On March 14, 1950, the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly released a list of its “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.” Born out of a conversation between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and International News Service Editor-in- Chief William Kinsey Hutchinson, the list was designed to engage the public in helping law enforcement capture fugitives deemed to be particularly dangerous. Over the course of the last sixty-eight years, the FBI has placed more than five hundred people on the list, replacing those who have died or been captured—and on rare occasions, those deemed no longer a danger—with new entries. To date, exactly ten women have appeared on the list. Collectively, their cases demonstrate how the list has been shaped by the shifting politics and priorities of the FBI as much as by any objective definition of who constitutes an actual danger to the general public.

Ruth Eisemann-Schier (1968): The first woman to appear on the list, Eisemann-Schier was added in 1968 after she and her boyfriend, Gary Krist, kidnapped twenty-year- old Barbara Jane Mackle, the daughter of a Florida land developer. After abducting Mackle from a hotel room in Georgia, Eisemann-Schier and Krist buried her inside a fiberglass box equipped with water, food, an air pump, and a battery-powered lamp. They then demanded a ransom of half a million dollars for her release. Mackle was discovered by police after having spent three days underground. Krist was captured soon thereafter, hiding in a Florida swamp, and Eisemann-Schier spent more than two months on the run before being captured in Oklahoma. She served four years of a seven-year prison sentence before being paroled and deported to her native Honduras.

Marie Dean Arrington (1969): In 1968, Arrington was convicted of brutally murdering the legal secretary of a Florida public defender who represented Arrington’s two children on felony charges and failed to get them acquitted. Sentenced to death, Arrington escaped from prison in 1969, whereupon she was added to the Ten Most Wanted list. She eluded capture for nearly three years before being taken back into custody in New Orleans in December 1971. Her sentence was commuted to life in 1972 after the Supreme Court declared capital punishment to be unconstitutional, and she died in Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution in 2014.

Angela Yvonne Davis (1970): An activist and philosophy professor at UCLA, Davis was already a controversial figure by the late 1960s for her membership in the Communist Party and her work on behalf of global black liberation. She became one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted in 1970, after guns purchased in her name were used in an escape attempt from a courtroom by three men accused of killing a guard in California’s Soledad Prison. The judge and all three defendants died during exchanges of gunfire, and Davis was charged with kidnapping and murder for her role in the incident. She was arrested after two months on the run, leading President Richard Nixon to congratulate the FBI for having taken a “dangerous terrorist” into custody. Her case became a cause celebre, and a widespread movement formed for her release. Davis spent nearly a year and a half in custody before being found not guilty of the charges in 1972. She has continued to work as an activist, scholar, author, teacher, and speaker for more than forty years since her release.

Bernardine Rae Dohrn (1970): After graduating from law school at the University of Chicago in 1967, Dohrn became the first student organizer for a progressive association of members of the legal profession known as the National Lawyers Guild. She also became involved in Students for a Democratic Society, and by the end of the 1960s was a leader of a radical faction of that group called the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which came to be known as the Weathermen or the Weather Underground. Believing in the need for “revolutionary war” against an American government they considered racist, classist, and imperialist, the Weathermen carried out a series of bombings in the early 1970s, and Dohrn was added to the Ten Most Wanted list in the fall of 1970 after being indicted on charges of conspiracy to violate anti-riot laws. She was removed from the list in 1973 after most of the charges against her were dropped, but she remained in hiding with William Ayers, a fellow leader of the Weathermen whom she would later marry, for nearly a decade before the couple surrendered to authorities in 1980. Dohrn served a short stint in jail on some still outstanding charges. She later went on to become a law professor and human rights attorney, and she continues her advocacy work.

Mugshots of Ruth Katherine Ann Power and Susan Edith Saxe, placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 1970 (FBI.gov)

Katherine Ann Power and Susan Edith Saxe (1970): Power and Saxe were roommates at Brandeis University. In the late 1960s, they became active organizers of student protests against the Vietnam War, and in September 1970 they helped plot a bank robbery in Boston, the proceeds from which they hoped to use to help finance antiwar activities. Walter Schroeder, a Boston police officer, was killed during the robbery, and although three participants in the crime, including the gunman, were quickly captured, both Power and Saxe escaped. They were added to the Ten Most Wanted list in November 1970. Saxe eluded capture until being caught in 1975, after which she served seven years in prison. Power remained at large under an alias and was removed from the list in 1984. After beginning an entirely new life as a food writer and restaurant owner in Oregon, a remorseful Power turned herself in to federal authorities in 1993. She pled guilty to armed robbery and manslaughter, and was released from prison in 1999.

Donna Jean Willmott (1987): It was seventeen years after the listing of Katherine Power and Susan Saxe before another woman became one of the Ten Most Wanted. In 1987, Donna Jean Wilmott and Claude Daniel Marks were added to the list for plotting to blow up Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Willmot and Marks, both of whom had been members of the Weather Underground, hoped to free from Leavenworth an inmate convicted of sedition for his involvement with an organization seeking Puerto Rican independence and that was linked to a series of bombings. Initially charged in 1985, Willmot and Marks fled after discovering a listening device planted in their car by the FBI. They changed their names and became well-known for their community and charity work in Pittsburgh, avoiding discovery for nine years before being located by federal agents and arrested in 1994. Willmot was sentenced to five years in prison.

Shauntay Henderson (2007): Another twenty years passed between the listing of Donna Willmot and the next woman to appear on the Ten Most Wanted list, but Shauntay Henderson served one of the briefest tenures on the list, as she was captured less than twenty-four hours after the FBI placed her there in March 2007. Wanted in connection with shooting and killing a man at a gas station in Kansas City, Missouri, Henderson was also accused by police of being a leader of a Kansas City gang and of being responsible for nearly half a dozen other murders. The police offered no evidence to substantiate those other accusations, which Henderson denied, but she was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the gas station killing. Initially granted probation for that crime, Henderson was incarcerated for three years on related charges. She then had her probation revoked for a gun charge in 2012, and was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Mugshots of Brenda Delgado and Shanika S. Minor, placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 2016 (FBI.gov)

Brenda Delgado (2016): In 2015, Delgado hired two people to murder Kendra Hatcher, a pediatric dentist in Dallas who was romantically involved with Delgado’s former boyfriend. She fled to Mexico after being interviewed by FBI agents investigating Hatcher’s death, and was placed on the Ten Most Wanted list in April 2016 after evading apprehension for six months. Two days later, she was captured and held in a Mexican jail before being extradited back to the United States in October 2016 on the condition that the state would not seek the death penalty. Her court date is still pending.

Shanika Minor (2016): The most recent woman to be placed on the Ten Most Wanted list, Minor shot and killed her pregnant neighbor and former high school classmate in Milwaukee in March 2016, following an argument about loud music. Minor fled the state after the killing and was added to the Ten Most Wanted list in June 2016. She was taken into custody three days later in North Carolina. In July 2017, Minor pled guilty to first degree reckless homicide and to first degree reckless homicide of an unborn child. She was sentenced to thirty years in prison.