The FBI went decades without a female special agent until she and Susan Roley Malone were sworn-in in 1972. After she retired, Ms. Misko sued the bureau for sex discrimination.
After a long day of teaching at Mount Mercy Academy, a Catholic school in Buffalo, Joanne Pierce Misko would return to her home at the Sisters of Mercy convent, where she and the other nuns liked to unwind with board games. "She always wanted to play Clue," one of her fellow teachers later said. "That should have been a clue."
Ms. Misko, who died Dec. 13 at age 83, eventually traded her nun's habit for a career in law enforcement, joining the FBI in 1970. She started out as a researcher, one of the few roles then available to women at the bureau, and two years later became one of the first women to serve as a special agent.
The job had effectively been closed to women ever since J. Edgar Hoover took over as director in 1924, back when the FBI was still called the Bureau of Investigation. But weeks after Hoover's death in May 1972, FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray III relaxed the rules, making it possible for Ms. Misko and a Marine Corps veteran, Susan Roley Malone, to be sworn-in that July.
Known internally as "the nun and the Marine," they were the first female special agents in nearly a half-century. The duo became roommates and friends while training at the newly opened FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they joined 43 others in their special-agent class -- all men -- in preparing for life in the field.
"We were sort of an oddity," Ms. Misko recalled in a 1994 interview with the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. "I never experienced outright resentment. People tended to take a wait-and-see attitude."
Ms. Misko and Malone trained together, taking firearm classes and working on their pull-ups and two-mile run times, while seeking to prove themselves to their peers and instructors. "We were complementary," Malone said in a 2012 interview for the FBI. "We worked together. We would practice the run at night, we would go to the gym and work out. We were allies."
After earning her gun and credentials -- Ms. Misko said that unlike her male counterparts, she was also issued a purse -- Ms. Misko was assigned to the bureau's St. Louis office, working on a white-collar crime squad.
Only a few months into her tenure, she was detailed to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, during a 71-day standoff between federal agents and protesters with the American Indian Movement. Converging near the site where Army soldiers massacred as many as 300 Lakota men, women and children in 1890, the demonstrators sought to highlight corruption in tribal leadership and demanded that the federal government adhere to the treaties it had signed with Indian nations.
By the time the activists surrendered to law enforcement on May 8, 1973, thousands of shots had been fired by the two sides. Authorities shot and killed two of the Native protesters, and a U.S. marshal was struck by a bullet that left him paralyzed.
Ms. Misko was involved in at least one of the firefights. Taking cover in an armored personnel carrier, she passed ammunition to federal agents during the shootout.
Years later, she said that she never had to fire a gun while on the job, although she sometimes had to pull one. She had assignments in Pittsburgh, Miami and Washington, where she helped recruit the next generation of special agents, and for a time she pursued fugitives out of St. Louis. Her first target, she later told an FBI interviewer, was a military deserter who, after learning that Ms. Misko was on his trail, called the field office, "incensed that a woman was being sent out to get him."
The men she worked with were more agreeable, for the most part.
"I never had anything nasty happen to me," she told the Buffalo News. "But you're always going to have a few pockets of resistance, men who will say, 'I'm not going to work for a woman.'"
Shortly after retiring from the FBI in 1994, Ms. Misko sued the bureau for sex discrimination, alleging that she had been repeatedly passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified male colleagues. She had been stymied by an " 'old boy' network," she alleged in the lawsuit, and wanted as much as $25,000 in back pay.
The case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
"Filing that lawsuit was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, because the great majority of my feelings toward the FBI, and the people I worked with, are good feelings," she said in the Buffalo News interview. "For the most part, it was a great experience in a tremendous law enforcement agency."
The oldest of four children, Joanne Eileen Pierce was born in Niagara Falls, New York, on Jan. 7, 1941. Her father was a police officer during World War II -- he called it a highlight of his professional life -- and later worked at paper, battery and chemical plants, retiring as a watchman. Her mother managed the home.
Ms. Misko became a nun after graduating from high school and continued her education at Mt. St. Joseph College, later known as Medaille College, in Buffalo. She received a master's degree in history from St. Bonaventure University, a Franciscan school outside Olean, New York, in 1970.
Around that same time, she decided to join the FBI, inspired by a recruiter from the bureau who visited the school where she was teaching. Life in the convent was "wonderful," she told the Sun-Sentinel, "but I just wanted to move on and have a family and get married."
Ms. Misko married a fellow FBI agent, Michael Misko, in 1981. She was awarded the American Police Hall of Fame's Lifetime Law Enforcement Achievement Award in 1995. Years later, she returned to FBI headquarters for a few commemorative events, although she downplayed her role in the bureau's history.
"I honestly didn't see myself as a pioneer," she said in the FBI interview. "It was just a role that I was fortunate enough to become a part of."
Her death, at a nursing home in Wheatfield, New York, was confirmed by her brother James Pierce. Ms. Misko had a chronic lung disease and recently contracted pneumonia, he said.
In addition to her brother, survivors include his twin, Terry Pierce. Her husband died in 2021. Another brother, Mark, died in 2005. He was a longtime detective at the Niagara Falls Police Department, and was unsurprised when Ms. Misko became a special agent.
"She could always hold her own," Mark Pierce told the Buffalo Evening News in 1972. "She gave me a boxing lesson once when I was 8. Joanne went two rounds with me and I quit."