by James Renner
“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.”
I called Frank and told him, “Jeff Keith is not Ted Conrad.”
“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. Yeah, I’m sure.”
“So how did he know so much about Ted?” asked Frank.
Good question.
* * *
“I knew Ted from Aero Kit,” said Keith, the next day. We sat in a tiny room, with a prison official monitoring our conversation quietly 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 ’60s, in order to give 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 Yonge 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 book for Josephine. He shook his head. “I can’t remember,” he said.
* * *
Retired Deputy U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott pursued Conrad for nearly 40 years. His son now runs the office in Cleveland.
“I was interested in the case, because Conrad lived in my neighborhood,” Elliott said. “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.”
In 1969, it wasn’t yet standard procedure for bank employees to be fingerprinted. So Elliott methodically back-tracked paperwork that Conrad had signed at the bank, papers that he had to have touched. From those sheets of paper, crime lab technicians were able to isolate 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-1980s, when a man who matched Conrad’s description was arrested in Honolulu. Elliott flew out to Medford, Oregon, where the man was being held, but the fingerprints 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!’ ”
Before he hangs up, Elliott leaves me with the real name of Ted’s good friend—Russell Metcalf. I find a man with that name still living in Ohio, but the number is unpublished, and there isn’t enough time to drive out to his house before the story’s due.
* * *
On a whim, I enter 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 10 heists of all time” by Canada’s History TV. More than one person has noted the similarities the crime has to the second Thomas Crown Affair.
I wonder . . .
Ted Conrad’s last known photograph, taken at a party before he fled. (FBI)
Headlines in the Plain Dealer (left) and Cleveland Press (right). In 1969, when $2,400 bought you a new Dodge, $215,000 was enough to retire on. (Cleveland State University Archives)
Years later, the FBI constructed the images on the right to show what Conrad might look like as an older man. (FBI)
Jeff Keith wrote a “fictionalized” account of Conrad’s crime. Some think it might not be fiction at all.
In 1997, Jeff Keith was sentenced to serve 20 years and 6 months in federal prison at the Trumbull Correctional Institution. He says he’s not Ted Conrad. (Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office)
Chapter 7
Third Time’s a Charm
The Unsolved Murder of Ramona Krotine
Jeffrey Krotine is halfway through his hamburger when he notices the manager of the Edgewater Yacht Club walking through the dining room. Krotine’s wave catches the man’s eye; he stutter-steps to a momentary stop and waves back in awkward recognition. Then he disappears through a doorway and Krotine turns back to his sandwich with a shrug. He’s used to this by now.
Ten minutes later, Krotine steps out of the arctic chill of the dining room and into the withering August heat. He wants to show off the sailboat he hopes to buy. His wide hips concealed beneath a casual, bright button-down, Krotine meanders toward a line of boats parked on rollers near the security stand. His hair has mostly given way to gray but has yet to recede. It’s cut neatly, a holdover from his time in the army, when he transported Agent Orange in Danang. His smile reveals misshapen, yellow teeth.
“This is the Corvette of sailboats,” he says, leaning against a small, sleek Highlander covered in a green tarp, its mast tilted over its hull. “I was going to buy it. But when other members here found out about it, they undercut me.” Conspiracy, for Krotine, has become a central theme.
Krotine’s sunken eyes look tired and unfocused, half-hidden in wrinkles. It’s not age. It’s the mileage. He stood trial three times for the grisly 2003 murder of his wife, Ramona, enduring two hung juries before a third found him not guilty in May 2005. If he was stalwart in his defense, now he is mostly just numb. The ruling gave him his life back, although it scarcely resembles the one he once had.
Prior to Ramona’s death, Krotine earned $325,000 a year, managing a State Farm Insurance office he had cultivated from zilch. A consummate schmoozer, he boasts that he once claimed more auto policies than any other agency in Ohio. When he went out to eat, restaurant owners would stop at his table and chat, not retreat into kitchens.
He and Ramona raised three children in a comfortably modest four-bedroom colonial in Parma, and all of them were heading down the right path. Jeff Jr. was a chemis
t and was starting a family of his own. Jennifer was studying accounting at the University of Cincinnati. Following in his father’s footsteps, youngest son Jason had joined the Marines.
Since then, Krotine has surrendered the family home in Parma. He sold it to help cover his legal bills. His savings, once fattened in the promise of a leisurely retirement, has been drained to keep him fed and clothed. When I caught up with him in 2005, Krotine was living in the stale air of his former office on Rocky River Drive. Worn clothes and dirty dishes cluttered the rooms.
His children maintained their father’s innocence at trial, but they don’t visit any more. His in-laws, also estranged, are still convinced that he killed Ramona.
There’s nothing casual about the way Krotine talks nowadays. His eyes seek out insincerity like well-calibrated robotic sensors. If he’s interrupted, he casts his eyes down and raises a protective hand, as if defending against an onslaught of hostile words. He’s heard enough arguments for a lifetime; now, the only conversations worth having are those he leads.
Krotine is still navigating his freedom, trying to stitch a life—a personality—together. The boat in the parking lot is one more step toward feeling normal again, toward softening the numbness that enshrouds him.
He gives the boat a gentle pat, then leads the way to a wooden gazebo by the water. A barely perceptible breeze drags across the waves and plays at his hair. His smile slips away. A pause drifts outward over Lake Erie.
Then Krotine returns to talk of Ramona.
As the sun set on Friday, March 21, 2003, Greg Wilczewski drove aimlessly through Brook Park in search of his missing sister. An employee at the Ryba Fudge booth inside the I-X Center, Ramona had attended an exhibitors’ party on Thursday night at the Clarion Hotel in Middleburg Heights. She had last been seen walking to her Toyota Camry around 2:30 Friday morning.
Around 11 p.m. Wilczewski found Ramona’s Camry in the parking lot of the Brookpark Road rapid transit station. The car was locked. There was blood on the ground next to the back door. He peered inside and saw more blood on the back seat. Then he shattered the driver’s side window with a tire iron and popped the trunk. Inside was his sister’s body.
Ramona’s face was horribly bruised, the result of blows that split her scalp open in several places. A gunshot wound from close range had left a dark hole above her left ear. Her black shirt was pulled halfway out of her jeans; her legs were bent behind her, arranged to fit inside the makeshift tomb.
A baby seat had been taken from the vehicle, along with $4,000 Ramona was planning to deposit for her employer that morning. Initially, it appeared to police that she had been the victim of a robbery that had escalated to murder.
By midnight, Brook Park police arrived at Krotine’s house to deliver the grim news. Krotine never asked how she died, they later told prosecutors. He appeared to cry, but shed no tears. The police also reported that Krotine had never searched for her. He had gone to work as usual that day, met with a client at noon. He listened to radio news coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, where their son’s Marine unit had been deployed. He made numerous calls to Jeff Jr., who had left work to wait at his parents’ home, in case his mother returned. Sometime that afternoon, Krotine surfed the Internet for new mattress covers.
For three weeks, police tried to flush out a suspect from sparse leads gathered from people who had been at the party. An autopsy yielded few clues. Then, when detectives drove past the Krotine home one afternoon, they found old carpet on the tree lawn and a work truck parked in the driveway. Krotine was remodeling his bedroom. The walls were freshly painted and the house had been professionally cleaned. Krotine said the new room would honor his wife’s memory. It was painted bright yellow, with sun-like crescents on two walls. He told them that in his letters from Vietnam, he had referred to Ramona as his “sunshine.”
That night, detectives pulled the carpeting from a trash bin. On it, they found Ramona’s blood. Jeffrey Krotine was now the main suspect. The crime scene, they asserted, had been staged.
Detectives spent 10 months methodically building a case against Krotine. On February 2, 2004, he turned himself in and was charged with murder and tampering with evidence. Prosecutors alleged the following chain of events:
Ramona returned from the party late that night and climbed into bed. That’s when Jeffrey suddenly turned violent. He beat her skull repeatedly on the wooden headboard, rendering her unconscious. Then he wrapped her body in sheets and carried her to the garage. He removed the baby seat that was in the Camry for a nephew and placed Ramona in the back seat. Jeffrey then drew a 9mm handgun and shot his wife once in the head. He tossed items from her purse onto the floor of the car, perhaps to simulate a robbery, then transferred her body to the trunk and drove into town, where he abandoned the car at the RTA lot.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason presented the case to the media with his signature self-assured vigor. He called it an instance of domestic violence that had quickly escalated to cold-blooded murder. By the time the trial began five months later, Court TV had descended upon Cleveland.
The evidence against Krotine was circumstantial, but it was also voluminous.
Ramona’s blood was on their bedroom door, on a step leading into the garage, and on the rim of a sink inside their home. A 9 mm handgun Krotine kept in his office was the same basic type that had fired the lethal bullet.
Ramona was seen wearing black heels at the party, but her body was found in bloody socks and spotless white shoes—a mistake made by Krotine in the heat of the moment, Assistant Prosecutor David Zimmerman asserted.
If the killer had simply been a random thief, he wasn’t a very good one. Ramona’s credit card, checkbook, and wedding ring were not taken, but her key chain was. “The only person who would take those keys would be someone who needs those keys to get back inside his house,” says Zimmerman.
Prosecutors also pointed out peculiarities in Krotine’s bedroom renovation. The carpet he discarded three weeks after Ramona’s death was missing a four-by-six-foot strip between the bed and the bathroom. Krotine, prosecutors claimed, knew that piece would implicate him, so he took extra care in its disposal. After new carpeting was installed, Krotine pulled it up and painted the section of wooden floor once covered by the missing carpet.
“His paranoia got the better of him,” says Assistant Prosecutor Anna Faraglia, who tried the case with Zimmerman.
Krotine’s explanation for painting the bedroom in his wife’s honor was also bunk, they claimed. “Ramona hated the color yellow,” says Zimmerman. “The family members told us she hated that color.”
Then there was the mistress.
Interviews with former employees of Krotine revealed he had carried on an affair with Mary Engel, a State Farm representative who worked in his office. For two years, they had been having sex in a third-floor room of the office, which prosecutors referred to as their “love nest.” Ramona, the couple believed, never knew.
Most damning, according to Zimmerman, was Krotine’s behavior in the first hours after his wife disappeared: how he went to work, although he knew that Ramona hadn’t come home; how he surfed the web for a new mattress cover; how he reacted in front of police to the news of her murder. Krotine admitted each of these claims.
Yet he also had answers for just about every question. He pulled up the carpeting after he spilled cognac in a drunken stupor, he said. And the carpeting recovered by detectives did not appear to have been vigorously cleaned, as one would expect from a covered-up crime scene. Ramona’s blood around the house? Only three drops were on the carpet. The trace amounts found elsewhere could have been left anytime in the past. Moreover, if Ramona had been beaten in the bedroom, the place would have been covered in blood, according to testimony from Cuyahoga County Deputy Coroner Stanley Seligman.
Ballistics tests could not confirm whether Krotine’s gun was an exact match to the weapon that killed Ramona. Further, the defense argued, many of Krotine’s employees kn
ew that he kept the gun at work—hidden under a hat—not at home. He made no effort to conceal it after Ramona’s death.
The Krotines’ daughter, Jennifer, had slept in their house the night Ramona disappeared, in a bed just 11 feet from the master bedroom. If a violent struggle had taken place there, how did Jennifer sleep right through it? “She never heard screams, an argument, a beating, a shot—nothing,” attorney William Doyle argued.
As for the affair, Krotine admitted to it, and he told his children about it before the trial began.
Police bungling, the defense argued, prevented them from finding the real murderer. Blood from someone other than Ramona had been found under one of the Camry’s door handles but Brook Park detectives never attempted to match it to anyone. A red fiber found on Ramona’s body was lost, as were leaves that had been found stuck to her back. The defense team fixated on the shoddy work of Brook Park detectives for the better part of three hours before jurors began deliberations. It paid off. On August 4, 2004, the jury announced it was deadlocked at nine to three in favor of conviction. Judge Timothy McGinty declared a mistrial.
Krotine hired four new lawyers for his autumn retrial because his first team told him he no longer could afford them, he says. The prosecution returned the team of Zimmerman and Faraglia, with virtually no changes in their presentation. After three weeks of testimony, 10 of the 12 jurors sided against Krotine. But the two holdouts could not be pressured into changing their minds. On November 30, McGinty declared a second mistrial.
Then Mason called in the big guns. Assistant Prosecutor Steve Dever replaced Zimmerman and reconfigured the approach to the third trial. Dever’s predecessors had laid out the circumstantial evidence only superficially, choosing instead to focus on Krotine’s odd behavior in the wake of Ramona’s disappearance. Actions could be explained away, thought Dever. Science could not.