WASHINGTON — The idea came out of a card game. A reporter playing Hearts with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover asked him to name the meanest, wiliest fugitives the bureau could not track down. He thought putting their pictures in the newspaper might help.

It was 1949 and Hoover long had insisted no one could outsmart his FBI — not for long, anyway. But a few weeks later, 10 names and pictures appeared at the reporter’s door and he plastered them on the front of the Washington Daily News.

They were a sorry lot. Four escapees, three con men, two accused murderers and a bank robber. They were plucked from 5,700 fugitives hiding in the U.S. or abroad. To Hoover’s surprise, nine of the 10 were soon captured. A year later, the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list was officially born.

Since then, 497 fugitives have made the roster. Their photos and IDs have gone from newspaper pages to TV screens, from Post Office posters to iPhone apps. Some names remain etched in the nation’s psyche, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, serial killer Ted Bundy and al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

In recent months new details about some of the cases have come to light as about 250 former FBI agents have told their stories in oral histories that will be housed at the National Law Enforcement Museum when it opens next year in Washington.

“There are some big names, and some unsung heroes in here,” said Susan Walton Wynkoop, a former agent helping spearhead the project.

John Fox, the FBI’s in-house historian, said the list reflects the changing phenomenon of crime in America.

The 1950s: bank robbers, prison escapees and car thieves. The ’60s and ’70s: anti-war radicals and organized crime figures. The ’80s and ’90s: drug traffickers and sexual predators. The current era: international terrorism.

“You have to be someone … who is missing, escaped from prison, disappeared after you were indicted,” Fox said. “You have to vanish.”

First on the official FBI list was Thomas James Holden. On June 5, 1949, he killed his wife and her two brothers in their fourth-floor apartment in Chicago. He left the .38 revolver, four spent cartridges and two loaded shells on the dresser.

Agents tracked him to Cedar Lake, Ind., but the trail went cold. Yet as the list circulated, a reader of the Oregonian newspaper in Portland spotted a black-and-white photo on page 7.

The paper said the fugitive was “a menace to every man, woman and child in America.” But the reader recognized the man in the photo as John McCullough, with whom he worked as a plasterer. The next day agents appeared at the job site and arrested Holden.

Glen Roy Wright, No. 8 on the original list, was a prison escapee out of Oklahoma; he persuaded the guards to let him visit his “ailing” mother. After a string of robberies, he relocated to Salina, Kan., and patrons at a local drug store wondered about the stranger in town. The next time Wright stopped in, the FBI was waiting.

Those early captures thrilled the country and excited the FBI, which kept the list rolling.

James “Whitey” Bulger, wanted for mob killings in Boston, was the oldest at 69 when he was added in 1999. He was 81 when the FBI caught him last year near his Santa Monica, Calif., apartment.

Victor Manuel Gerena, who allegedly handcuffed two of his colleagues and made off with $7 million in their Wells Fargo armored car, has been missing the longest — 28 years. Best guess? Hiding in Cuba.

“He still is a Top Ten fugitive,” lamented retired Agent William Dyson. All they know for sure, Dyson said, is the $7 million showed up in Puerto Rico.

After the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta, Eric Rudolph took to the hills of North Carolina. Five years later, a sheriff’s deputy spotted No. 454 searching a dumpster.

Bin Laden, No. 456, made the list for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was killed a year ago in a Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan.

But what has made the roster so infamous is not the celebrity of those on it. Rather, it became a rogues gallery of sometimes colorful crooks who often got caught in unlikely ways.

Take Isaie Aldy Beausoleil, who made the list in 1952 for killing his female companion in Michigan.

A year later, he was arrested in a women’s public restroom in Chicago, dressed in a blue blouse, green skirt and heels.