The History of the FBI’s Most Wanted List
A number of events happened in 1949 America; Los Angeles recorded its first snowfall, a 1,200-pound cow got stuck inside a silo in Oklahoma, and it was the first year no African-Americans were lynched in the USA. It was also when the idea of the FBI’s Most Wanted list was conceived.
Classic wanted posters already existed, and the FBI had been using these since the 1920s, to catch military deserters and mob affiliates. But it was now a time where information came from two main sources; television and newspapers.
A conversation between J. Edgar Hoover and William Kinsey Hutchinson, the editor of the International News Service, brought about the idea of a list and need to promote the police capturing public enemies.
If the FBI could gather information from the public, it would make their investigations faster and put more criminals in prison, protecting communities.
An article detailing the FBI’s most wanted fugitives was published on the 7th February 1949, by The Washington Daily News. The article gained so much positive publicity, that the FBI published the first Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on the 14th March 1950.
