A man has just been arrested by police and is sitting in a room in the station hand-cuffed
to a chair.
Sitting in the same room are three detectives, so one would presume that this man could not
go anywhere.
One would be wrong, because the man has lip balm in his pocket and he uses that to slip
his hands out of his handcuffs.
He then runs for it and what ensues is a chase on foot that looks like something from the
Keystone Cops.
This man we are talking about has been called one of the most brilliant escape artists in
history, and now you’ll see why.
The man we are discussing is one Richard Lee McNair, and that escape we just mentioned
was certainly not his greatest escape…not by a long way.
McNair successfully escaped from the authorities three times, but it was his self-mailing escape
and his life on the run that made him famous.
Let’s get back to the start, though.
In 1987, when McNair was a month shy of his 30th birthday, he made a very bad choice.
That bad choice was to try and break into and burgle a grain storage facility in a town
called Minot in North Dakota.
Why he wanted to do that we just don’t know, because it wasn’t as if McNair was unemployed
or lacking intelligence.
In fact, he had a job as a sergeant at the Minot Air Force Base that wasn’t too far
from the grain storage place.
As McNair’s brother once said, he just made some really bad decisions.
That brother also said Richard was the smartest guy he ever met.
Ok, so he was smart, but that didn’t stop him from botching a burglary and shooting
two men in the process.
One of those men died and the other survived.
McNair was quickly brought in for questioning and he gave up a handgun at the same time.
It was looking like the cops had their man and McNair was looking at a life sentence.
But as you know, things didn’t exactly go as planned, and with a stick of lip balm,
McNair decided to test the health and fitness of the local cops.
He somehow managed to get out of the room and out of the police station.
He proceeded to literally run for his life, something he’d do time and again in the
future.
He led the cops down a bunch of streets and then they chased him up the steps of a three-story
building.
By this time, there were cops everywhere and it was one of those “We’ve got this place
surrounded, come out with your hands up” situations.
McNair then made another bad choice...He decided not to come out with his hands up and jumped
from a third-floor window onto a tree.
The branch he landed on snapped, and McNair took a nasty fall.
Now that McNair was broken, the cops could make an easy arrest.
After a stint in the hospital, McNair was housed at Ward County Jail in Minot.
It seems that he wasn’t too pleased with his new home and he might have escaped again
had the prison guards not found out that he’d chiseled a couple of cinder blocks loose in
his cell.
He was eventually sentenced to 30 years for the robbery and given two life sentences for
murder and attempted murder.
Ok, so we have one escape and one attempted escape, and now we have yet another escape...
one that is not even his best escape.
After a few years behind bars at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, McNair and two
other guys managed to escape after crawling through ventilation shafts.
The two other guys didn’t stay free for very long, but high IQ McNair dyed his hair
and did everything you should do to disguise yourself.
He moved around the U.S. for ten months but was eventually captured.
Ok, thought the authorities, it seems some men you just can’t teach and they marked
him as a problem inmate and moved him to the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Oak Park
Heights.
This place is the state’s only Level 5 maximum security prison.
It houses what the authorities say are the worst of the worst; people with histories
of violence or people like McNair...guys with a flair for escape.
No one has ever escaped from this place and there has only been one murder in the prison.
That’s because prisoners are pretty much locked down during their incarceration.
So, there was no way he was getting out of that joint.
He realized that, and so after a few years he joined in a sit-down protest that eventually
got him moved to the high security United States Penitentiary, Florence High.
Yet again, he realized that it was unlikely that he’d escape from that place and so
he managed to get himself moved to a high-security federal prison located in Louisiana.
This was the place where he would perform his piece de resistance.
You see, he got a job in this prison and that job was to fix torn mail bags so they could
be sent back to the post office to be used.
All the time that McNair was doing this job he was plotting yet another escape.
The date it happened was on April 5th, 2006.
McNair was now almost 50 and had spent a good portion of his adult life behind bars for
making that stupid choice back in the day to rob a grain facility.
That morning McNair managed to hide inside a pallet that was full of repaired mailbags.
The palate was later shrink-wrapped, and you might wonder just how McNair managed to breathe.
Well, the answer is he had created a kind of escape pod, and that included a tube that
he could breathe through once he’d secretly pierced the packaging.
The pallet was soon taken to a storage facility outside of the prison grounds and there McNair
waited inside his pod.
When he heard workers go for lunch he got out of the pod and once more he ran for his
life.
So this was lunchtime, and McNair knew very well that officers at the prison wouldn’t
know he was missing until about 4 p.m He had four hours to run like hell towards the nearest
town to get supplies and steal a car.
The next part of this story is nothing short of unbelievable.
So, McNair is running near some railroad tracks and a cop thinks that’s a bit weird and
stops him, since the cop knows an inmate is on the loose.
The cop asks McNair for ID, to which he replies that he has none.
He tells the cop he’s just doing some exercise, but then when he’s asked what his address
is, McNair says he’s staying at a nearby hotel with his brother.
The cops then says, the problem is, we have an escapee on the loose.
That’s why McNair, who is now calling himself Robert Jones, has been stopped.
The two laugh about this, and then the cop radios the station to ask if the subject wears
glasses.
He also asks for more information about the escapee’s appearance.
McNair could make a run for it anytime, but he just stays there, waiting to see what the
cop will do while he’s on the radio.
The cop explains to the other person on the line that he's looking at a man who’s around
50, has bluish eyes, short hair, a goatee beard and who wears glasses.
The policeman then says, “You know the bad thing about it, you’re matching up to him.
To which McNair replies, “Well, that sucks doesn’t it.”
Somehow McNair manages to convince the cop that he’s staying at some hotel whose name
he can hardly remember which is close to some construction works.
“What’s your name again,” the cop asks, and McNair makes the mistake of now saying,
“Jimmy Jones.”
The cop actually sounds apologetic for harassing the jogger, and then says, “You wouldn’t
believe what those guys do.
They got years and years to think about how they’re gonna do it.”
McNair must have thought...tell me about it.
The next few minutes is McNair brilliantly describing the area where he is staying and
again convincing the cop that he’s staying at some small hotel and he’s just out on
his daily jog.
“I promise you I’m not the escapee,” says McNair, to which the cop replies, “Yudda
done run by now.”
And then they both have a laugh about that.
“Just don’t get run over by train,” says the cop...
Soon McNair is off again on his run to freedom as the cop says, “Be careful buddy.”
He was careful, too, and his journey now would shock just about every household in North
America When Christmas time rolled around, McNair
did something quite brazen.
He actually sent the warden of his former prison a greetings card.
The authorities were not too happy about this.
McNair had totally embarrassed them and now he was rubbing pie in their faces.
U.S marshals put McNair on their ‘15 Most Wanted’ list and his story appeared on the
TV series ‘America’s Most Wanted.’
After over a year on the run.
McNair was pulled over in Canada after police had spotted the stolen car that he was driving.
At the roadside while being questioned, yet again McNair made a run for it.
As you can guess by now, McNair was pretty good at running.
He outran the Canadian cops and it wasn’t until two days later that they realized that
the car thief was that guy that had appeared on America’s Most Wanted.
The car was more closely examined and the cops found a camera.
On that camera there were lots of self-portraits of McNair.
He hadn’t been doing selfies out of narcissism…he’d been planning on making fake IDs.
Investigators also found McNair’s fingerprints in the car.
The chase was on again.
A few days passed and McNair had stolen a motorbike and had already covered a lot of
ground in the province of British Columbia.
He then really hit the gas after stealing yet another car.
To keep the authorities at bay, he crossed back into the U.S., and drove across a few
states.
He then decided to drive back into Canada and drove all the way from Ontario to Vancouver.
He planned to settle down in Northern British Columbia at a place called Williston Lake,
and was about to buy some property there until he found out there had been a pine beetle
infestation in the area.
He was also concerned that there weren’t good enough escape routes if the cops should
ever show up.
If you’re wondering how he managed to get the money to buy a property and survive on
the run all that time, the answer is that he stole a lot of cars, and we mean a lot.
You see, he had once worked as a car showroom salesman and he knew how to steal cars from
those places without getting caught.
He would take brand new cars, ones without GPS, and he would try to steal white cars
because they usually blended in better.
He would use those cars for a while, and then he’d sell them.
That’s how he got his cash.
He appeared 12 times on America’s Most Wanted and there was even an 11-page piece written
about him in The New Yorker.
He’d later say that he was surprised that he had become so famous... or infamous.
This was a problem for him since just about everyone in North America who owned a TV knew
what McNair looked like.
But, he managed to use computer technology to create driver’s licenses and he also
changed his appearance a lot.
He even had laptops that he used just for solely monitoring what the press was saying
about him.
His downfall was his own ingenuity in the end because he was captured when a Canadian
cop noticed a van that seemed to have home-made tinted windows.
McNair had made those tints himself, but the cop was suspicious because the van looked
really expensive.
The cop took the plate number and called it in.
The next day a young Canadian policeman who’d only been on the job six weeks spotted McNair’s
van.
A chase ensued and when the van was cornered, yet again McNair took off on foot.
But this time he was being chased down by a young, fit cop.
McNair didn’t get very far.
The cop was later given an award, and in interviews he said McNair laughed and joked with him
after he was captured.
The game was now up, and the Running Man was about to face extradition to the United States.
McNair now resides in ADX Florence, a supermax prison where inmates are locked down 23 hours
a day and when they do leave their cell they are surrounded by guards.
This facility is one place that no man can escape from.
That’s why it houses international and domestic terrorists, spies, leading gang members as
well as infamous organized crime members and the likes of one El Chapo Guzman.
In fact, McNair once talked about El Chapo, and we know that because a Canadian journalist
who’s been writing to McNair for a long time sometimes posts what McNair says in letters
on Twitter.
One tweet went like this, “I've been a 10-year resident of #ADXFlorence, and I see a new
resident is coming.
El Chapo, I look forward to meeting you and sharing breakout stories.”
If you read that Twitter account you’ll also know why McNair always ran so well.
That’s because he worked out every single day while he was behind bars.
Now you need to watch this video, “The Most Insane Ways Men Escaped from Prison.”
Or go and watch this….