Joanne Pierce Misko, a former Roman Catholic nun who in 1972 became one of the first two women sworn in as special agents for the F.B.I., breaking the bureau’s longstanding bar against women in frontline law-enforcement roles, died on Friday in Wheatfield, N.Y., east of Niagara Falls. She was 83.
Her brother James Pierce confirmed the death, in a hospital, from a lung infection.
Mrs. Misko had spent 10 years as a member of the religious order the Sisters of Mercy in western New York before deciding to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a researcher in 1970, one of the only jobs available to women there at the time.
The bureau’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, had always insisted that only men were physically capable of the arduous and sometimes dangerous work required of special agents. After he died in May 1972, his interim successor, L. Patrick Gray III, opened the role to women.
With her supervisor’s encouragement, Mrs. Misko applied, and within a few months she was being sworn in with 44 others at the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. She and another woman, Susan Roley Malone, a former Marine, then traveled with the others to the new F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va., for 14 weeks of training.
Both Mrs. Misko and Mrs. Malone said they had gotten along well with most of their fellow recruits, with only a few smirks and sideways glances along the way as they mastered the .38 revolver, the two-mile timed run and a host of rules and regulations that every agent has to know.
The two roomed together, and they bonded over the bureau’s rigorous physical requirements, which were the same for men and women.
“We worked very hard,” Mrs. Malone said in an interview. “We would go out after dinner at night and run Hoover Road” — one of the academy’s main routes — “and we’d do pull-ups and sit-ups. She was tenacious.”
Mrs. Misko’s first posting was St. Louis, where she worked on white-collar crimes. But within a few months she was detailed to the town of Wounded Knee, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which had been occupied by members of the American Indian Movement, drawing U.S. Marshals and F.B.I. agents to the scene.
During a 71-day standoff with the authorities, members of the movement opened fire on Mrs. Misko and her colleagues, forcing them to take cover in an armored personnel carrier. For over an hour she passed ammunition to two agents firing M16s. One movement member was killed in the shootout; no agents were wounded.
Mrs. Misko later worked in Pittsburgh, where she pursued fugitives and military deserters. She said almost all her male colleagues had treated her as an equal, but the same wasn’t true of the suspects she pursued.
“I can remember very vividly the first case I had,” she told the Buffalo TV station WGRZ in 2022. “We went out to get the guy, and he found out that we were looking for him and he called back into the office; he was incensed that a woman was being sent out to get him, you know, that he wasn’t worthy of a guy. He had to have a woman go after him.”
Often, she found her gender could be an advantage, as suspects often let their guard down around her.
“Most people back then didn’t even realize the F.B.I. had female agents,” Mrs. Misko said on the Madame Policy podcast in 2022. “Many times a subject would simply open the door when I knocked, not expecting me to say, ‘F.B.I.’”
She retired in 1994 and went to work for a bank. That same year, she filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, saying she had been held back from promotion because of her gender. She settled the suit in 1996 for an undisclosed sum.
“Filing that lawsuit was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life,” she told The Buffalo News in 1994, “because the great majority of my feelings toward the F.B.I., and the people I worked with, are good feelings.”
Joanne Eileen Pierce was born on Jan. 7, 1941, in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Her father, Howard, worked for a chemical company and her mother, Ann (Egan) Pierce, oversaw the home.
She joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1960. She received a bachelor’s degree in social science education in 1965 from Medaille College, in Buffalo, and a master’s degree in history from St. Bonaventure University, south of Buffalo, in 1970.
She taught high school history through the 1960s at schools in Niagara Falls and Orleans, also in western New York. One day an F.B.I. agent came to her school in Orleans to talk about jobs in the bureau. She had already been thinking about leaving her order, and the idea of a career in the F.B.I. intrigued her.
The sisterhood “is a wonderful life, but I just wanted to move on and have a family and get married,” she told The Tampa Bay Times in 1994.
The visiting agent told her that the only jobs open to women were clerical and research positions, but she was hooked. She moved to Washington in 1970.
She married Michael Misko, another agent, in 1981. He died in 2021. Along with her brother James, she is survived by another brother, Terrence.
Mrs. Misko later worked in Pittsburgh and Washington, where she ran the office that vetted special-agent applicants. Her final posting was in South Florida. In 1995, she received the Lifetime Law Enforcement Achievement Award from the American Police Hall of Fame.
“I honestly didn’t see myself as a pioneer,” she said in an interview for the F.B.I.’s website. “It was just a role that I was fortunate enough to become a part of.”
The post Joanne Pierce Misko, Ex-Nun Who Made F.B.I. History, Dies at 83 appeared first on New York Times.
