On June 29, 1961, the FBI did something it had never done in the eleven years of its Ten Most Wanted program. The list held ten names, always ten, and a fugitive had to come off before another could go on. That Thursday it held eleven. The Bureau had decided that a Portland man wanted for murder could not wait for a vacancy, and before the next morning a man in a credit office in Santa Maria, California, had opened the new bulletin, glanced at the picture and recognized a face.
A wanted poster is among the oldest instruments in criminal justice and among the least dependable. It asks strangers to carry a description in their heads and to match it, weeks or years afterward, against a face across a counter, a dinner table or a bus seat. Mostly nothing comes of it. Ten cases stand out as ones in which something did, spread across a century and a half and three continents: notices, flyers, a newspaper essay, reward funds and a televised police press conference. The questions are the same in every one of them. What did the appeal say, who read it, and what followed?
Richard Laurence Marquette was 26 in June 1961, a Portland, Oregon, auto-wrecking worker with a prison term behind him for assault with intent to rob. He was wanted for the murder of Joan Rae Caudle, a 24-year-old wife and mother of two. He was convicted of that murder in December 1961.
For more than two weeks his photograph ran in Oregon newspapers, and reports of him came in from across the Northwest. Police gave his height as 6 feet 1 inch and his weight as 162 pounds, with blue eyes, brown hair and a tattoo of a wreath around the word "Mom" on his right forearm. None of the reports was him. Officers with bloodhounds and a helicopter searched woods near Beaverton after a farm worker reported a shirtless man, then concluded he was not Marquette. In Seattle, police went through a freight train and its rail yard on a tip. By then Marquette was far from either place. He later told reporters he had taken a bus from Portland to Los Angeles, then to San Diego and on to Tijuana, spent about a week in Mexico, and come back across the border under his own name. He reached Santa Maria on June 14.
On June 29 the FBI announced that Marquette had been added to the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. He became number 154 in the list’s history, and the first "special addition," a category the Bureau’s own history of the program records in a single line. The Associated Press reported that the FBI described him as possibly mentally unbalanced and extremely dangerous. There have been 13 special additions in all, the FBI said in 2020, among them James Earl Ray and Ramzi Yousef.
In Santa Maria the new bulletin reached the Merchants' Credit office the same day. The manager, flipping through it, passed Marquette’s picture to Harvey Allen with a joke: "Here’s YOUR picture." Allen recognized the man his partner, Powell, had hired, and he notified agents. The FBI’s own summary says only that a citizen recognized his photograph on a wanted flyer posted in a credit bureau.
Agents arrived the next morning, June 30. "Are you Marquette?" they asked. "Yes, I am," he answered. J. Edgar Hoover quoted him as saying he had known the FBI would get him sooner or later, and Powell described him as "very cooperative." He was committed to the Santa Barbara County jail on a federal fugitive warrant, with bail set at $100,000. Asked about Mrs. Caudle, he told the FBI, "I’d better not say."
A Multnomah County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in December 1961. It recommended leniency, which made a life sentence automatic, and when the verdict was read Marquette said "Thank God" in a voice almost too quiet to hear. Judge Alan F. Davis was due to pronounce sentence on December 18. On March 2, 2022, the Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed, without opinion, a decision of the state parole board that he had challenged.
By the summer of 1984 the search for Alton Coleman covered six states. Coleman, of Waukegan, Illinois, and his companion, Debra Denise Brown, had moved through Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky in about seven weeks, and at the point the FBI added him to its list he was a suspect in five deaths.
The listing came on July 11, 1984. Coleman was fugitive number 388. Reporting it, United Press International quoted Richard Schwein, an assistant special agent in charge in Cleveland, on what would catch him: "That is how we’re going to get this guy," Schwein said of help from the public. Sightings arrived from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. None was confirmed.
The call that mattered came nine days later and had nothing to do with the list. On Friday, July 20, a former high school classmate of Coleman’s recognized him in Evanston, the suburb just north of Chicago, and alerted police. A detective in an unmarked car heard the dispatch and located the pair in a park. Both gave false names; fingerprints taken at the station settled who they were. The Daily Northwestern recounted the sequence in 2002, on the eve of his execution. The credit is divided in the official record. The FBI’s own listing records local police and citizen cooperation, while the Chicago field office history says Chicago agents made the arrest.
Prosecutors in the end charged him with eight deaths during the spree. He was convicted of the murders of four people, three of them children, in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping charge. Courts in all three states sentenced him to death, which left him, for a time, the only person under sentence of death in three states at once. Ohio executed him on April 26, 2002, for the murder of Marlene Walters. Brown was convicted separately and sentenced to death in one Ohio case.
Gary Ray Bowles, 32 in 1994, an ex-convict and drifter, confessed to the killings of six men in Florida, Maryland and Georgia between March and November of that year. The FBI began looking for him in the summer, and according to Action News Jax he was profiled at least five times on America’s Most Wanted while he was at large. Shortly before his arrest he was added to the Ten Most Wanted list as fugitive number 438.
The record of how he was caught is plain, and it is not a story about a poster. On November 22, 1994, officers of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office questioned a man they believed was a day laborer named Tim Whitfield about a local death. He gave his real name, and fingerprints confirmed it. The FBI’s entry says he was arrested in Jacksonville Beach after being brought in for questioning in a local murder investigation, which is a very different path from the one the list had been built to produce. The next day the St. Petersburg Times told readers that a man described as one of the nation’s most wanted fugitives had confessed to six murders in three states.
Bowles was convicted on guilty pleas of three of the killings, all in Florida: John Hardy Roberts, in Daytona Beach in March 1994; Albert Morris, in Nassau County in May; and Walter Hinton, in Jacksonville in November. The Hinton case carried the death sentence, which the Florida Supreme Court reversed in 1998 and a new sentencing reimposed in 1999; the court affirmed it in 2001. He received life terms in the other two. The deaths in Maryland and Georgia were never prosecuted. Florida executed him on August 22, 2019.
Angel Maturino Resendiz is the case in which the wanted notice itself became the subject of an argument. When the FBI placed him on the Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999, it listed him as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, fugitive number 457. CBS News reported that the Bureau believed he had used more than 30 aliases, and that a birth certificate gave his real name as Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendis. Reporters asked why the FBI kept the name it had. An agent answered that "the public has given us some very good information with the name that’s known." Agents believed he had borrowed the name from an uncle. The courts, later, used the name under which he was tried and executed.
The poster had a hole in it that no printing could have repaired. On June 1, 1999, while he was wanted for murder, the Border Patrol fingerprinted him in New Mexico, passed over the matches its own computer returned, and sent him back to Mexico the same night. No one had entered a lookout for him. The Justice Department’s Inspector General reviewed the episode and published its findings on March 20, 2000. Four of the killings later attributed to him came after that return.
What ended the hunt was neither a sighting nor a reward. On July 13, 1999, he walked from Ciudad Juarez onto a bridge at El Paso and surrendered to Texas Ranger Sgt. Drew Carter, under an arrangement his sister had made through an intermediary. A Harris County jury convicted him of the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton on May 18, 2000. He was executed on June 27, 2006. The Associated Press linked him to at least 15 killings; apart from the Benton case, none went to trial.
Akira Nishiguchi killed five people in Japan in the last three months of 1963, in three incidents weeks and hundreds of miles apart: two men in Fukuoka Prefecture on October 18, two women in Hamamatsu on November 18, and an elderly lawyer in Tokyo on December 29. In between he lived on frauds, posed as a university professor and later as a lawyer, and mailed the Yukuhashi police a letter signed with his name in which he said he intended to take his own life. A ferry bound for Tokyo yielded a jacket, shoes and a note, and no body. Police decided the suicide had been staged.
The authorities answered with every instrument available. The National Police Agency named him a key wanted suspect and issued a special alert. Investigators went to Beppu and asked his family to write a letter urging him to give himself up, and the letter was printed in national newspapers. Police printed 5,000 wanted posters carrying his photograph and sent them across the country. For 78 days none of it produced him.
The poster that mattered hung on a town notice board in Tamana, Kumamoto Prefecture. A classmate of the priest Tairyu Furukawa’s second daughter had a surname one character different from Nishiguchi’s, and because of that coincidence she had often stopped to study the face on the board on her way to primary school. She was 10 years old by the account in Bunshun Online, 11 in Gendai Business. On January 2, 1964, a visitor arrived at her father’s temple household calling himself a lawyer named Kawamura. About ten years earlier Furukawa had visited Fukuoka Prison while Nishiguchi was an inmate, and Nishiguchi remembered him; Furukawa did not remember Nishiguchi. The visitor offered to help with a campaign for a prisoner’s release, and the family took him in.
The girl looked at the guest and saw the poster, down to two distinct moles. She told her parents that the lawyer was the murderer Nishiguchi. Her father scolded her. She would not be moved, and insisted the man was an emissary of the devil. Furukawa began to watch more closely. The visitor claimed long experience at the bar but knew only what a layman knows of the law. Furukawa went to look at the poster himself and became convinced.
He decided the guest must not learn he had been recognized. He settled him in a room, fitted a lock to another room and moved his family into it, and his wife kept the visitor talking so the noise would not carry. At about eleven that night his wife and eldest daughter went to the Tamana police station. By telephone the police established that the real Kakuji Kawamura was at his residence in Tokyo. The station called in the Kumamoto prefectural headquarters, and a large force surrounded the building. Nishiguchi was arrested at about four on the morning of January 3, 1964.
He was sentenced to death on December 23, 1964. The Fukuoka High Court dismissed his appeal on August 28, 1965, and on August 15, 1966 he withdrew his last appeal himself. He was executed at the Fukuoka Detention House on December 11, 1970. Ryuzo Saki’s account of the case, Fukushu suru wa ware ni ari, won the Naoki Prize in 1975, and Shohei Imamura’s film of it appeared in 1979. The book follows the 78-day flight and the 10-year-old girl who exposed him.
Charles Peace is the oldest of the ten, and the notice that began it did not catch him. After the killing of Arthur Dyson at Sheffield on November 29, 1876, the police issued a notice offering a reward of £100 for Peace’s capture. It described a thin, slightly built man with grey, almost white hair, beard and whiskers, without the use of three fingers on his left hand, who walked with his legs wide apart and spoke as if his tongue were too large for his mouth. It gave his age as 55 to 60. He was 44. That was the first of several misjudgments. Peace shaved, dyed his hair, put on spectacles, and for the first time made use of a gift he had for rearranging the set of his face. For about two years he lived at Peckham as the respectable Mr. Thompson.
He was taken on October 10, 1878, in the course of a burglary at Blackheath, held as John Ward, and convicted at the Old Bailey that November of the attempted murder of Police Constable Edward Robinson, for which he received penal servitude for life. It was after that, with the notice two years old, that the reward began to matter. On November 2 Peace wrote, in deliberately bad spelling, to a Peckham neighbor named Henry Brion and asked him to visit. Brion arrived at Newgate to face his Peckham acquaintance Mr. Thompson. The police later said information from Peckham, most likely from Brion, first put them on the right track. Police searched the house of Peace’s son-in-law in Sheffield on November 6 and recovered stolen property and evidence that John Ward was Charles Peace. A Sheffield constable who had known him was walked into the exercise yard at Newgate and picked him out: "That’s Peace."
The £100 produced a dispute. Susan Grey, the woman who had lived with him at Peckham as Mrs. Thompson, applied to the Treasury on February 5, 1879 for the reward, saying she had given information to the police on November 5, 1878. Raymond Postgate, writing in 1925, put it that she turned the police’s suspicion into certainty. Neither she nor Brion is the clear author of the identification, and the notice, whatever its description said, had little to do with it. The first lead came from a man Peace himself had summoned.
The Leeds Assizes sentenced him to death on February 4, 1879 for the murder of Arthur Dyson, and he was executed at Armley Gaol on February 25. Before then he confessed to another killing: that of Police Constable Nicholas Cock, in Manchester in August 1876, for which a young Irish laborer, William Habron, had been convicted and sentenced to death. The House of Commons took up Habron’s case in March and April 1879, and he received a free pardon. Peace had sat in court at Manchester and watched a 19-year-old sentenced to death for a killing Peace had committed.
The most unusual appeal of the ten was made by the wanted man himself. For seventeen years the bombs of Theodore Kaczynski had been mailed and placed without a name attached. The FBI-led task force, formed in 1979, had grown to more than 150 investigators and analysts and had no identity to work with until 1996. In June 1995 The New York Times and The Washington Post each received a typed essay of about 35,000 words, Industrial Society and Its Future, from an author claiming to speak for the group "FC." He said he would stop killing if it was published.
The task force recommended printing it, in the hope that a reader would recognize the author. FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved, and the Washington Post published the essay on September 19, 1995. In the months that followed more than 50,000 people called the FBI’s tip line, according to Terry Turchie, who had taken over the task force in 1994. A forensic linguist on the team, James R. Fitzgerald, noticed old-fashioned terms in the text that helped him estimate the writer’s age.
The call that mattered came from a family. Kaczynski’s brother, David, and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, read the essay, compared it with letters Ted had written, and carried their suspicion to the FBI through a lawyer. The family also handed over an essay Ted had written; Fitzgerald later said it read like "a well-crafted outline of the manifesto." The Bureau’s summary is that its linguistic analysis concluded that the author of David’s documents and the author of the essay were almost certainly the same person, and that this, together with what investigators knew of the bombings and of Ted Kaczynski’s life, supported a search warrant. Kaczynski was suspect number 2,416.
David said later that the choice had come down to being responsible or turning away, and that "whatever choice we made could cause someone to die." Agents arrested Kaczynski at his cabin near Lincoln, Montana, on April 3, 1996. On January 22, 1998, he pleaded guilty in Sacramento to charges covering the deaths of Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser and Gilbert Murray and the injuries to Dr. Charles Epstein and David Gelernter, after a fight with his own lawyers over a defense built on his mental state. He received four consecutive life sentences plus 30 years. CBS News reported in August 1998 that his kin received a $1 million reward. He died in federal custody on June 10, 2023.
Between October 9 and November 14, 2017, four people were killed in Seminole Heights, a neighborhood of Tampa, Florida: Benjamin Mitchell, Monica Hoffa, Anthony Naiboa and Ronald Felton. Police received more than 5,000 tips. Their appeal had two parts.
The first was a call for help identifying a man seen in surveillance video, whom police described only as someone who might have seen something. Police released a couple’s video on October 13 and a longer compilation on October 26, and digital billboards carried the victims' faces. The second was money. Crime Stoppers, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and others built a reward that rose from $18,000 to $25,000 and then $35,000. After the fourth death it jumped. By November 16 it stood at $100,000, with contributions from the ATF, the FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Crime Stoppers, a civic association, a local brewery tour, a property company and the owner of a restaurant group. It later reached $110,000. It became the largest police effort in Hillsborough County since the 2010 manhunt for a police killer, Dontae Morris.
Investigators were closer to Howell Donaldson III than anyone knew. Documents released in 2018 showed that after the third death, ATF agents following up on tips had texted him and asked him to call back. He never did. The break came on November 28, 2017, when a co-worker at a McDonald’s in Ybor City, Tampa, acted on a bag Donaldson had asked her to hold for him. He was arrested that day and indicted on December 7.
On December 1 the police chief announced that the co-worker would receive the full $110,000. The couple whose video had shaped the search for weeks said they felt overlooked. The Crime Stoppers president answered that the reward belonged to the person whose actions led to the arrest. Donaldson pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. In January 2018 the Hillsborough State Attorney announced he would seek the death penalty. Donaldson was 24 at his arrest. On May 1, 2023 he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and received four consecutive life terms without parole, in a plea that took the death penalty off the table. The Florida Department of Corrections listed him as serving life at the Central Florida Reception Center on October 14, 2026.
Joshua Dotson’s file reads like a poster that did its work faster than the people who wrote it expected. On June 17, 2020, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation added him to its Most Wanted list. Its poster described him as 5 feet 11 inches tall and about 150 pounds, called him armed and dangerous, and listed four counts of first-degree murder, two of attempted first-degree murder and two of employing a firearm during the commission of a felony. The U.S. Marshals Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive Task Force issued its own appeal the same day, naming a May 24 incident in Memphis and the June 12 killing of Jamesha Covson, 19. The rewards together reached $13,500: up to $1,000 from Crime Stoppers, up to $2,500 from the TBI and up to $10,000 from the Marshals Service. U.S. Marshal Jeff Holt said the service was making it a top priority to bring Dotson to justice. The Marshals' release noted his prominent facial tattoos.
Dotson was arrested in Nashville on June 18, 2020, six days after Covson’s death and one day after the listing. He was 20.
The case did not reach a jury until August 2024. On August 22, 2024, a Shelby County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Covson and of her unborn child, and on October 31 Judge Carlyn Addison sentenced him to two consecutive terms of 51 years. On February 14, 2025, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Divieon Parker, Renita Bennett and Reginald Anderson, which brought a further 159 years, 261 in all.
Zhou Kehua was never arrested, charged or tried, and every statement about him is a police allegation or a press report of one. At a news conference on August 14, 2012, the Chongqing Public Security Bureau attributed to him ten armed robbery cases between 2004 and 2012 in Chongqing, Changsha and Nanjing, in which ten people died and six were wounded. Most of the victims, police said, had just withdrawn cash from banks.
The appeal grew city by city. Changsha police said he carried out four of the cases there between October 2009 and June 2011. They collected more than 2,000 tips from 2009 onward, each of which needed clear video or a photograph before it could be ruled out. A deputy head of the city’s criminal police confirmed a story that had circulated online: five officers sold steamed buns from a stall for a month, and others waited tables and worked in shops, near places the suspect had been seen. He never came. In March 2011 officers recovered footage of the suspect without a disguise and, from an internet cafe’s records, two clear photographs of his face. The photograph went public. Residents in Chongqing later reported that it looked like him.
Nanjing, in January 2012, made it national. The reward rose from 100,000 yuan to 150,000 and then to 200,000. CCTV said Nanjing police mobilized 13,000 officers; the Xuanwu district police office told CNN that more than 80,000 took part. On January 9 the Ministry of Public Security held a meeting in Nanjing and made the Jiangsu-Hunan-Chongqing series its "No. 1 case." CNN reported that at least nine provinces joined the search. Rewards, CNN and ABC News reported, reached 5.4 million yuan in total by August.
Then the answer came from the suspect’s native district. According to The Paper, on January 19, 2012 the task force took samples from Zhou’s family in Chongqing and matched them. Deputy Police Chief Huang Wei’s account is that the Jingkou police station in Shapingba, screening its area, identified Zhou as an important suspect, and that his immediate relatives' DNA matched a sample from Nanjing. A Jinyun compilation adds that Chongqing police noticed him among residents who had never replaced old identity cards and who had been away a long time. The last two of the ten cases, both on August 10, 2012, were in Chongqing. On August 14, after a four-day hunt, he was killed by police in Chongqing. No court has ruled on any of the cases.
Set side by side, the ten appeals did different work. Marquette’s flyer reached one reader, in a credit office, by way of a manager’s joke. Coleman’s listing produced a swarm of unconfirmed sightings and, nine days later, a single classmate. The Ten Most Wanted entry for Bowles ended in a station interview, and Resendiz’s in an arrangement between a sister and a Texas Ranger. Nishiguchi’s 5,000 posters held a child’s attention on a notice board for weeks before she saw the same face at her father’s table. Peace’s £100 reward bought a quarrel over who had earned it. Kaczynski’s essay put a text in front of newspaper readers, and one reader knew the voice. In Tampa the reward grew from $18,000 to $110,000 and went to a co-worker. In Memphis a listing and a task force’s appeal were a day old when the arrest came. In China the amounts grew with every failure until the answer came from the police station nearest the suspect’s birthplace.
What the posters and rewards had in common was less the faces on them than the people who looked: a manager, a classmate, a child, a neighbor, a brother. In several cases the credit was disputed afterward, among agencies and among claimants, and the disputes were part of the record the appeals left behind.
• August 1876: Police Constable Nicholas Cock dies at Manchester; William Habron is later convicted of the killing.
• November 29, 1876: Arthur Dyson is killed at Sheffield; police issue a notice offering £100 for Charles Peace.
• October 10, 1878: Peace is arrested at Blackheath and held as John Ward; early November, identified as Peace after letters and a visit at Newgate.
• February 4, 1879: Peace is sentenced to death at Leeds Assizes; executed February 25, 1879.
• June 29, 1961: the FBI adds Richard Laurence Marquette as a special addition to the Ten Most Wanted list; he is arrested at Santa Maria on June 30.
• December 1961: Marquette is convicted of first-degree murder at Portland.
• October to December 1963: Akira Nishiguchi’s killings in Fukuoka Prefecture, Hamamatsu and Tokyo.
• January 3, 1964: Nishiguchi is arrested at Tamana after a 10-year-old girl recognizes him from a poster.
• December 11, 1970: Nishiguchi is executed.
• 1979: the FBI-led UNABOM task force forms.
• July 11, 1984: the FBI adds Alton Coleman to the Ten Most Wanted list.
• July 20, 1984: a former classmate recognizes Coleman at Evanston; he is arrested.
• November 22, 1994: Gary Ray Bowles gives his real name to Jacksonville officers.
• June 1995: the UNABOM author sends his essay to two newspapers; the Washington Post publishes it on September 19, 1995.
• April 3, 1996: Theodore Kaczynski is arrested in Montana.
• January 22, 1998: Kaczynski pleads guilty at Sacramento.
• June 1, 1999: the Border Patrol returns Angel Maturino Resendiz to Mexico; June 1999, the FBI lists him as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez.
• July 13, 1999: Resendiz surrenders at El Paso.
• May 18, 2000: a Harris County jury convicts Resendiz of capital murder.
• April 26, 2002: Coleman is executed in Ohio.
• June 27, 2006: Resendiz is executed in Texas.
• January 2012: the Nanjing reward rises to 200,000 yuan and the Ministry of Public Security calls the series its "No. 1 case."
• August 14, 2012: Zhou Kehua is killed by police in Chongqing.
• October 9 to November 14, 2017: four killings in Seminole Heights, Tampa; the reward reaches $100,000 on November 16.
• November 28, 2017: Howell Donaldson III is arrested; on May 1, 2023 he pleads guilty.
• August 22, 2019: Bowles is executed in Florida.
• June 17 to 18, 2020: the TBI lists Joshua Dotson as most wanted; he is arrested in Nashville the next day.
• August 22, 2024: Dotson is convicted in the Covson case; February 14, 2025, he pleads guilty to three more murders, 261 years in all.