ESCAPED.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, people who meet Richard McNair tend to find him likable. He typically has an engaging and relaxed manner, chatty and unhurried; a former employer characterized him as having "an outgoing, lovable personality." When McNair was younger, women were drawn to him because he was good-looking: six feet tall, wiry and well groomed, with a playful smile. Now in his late forties, he remains trim and fit but has a curiously protean appearance. Sometimes he lets his hair grow long enough for a ponytail, and sometimes it's styled in a crewcut; sometimes it's blond or black instead of its natural brown. He might have a mustache and a goatee, a mustache but no goatee, a week's worth of stubble, or a clean shave. Most official documents list his eye color as blue, but it's also been identified as hazel. Last spring, in Louisiana, McNair removed his wire-rimmed glasses and told a police officer standing only a few feet away from him that his eyes were "green--well, kind of a turquoise-blue," and the officer didn't contradict him.

Acquaintances also remark upon McNair's intelligence and powers of observation. He has a casual alertness, a talent for sizing up people and his physical surroundings. His father, Jim, has said of him, "Anything he wants to do he would figure out," adding that any periodical his son read he digested cover to cover, and anything he read he remembered. Despite being both a quick study and a diligent long-term planner, however, McNair hasn't had a professional life to speak of, because for almost two decades he's been incarcerated in various state and federal prisons--that is, when he hasn't been on the lam. At the moment, he's thought to be somewhere in western Canada. If the United States Marshals who've been pursuing him since April have a more specific idea of his whereabouts, they haven't said so. His most recent unauthorized furlough, from the U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana, made him the first person in thirteen years to escape successfully from a maximum-security federal prison.

McNair is a convicted murderer. The bulletins in the wake of his most recent escape--his third--noted that he should be considered "extremely dangerous." His encounter with the police officer in Louisiana, however, which lasted about ten minutes and happened to be recorded by a video camera mounted on the dashboard of the officer's cruiser, hardly suggested this. Within two hours of receiving instructions to be on the lookout for a freshly escaped prisoner, the cop spotted a man jogging along a railroad track who turned out to be carrying no identification and who roughly matched a description of the fugitive. Yet, somehow, the men's conversation ended with the jogger saying, "You have a good day, now," and the cop replying, "Be careful, buddy," and sending him on his way. Only by wrestling the officer to the ground and seizing his weapon could McNair have demonstrated more literally what it means to be disarming. By the time his new friend had grasped whom he'd been talking to, McNair was miles away.

The taxonomy of penology includes various inmate archetypes, among them: the mind-their-own-business majority, who try to remain inconspicuous by complying with the rules; the incorrigibly violent, whose behavior inevitably causes them to be segregated from the main population; the predator and the preyed upon; the perpetually aggrieved and concomitantly litigious; the habitual scammer looking for ways to make his incarceration easier at the expense of other inmates; the snitch; and the pretend snitch, who trafficks in misinformation. Patrick Branson, a deputy warden at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, a maximum-security institution where McNair spent almost five years--and from which he escaped in 1992--told me, "The problem with McNair is he doesn't really fit any inmate mold. That's what makes him such a high risk. He is a con man, but he's very calculating, very patient. Most con men in prison are by definition not very successful or they wouldn't be here. McNair stands out because of his fixation on escaping. Knowing what I know about him, I can tell you this: If they catch him tomorrow, he's going to the nearest county jail or lockup. First they're going to put him in restraints, then put him in a police car, then take him to a processing area. From the time you start step No. 1, his mind is thinking, How do I get out of these cuffs or this car? What's the weak spot in this facility? When he goes to a new facility, from the moment he arrives, he's thinking about escaping."

Around nine-thirty on a November night in 1987, on the outskirts of Minot, North Dakota, Richard Kitzman, an employee of the Farmers Union grain elevator, returned to the elevator to meet a truck driver named Jerome Theis. Minot, the seat of Ward County, is in the central part of the state, a hundred or so miles north of Bismarck, the capital. Kitzman was in his early thirties, had worked for the Farmers Union for more than a decade, and lived with his wife and two children in a mobile-home court across the street, which was con-venient because trucks often had to be loaded at odd hours. Theis, himself a father of three and stepfather of five, lived outside Minneapolis, five hundred miles to the southeast. He'd called Kitzman from a pay phone and told him that he was ready to fill up--with whatever, flax or wheat or durum--for transport to a grain processor near the Twin Cities. He parked his tractor-trailer rig on the entrance ramp to a loading bay. From inside its cab, where he was fortifying himself with a carton of vanilla ice cream and a Pepsi, he wouldn't have seen Kitzman entering the elevator business office, around the corner.

Nor had he laid eyes on McNair, who had trespassed an hour or so earlier and got busy rifling desks and trying to pry open a small safe. This was an avocation that McNair had pursued that fall in and around Minot--burglarizing businesses that lacked security alarms, thus allowing him ample time to grab whatever seemed valuable, which, over all, hadn't amounted to much: a few hundred dollars (including change from vending machines), tools, postage stamps, a videocassette recorder, rolls of tape and tape dispensers, doorknob assemblies. Invariably, he left drawers and doors open, and he often left behind footprints of wavy-patterned soles.

Kitzman unlocked the front door, noticed that a retractable gate separating the office clerks' desks from the grain-handling operation was raised, didn't think much of it, stepped through a pair of glass doors into an area called the shaker room, turned on the lights, and was confronted with the aftermath of a ransacking.