we saw that...

louisiana cops give late ball asst police chief carl bordelon huge sendoff

no one will ever accuse wst... of being a pro-cop blog but to witness the fantastic turn out to the funeral for late ball, louisiana, assistant police chief, carl bordelon was an amazing, if not heartwarming sight to behold.

perhaps, we felt that way today because we remember all too well the spring 2006 incident he was a party to and the barrage of international criticism that he had to endure.

clip one - removing the casket from the hearse and bringing to the porch 00:37
clip two - pall bearers bring the casket into the church 01:21
clip three - after services bringing the casket from the church to the hearse 05:22
clip four - the funeral procession departing the church 07:09 
clip five - tiny fraction of the funeral procession approaching the cemetery on hwy 165 01:41
playlist direct link

Ball, La. Asst. Police Chief Carl Bordelon of Richard Lee McNair Dash Cam Fame Passes Away

we were saddened yesterday when the following tweet from kalb tv5 appeared in our timeline:

The Ball Police Department has announced that its assistant chief of police, Carl Bordelon, has passed away. pic.twitter.com/DhJrfqHWRT
— KALB News Channel 5 (@KALBtv5) January 10, 2015

carl bordelon is of course the ball, louisiana, policeman who in early april 2006 gained some level of international fame due to the dash cam video of his roadside interview of federal inmate escapee richard lee mcnair.


in 2010, canadian crime reporter, byron christopher, interviewed bordelon - the only interview mr. bordelon ever granted - for his book,"the man who mailed himself out of jail" about richard lee mcnair and his escape from u.s.penitentiary pollock, louisiana.  mr. bordelon was one of several law enforcement officers to whom mr. christopher dedicated his book.

this morning, we spoke by phone to byron christopher at his home in edmonton, alberta, canada. mr. christopher wanted to talk about the time he spent here with mr. bordelon and the influence that bordelon made on his life. they had remained on friendly terms throughout the intervening years and spoke occasionally.

mr. christopher had this to say to any of mr. bordelon's family who might happen across this post: "if any members of  his family are listening to this, i want you to know that mr. bordelon had made quite an impact with me and i'am going to miss him and that i was proud of him. i want you to tell them that."     

mr. christopher played a short clip of mr. bordelon explaining in his own words how the media focus had affected his life.  listen to the entire interview below:


link to internet archive download/listen page


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBEVJZyB_m4

audio interview: canadian crime reporter byron christopher releases book about pollock, grant parish, la., federal penitentiary escapee richard lee mcnair

on 19 june 2013 canadian crime reporter, byron christopher, electronically released the inaugural version of his much anticipated true crime story into the fantastic escape and incredible eighteen months on the lam by federal inmate richard lee mcnair. 

wst... caught up with mr. christopher the night of friday, 02 august 2013 and in this nearly 39 minute interview, mr. christopher from his home in edmonton, alberta, canada, discusses his book, mcnair, and several central louisianians he met in person and interviewed, including ball, la., policeman, carl bordelon.

click here to go to the audio download page at the internet archive


"the man who mailed himself out of jail the incredible story of escape artist richard lee mcnair," is available on amazon.com and amazon.ca:

click here to go to amazon.com.

and

click here to go to amazon.ca the canadian version.

richard lee mcnair writes to wst...

richard lee mcnair is the prisoner who escaped from the federal penitentiary at pollock, grant parish, louisiana on 05 april 2006 and remained at-large until 25 october 2007 when he was captured by the royal canadian mounted police at campbellton, new brunswick, canada.

when mcnair escaped we posted about it a few times and over time posted a few follow-ups; it turns out that mcnair would monitor wst...

mcnair included his note in a letter package he sent to canadian crime reporter, byron christopher, who is writing a case study on mcnair's life and times. mr. christopher first scanned it and emailed it to us then mailed the original.

we've since written to mcnair directly.

in a follow-up letter to mr. christopher, mcnair reveals that he actually purchased a separate computer to check wst... out on. lol

image credit: byron christopher

note: "amw blog" means america's most wanted, a tv program.
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see also
the richard lee mcnair label
in the footer of this post
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EXTERNAL LINK

**FLASH** richard lee mcnair talks about viewing solitary mermaid blog and wst... while on the lam

link to audio download page

richard lee mcnair is the federal inmate who escaped from the the united states penitentiary (usp) in pollock, grant parish, louisiana, a "high security institution housing male offenders," on wednesday, 05 april 2006. he was captured in campbellton, new brunswick, canada on thursday, 25 october 2007.

mcnair is now incarcerated at the the administrative maximum (adx) facility (aka supermax) in florence, colorado. it "houses offenders requiring the tightest controls."

as you can imagine, during his 568 days on the lam, mcnair, used the internet as much as he could.

at the beginning we posted about the escape several times; our most notable post is this one, because it contains the dashcam video.

sometime after friday, 11 august 2006, we noticed, probably from referral logs, that an anonymous, female canadian blogger, "solitary mermaid," had linked to that post.

we've often wondered and it was only recently that we learned, for sure, that mcnair had indeed visited wst... as well as the solitary mermaid blog.

while we're anxious to find out what mcnair writes about it, in the letter he mentioned in the above audio clip, that he is mailing to byron christopher this week, we can see where there might be some confusion about the mysterious "comment - link(s)" from wst... to solitary mermaid.

we refer to them as "mysterious comment-link(s)" now because if anyone who hears the above clip or if by chance it's included in mr. christopher's book and then visited the 06 april 2006 post or any other of our richard lee mcnair posts, they would not find any comment from, nor link to, the solitary mermaid blog. so wtf?

this is what we believe happened: on 05 april 2006 we were still using blogger.com's comment system.

blogger's commenting system is o.k. but the comment spam we would receive was just overwhelming. for example: "we really despise scott arthur edwards."

it looks like that on 26 october 2006, we registered with and installed the haloscan commenting system. we used haloscan until they went out of business in early 2010.

the thing about replacing the blogger commenting system is that you lose all those blogger comments. actually they're not lost, just covered over.

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internet archive, wayback machine snapshot from 14 april 2006

this snapshot was made on 14 april 2006, months before solitary mermaid's 11 august 2006 post which mentioned and linked to the wst... post. this is where mcnair would have seen the "mysterious" link to solitary mermaid.

apparently, another feature that you lose when you switch from the blogger commenting system to another, is the backlinks or "links to this post" feature.

how that works is, when another blogger links to one of your posts the title of their post along with the link will magerifically appear towards the bottom of the post of yours that they linked to.

confused yet? check out this post from the official google video blog and look under the "links to this post" and you will see all the posts that linked to that post displayed.

so from the period of 11 august 2006 until we installed haloscan on around 26 october 2006 there was a backlink under "links to this post" to the solitary mermaid blog. this is what mcnair saw.

whether mcnair discovered wst... from the solitary mermaid blog or the other way around we dont know and perhaps he will address that in his letter.

without giving away the details, we do know that the very first time (in his life) mcnair got on the internet was from a computer located in interstate dodge, chrysler, jeep -- then located in monroe, la., now west monroe -- and the very first thing that he viewed was the ball, la. police video.

EXTERNAL LINK

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]
====

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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EXTERNAL LINK

wst...youtube channel no. 46 32 30 most viewed in category for 05 06 march 2009

bill-o the clown and the late tony snowjob's 21 february 2008 conversation about rumors of an untoward nature concerning a "prominent democrat" our clip of which we titled "a clue the larry sinclair story is about to go mainstream," is so far our most viewed clip.

wst... vid clips get viewed! as well as embedded in the most interesting places.

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wst...piyush "bobby" jindal rethuglican response to barack obama video currently number 5 on google video

our capture of louisiana's rino, governor piyush "bobby" jindal response (if you can call it that) to president barack obama's address to the joint session of congress, is currently at no. 5 of the most watched videos on all of google video.

oyster @ your right hand thief, has been faithful and diligent in collecting links to all the buzz about piyush's colossal flop and we certainly thank him for that:

EXTERNAL LINK

google video to halt video uploading

according to a 14 january 2009 post on the official google video blog, google will shortly discontinue support for uploads to google video. google says that they are not removing any content already on the service, just disallowing the uploading of any new content.

google says that those who wish to upload content to them, should use youtube or picasa web albums -- although its unclear if youtube's current 10 minute and 1gb time and file size restrictions will be changed. currently, videos uploaded to picasa web albums must be no larger than 100 mb.

UPDATE: according to 'the blog herald:' "blogger video uploads are not affected."
videos uploaded directly to a blogspot post (which are ultimately hosted on google video) are limited to 100mb. it's unknown right now if that file size will be increased.

EXTERNAL LINK

richard lee mcnair writes to edmonton crime reporter byron christopher

via twitter.com/deadmonton

excerpt:
A convicted killer who escaped prison three times, made the U.S. Marshals' Top 15 fugitive list and was featured on America's Most Wanted 12 times, Richard Lee McNair was captured as the result of the keen observations of a New Brunswick Mountie in October 2007.

And while he may have answered a lot of questions posed by law enforcement, McNair never answered any questions posed by media until he wrote to Edmonton crime reporter Byron Christopher.

In late 2008, Christopher (who hails from the same New Brunwick town where McNair was captured) decided to write to the prisoner.

Surprisingly, McNair wrote back. It was his first response to media.

EXTERNAL LINK

german prisoner pulls a richard lee mcnair: mails himself to freedom

A JAILBIRD has staged an incredible prison break-out – after MAILING himself to freedom.

The escaped conman is believed to have posted himself out in a giant FedEx box used for dirty laundry.

Cops hunting him have now put up wanted photos across Germany.

According to police, Turkish national Yasar Bayrak, 37, has used several identities, including Ibrahim Yasin, 42, and Hans Lang, 42.

He has been on the run since November 10...read more

EXTERNAL LINK