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For more than 75 years, the FBI has maintained a list that puts some of America’s most elusive fugitives directly in front of the public.
It has included bank robbers, murderers, terrorists, organized crime figures, and people who remained at large for decades. Some were captured within hours, while others were never found at all.
Along the way, the list became one of the most recognizable tools in American law enforcement.
Learn more about the history of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The FBI Most Wanted List is one of the FBI’s best-known programs. Its origins trace back to before the FBI’s formation in the late 1910s. At the time, the FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, began issuing “Identification Orders” to find and catch fugitives.
Identification Orders, or IOs, were an early term used to describe wanted posters. The first poster was issued for a 23-year-old soldier named William N. Bishop, who escaped a stockade in Northern Virginia.
Following Bishop’s escape, the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division asked for help in locating him. The assistant director of the Bureau at the time, Frank Burke, sent a letter to other government employees with a physical description, a copy of his portrait, and possible locations Bishop might be.
This document became known as “Identification Order No. 1” and helped authorities locate and apprehend Bishop a few months later in April of 1920.
Shortly after Bishop’s arrest, it became commonplace to issue Identification Orders to help find fugitives. To make the process easier, the orders were standardized into an 8-by-8 inch format that included fingerprints and background information.
While this identification method was simple, there wasn’t an easily accessible list of wanted criminals, so information was limited to who received the flyers and where they were posted.
J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. Under his direction, the agency hunted down notorious gangsters and conducted domestic counterintelligence, counterespionage, and sabotage investigations.
Under his direction, the FBI became critical to identifying the country’s most wanted fugitives. Hoover and his agency became the top resource for hunting down criminals.
The FBI’s Most Wanted list can trace its origins back to 1949. The list was the brainchild of two individuals: J. Edgar Hoover, and the editor-in-chief of the International News Service, William Kinsey Hutchinson.
The idea grew out of a conversation between Hoover and Hutchinson, who asked the FBI for the names of some of the toughest fugitives they was trying to capture.
Hoover gave the reporter a list, which subsequently received national attention. That attention helped bring in leads on the fugitives that Hoover had named.
Realizing that the most effective form of law enforcement was the cooperation and support of the American people, Hoover established the top 10 list of criminals.
The first most wanted list debuted on March 14, 1950. The first person to be added to the list was an accused murderer named Thomas James Holden.
Holden was accused of murdering his wife, his wife’s brother, and his wife’s stepbrother. In addition to murder, Holden was a robber and a member of the Holden-Keating bank-robbing team.
Holden was on the list for 15 months until he was recognized from a photograph posted in a newspaper. After being arrested, he was tried and convicted of the three murders. This first example highlights the list’s power, showing the FBI’s ability to leverage the public to crowdsource leads for law enforcement.
As a top-10 list, it has understandably changed over the years. It primarily mirrors crime trends across the United States.
When it was first released in the 1950s, the list mainly consisted of burglars and bank robbers who crossed state lines. As it rolled into the 1960s and early 70s, the country experienced more civil unrest, and more domestic terrorists were added to the list.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the list transitioned to target drug traffickers and serial killers. Those placed on the list tended to have committed high-profile, sensational crimes.
In the 21st century, the list changed once again. The focus turned to prioritizing global crime. This included terrorism, drug trafficking, and cybercrime.
To get on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, the FBI starts by communicating with its field offices. Each office provides a nomination, and FBI Headquarters reviews the submitted names.
The list is intended for fugitives whose identities are known and for whom national publicity has a realistic chance of producing useful leads. Someone whose identity is completely unknown would therefore be a poor candidate for the program, regardless of how dangerous the unidentified offender might be.
These criteria kept a notorious criminal like the Unabomber off the list. While the Unabomber was a menace to society, they had no clue who he was. Therefore, there was no information to provide to the public that would reasonably help secure his arrest.
As of March 2026, the FBI offers a reward of at least $1 million for information leading to the arrest of each Ten Most Wanted fugitive, with larger rewards in some cases.
The FBI gives three principal ways to be removed from the list: apprehension, dismissal of the federal process against the fugitive, or a determination that the person no longer meets the criteria. Historically, several fugitives have been removed because they no longer qualified as a particularly dangerous menace.
To keep the list in the public mind, they keep it in easily accessible public areas, including on the internet and in post offices.
The Top 10 Most Wanted List is not ranked. They are not placed on the list in order of danger or how wanted they are.
The list is also not set at 10. If the FBI identifies another extremely dangerous person but doesn’t feel any current members should be removed, they will add a slot 11. This is usually due to an overlap between putting someone on the list and taking someone off.
The longest-serving person on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list was Victor Manuel Gerena. Gerena was added to the list in 1984 and is best known for his participation in the White Eagle Robbery on September 12, 1983. The robbery saw over $7 million stolen from a Wells Fargo armored car facility in West Hartford, CT.
When the robbery occurred, it was the largest cash robbery in the history of the United States. He succeeded in robbing the facility after knocking out his coworkers.
Following the heist, Gerena seemingly vanished with the money. As investigators began to look into the case, they learned that Gerena was a member of a Puerto Rican terrorist group known as Los Macheteros. At the time, the group was fighting for Puerto Rican independence from the United States.
On May 14, 1984, Gerena became the 386th fugitive placed on the most wanted list. He was never caught and still remains at large.
Gerena remained on the list until December 15, 2016, a run of 32 years. It is believed that he has probably been in Cuba, and the prospects of catching him if he is still alive are low.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the shortest time on the list was in March 2026. Samuel Ramirez Jr. was accused of murder and was captured after being on the list for one hour and 13 minutes.
For 55 years, the record for the shortest time on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list belonged to Billie Austin Bryant. After escaping from a Virginia prison in 1968, Bryant robbed a Maryland bank in January 1969. FBI agents tracked him to his wife’s Washington, D.C., apartment, where Bryant opened fire through the door, killing two agents.
He escaped through a window and climbed down a tree. After being placed on the Ten Most Wanted list, Bryant hid in a nearby attic, where he became trapped. Police captured him roughly two hours after his addition to the list.
The list also includes many notorious criminals. The most notable are likely serial killer Ted Bundy and Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks.
Ted Bundy was placed on the list on February 10, 1978, following his second escape from custody in Colorado and a federal charge of unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution. By then, while on the run, he had also committed the brutal attacks at Florida State University’s Chi Omega sorority house. He was captured five days after being added to the list.
Bin Laden was actually placed on the list before 9/11 in 1999 due to being suspected of participating in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He would not be removed from the list until he was killed in a US raid in 2011.
While the list did not directly help locate or capture either of these notorious figures, it did put their names and faces in front of the public and intensified the hunt for them.
Leslie Ibsen Rogge became the first fugitive captured as a direct result of the FBI’s website. In 1996, a 14-year-old American living in Guatemala visited FBI.gov and recognized Rogge’s photograph on the Ten Most Wanted page.
He knew the fugitive as “Uncle Bill,” a family friend and handyman who had even helped install the boy’s computer. The teenager alerted authorities, prompting a manhunt and widespread publicity. Rogge, a prolific bank robber who had been on the list since 1990, eventually surrendered to an FBI agent at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City on May 18, 1996.
Since the inception of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list, 542 fugitives have been listed. Of them, only 13 of the people placed on the list have been women. In total, 503 were located or captured. A success rate of 93%. Of those, 164, or 31%, were located by information from the public.
Because of the list’s success, the FBI has been inspired to create other lists to seek the public’s help. This includes a separate most wanted terrorist list, which was established after the 9/11 attacks.
The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List has endured because it turns millions of ordinary people into potential participants in the search for dangerous fugitives. Over the decades, the names and crimes have changed, but the basic idea has remained the same: publicity can be a powerful investigative tool.
More than just a collection of wanted posters, the list has become one of the most recognizable symbols of the FBI and one of the longest-running examples of law enforcement using the public to help solve crimes.