Richard Lee McNair

Richard Lee McNair (born December 19, 1958) is a convicted murderer known for his ability to escape and elude capture.

In 1987, McNair murdered one man and shot a second man four times during a botched robbery.

He is currently serving two terms of life imprisonment for these crimes including escaping from prison.

After McNair's arrest, he escaped three times from three different institutions using various creative methods.

On his first attempt, he used lip balm to squeeze out of a pair of handcuffs.

He escaped a second time by crawling through a ventilation duct.

On November 17, 1987, while attempting a burglary in Minot, North Dakota, McNair was surprised by two men and murdered one of them.

McNair's murder of Jerry Thies occurred at a grain elevator operated by the Farmers Union Elevator Co. while McNair was a sergeant posted at the nearby Minot Air Force Base.

A second man was shot four times, but survived.

McNair remained at large until February 1988, when the police called him in for questioning.

McNair then surrendered a concealed handgun.

It was then that McNair's first escape attempt occurred, at the Minot municipal police station.

McNair's first period as a fugitive lasted only a few hours, after which McNair was quickly recaptured.

After his initial arrest, McNair was handcuffed to a chair and left in a room with three detectives.

McNair used lip balm, which he had in his pocket, as a lubricant to squeeze his hands free from the handcuffs.

McNair then led police on a chase on foot through the town, eventually being chased up a three-flight stairway in an effort to evade capture.

After becoming surrounded by police on the roof of a three-story building downtown, McNair attempted to jump to a tree branch to escape arrest, but the branch broke.

McNair landed on the ground and hurt his back, after which he was easily apprehended.

After McNair was released from the hospital, he was moved to the Ward County Jail in Minot.

That same month, sheriff's deputies discovered another escape attempt when, after moving McNair to another cell, they found two cinder blocks partially chiseled out from the cell in which he was being held.

McNair was later sentenced to two life sentences for murder and attempted murder, and a thirty-year prison sentence for burglary.

On October 9, 1992, McNair escaped with two other prisoners from the North Dakota State Penitentiary in Bismarck, North Dakota, by crawling through a ventilation duct.

One of the prisoners who escaped with McNair was apprehended within hours, and the other within days.

After his escape, McNair grew out his hair and dyed it blonde in an attempt to disguise himself.

Much of his time on the run was spent roaming the United States in stolen cars.

McNair remained free for ten months, until he was eventually arrested in Grand Island, Nebraska, on July 5, 1993.

After his second recapture, the North Dakota Department of Corrections deemed McNair a problem inmate, and arranged his transfer through the Interstate Compact to Minnesota Correctional Facility – Oak Park Heights.

After a number of years at this facility, and realizing he would not be able to escape, McNair participated in a sit-down strike that caused his return to North Dakota, and his later transfer to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

He was assigned to the maximum security United States Penitentiary, Florence High which is next to – but distinct from – ADX Florence.

Again realizing that escape would be unlikely, he arranged a transfer to United States Penitentiary, Pollock on the grounds that this was marginally closer to his parents' home in Oklahoma.

In his last escape from a federal prison on April 5, 2006, he escaped by concealing himself in a pallet of used postal mailbags and successfully convinced a police officer he was not the prison escapee but actually a jogger.

This resulted in his mugshot being featured a dozen times on the TV show America's Most Wanted, and made him one of the top fifteen fugitives wanted by US Marshals.

On April 5, 2006, McNair escaped from the United States Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana.

McNair's duties in prison included work in a manufacturing area, where he would repair old, torn mailbags.

He held this position for several months, throughout which McNair plotted his escape.

McNair escaped by hiding himself in a specially-constructed "escape pod" (which included a breathing tube), which was buried under a pile of mailbags.

The pallet was shrink-wrapped and forklifted to a nearby warehouse outside of the prison fence.

After prison staff delivered McNair's pallet and went for lunch, McNair cut himself out of his "escape pod" and walked through the unsecured area to freedom.

McNair traveled to Canada twice in order to evade capture, traveling across the country for over a year before being apprehended in a random police check on October 25, 2007.

Much of what the public knows about McNair's escape and his time as a fugitive is through McNair's prison correspondence with a Canadian journalist, Byron Christopher.