The Furious Search for Danelo Cavalcante and 8 Other Infamous Criminal Manhunts
Police captured the escaped Pennsylvania murderer on September 13 following an almost two-week search that grabbed national attention.
The furious manhunt for Danelo Cavalcante is finally over, with police apprehending the escaped Pennsylvania murderer Wednesday morning in the woods of South Coventry Township, Pennsylvania.
Police discovered Cavalcante with a heat signal from a flying helicopter early Wednesday morning. According to CNN, a team of around two dozen tactical officers secured the area and waited out a thunderstorm before capturing Cavalcante around 8 a.m. State police released a photo of Cavalcante being taken into custody on social media site X.
Cavalcante, 34, escaped from the Chester County jail on August 31 by crab-walking up two walls topped with razor wire and jumping from a roof. According to the Associated Press, Cavalcante had been awaiting a transfer to state prison days after he was sentenced for fatally stabbing his girlfriend. He is also wanted in connection with a killing in Brazil.
The chase grabbed national headlines, as area schools closed and residents waited in fear while police searched for the “desperate” and “dangerous” Cavalcante. However, the saga is far from the only instance of a criminal managing to elude authorities for weeks—or even years.
Here are some of the other notorious figures who were captured after a long time on the lam.
John Wilkes Booth
President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin managed to flee from Ford’s Theatre on horseback on April 14, 1865. Despite reportedly suffering a broken leg and having a $100,000 bounty placed on his head, Booth escaped authorities for 12 days.
Booth first went to Maryland with accomplice David Herold. They eventually took refuge at the farm of Richard H. Garrett in Port Royal, Virginia, where Booth refused to surrender to pursuers on April 26. He was shot in the neck in the ensuing conflict and died a few hours later.
Pancho Villa
Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa kidnapped and killed 18 Americans in January 1916, and his group of rebels murdered 19 more people in a raid on Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9 of that year.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson dispatched General John Pershing to Mexico to capture Villa, but extensive searches in 1916 and 1919 were fruitless. When Adolfo De la Huerta became president of Mexico in 1920—following the assassination of Venustiano Carranza—he negotiated a deal for Villa’s retirement from the battlefield. Villa died three years later.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow
After his release from prison in February 1932, Barrow attempted to live a normal life with Parker, his romantic partner. But upon losing his job at a Dallas glass company, Barrow formed a criminal gang and went on a deadly months-long robbery spree. Parker eventually joined him, solidifying the couple’s notorious reputation.
Police chased Bonnie and Clyde across multiple states until May 1934, when the father of an accomplice betrayed them. The two were killed by gunfire in a police ambush in Louisiana.
James Earl Ray
Ray confessed to the April 4, 1968 killing of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, but not before he led the FBI on what was then considered its biggest investigation in history.
According to the BBC, Ray fled the rooming house from which he shot King and went by train to Toronto, Canada, where he obtained a passport using an alias. He flew to London, then Lisbon, Portugal, before returning to the United Kingdom. Ray was captured in London on July 19 and extradited to the U.S. He pleaded guilty to the murder in March 1969, although he would later insist he was not responsible.
Ted Bundy
Notorious serial killer Bundy was convicted in the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch in March 1976, but would make two escapes from custody the following year.
The first escape lasted only eight days after he jumped out of a window at a courthouse library in Aspen, Colorado, in June. Then in December, Bundy managed to climb through a small hole in the ceiling of his prison cell—with authorities failing to notice his absence for 15 hours. He escaped to Florida and committed three more murders before police apprehended him for good in February 1978.
Ted Kaczynski
Less a direct chase than a years-long cat-and-mouse game, authorities failed to identify Kaczynski as the “Unabomber” from the time of his first attack in 1978 through the mid-1990s. Finally in 1995, his written manifesto published in The Washington Post and the New York Times provided the FBI the break it needed in the case. He was arrested in April 1996.
Kaczynski’s pursuit was so infamous, it served as the basis for the 2017 Discovery Channel miniseries Manhunt: Unabomber, featuring MCU star Paul Bettany as Kaczynski.
James "Whitey" Bulger
Notorious Boston mobster Bulger fled the city with his girlfriend in the mid-1990s after a former FBI agent provided a tip about an upcoming indictment related to his gambling operations.
Bulger briefly returned with his girlfriend, but quickly fled again with mistress Catherine Greig and eventually became the FBI’s second-most-wanted man behind Osama bin Laden. After hiding for more than 16 years, Bulger was finally arrested in Santa Monica, California, in June 2011. He had been living under the alias Charlie Gasko.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Days after he was named a suspect in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings—which killed three people and injured hundreds more—Tsarnaev, 30, and his brother, Tamerlan, reportedly carjacked a vehicle and fled to the suburb of Watertown, Massachusetts. There, Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police on April 19, while Dzhokhar hid wounded inside a covered boat in a city backyard. The boat’s owner discovered him and called police.
Tsarnaev received the death penalty in May 2015 for his role in the bombings. The sentence was overturned in 2020, but reinstated by the U.S. supreme court in March 2022.
Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.
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