All Knucklehead Day Award Seventeen

Our seventeenth winner is Richard Lee McNair. He gets the award for the following.

New Brunswick RCMP transferred convicted murderer and escape artist Richard Lee McNair to a maximum security prison in Renous on Friday.

RCMP officers stopped this van, driven by Richard Lee McNair at the time of his arrest, after noticing its tinted windows and Ontario licence plates.

McNair, 48, has been featured on America's Most Wanted since escaping from a Pollock, La., federal penitentiary in April 2006 where he was serving three back-to-back life sentences.

He was captured in the northern New Brunswick town of Campbellton on Thursday.

McNair had committed several petty burglaries of stamps, tools and small amounts of cash before he shot and killed truck driver Jerome Theis during a botched robbery at a grain elevator in 1987.

The RCMP said rookie Const. Stephane Gagnon was patrolling Campbellton with his field coach, Const. Nelson Levesque, on Thursday when the van was spotted again. The officers turned on the cruiser's lights to pull the driver over for a check of identification and registration.

The vehicle refused to stop and the two officers in the cruiser followed until the van eventually pulled onto a gravel road near the Restigouche Hospital, where McNair got out and began running.

Gagnon chased him into a forested area and tackled the man after about 400 metres.

After he had been apprehended, McNair told the officers they'd be on television that night and that he'd "captured a big fish," Levesque told a news conference Friday morning.

Gagnon, 29, has only been on the job for six weeks.

Way to go Constable Gagnon.

As for Richard Lee McNair, he isn't a big fish but a caputred fugitive and today's Seventeenth Knucklehead of the Day.

Linked to- Big Dog, Right Wing Nation, Stop the ACLU, Third World County, Woman Honor Thyself, Rosemary,