Little Mitch: The Only Man the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List Never Caught

Henry Randolph Mitchell was the fourth name on the FBI’s inaugural Ten Most Wanted list. The list caught everyone else who started on it. Holden was found in Oregon. King was found in Philadelphia. Nesbit was found in a cave in St. Paul by two teenagers with a newspaper clipping. Mitchell was found nowhere. Eight years later the Federal District Court at Jacksonville dismissed the charges and the FBI quietly removed him. Nobody has ever established what became of Little Mitch.

The bank was in Williston, Florida.

On January 21, 1948, two men walked into a Federal Deposit Insurance Company bank in Williston, a small town in Levy County in north-central Florida, and produced guns and told the employees to get on the floor. The employees got on the floor. The two men helped themselves to the contents of the cash box: ten thousand, three hundred and fifty-three dollars and left. The robbery was efficient, professional in the specific way of men who had done this before, and over quickly enough that by the time the employees were back on their feet and the police were called, the two men were already somewhere else.

FBI agents interviewed the bank employees and compared the descriptions to their files. The two men resembled two recent guests of the Florida State Penitentiary and one of them, the agents concluded, was Henry Randolph Mitchell. Mitchell was fifty years old, known to the Bureau by the nickname Little Mitch, a man whose criminal record included bad check passing, grand larceny, narcotics violations, breaking and entering and forgery. A CV that suggested not a man with a single criminal speciality but one who had spent a long career applying whatever skills the moment required to whatever opportunity presented itself. His particular weakness, the files noted, was gambling. Specifically horses. He robbed to support his habit at the track, and the habit required regular and substantial robbing to sustain.

His partner in the Williston job was arrested quickly. Mitchell was not. He left Florida and kept going and by the time the FBI had formally connected him to the robbery and issued a warrant, he was already somewhere that was not Florida and was not disclosing where that somewhere was. He would not disclose it for the next ten years.

Number Four

On March 17, 1950; three days after the FBI launched its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, Henry Randolph Mitchell’s photograph and physical description were added as the fourth entry. The list had already, in its first three days, demonstrated its operational value. Holden was on it. King was on it. Nesbit was on it and had already been caught by teenagers with a newspaper. The programme was proving itself with a speed that delighted Hoover and alarmed the fugitive community.

Mitchell’s addition to the list meant his face was in post offices across the country, in newspapers across the country, distributed through the wire services that connected American media in 1950 with a thoroughness that made genuine invisibility very difficult for anyone with a photograph on record. The faces of the other original ten had each, in their way, been found by the people who were looking for them, through citizens who recognised photographs, through forensic traces, through the specific mechanism of a programme designed to make the public an active participant in the work of catching criminals.

Mitchell’s face was out there. Mitchell was not found.

“The Ten Most Wanted list worked for everyone who started on it except Henry Randolph Mitchell. Holden found in Oregon by a citizen with a newspaper. King found in Philadelphia by a shoe. Nesbit found in a cave in Minnesota by two fourteen-year-olds with a handful of snow. Mitchell found nowhere, by nobody, ever. The list that had proven its value so dramatically in its first days had, in one specific and permanent case, simply failed. Little Mitch beat it.”

Eight Years

The original Ten Most Wanted list was replaced with new names as fugitives were captured and new cases required attention. The list cycled. Names came on and came off. Dozens of new fugitives joined the programme across the 1950s, their faces added to the post office walls and the newspaper wire services, the same infrastructure that had produced such rapid results for the inaugural entries.

Mitchell’s name stayed. He was on the list for eight years, longer than any other original member by a considerable distance. While new names cycled through the programme and the Bureau refined its methods and the citizen recognition infrastructure that Hoover had built produced arrest after arrest after arrest, Henry Randolph Mitchell remained at large in a country that had his photograph on the wall of every post office and had no idea where he was.

He would have been sixty-three years old in 1958. A man of sixty-three with a horse racing habit and a long criminal record and his face on the FBI’s most prominent fugitive programme for eight consecutive years. A man who should, by any ordinary calculus of law enforcement visibility and citizen engagement, have been recognised at some point by someone who had seen the poster and called the number.

He was not recognised. Or if he was, the recognition produced nothing that reached the FBI. He moved through the United States for eight years without surfacing, without a bank robbery that could be attributed to him, without a bad cheque that led back to a name the Bureau connected to a face on a poster, without any of the ordinary criminal activity that his record suggested he was incapable of entirely abandoning. He was either enormously disciplined in his concealment or he was dead. The FBI never established which.

The Dismissal And The Theories

On July 18, 1958, the Federal District Court at Jacksonville, Florida, dismissed the federal process against Henry Randolph Mitchell. The statute of limitations on the Williston bank robbery had run. Ten years had passed since the crime. The legal mechanism that might have brought him before a court had expired. Mitchell was removed from the Ten Most Wanted list, not because he had been captured, not because he had surrendered, not because any information had been developed that resolved his whereabouts, but because the legal basis for his continued listing had dissolved through the passage of time.

It was the only time in the history of the inaugural list that the programme ended for a fugitive without a resolution. Every other original member had been accounted for- arrested, extradited, tried, convicted or cleared. Mitchell was simply not there. He had not been found and the opportunity to find him, in the legal sense that mattered, had closed.

The theories about what had become of him circulated among the people who wrote about the early history of the Ten Most Wanted programme. The most durable was the simplest, that Mitchell, who had robbed to fund his gambling debts and whose criminal world was one in which debts were settled by methods that did not involve courts, had eventually borrowed from the wrong person or welched on the wrong loan and that the reason nobody had found him was that the people who had found him first had ensured he would not be findable afterward. This theory has the advantage of explaining both his disappearance and the absence of any subsequent confirmed sighting or criminal activity. It has the disadvantage of being entirely unverifiable.

The alternative is simpler and less dramatic, that Little Mitch, a fifty-year-old man with a limp and a pony habit and a criminal record as long as his arm, simply found a corner of America where nobody was looking and lived in it quietly until he died, unrecognised, uncaught, the one man who beat the list that caught everyone else.

Two men walked into a bank in Williston, Florida on January 21, 1948, and took ten thousand, three hundred and fifty-three dollars from the cash box and walked out, and one of them was arrested and one of them was not, and the one who was not became the fourth name on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in March 1950 and stayed on it for eight years while the list caught everyone around him and found no trace of him anywhere. He would have been sixty-three when they gave up. Holden was caught in Oregon. King was caught in Philadelphia by a shoe. Nesbit was caught in a cave in Minnesota by two teenagers with a newspaper clipping and a handful of snow. Mitchell was not caught anywhere by anyone. The Federal District Court at Jacksonville dismissed the charges in 1958 and the FBI removed his name and that was the end of Little Mitch, officially, on the record. What happened to him before that or after that or instead of that is not something the record contains. He is the one name from the original list that the list never resolved. He beat the FBI, or the criminals beat him, or he simply found a quiet corner and stayed in it. Nobody knows. The horses kept running without him, presumably, somewhere in America, on tracks he may or may not have been watching from the rail.