What’s with the American obsession over police manhunts?

Once more, a daring individual has escaped from a Pennsylvania prison, and a manhunt has begun.

For the fifth time this year (four in Philadelphia alone), a prisoner has scaled the walls and fences of a facility to escape custody. Earlier this fall, national media and residents in the Northeast were agitated and enthralled by the search for convicted murderer Danilo Cavalcante across the suburban countryside in Chester County.

On the run for two weeks, Cavalcante was surrounded and then apprehended by Pennsylvania State Police, assisted by aircraft with heat-sensing technology, specially trained police dogs, and the dangerous work of cutting through thick forested underbrush in pursuit of an armed fugitive.

“Our nightmare is over and the good guys won,” said Chester County District Attorney Deb Ryan following Cavalcante’s capture. Something similar, perhaps, might once again be uttered following the search for Gino Hagenkotter.

Americans have a long history of obsession with the search for fugitives from justice. The pursuit of Cavalcante and Hagenkotter are not one-of-a-kind or even rare events. They resemble celebrated manhunts that have periodically captured the imagination of the nation for nearly two centuries. But why?

The cable television coverage on June 17, 1994, of the slow-speed chase of O.J. Simpson in his white Ford Bronco on the freeways of Los Angeles remains one of the most-watched events in television history.

The 17-year pursuit of Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, ultimately arrested in 1996, was no less riveting for its drawn-out search.

Perhaps the most significant of these chases in U.S. history was the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre, mere days after the Civil War ended in April 1865.

On a personal level, I can still vividly recall the fear of leaving home during the police lockdown of communities around Boston, where I was living at the time, amid the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who had carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013.

Thousands of residents had no choice but to fix attention on live online media until Tsarnaev was reported wounded and captured. Friends who lived within blocks of the site of his arrest cowered at the sound of gunshots and stayed as far away as possible from their windows.

Not surprisingly, the visual images of that manhunt resembled the full-scale mobilization of militarized police forces, similar to what was amassed in Chester County to search for Cavalcante.

The obsession with manhunts in the United States might well have had its beginnings with the case of an evangelical preacher named Ephraim Avery, accused of murdering a young factory worker named Sarah Maria Cornell, outside the mill town of Fall River, Mass., in 1833.

Avery, a married Methodist minister, was believed to have strangled Cornell and then fixed her body to make her death appear a suicide. His aim was to cover up the crime of coercing her into sex, resulting in pregnancy, at a weeklong religious revival called a camp meeting.

After the Rev. Avery was released following a local arraignment hearing, he went into hiding. Rumors of his escape spread rapidly, and newspapers speculated furiously on his whereabouts. With a new arrest warrant in hand, a local lawman from Fall River, Harvey Harnden, set out on a weeklong trek across three states to discover the hiding place of the Methodist preacher. By the time Harnden apprehended him, Avery had significantly changed his appearance by growing out his beard.

Harnden wasn’t content with merely hunting down the preacher and returning him to the authorities to face trial in what might be called America’s first “crime of the century.” To recoup his expenses, after Rhode Island’s governor refused to pay him the advertised reward for Avery’s apprehension, Harnden turned to popular culture and media.

Ten years before Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story as a new literary genre, Harnden published one of its earliest forerunners, a page-turner in which he cast himself as the lone hero, deploying his wits and guile to find and bring in the fugitive. Newspapers touted his detective tale as an irresistible story of universal appeal (one paper recommended it to “all who wish to while away a dull hour,” while another declared that “few who take it up” will be able to “lay it down”).

We have long been a crime-obsessed nation. What makes manhunts so thrilling for viewers or readers in the United States — even as our fears of a criminal on the loose are genuinely troublesome — is that the ambition, dedication, and wherewithal that go into eluding capture align with those values Americans tend to admire most.

Sure, the “good guys” won when Cavalcante was caught, but Americans also, somewhere deep in our psyches, like to root for the “bad guys,” too.

Bruce Dorsey is a professor of history at Swarthmore College. He is the author of “Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation” (Oxford University Press, 2023).