In a rent-controlled apartment three blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, California, the FBI in June 2011 arrested James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, the South Boston gang boss who had eluded a federal manhunt for sixteen years. He was eighty-one. His longtime companion, Catherine Greig, was taken with him. Inside the unit agents recovered more than thirty firearms, many hidden in holes cut into the walls, and roughly 822,000 dollars in cash. For more than a decade Bulger had lived under the name Charles “Charlie” Gasko, an unremarkable retiree among unremarkable retirees, while his face circulated on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list and a two-million-dollar reward stood unclaimed.
Bulger ran the Winter Hill Gang, the dominant Irish-American criminal organization in Boston, and for much of that reign he was also a paid FBI informant. The relationship was the engine of both his power and his escape. His handler, Special Agent John Connolly, fed him intelligence that helped him eliminate rivals and avoid prosecution, and in December 1994 Connolly tipped him that a sealed racketeering indictment was coming. Bulger left town before the arrests and did not surface again for sixteen years.
The trail did not break through brilliant detective work. It broke through advertising. In 2011, having concluded that the aging, disciplined Bulger was nearly invisible but his companion was not, the FBI ran a publicity campaign built around Greig — her manicures, her plastic surgery, her habits — and aimed it at the daytime television audience most likely to recognize her. A former neighbor in Santa Monica, a one-time Miss Iceland who had bonded with Greig over a stray cat, saw the coverage and called. Agents lured Bulger to the building’s garage and arrested him without a shot.
A federal jury convicted him in August 2013 on thirty-one of thirty-two counts, finding him responsible for eleven of the nineteen murders charged. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years. On October 30, 2018, hours after being transferred to USP Hazelton in West Virginia, Bulger was beaten to death by other inmates. He was eighty-nine.
On April 3, 1996, FBI agents arrested Theodore John Kaczynski at a one-room plywood cabin without electricity or running water outside Lincoln, Montana, ending the longest and most expensive manhunt in the bureau’s history to that point. For nearly seventeen years, beginning in 1978, Kaczynski had mailed or planted sixteen bombs that killed three people and injured twenty-three, eluding a task force that had no usable physical description of him. He was not found by forensics or surveillance. He was found because his brother recognized his writing.
Kaczynski, a former mathematics professor who had withdrawn to the Montana woods to live in self-sufficient isolation, conducted a campaign aimed loosely at people he associated with technology and modern industrial society. His three fatal victims were Hugh Scrutton, a Sacramento computer-store owner killed in 1985; Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive killed in 1994; and Gilbert Murray, the president of a California timber lobby, killed in 1995. The deaths were the point of the case, not the manhunt’s backdrop, and the record treats them as the deliberate killings they were.
The break came from the bombs’ final escalation into words. In 1995 Kaczynski demanded that major newspapers publish a 35,000-word essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” promising to stop the killing if they did. After consultation with the FBI and the attorney general, The Washington Post printed it on September 19, 1995. David Kaczynski read it, recognized his brother’s distinctive phrasing and ideas, and — through an attorney — brought his suspicions and old family letters to the FBI.
That tip led agents to the cabin, where they found bomb components, thousands of pages of journals documenting the crimes, and one fully assembled device. Kaczynski was indicted in 1996 and, after his lawyers’ attempt to mount a mental-health defense over his objection, pleaded guilty on January 22, 1998, to avoid a death-penalty trial. He was sentenced to multiple life terms without parole and held at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. He died by suicide on June 10, 2023, at a federal medical center in North Carolina.
Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on May 31, 2003, a rookie police officer in Murphy, North Carolina, named Jeffrey Postell saw a man crouched behind a Save-A-Lot grocery store, took him for a burglar, and arrested him. The man was Eric Robert Rudolph, the most wanted fugitive in the United States, who had eluded one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in the country’s history for more than five years by living in the Appalachian wilderness. The end of that manhunt was not a tactical triumph but an accident — a foot patrol behind a supermarket at dawn.
Rudolph carried out four bombings across the Southeast. The first and most notorious, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta on July 27, 1996, killed Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old visitor from Albany, Georgia, and indirectly caused the death of a Turkish television cameraman, Melih Uzunyol, who suffered a fatal heart attack running to the scene; more than a hundred people were injured. Rudolph followed with bombings at a Sandy Springs abortion clinic and an Atlanta gay nightclub in 1997, and at a Birmingham, Alabama, women’s clinic in 1998. These were targeted attacks driven by his hostility to abortion and to what he denounced as the policies of the federal government, and the dead and maimed are the center of this record.
The Olympic Park bombing also produced a notorious investigative failure: the security guard Richard Jewell, who had found the bomb and helped clear the area, was publicly treated as the prime suspect for months before being cleared. Rudolph was not identified until the 1998 Birmingham bombing, where witnesses noted a man and his truck leaving the scene; the license plate led investigators to him within days.
He fled into the mountains of western North Carolina before he could be arrested. For five years a multi-agency task force searched terrain he knew intimately and could not locate him. After Postell’s chance arrest in 2003, Rudolph agreed in 2005 to plead guilty to all four bombings in exchange for the government dropping the death penalty, a deal that also required him to disclose hidden caches of dynamite. He was sentenced to consecutive life terms without parole and is held at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado.
In the early morning of June 6, 2015, two convicted murderers were found missing from the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, the first escape from the prison’s secure perimeter in its long history. Richard Matt, forty-eight, and David Sweat, thirty-four, had spent weeks cutting through the steel wall at the back of their adjoining cells, working down through a labyrinth of catwalks and tunnels, sawing through a steam pipe, and surfacing through a manhole on a Dannemora street roughly a block beyond the wall. They left a taunting note behind. The breakout triggered one of the largest manhunts in New York history.
The escape was not a feat of solitary genius; it ran on inside help. A civilian tailor-shop instructor, Joyce Mitchell, supplied the hacksaw blades, drill bits, and chisels the men used, smuggling them past unmanned screening in frozen ground beef. A corrections officer, Gene Palmer, passed contraband for Matt’s paintings. Mitchell had agreed to be the getaway driver and to bring a gun; on the night of the escape she suffered what she described as a panic attack and never appeared, leaving Matt and Sweat on foot in the densely forested Adirondack borderland just south of Canada.
For three weeks the two evaded a force the State Inspector General later put at as many as 1,300 law-enforcement personnel, costing 22.8 million dollars in state overtime alone, who chased more than 2,500 leads through rain-soaked woods and abandoned hunting cabins. The arc ended in violence. On June 26, in the wilderness near Malone, U.S. Border Patrol agents confronted Matt after he fired a shotgun at a passing camper; he was shot and killed. Two days later, on June 28, a State Police sergeant spotted Sweat walking a back road near the Canadian line, gave chase across a hayfield, and shot him twice as he ran for a tree line. Sweat survived.
David Sweat, captured wounded and later recovered, pleaded guilty to first-degree escape and received an additional three-and-a-half to seven years on top of his existing sentence of life without parole. Richard Matt, who had been serving twenty-five years to life for a 1997 murder and dismemberment, died in the field. The escape exposed a culture of complacency at Clinton so thorough that, by the Inspector General’s account, basic counts and cell inspections that would have foiled the plot many times over had not been performed for years.
On June 9, 2008, the day Samuel Israel III was ordered to surrender to federal prison for a twenty-year sentence, he disappeared instead. The next day his 2006 GMC Envoy was found abandoned at the apex of the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River north of New York City, the phrase “Suicide is Painless” — the theme from the television series MAS*H — traced in the dust on the hood. The staging was meant to read as a jump. Israel had not jumped. The fifty-year-old hedge-fund manager, already convicted of running one of the era’s notable investment frauds, had driven away to hide.
Israel had founded the Bayou Hedge Fund Group in 1996 and induced investors to place more than 450 million dollars in his funds. The money was misappropriated and the returns were fiction. After losses mounted in the late 1990s, Bayou’s chief financial officer, Daniel Marino, created a sham accounting firm called Richmond-Fairfield Associates whose sole function was to audit Bayou and bless its falsified statements. The scheme unraveled in 2005; Israel pleaded guilty that September to conspiracy and investment-adviser fraud, and in April 2008 a federal judge sentenced him to twenty years and ordered him to forfeit 300 million dollars.
The flight was brief and unglamorous. While a manhunt treated him as a fugitive and his face moved across the news, Israel was living in a recreational vehicle, having staged his death with help from his girlfriend, Debra Ryan, who had watched him paint the message on the car. He moved the RV between campgrounds in the Northeast. Within three weeks the calculus of a fifty-year-old man hiding in a camper, his health failing and his money gone, collapsed. He resolved to give himself up.
On July 2, 2008, twenty-three days after he vanished, Samuel Israel rode a motor scooter to the police station in Southwick, Massachusetts, walked in, and identified himself as a fugitive wanted by the federal government. The faked suicide bought him nothing but a second crime: in July 2009 he was sentenced to an additional two years for bail jumping, consecutive to the twenty he had tried to flee. Debra Ryan was sentenced to probation for helping him.
On February 12, 2013, in a vacation cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains above Big Bear Lake, California, Christopher Jordan Dorner died of a single self-inflicted gunshot wound as the building burned around him. He was thirty-three. A former Los Angeles Police Department officer who had been fired in 2008, Dorner had spent the preceding nine days hunting current and former members of the department and their families, guided by a manifesto that named roughly forty people as targets. By the time he was cornered, he had killed four people and wounded three, and had triggered one of the largest manhunts in California history.
Dorner’s grievance was specific and documented. In 2007 he reported that his training officer had kicked a mentally ill suspect during an arrest; an LAPD Board of Rights concluded that the kicking had not occurred and that Dorner had made false statements, and he was terminated in 2008. He challenged the firing in court and lost, with a California appeals court affirming the dismissal of his petition in 2011. In early February 2013 he posted a long manifesto demanding that the department publicly admit it had fired him in retaliation, and announced what he called asymmetric warfare against police and their relatives.
The violence began on February 3, when he shot Monica Quan and her fiancé Keith Lawrence in a parked car in Irvine. Quan was the daughter of Randal Quan, the retired LAPD captain who had represented Dorner at his disciplinary hearing. Four days later Dorner ambushed officers in Riverside, killing one and wounding another, before his burned pickup truck surfaced near the Big Bear ski resort. The discovery converted a regional alarm into a mountain manhunt, and for several days the search found nothing.
The end came on February 12, when Dorner — who had been hiding in a condominium near the command post the whole time — tied up a couple, stole a vehicle, and was spotted. A gunfight with San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies left one deputy dead and another gravely wounded. Surrounded, Dorner did not surrender. Deputies fired pyrotechnic tear-gas canisters into the cabin; it caught fire; a single shot was heard from inside; the structure burned to the foundation. Remains recovered from the rubble were identified as Dorner two days later, the death ruled a suicide.
On October 30, 2014, members of a U.S. Marshals tactical team arrested Eric Matthew Frein without resistance in an open field beside an abandoned aircraft hangar at the Birchwood-Pocono Airpark, ending a forty-eight-day manhunt across the wilderness of northeastern Pennsylvania. Frein, then thirty-one, was a self-taught survivalist and military reenactor who, seven weeks earlier, had ambushed the Pennsylvania State Police barracks at Blooming Grove with a high-powered rifle, killing one trooper and gravely wounding another before vanishing into the Pocono Mountains. The marshals, in a detail noted at the time, restrained him with the handcuffs of the corporal he had killed.
The attack came during a late-night shift change on September 12, 2014. Firing a .308-caliber rifle from the treeline outside the barracks, Frein killed Corporal Bryon K. Dickson II, thirty-eight, and shot Trooper Alex Douglass, who survived with disabling injuries. Frein then disappeared into terrain he knew well, prompting a search that at its peak involved nearly a thousand officers, ranged across more than three hundred square miles, closed schools, and cost an estimated 11.9 million dollars.
The hunt was a slow contest of attrition rather than a chase. Searchers periodically recovered items Frein abandoned in the woods — among them an AK-47-style rifle, pipe bombs, ammunition, and soiled diapers he had apparently used to remain motionless in hiding. The discoveries confirmed both his presence and his preparation, but for weeks he stayed ahead of the cordon, moving at night through a landscape of dense forest and abandoned structures. The end was an anticlimax: spotted near a disused airfield, he gave up without a fight.
A jury in Pike County convicted Frein in April 2017 on all twelve counts, including first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer, two counts of terrorism, and two counts involving weapons of mass destruction. A week later the same jury sentenced him to death. In April 2019 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a mandatory review, affirmed the conviction and the death sentence, finding the evidence sufficient to support both.
On July 23, 1997, in the upstairs bedroom of a houseboat moored on Indian Creek in Miami Beach, Florida, police found Andrew Phillip Cunanan dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, ending a three-month manhunt that had spanned four states and put him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He was twenty-seven. The pistol beside him, a Taurus he had taken from his first victim, was the same weapon used to kill three of the five people who died in his spree, including the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, shot eight days earlier on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion.
Cunanan, an articulate, well-educated San Diego man who had lived for years on the support of wealthy older companions, began killing on April 27, 1997, in Minneapolis, where he beat his friend Jeffrey Trail to death and hid the body in the apartment of his former boyfriend David Madson. Within days Madson too was dead, shot and left near a Minnesota lake. The violence then moved east: Chicago real-estate developer Lee Miglin was tortured and killed, and a New Jersey cemetery caretaker, William Reese, was shot for his pickup truck.
The killing of Versace on July 15 transformed a multi-state homicide investigation into an international news event. Despite Cunanan’s presence on the Ten Most Wanted list and saturation coverage of his face, he was not caught through detective work or a tip from the public. He had been hiding for weeks in Miami Beach, at one point in plain sight, before retreating to an empty houseboat whose owner was abroad.
He was found because a caretaker checking the vessel heard a gunshot. Police surrounded the houseboat, fired tear gas, and entered to find Cunanan already dead by his own hand. He left no explanation. His motive — what drove an educated man with no prior record of violence to kill five people across the country in three months — was never established, and the case closed with its central question unanswered.
On the night of July 22, 1934, federal agents shot and killed John Herbert Dillinger in the alley beside the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, ending a thirteen-month run that had made the Indiana bank robber the most hunted man in the United States. He had just left a screening of the gangster picture Manhattan Melodrama, flanked by two women, when agents of the Division of Investigation — the bureau that would soon be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation — moved in. As Dillinger reached toward a pistol and broke for the alley, three agents fired; three bullets struck him, the fatal round entering the back of his neck and exiting beneath the right eye. He was pronounced dead a short time later. He was thirty-one.
The trail to that alley had been laid by a paid informant. Ana Cumpănaș, a Romanian-born brothel madam known to the press as Anna Sage and miscast in legend as the “Woman in Red,” had told authorities where Dillinger would be in exchange for money and help against a pending deportation. She wore an orange dress that read as red under the marquee lights, a signal to the waiting agents. The deal bought the bureau its quarry; it did not, in the end, spare her, and she was deported to Romania later that year.
Dillinger had earned the manhunt across a frantic 1933 and 1934. Paroled in May 1933 after nearly a decade in Indiana prisons for a botched grocery robbery, he assembled a gang — among them Harry Pierpont, John Hamilton, Homer Van Meter and, for a time, the volatile Baby Face Nelson — and robbed a string of Midwestern banks. He broke out of the Lima, Ohio jail in October 1933 in an escape that left a sheriff dead, and on March 3, 1934 walked out of the supposedly escape-proof county jail at Crown Point, Indiana using, by his own later account, a pistol whittled from wood and blackened with shoe polish. Driving a stolen sheriff’s car across the state line into Illinois, he handed the federal government its jurisdictional hook.
The Bureau’s pursuit was not flawless. On April 22, 1934, a raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin ended with agents killing and wounding bystanders while Dillinger and others escaped out the back. He underwent crude plastic surgery to alter his face and had acid applied to his fingertips to obscure his prints. None of it saved him. Named Public Enemy Number One and betrayed by an informant, he was run to ground outside a neighborhood movie house and killed where he fell — a founding legend of the modern FBI, and a sober study in how a fugitive’s own associates, not his disguises, tend to end the chase.