- Home
- international
- news
- From anti-war activists to the 'Crypto-queen,' here are the 11 women who have made the FBI's most wanted in its 72-year history
From anti-war activists to the 'Crypto-queen,' here are the 11 women who have made the FBI's most wanted in its 72-year history
Sarah Al-Arshani
- The FBI's recent update to its Most Wanted list features the "Crypto Queen," who tricked investors out of billions.
- The suspect — Ruja Ignatova — was only the 11th woman to make it onto the list in its history.
The so-called 'Crypto-queen' — Ruja Ignatova
In the FBI's Most Wanted List's 72-year history, only 11 women have made it on it. The women ranged from political activists like Angela Davis to the most recent, Ruja Ignatova.
Ignatova became the 11th woman to make it on the FBI's most-wanted list for allegedly scamming wealthy investors out of $4 billion between the end of 2014 and 2016 in a Ponzi scheme under her company OneCoin. She then boarded a plane and disappeared in 2017 and has not been seen since.
US authorities charged Ignatova with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering in 2019 in absentia.
The FBI is now offering $100,000 for information on her whereabouts but suspects she may have had plastic surgery or altered how she looks in some ways.
Shanika S. Minor
Minor was added to the FBI's most wanted in June 2016.
The FBI said Minor was wanted for killing a pregnant woman in Milwaukee. Minor had allegedly confronted her mother's neighbor who was 9 months pregnant in March 2016 after her mother told her the neighbor was playing loud music and Minor thought the woman "disrespected" her family.
Minor instigated two confrontations with the neighbor and both times her mother tried to intervene but the woman and her unborn baby were killed and Minor later fled, the FBI said.
The FBI announced on July 1, 2016, just three days after Minor was placed on the most wanted list that she was apprehended in a North Carolina motel.
Brenda Delgado
Delgado, a Mexican citizen was added to the FBI's most-wanted list on April 6, 2016, and arrested just two days later. Delgado was wanted for her role in a murder-for-hire plot that resulted in the killing of her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, a prominent local pediatric surgeon.
The FBI said Delgado bribed two co-conspirators with drugs and money, which she claimed came from cartel connections to kill Dr. Kendra Hatcher. Hatcher was murdered in the parking garage of her Dallas apartment complex.
Shauntay L. Henderson
Henderson was placed on the FBI's most wanted list on March 31st, 2017, and arrested that same day. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times that Henderson was arrested right before the television show "America's Most Wanted" was set to announce that she made the list.
Authorities caught her when she opened the door at an associate's house, as police were searching for someone else.
She had been wanted in connection with the shooting and killing of a 21-year-old man at a gas station in Kansas City, Missouri. Authorities also said she was the leader of a gang and wanted in connection to more murders.
Donna Jean Willmott
Willmott was placed on the FBI's most wanted list in May 1987 but wouldn't surrender until On December 6, 1994.
After Willmott's capture alongside her partner, Claude Daniel Marks, in 1994, The New York Times reported that they had been hiding out in Chicago under the alias Greg Peters and Jo Elliot.
Willmott and her partner in crime were wanted by the FBI for charges stemming from their alleged involvement in trying to blow up a maximum security prison in Kansas — including landing a helicopter amid the chaos — to try and free a leader of a Puerto Rican nationalist group known as the F.A.L.N., the Times reported.
Katherine Ann Power
Power was added to the most wanted list in October 1970 but was later dropped from the list in June 1984. She wouldn't be caught however until 1993.
In 1970, Power was a senior at Brandeis University when she robbed a National Guard armory and a bank in Massachusetts with her roommate Susan Edith Saxe and three ex-convicted criminals. While robbing the bank, one of the ex-cons fatally shot a police officer on the scene, The New Yorker reported.
The goal of the robbery was to collect money to support the Black Panthers.
Power would spend more than 20 years under a false identity before she surrendered after going to therapy.
Susan Edith Saxe
Saxe was placed on the list for the same robbery that put her roommate Power on the list but unlike Power, Saxe was caught in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1975.
Bernardine Rae Dohrn
Dohrn was placed on the FBI's most wanted list in October of 1970 before the charges against her were dismissed on December 7th, 1973.
In 1970, Dohrn was a leader of Weather Underground, a radical group, when an accidental explosion at the home of a member resulted in three deaths, BuzzFeed reported. Dohrn, alongside other leaders, went into hiding.
By the time Dohrn had turned herself in 1980, all the charges against the group had been dismissed because the FBI's counterintelligence efforts were ruled to be criminal, Buzzfeed reported.
Angela Yvonne Davis
Davis, a well-known activist was placed on the FBI's most wanted list in 1970 and was captured in a New York City motel that same year.
The New York Times reported that her arrest at the time was very controversial. Davis was wanted for murder and kidnapping when she evaded the police and became only the third woman to be on the FBI's most wanted.
The murder and kidnapping charges stemmed from allegations that Davis bought a shotgun that was used to kill a judge in a courthouse shooting, the Times reported.
The Times added that it did not appear that Davis was there and was charged because of "a California law that makes an accomplice equally guilty for having purchased the guns used."
She was acquitted in 1972.
" The guns in question were used for a courthouse kidnapping during the trial of the Soledad Brothers' – George L Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Wesley Clutchette, accused of killing a white guard Soledad prison – that left four dead, including a judge
Marie Dean Arrington
Arrington was added to the list in 1969 after she escaped from a Florida prison where she was on death row for murder, the Orlando Sentinel reported in 2014 at the time of her death.
The Sentinel reported that Arrington had been imprisoned for the killing of a secretary for the public defender who failed to have criminal charges dropped against Arrington's two children. She was labeled a "mad-dog killer."
Arrington was caught working as a waitress at a New Orleans restaurant in December of 1971, where she allegedly kept herself busy by reading newspaper articles about the reward placed for finding her, the Sentinel reported.
"That reward business," she told a reporter, chuckling, in a 1973 jailhouse interview, according to the Sentinel. "It sounded like the old wild wild West and the Jesse James Gang."
Ruth Eisemann-Schier
Eisemann-Schier was the first woman to ever be placed on the FBI's most wanted list in December of 1968.
According to the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, Eisenmann-Shier confessed to the FBI in March 1969 that she helped kidnap a Miami heiress because she was in love with the kidnapper, Gary Steven Krist.
The pair kidnapped Barbara Jane Mackle on December 17, 1968. Mackle, the daughter of Robert Mackle, a millionaire Florida land developer was placed in a coffin-like box for more than three days. Mackle's father paid a ransom of $500,000 and the kidnappers then informed the FBI of where Mackle was buried.
Popular Right Now
Popular Keywords
Advertisement