page_title: Richard Lee McNair
section_title: Media correspondence
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Lee McNair / Current housing / Media correspondence
caption_attribution_description: English: Award-winning Canadian journalist Byron Christopher on vacation in Jasper National Park, Alberta
context_page_description: Richard Lee McNair is a convicted murderer known for his ability to escape and elude capture. In 1987, McNair murdered one man and shot a second man four times during a botched robbery. He is currently serving two terms of life imprisonment for these crimes including escaping from prison.
  After McNair's arrest, he escaped three times from three different institutions using various creative methods. On his first attempt, he used lip balm to squeeze out of a pair of handcuffs. He escaped a second time by crawling through a ventilation duct. In his last escape from a federal prison in April 2006, he mailed himself out of prison in a crate and successfully convinced a police officer he was not the prison escapee but actually a jogger. This resulted in his mugshot being featured a dozen times on the TV show America's Most Wanted, and made him one of the top fifteen fugitives wanted by US Marshals. McNair traveled to Canada twice in order to evade capture, traveling across the country for over a year before being apprehended in a random police check.
context_section_description: In 2008, Byron Christopher, a crime reporter from the same New Brunswick town where McNair was captured, began a correspondence with McNair via mail. In his first letter, Christopher included a picture that he had taken of the town, taken near the place that McNair was arrested. He told McNair that he hoped the Campbellton Chamber of Commerce would write a check to McNair for all the publicity he had brought to the town, and wrote to McNair about the recent World Series and federal election. Christopher included three American dollars in order to cover the cost of paper and postage. The prison returned his money.
  When McNair wrote back to Christopher, it was his first response to the media. The letter revealed many personal details about McNair's most recent escape which had previously been unknown. Revealing that he had spent time hiding in Fredericton, New Brunswick, McNair described Fredericton's residents as "very friendly and well educated." He revealed that his favorite serial was the Christian Science Monitor. Campbellton's local newspaper, The Tribune, covered the correspondence in detail.
  In subsequent letters to Christopher, McNair revealed details about his escape and travels through Canada, providing most of what the public knows about McNair's time as a fugitive. McNair had an interest in discussing his story with a British TV reporter, but suspects that the correspondence may have been terminated by prison censors.
  Christopher later compiled his correspondence, conducted additional research on the story, and eventually produced a book on McNair, The Man Who Mailed Himself Out of Jail. It was released via Amazon.com on June 20, 2013. The book is a follow-up to "The Running Man" series, published by The Tribune newspaper of Campbellton, New Brunswick, in 2009.
caption: Much of what the public knows about Richard McNair is through his correspondence with Byron Christopher, a Canadian journalist.
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