FBI Issues Mobile App Warning, Plus 32 Most Significant FBI Cases in American History

On May 24, 1935, George Weyerhaeuser, the 9-year old son of lumber tycoon J.P. Weyerhaeuser of Tacoma, Washington, disappeared on his way home from school and was held for ransom initially put at $200,000. FBI agents apprehended three kidnappers and retrieved more than $157,000 of the ransom money.

In a scene reminiscent of a movie, Special Agent J. Brady Murphy was fatally wounded during a gun battle with murder suspect and career criminal John Elgin Johnson in a Baltimore movie theater on Sept. 25, 1953.

An investigation into abuse at Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple the jungle of Guyana on Nov. 14, 1978, led to the death of California Congressman Leo Ryan and then the poisoning of more than 900 cultists, including more than 200 children.

The theft of a valuable diamond ring and $700,000 on April 10, 1959, by three men at the Krupp family ranch in Nevada triggered a nationwide FBI chase.  The chase ended with the arrest of one man in a hotel room in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The ring’s diamonds were reassembled, and the precious band was later purchased at auction by Richard Burton for his then-wife Elizabeth Taylor.

On May 3, 1938, Special Agent William R. Ramsey died from wounds that he sustained while attempting to arrest one of the suspects, Joe Earlywine, in an Indiana bank burglary that had taken place the previous year. Ramsey was able to shoot and kill Earlywine before he died. Two other paroled convicts were arrested.

In late 1989, the nation was rocked by a series of bombings in the Southern United States aimed at federal buildings, law enforcement officials, and the Jacksonville office of the NAACP. Judge Robert Vance was killed in his suburban Alabama home on December 16, and two days later, Robert Robertson was murdered in Atlanta. The investigation led to Walter Leroy Moody, who held a grudge against Judge Vance from a previous case. Moody was executed in 2018.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., 20-month-old son of the famous aviator and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was kidnapped on March 1, 1932, from the nursery on the second floor of the Lindbergh home near Hopewell, New Jersey. The child died during the ordeal and the kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was executed in the electric chair.

After forming an alliance in an Ohio prison, Albert Nussbaum and Bobby Wilcoxson robbed eight banks, accumulated an arsenal of weapons, murdered a bank guard, and detonated several bombs in the nation’s capital in 1961. Their partnership soured, leading to their capture in the countryside outside of Buffalo. Both were sentenced to life in prison.

A series of murders committed against members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, who owned rights to recently discovered oil and earned royalties from its sale, was solved when the FBI apprehended business mogul William Hale and his henchmen. The story is the subject of the Martin Scorsese-directed film “The Killers of the Flower Moon.”

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst,  was abducted from her dorm room at the University of California, Berkeley, by armed anti-capitalist radicals of the Symbionese Liberation Army(SLA) in California. The SLA demanded a $2 million ransom to distribute to the poor. Patty Hearst was reportedly brainwashed by the SLA and later participated in a bank robbery and helped make explosive devices. She was apprehended on Sept. 18, 1975, and faced charges including bank robbery. President Carter commuted her seven-year sentence after she had served two years.

Sixteen incendiary devices sent by mail were detonated between 1978 and 1995, one exploding in the bay of an American Airlines plane and another sent to the president of United Airlines. In all, the bombs killed three people. The case was cracked when the the Justice Department OK’d the newspaper publication of a 35,000-word manifesto by the so-called Unabomber. Social worker David Kaczynski alerted the FBI to similarities between what was published and the writing style of his brother Ted. The FBI tracked down Ted Kaczynski to a shack in Montana. Kaczynski pled guilty and died in prison in 2023.

On April 7, 1972, a man brandishing a hand grenade and a pistol hijacked a United Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles from Newark, N.J., with a stopover in Denver, and parachuted from the plane over Utah with $500,000 in ransom money. Vietnam War veteran and helicopter pilot Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., was eventually tracked down and sentenced to a 45-year jail term for air piracy. In 1974, McCoy escaped from the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., with two other convicts and was eventually killed in a shootout with law enforcement.

One-month-old Peter Weinberger was abducted from his home in Westbury, N.Y., on July 4, 1956, by Angelo LaMarca, a financially struggling taxi dispatcher and truck driver. LaMarca left a ransom demanding $2,000 but became panicked when police and the press swarmed the money drop-off site. He abandoned the baby, who tragically passed away later. The FBI identified LaMarca by matching his handwriting with his writing from a previous probation file and arrested him. He was convicted of kidnapping and murder, and was executed in 1958.

Joanne Chesimard, a member of the extremist group Black Liberation Army, fled the U.S. and is wanted for domestic terrorism; bank robbery; unlawful flight to avoid confinement after escaping prison in New Jersey in 1979; and the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. Chesimard was named a Most Wanted Terrorist by the FBI and is the first woman ever to make the bureau’s list of top terrorists. She is thought to be living in Cuba.

The Oklahoma City bombing took place on April 19, 1995, when a truck filled with explosives was detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. Anti-government conspirators Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier were found guilty of carrying out the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history. McVeigh was executed, Nichols received a life sentence, and Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison before being released in 2007.

Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was gunned down in front of his Mississippi home on June 12, 1963. Two all-white juries rejected testimony from FBI agents and witnesses to convict Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. The persistence of Evers’ widow Myrlie Evers-Williams forced the FBI to reopen the case. New witnesses were located and De La Beckwith was convicted in 1994. He died in jail in 2001.

In July 1941, prior to America’s entry into World War II, FBI agents arrested German spy Frederick Joubert “Fritz” Duquesne and 32 other German agents after a two-year investigation. The following year, the agency thwarted two teams of German saboteurs who had landed on Long Island and Ponte Vedra Beach in Florida.

Holdups of banks and other businesses were common in Depression-era America in the 1930s, and the crimes of robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger commanded the nation’s attention. In 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were slain in a hail of bullets from law enforcement, and later that year, and Dillinger was killed by special agents outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago while resisting arrest.