If you haven’t seen Richard Lee McNair deftly outwitting a Louisiana sheriff on youtube, you’re in for a treat. Diabolical is the perfect word to describe McNair, a prison escape artist who outsmarted law enforcement on both sides of the border. While he was spotted in my city, he was ultimately captured across the country in Campbellton, N.B. on Oct. 25 2007, 18 months after escaping prison. An off-duty Mountie spotted a suspicious looking van and a rookie cop pulled him over, later capturing him after a short foot chase. Finally cornered, McNair charmingly informed the cops, ”You got a big fish.”
Richard McNair: Catch him if you can; Three American prisons couldn’t hold him. He came face to face with U.S. police and Canadian Mounties and outfoxed them. Killer and escapee Richard Lee McNair is still on the lam and is reportedly hiding in plain view in and around Calgary. So how will Calgary’s finest go about catching a notorious escape artist who is one of America’s Most Wanted?
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Sherri Zickefoose
Calgary Herald ©
McNair stood over him, firing point-blank. One bullet passed through both of Kitzman’s legs. Another hit him in the wrist. Two others missed. Kitzman played dead, curled in a fetal position. McNair finished ransacking the office and left.
Kitzman crawled to a telephone and called 911. While he was on the phone, he could hear more shots being fired in the parking lot. McNair shot Minnesota trucker Jerome Theis between the eyes, killing him.
By the time police cars and an ambulance arrived, McNair had vanished.
His disappearing act was just beginning.
During a 20-year career as a criminal Houdini, he escaped three U.S. prisons, outsmarted authorities on both sides of the border and became proficient at hopping moving trains, disappearing on the rails in a puff of train smoke. The escape artist is one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s 15 most wanted.
Today, he could be living under the nose of ordinary Calgarians. But police hope they can finally bring down the curtain on the master of disguise.
“All we can do is try our best and follow our leads. He can run and he can run, but he can’t hide forever,” Calgary Const. Tim Fitzgibbon told the Herald.
To some, 48-year-old Oklahoma-born McNair is a charming, likable, lanky everyguy. His cunning escape tactics and coolness under pressure reveal impressive street smarts.
But to police and Kitzman, he is no folk hero. To them, McNair is a violent, cold-blooded killer who knows how to live while on the run.
“He’s the real deal. He’s as bad as they get,” said U.S. Marshal Deputy Chris Turner of Louisiana. Turner has been hunting McNair for 19 months.
In his Louisiana office, Turner has filing cabinets filled with about a thousand unconfirmed McNair sightings across North America.
His enthusiasm about yet another McNair sighting is low. Turner said it’s news to him that Calgary police claim McNair has taken up residence in southern Alberta.
But he can’t rule the tip out.
“We don’t have anything to indicate he’s not there,” said Turner. “He’s probably assumed a new identity and is working some kind of a nine-to-five blue-collar job,” he said.
Because of his uncanny ability to blend in, transforming his looks from average guy with glasses to average guy with a goatee, recapturing the elusive McNair isn’t going to be easy, the fugitive hunter says.
“It’s going to take a really sharp police officer working the streets or good solid tip coming in from a private citizen to catch this guy.”
Keeping him in custody is the other challenge.
When McNair was arrested for murder in 1987, county sheriffs left him alone, handcuffed to a chair. He greased himself out of the irons with lip balm and bolted. During his escape, he jumped off a roof, missed a tree limb and fell to the ground where he was recaptured. He received three life sentences — one for Theis’ murder, one for Kitzman’s attempted murder, and 30 years for burglary.
No jail has been able to keep him — he’s broken out of a North Dakota county jail in 1988, crawled to freedom through a state penitentiary ventilation duct in 1992, and infamously escaped by mailing himself out of a Pollock, La., maximum-security prison hidden under a pallet of shrink-wrapped mailbags on April 5, 2006.
The day of his escape, McNair‘s dark talents can be witnessed in a police dashboard video as he outsmarts a Louisiana officer looking for the missing convict.
McNair is wearing long shorts and a tank top and tells the officer he’s a roofer named Robert Jones. He convinces the cop he has no identification because he’s out jogging. He has an answer for everything.
“What it is, we’ve got an escapee,” the officer explains.
“There’s a prison here?” McNair asks.
The chatty 10-minute interrogation, seen on YouTube, is a head-smacker. The officer doesn’t have a full description, but what he has matches McNair. Still, McNair fools him.
“What’s your name again?” the officer asks.
“Jimmy Jones,” McNair says. The officer doesn’t notice the name change.
“I’m no prison escapee.”
“Hey, you wouldn’t believe what them guys do. They’ve got years and years to think about how they going to do it. When I crossed the tracks down there and saw you running, I said, well how lucky can I be?” the officer laughs, letting him go.
“Nope, nope, nope, nope. I’m not no prison escapee.”
It was classic McNair. Charming, confident, cool and capped off with his trademark repetitious speech pattern that would later become part of his be-on-the-lookout-for description.
Weeks later, he snuck across the Canadian border through British Columbia.
The night of April 28, 2006, Penticton RCMP came across a stolen car parked at a lakeshore. They ordered McNair out of the Pontiac Grand Am. McNair fled into the brush.
Only later did police learn who got away. Inside the car, police later found stolen laptops, a cellphone and a digital camera with self-portrait, ID-style headshots taken at arm’s length.
They also found fingerprints, the only reliable way of confirming a McNair sighting. There have been hundreds of reports from Mexico, Texas and Louisiana, to the wilds of Kananaskis Country, the north end of Calgary, and Flin Flon, Man.
On Wednesday, Calgary detectives announced they have good information that McNair, 48, is likely in the Calgary area. Police stopped short of saying what the information is, only saying it is “very fresh.”
Several tipsters alerted police to men riding the northeast C-Train into the city’s downtown core during Thursday morning’s commute. One man taken in for questioning and fingerprinting was later released.
The mistaken identity left police to wonder: Where is Richard Lee McNair?
By his own account, Kitzman is coping well as his would-be killer remains on the loose.
“It don’t bother me none. He isn’t after me none. He’s just trying to stay out of jail,” said Kitzman.
“He should be behind bars. He was no dummy, that was for sure. He knows how the system works.”
Being shot and left for dead by one of America’s most wanted 20 years ago has done little to change Kitzman’s life.
While McNair has made a career of running, Kitzman, a father of two, is content staying put. He continues working the same job as a grain elevator plant manager in sleepy Minot.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can’t let that bother you. You’d drive yourself nuts.”
While he wants to see McNair brought to justice, he admits he doesn’t make much of an effort to keep track of the fugitive in the news.
“I don’t have a scrapbook or anything,” he said. “I haven’t heard a whole lot. It’s been a long time since there’s been any sighting. The last I heard, they thought they’d seen him in Vancouver or somewhere.”
Calgary police say he’s been spotted here and could be moving from Red Deer south to the Montana border.
McNair‘s ability to stay hidden from the law can’t last forever, despite his skill at fooling everyone around him.
“He’s got good coping skills, he’s able to move around. He’s probably polite and drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes and blends in. He doesn’t have purple hair, he doesn’t stand out. He’s as average as can be,” said Janne Holmgren, a Mount Royal College criminologist.
“If we think of a killer, we’re almost expecting someone who drives a Mustang with a licence plate that spells KILLER,” she said.
Escapees like McNair who prefer to outsmart people and play by their own rules are unpredictable, she said.
“They want to get the loot in a non-violent way, but they are notoriously dangerous if they encounter somebody.”
“He will get caught. He’s likely to make a mistake.”
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