In the 1950s, the United States FBI began to maintain a public list of the people it regarded as the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Following is a brief review of FBI people and events that place the 1950s decade in context, and then an historical list of individual fugitives whose names first appeared on the 10 Most Wanted list during the decade of the 1950s, under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In late 1949 the FBI helped publish an article about the "toughest guys" the Bureau was after, who remained fugitives from justice. The positive publicity from the story resulted in the birth of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" list on March 14, 1950.

Cases of espionage against the United States and its allies were some of the prevalent investigations by the Bureau during the 1950s. Eight Nazi agents who had planned sabotage operations against American targets were arrested. Organized crime networks and families in the United States also became targets, including those headed by Sam Giancana and John Gotti.

As wanted fugitives were added, and then later removed, the FBI began to keep track of the sequence number in which each fugitive appeared on the list. Some individuals have even appeared twice, and often a sequence number was permanently assigned to an individual fugitive who was soon caught, captured, or simply removed, before his or her appearance could be published on the publicly released list. In those cases, the public would see only gaps in the number sequence reported by the FBI. For convenient reference, the wanted fugitive's sequence number and date of entry on the FBI list appear below, whenever possible.

The most wanted fugitives listed in the decade of the 1950s include (in FBI list appearance sequence order):^[1][2][3]

March 20, 1950 #11
William Francis (Willie) Sutton
On February 18, 1952, Sutton was arrested without incident in New York after two years on the list.

December 19, 1951 #28
George Arthur Heroux
On July 25, 1952, Heroux, who was a bank robber with accomplice and fellow top Ten Fugitive, Gerhard Arthur Puff, was caught at Miami, Florida after seven months on the list.

January 28, 1952 #30 - was added soon after his partner George Arthur Heroux, #28
Gerhard Arthur Puff
Puff, who was a bank robber with accomplice and fellow top Ten Fugitive, George Arthur Heroux, was caught after killing an FBI Agent in a gunbattle after six months on the list. He was executed two years later.

By the end of the decade, the following fugitives were remaining at large on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list:

• J. Edgar Hoover (1935–1972)

• Current FBI top ten most wanted fugitives at FBI site