we saw that...

richard lee mcnair captured!

www.thedeadpelican.com

oopsie no2 ball cops capture then release escaped fed prisoner

**update 25 october 2007** richard lee mcnair captured

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**9:02 pm cdt friday 05 may 2006** mcnair spotted in canada

we were wondering about this since we noticed a lot of canadians arriving here today by google search.
heres the latest from the alexandria (louisiana) daily town talk:

McNair spotted in British Columbia

Canadian police are searching for escaped murder Richard Lee McNair after he was stopped by, and fled from, officials there.

Last week, Canadian police pulled over a vehicle that had been reported stolen. The driver got out of the car and fled the scene. Evidence later showed the driver was McNair.

The Town Talk will provide additional information as it becomes available. For coverage of this story by America's Most Wanted, click the link to the right of this story.

Originally published May 5, 2006

click here to view this story from the town talks website.

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see also: mcnair's trip to canada from the america's most wanted website by clicking here.

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scroll down for video
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9:44 am wednesday 26 april 2006
now our local gannett garbage can the town talk or as its known in some circles the clown talk is editorializing (propagandizing) for "local law enforcement officials" that richard lee mcnair "had help from people, perhaps people living in this area." hmm okay wheres the proof? no one has been arrested for aiding mcnair. the carl bordelon incident aside lets face it our clueless local law enforcement was outfoxed by a murderer. here is an article published by the town talk on 22 april 2006 quoting u.s. marshall beau bartell who couldnt comment on who the suspected accomplices are but promised arrest warrants and arrests as early as this week.

added 12:48 pm cdt friday 28 april 2006 well its friday afternoon and still no reported arrests of any accomplices aiding richard lee mcnair's escape. you see how the media and law enforcement does? instead of trying to bring the community together, encouraging everyone to learn from their mistakes and move on, they try and divide the community by insinuating that your friend, family or neighbor must have helped mcnair. ridiculous.

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**updated 12:46 pm cdt tuesday 25 april 2006**

Texas police think McNair is in Mexico
KXMA link. by way of www.thedeadpelican.com
Texas police say they've scaled back their search for Richard McNair, who escaped from a federal prison in Louisiana earlier this month.

McNair was serving a life sentence for killing a trucker in Minot in 1987. He escaped from the Louisiana prison on April Fifth.

Police in Harlingen, Texas say they think McNair has fled across the border to Mexico.

A film crew from the "America's Most Wanted" television show will be in Minot on Thursday.

The crew plans to re-enact the scene at the grain elevator where trucker Jerome Theis of Circle Pines, Minnesota, was killed in 1987 during a burglary attempt. Elevator employee Richard Kitzman was wounded.

McNair is on the U.S. Marshal's list of the 15 most wanted criminals, and there's a $25,000 reward for his capture.

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mcnair pictured in previous escape action

more richard lee mcnair photo's on america's most wanted website - click here

click here to read more. (.pdf file)

KALB.com: Bordelon isn't ready to confront the media. click here to read more.

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Bureau of Prisons Lists Richard Lee McNair as

"Released...04-05-2006"

sunday 09 april 2006 9:30 am cdt -
....
screen grab from bureau of prisons jailbird locator...
click picture to enlarge
click here and see for yourself.
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click pictures to enlarge

ball la police officer carl bordelon motions to traffic. richard lee mcnair feigns timeliness. gilly williams road, ball, louisiana. wednesday 05 april 2006.

added 11:17 am cdt tuesday 11 april 2006...overnight low temperature was 50f (10c) humidity 36% sunny and breezy.

added 8:48 am cdt monday 10 april 2006...low temperature today was 44f (5c) the wind is calm and its sunny. humidity 48% - another glorious april day in rapides parish, louisiana.

added 10:37 am cdt sunday 09 april 2006...when we first posted about this story it was wednesday evening. channel 5 had been running a crawl continuously all evening. so we thought ok that looks like something (for posterity) to post about. thursday morning the town talk published that richard lee mcnair had been stopped, interviewed and "cut loose" by ball police we posted that here at 10:33 am. around 5:30 pm thursday we began receiving google searchers for richard lee mcnair. that evening it came out that the town talk had the squad car video showing the interview between ball police officer, carl bordelon and the escapee richard lee mcnair. so we found that link and posted it at 8:48 pm. so far we have received searchers from all over the usa and parts of canada and in some google search strings we are ranked at or near the top page rank. this story is becoming almost as popular as chocolateville first was back at the end of january. if mcnair is still around and hiding in the woods he must be misraeble. it was 53f (12c) here yesterday morning and 49f (9c) this morning. right now its sunny and warming but windy and the wind is cold especially in a shade. yesterday was the same too. overnight friday into saturday morning the weather was bad and it rained some. now its sunday morning and this story hasnt ended yet...

added 9:24 pm cdt friday 07 april 2006...we can admit when we are wrong and actually after finally viewing the complete video we find that officer carl bordelon was very courteous and isnt a jack booted thug after all. bordeolon isnt an idiot either. he represented the states power well; oh we're not kidding ourselves for a minute...ball is still a speed trap and officer bordelon would ticket us instantly lol and more than likely tell this story whilst hes doing it...and we would be lmao the whole time too ;-) ...so...the community right now is learning from this and hopefully the next time this happens and yeah there will be a next time...we will be more prepared....

**updated** 8:48 pm cdt thursday 06 april 2006
the town talk has the police video of ball police officer carl bordelon interview with escaped inmate richard mcnair. it should be noted that ball, louisiana is a notorious speed trap town here in central louisiana and when the chip's are down this is the kind of police work you get when your police force 's "police work" consists of hiding behind traffic signs preying on old men and women and kids handing out speeding tickets all day.

click here and view ball police video from the town talks website.

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gilly williams road, ball, la., from google earth. the railroad track is a colored line west of gilly williams road. to the east there is also a colored line for the other track. together they run south to form a V

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another google earth snap of gilly williams road. the colored line west of gilly williams road is the rail road track, richard lee mcnair was jogging on.

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gilly williams road, ball, la., community perspective.

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**updated 10:16 pm cdt sunday 09 april 2006**

Search for McNair remains fruitless
By Bill Sumrall
bsumrall@thetowntalk.com
(318) 487-6417

BALL -- The search for an escaped prison convict continued into its fifth day Sunday.

At a command center set up in the former King’s Country Shopping Center in Pineville, Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Detective Stephen Kartsimas said that authorities were still running down leads in the search for convicted murderer Richard Lee McNair.

McNair was serving a life sentence for murder, criminal attempt and burglary at the U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock when he escaped Wednesday. Since then, Tioga-area residents have reported numerous sightings of him.

Kartsimas said as long as they continued to receive tips about McNair being seen in the area, authorities would continue the manhunt where he was last spotted.

On Sunday, Kartsimas said authorities were checking the houses of residents who had been away for a few days. He said some people were asking authorities to search their homes to ensure McNair was not hiding there.

Originally published April 9, 2006
click here to view this story on the town talks website.

**8:40 am cdt saturday 08 april 2006**

a wst... global exclusive: case study: the richard lee mcnair file

wst... note: this is an extremely lengthy and difficult post. yet one of the most interesting posts that we've ever done.

while there is a chance that some may interpret this as our "blowing our own horn" so-to-speak thats really not the case as there is a chance that wst... might receive a sentence or two passing reference in a book about richard lee mcnair, it gave us a good opportunity to relive the events of the spring of 2006 ... and 17 november 1987.

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click picture to enlarge

"notice of escaped federal prisoner" original fax sent at 1:53 pm cdt by the bureau of prisons

source: byron christopher via: roy hebron

where to begin ... around mid morning on wednesday, 05 april 2006, the united states penitentiary in pollock, louisiana inmate, richard lee mcnair, "mailed" himself to freedom.

wst... first learned of it later that evening when we happened to glance at the television screen and read kalb's crawl -- which we posted about here.

we assumed that the escapee would be captured overnight and that would be the end of it. boy were we wrong.

on the morning of 06 april we learned that the prisoner had not been captured. sometime before 10:33 am gannett/the alexandria daily town talk newspaper had acquired and uploaded to their website www.thetowntalk.com a dashcam video between a ball, la., policeman and the escapee in which the policeman and mcnair, playing a runner, exchanged pleasantries before the ball cop shook mcnair's hand and let him continue his run.

thus began mcnair's "the running man" saga.

we really cant remember what if any opinion we had of the ball cop and what he did or didnt do in the mcnair stop. we just knew that the video was an incredible find.

at that time youtube was fairly new we didnt even have an account there so we opened one and we attempted several times to add it there but they had a strict 10 minute in length and 100 mb file size per video limitation and the ball cop video is seven seconds over the 10 minutes cutoff and at 101 mb was always rejected.

so we uploaded it to google video and posted it here.

now it's instantaneous, however, in those days, at least as far as wst... posts were concerned, it took google up to 24 hours to fully spider and index our postings into their search engine.

the evening of april 6th, we noticed that our first post containing the kalb crawl was beginning to receive a lot of traffic from googlers searching for mcnair news. so we updated it with a link to the second post -- the one containing the embedded dashcam video.

not long after the second post became the primary post that google would send traffic to.

looking back at that post now the length of it and all the updates scattered around, it hardly makes any sense but due to all the interest in mcnair's escape we were attempting to keep everything on one page to avoid creating another post and waiting for google to catch up again.

many of the visitors were from the feds - doj, homeland security, fbi, bop and police departments. still many more visitors were from regular citizens who were concerned that they might live in the path that mcnair was taking and were looking for the latest news and links.

one news article that we were able to acquire and repost with his permission was written by our friend andrew w. griffin. mr. griffin had been a reporter with the alexandria daily town talk and he had left only a few months before to take a job with the lawton, oklahoma, constitution which as it turned out is mcnair's hometown newspaper.

living here, on the same side of the red river and not that far, as the crow flies, from where everything was taking place, the longer this "cold blooded killer" was on the loose made it easy to identify and empathize with the fear and tension that folks over in the tioga area were feeling.

so it became like an obligation or a challenge really that as long as mcnair was on the loose and so many people were looking for information about his whereabouts that we would attempt to post all the updates that we could.

some visitors now may think that we were just attempting to draw traffic here for the ad revenue. however, we didnt add google adsense until nearly 21/2 years later in september 2008.

after it was confirmed that mcnair was out of the area the story was pretty much over as far as we could tell. we continued to post a few updates about him from time-to-time because of the local interest

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source: adatlantic.com 2010 better newspapers competition 32 page [12.2mb].pdf
click here to download hi-res scan of section b cover page 05 august 2009 campbellton tribune
one page .pdf [631 kb]
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unbeknownst to us though was that in canada and elsewhere the mcnair escape and 18 months on the lam generated a massive amount of interest and remains a sensation to this day.

one interesting tidbit that we learned -- we know alex cenla will love this -- is that apparently, cenla is receiving tour buses sent here at least in part by interest in the mcnair escape.

in the fall of 2008, canadian crime reporter, byron christopher received a lead from a colleague about a federal prisoner who escaped and made his way all the way to canada before being captured.

mr. christopher explains in the below audio file how one thing led to another and he began corresponding with mcnair, now held at the florence, colorado, supermax federal penitentiary.

actually, we had heard of byron christopher before. in january 2009, wst... fave mike magnoli (now with katc in lafayette, la.), did a local interest story about mcnair and interviewed mr. christopher by phone about their burgeoning correspondence. we posted about it here.

as far as we can tell, that january 2009 post is the last we heard anything about mcnair.

until last sunday, 07 august 2011, when out of the blue we received an email from byron christopher.

mr. christopher's interest was in our 13 april 2006 post "riding the richard lee mcnair escape train." in that post we mentioned all the various traffic that the mcnair escape was generating.

so we emailed him back and again, one thing led to another and we wound up having two telephone conversations with him that afternoon and evening.

mr. christopher had been commissioned to write a case study of the mcnair case which will be an enlargement of his award winning "the running man" series that ran in the campbellton tribune newspaper from august 2009.

all last week mr. christopher answered our follow-up questions and sent us more information about his work.

while mcnair's escape was the cause for all the excitement and tension around cenla, we often wondered what the story was behind why mcnair was in prison for in the first place.

in the msm accounts you might get a sentence here or a paragraph there touching on the 17 november 1987 incident in which mcnair, reportedly, shot two men, killing one when they walked in on him burgling a grain elevator office in minot, north dakota.

mr. christopher made available to us several passages from his draft about mcnair's escape, the [cenla part of the] search and the ball police officer/dashcam incident.

both passages are painstakingly researched. where possible the participants describe what happened in their own words. this was the result of mr. christopher's travels to cenla, north dakota and elsewhere to interview anyone as well as view evidence thats been connected to mcnair.

mr. christopher has perfected a technique in his case study of allowing mcnair to tell the his story, in his own words, while mr. christopher fills in around that with whats happening based on his research.

one of our concerns was whether this was all an attempt to glorify mcnair.

for sure, the mcnair escape and subsequent 18 months on the lam makes for a compelling story. just how did a 47-year-old man escape from a federal prison in grant parish, louisiana, on foot, with no money, with no outside accomplices and with the full force of the federal government as well as every parish and county sheriff in the country out looking for him -- make it all the way to canada?

we're happy to report that from the passages that we've read from mr. christopher's case study that the central louisiana police and people were treated very well -- including ball policeman carl bordelon, whom mr. christopher says was given a bad rap by the media and after being privy to mr. christpher's research and methods we believe him.

but there was that reason for mcnair's being in jail to start with: the 17 november 1987 minot, north dakota shootings and murder.

the murder and shootings are not glossed over in any way whatsoever. mr. christopher has allowed mcnair, in his own words, to describe the events of that night, while using the technique we described before, he went back and filled in around mcnair's words with the words of the surviving victim dick kitzman, first responders and another grain elevator employee, jerry omvig who arrived at the scene right after it happened.

mr. christopher also drew from his viewing of the crime scene photos and police reports including a transcript (to be in the book) of dick kitzman's 911 call.

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jerry thies tombstone

fort snelling military cemetery, minneapolis, minnesota

photo credit: byron christopher, december 2010

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the vivid recounting of the break-in, shootings and murder as well as mcnair's reasoning for it all, are as disturbing as their inclusion is necessary.

we understand that the family of the slain trucker, jerome "jerry" theodore thies, are very reluctant to talk to the media.

while we've never had an immediate member of our family murdered, so we cannot know exactly how they feel, we can understand on some levels where they are coming from.

if we could, we would probably tell them that for reasons known only to god and satan, that the lives of mr. thies, dick kitzman, larry omvig and others are forever linked to richard lee mcnair and that as long as mcnair's story is being told so will mr. thies and he will not be forgotten.

as for us, we dont hate mr. mcnair, nor do we, even if we could, damn him to hell for all eternity. we believe that he deeply regrets what he did and how he messed up his own life.

mcnair writes that back then he was like a selfish, spoilt child. "a piece of shit." that if north dakota, at the time, had the death penalty that he would have received it and deserved it. we agree.

which brings us back to the present -- on sunday evening 14 august 2011, we had an opportunity to have a telephone conversation with byron christopher about all this. the embed is below.

towards the end, mr. christopher plays an audio clip from a home move that mcnair made while on the lam.

this is the first time that mcnair's voice has been broadcast publicly -- exclusively from wst...

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link to audio download page

wst... note: this is a telephone conversation we had with byron christopher on sunday, 14 august 2011. this is not an "interview" or represented as such.

although we had chatted by phone with mr. christopher for about 30 - 45 minutes the previous sunday as well as emailed back and forth all week -- we still became a bit nervous at the beginning - but such is life.

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related posts

oopsie federal prisoner escapes from pollock prison

oopsie no2 ball cops capture then release escaped fed prisoner

riding the richard lee mcnair escape train

richard lee mcnair spotted in canada

richard lee mcnair latest

**flash** richard lee mcnair video no2 on google video

**flash** richard lee mcnair breaks previous escape record

richard lee mcnair still free one year later

richard lee mcnair believed in calgary and southern alberta area

richard lee mcnair captured

mcnair capture pushes dashcam vid back to no. 4 on google video

richard lee mcnair ordered deported from canada

richard lee mcnair returns to central louisiana

richard lee mcnair arresting officer interview

richard lee mcnair writes to edmonton crime reporter byron christopher

dear zachary: a letter to a son about his father

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richard lee mcnair returns to central louisiana

www.thedeadpelican.com
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town talk video part 1
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town talk video part 2
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richard lee mcnair
october 2007
royal canadian mounted police photo

via the town talk (see link)
excerpt:

One-time fugitive Richard Lee McNair returned tonight to Central Louisiana -- the scene of his April 2006 prison escape -- in the custody of U.S. Marshals.

McNair touched down at 7:27 p.m. at Alexandria International Airport in a U.S. Marshals plane. He then was whisked away in a motorcade comprising several area law enforcement agencies en route to an undisclosed, secure location.

After a year and seven months on the run, McNair was caught 100 miles north of Maine by Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Oct. 25. He was walked over the Canadian-Maine border Thursday at 11 a.m. eastern standard time and turned over to Deputy U.S. Marshal Glen Belgard, who accompanied him to Alexandria.

richard lee mcnair arresting officer interview

on 29 october 2007 royal canadian mounted police constable nelson levesque was interviewed about the 25 october 2007 capture of richard lee mcnair at campbelltown, new brunswick, canada.

richard lee mcnair spotted in canada

click here to view story from pentictonwesternnews.com