Three Escapes, Three Methods: The Ingenuity of Richard Lee McNair

On November 24, 1987, Richard Lee McNair murdered Jerry Thiel and shot Robert McFarland four times during a botched robbery at a grain elevator near Minot, North Dakota. Three months later, the former Minot Air Force Base sergeant was arrested—but his time in custody would be defined not by confinement, but by escape.

Over the next two decades, McNair would flee from three separate facilities using methods that ranged from the mundane to the remarkably engineered, each escape more audacious than the last.

**The Lip Balm Escape**

McNair's first escape came almost immediately. In February 1988, while alone in an interrogation room at Minot police station, he applied lip balm to his wrists and slipped free from his handcuffs. What followed was a desperate rooftop chase: McNair climbed to the roof of a three-story building, then attempted to jump to a nearby tree branch. The branch snapped under his weight, injuring his back as he fell. Officers recaptured him within moments.

It was a clumsy beginning, but it signaled something crucial about McNair: he was willing to exploit every opportunity, no matter how small.

**The Ventilation Duct**

Four years later, McNair's resourcefulness had matured. On October 9, 1992, while imprisoned at North Dakota State Penitentiary in Bismarck, he crawled through a ventilation duct alongside two other inmates. His companions were recaptured within days, but McNair vanished.

For ten months, he evaded one of America's largest manhunts. Police eventually found the truck he'd stolen and used in his escape, abandoned in Phoenix, Arizona in December 1992. But McNair remained at large until July 1993, when authorities finally located him during an attempted break-in at a car dealership in Grand Island, Nebraska.