Global News Exclusive
For 18 months Richard Lee McNair was on everyone’s most wanted list.
The convicted killer evaded authorities in the United States and Canada until October 2007, when an off-duty RCMP constable spotted the vehicle he was driving.
Mounties from the northern New Brunswick town of Campbellton apprehended McNair the next day, near the Canada-U.S. border.
McNair later wrote about his come-by-chance arrest, in a letter to Alberta crime reporter Byron Christopher, saying it was “just one of those days.”
He also spelled out some startling details about his year and a half spent on the lam, making his way across the United States and Canada before arriving in New Brunswick.
For instance; his arrest was not McNair’s first encounter with police during the period.
Some of those meetings were even captured on tape.
“I promise you I am not no damn escapee,” McNair, now 51, says in a patrol car dashboard video from the day he escaped Louisiana Federal Penitentiary.
He slipped out of the prison by hiding in a pile of mailbags that were shrink-wrapped on a pallet and trucked to a nearby warehouse. It was the third U.S. jail he had escaped from.
“You (I) would have run by now. You know that yourself,” he says in the police video, available on YouTube. “If you can’t verify me I will be going.”
And go he did.
Along the way McNair captured his own videos of his journey.
Global News got an exclusive look at some of his personal footage of his time in the Maritimes, aired on the Evening News November 3.
McNair records footage of buildings, often car dealerships, which he cased, for potential robberies. He even recorded an unguarded area of the U.S. border he contemplated crossing.
He actually snuck back into the U.S. briefly but fled back to N.B. before authorities came along.
McNair circled New Brunswick twice and ventured into Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley and South Shore and apparently liked the region.
He used Fredericton as his base and says he liked the people there.
But he says he never committed a criminal act in the city, unlike many other places across the country he robbed to keep himself going.
And although he was on the run, he didn’t exactly stay hidden, using the local library and riverside jogging trails frequently.
Police were looking for a sexual predator at the time and although McNair was a new and suspicious-looking face in town, he never did catch the eye of the force.
An astute criminal, he changed his appearance several times over the course of 18 months and forged his own identification.
Nonetheless police everywhere were waiting for the moment he would slip up.
Const. Dan Melanson, the off-duty officer that spotted McNair’s van back in 2007, was on his way back to Bathurst from Moncton when he saw what he thought was a suspicious vehicle headed north.
It turned out to be a stolen vehicle from Ontario.
Melanson reported it and just a day later another rookie constable, on the job for only six weeks chased McNair on foot and took him down.
The elusive mastermind was once again put behind bars, first in New Brunswick’s Renous prison and later at an American Supermax prison where he remains today.
*With files from Paul McLaughlin, Rebecca Lau, Global Maritimes and Byron Christopher
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