the factory, even though I was only 18. We worked the night shift. Some people walk into a room and it lights up. Ted was that kind of guy. He was not arrogant in any way."

On the table in front of us was a folder that Keith had put together. It was full of material about the history of the '60's; Keith wanted to offer some perspective on the time period when the heist occurred.

"Look, the first and last Catholic was elected president, we were at war, and we had the Pill," he explained. "We created recreational sex. All these things threatened to tear apart the fabric of the country. In the middle of this mirage, Ted Conrad watches a movie called The Thomas Crown Affair and he gets an idea about how to escape it all. It's hard to find one man fleeing when everyone is running from something, right?"

So what happened to Conrad?

"Ted went to Canada," said Keith. "Toronto. He posed as a draft dodger on Young Street."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"I know, okay? I know," he said. "In 1969, there were 10,000 draft dodgers going through Toronto. If you explained that your father was in the military - Ted's dad was a Navy man - then they set you up with a fake ID. After that, Ted went to Montreal. He had a French nose. You know what that is? It means when you speak French you sound like a Frenchman. He disappeared for good there. Maybe even he went to college, got a degree, somewhere like McGill University."

"How do I find him?" I asked.

"You won't find Ted. He'll find you. Make enough noise, he'll find you. Maybe through e-mail."

"Where was he the last time you spoke to him?" I asked.

Keith looked at the prison official, then back to me, with a smile. "That's a sneaky question," he said. "I'd say Montreal is where he evaporated. That I'm pretty sure of."

Before I left, I asked Keith why he had written "our agent" when he signed the copy of the book I'd found. He shook his head and said, "I can't remember."

Friday, April 4

"I was interested in the case, because Conrad lived in my neighborhood," said retired US Marshall Pete Elliott (his son now runs the Cleveland office). "I knew kids who knew him. They kept telling me to let him go. That he was some Robin Hood. I told them that he was nothing more than a thief."

When Elliott started tracking Conrad, nobody had a set of his fingerprints. In 1969, it wasn't standard procedure for bank employees to be fingerprinted. So Elliott methodically back-tracked paperwork that Conrad had signed at the bank, papers that he touched. From those sheets of paper, crime-lab technicians isolated several latent prints, but not a complete set. Still, it was enough to compare to suspects as they popped up, which is exactly what they did in the mid-'80s, when a man matching Conrad's description was arrested in Honolulu. But the prints did not match.

Elliott has always suspected Conrad may have fled to Canada.

"What would I say if I saw him tomorrow?" Elliott laughs. "I think I'd just like to say, "Gotcha!'"

On a whim, I entered a few searches into Google before sitting down to write about my short but strange search for the elusive Ted Conrad.

"Ted Conrad Montreal"

Nothing.

"Bank Heist Montreal."

Nothing that speaks to Conrad's flair for the dramatic.

"Montreal Thomas Crown Affair."

Now here's something.

In 1972, thieves climbed through the skylight at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and made off with artifacts worth over $1 million, including Rembrandt's Landscape with Cottages. It was a well-orchestrated and clever caper, listed as one of the "top ten heists of all time" by Canada's History TV. More than one person has noted the similarities to the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.

I wonder ...