FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives by year, 1958

In 1958, the United States FBI, under Director J. Edgar Hoover, continued for a ninth year to maintain a public list of the people it regarded as the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

As 1958 opened, the FBI had gone for a full ten months through the end of the prior year without being able to add a single fugitive to the top Ten list. The reason for the paucity of new fugitives is that by March of the prior year, the list of Ten Fugitives had become entirely populated by the most difficult captures, all ten of whom still remained at large, up through the first three months of 1958:

• 1950 #4 (eight years), Henry Randolph Mitchell, process was dismissed July 18, 1958
• 1950 #14 (eight years), Frederick J. Tenuto, remained still at large
• 1952 #36 (six years), James Eddie Diggs, remained still at large
• 1954 #78 (four years), David Daniel Keegan, remained still at large
• 1955 #83 (three years), Flenoy Payne, arrested March 11, 1958
• 1955 #87 (three years), Daniel William O'Connor, apprehended December 26, 1958
• 1956 #97 (two years), Eugene Francis Newman, remained still at large
• 1956 #98 (two years), Carmine DiBiase, surrendered August 28, 1958
• 1957 #99 (one year), Ben Golden McCollum, arrested March 7, 1958
• 1957 #102 (one year), George Edward Cole, remained still at large

But that situation was soon to change, as the FBI began one of its most productive years ever in 1958, in terms of removing long-timers from the top Ten list. In all, a full half of the list, five long-time Fugitives, were removed from the list during 1958.

Also notable in 1958, the longest wanted Fugitive, Henry Randolph Mitchell, #4 from the original list of Ten published in 1950, after eight years at large, became the first Top Tenner to ever be removed for reason other than capture or death. Mitchell became one of a series of longstanding top Ten Fugitives whose time on the list simply outlived their initial criteria for having been listed. In the case of Mitchell, his charges were finally dropped by a court in 1958, and so the FBI also dropped him from the top Ten list with the justification that his "process was dismissed." In many of the subsequent such removals, a top Ten Fugitive remained a fugitive from justice, yet was simply removed from the FBI top Ten list when the FBI determined that the original criteria were no longer being met for the top Ten listing.

With the removal of so many long-time top ten fugitives in 1958, the FBI once again began a series of turnover of many new Fugitives, adding a full half dozen new names to the list by year end.