Susan Edith Saxe


Susan Edith Saxe is an American who is one of only ten women ever to make the FBI's most wanted list, and one of three women from Brandeis University to do so. She was placed on the list on October 17, 1970, and remained on it until March 27, 1975.

Background

A student of Brandeis University, Saxe was one of several young radicals who were placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list in the early 1970s. Along with Katherine Ann Power, Stanley Ray Bond, and ex-convicts William Gilday and Robert Valeri, she escaped from a bank robbery in Brighton, Boston, in which accomplice Gilday shot and killed Boston Police Department officer Walter Schroeder. She and her four accomplices broke into a National Guard armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on Sept. 20, 1970, and stole a pickup truck, blasting caps and 400 rounds of.30-caliber ammunition. Saxe was on the run until 1975 when she was arrested in Philadelphia, after a police officer recognized her from a photo distributed by the FBI the same day. She served seven years in prison. Her trial was one of the early cases for Nancy Gertner, who later became a federal judge. Gertner describes the trial as her "first big case".