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….
