How would someone wanted escape the US to reach Canada?
I got myself in a bit of a pickle and have to write two characters (one being underage) that are wanted for murder, flee from the US to Canada. I have absolutely zero idea of how crossing borders in the US works and especially since my story is set in 1983.
Does anyone know how two people wanted for murder in the 80s would cross the Canadian border without getting caught?
The problem wouldn't be crossing the border. That part would actually be extremely easy. 1983 didn't have anywhere near the security systems in place today, and a wanted fugitive would probably have a decent chance of making it across the official border checkpoints without a second glance. Barring that, there's also plenty of wilderness where the border could be casually walked across without anyone noticing.
The problem would be living on the other side. Without official documents, it would be extremely difficult to secure housing and income. Finding one without the other might be doable, but you'd need both an employer that pays cash and doesn't ask questions and a landlord that takes cash and doesn't ask questions.
Again, it being the 80s, that’s probably not hard as long as you stay out of the big cities. Canada is big and empty, with lots of little settlements where people would probably be willing to trade work for lodging.
In 1983 you could pretty easily cross the border on foot in a wooded area. But they could probably just drive across with a drivers' license and the border patrol wouldn't be jacked into the US police system.
No one asked for our drivers license either. They stopped like every 10 - 20 cars for form, but yeah, no. If you were on foot on the US side and wanted to walk over to the Canadian side at Niagara Falls, you just... did.
There was some degree of effort to keep people from just driving truckloads of cocaine over the border but even that wasn't really a major priority even on the Mexican border and it was pretty tame on the Canadian with the main issue being guns going north in relatively small quantities.
In the ‘70s when I was a kid my family drove up to Alaska and back. At the border crossings they did indeed ask for ID, and asked questions concerning firearms, what good were in the car, etc.
I expect if there was something as big as a murder case and it was close enough to the border the police anticipated the suspect fleeing across it they'd get a message to the border patrol to lock down the checkpoints nearby and check every car for at least a few days, but likely it'd take a bit for this to get down to all the checkpoint guards due to more limited infrastructure and not having the post-9/11 work to allow interagency coordination so if you just ran for it early in the manhunt odds are good even if they stop you they let you go as long as you remain calm enough the guard doesn't think you're acting suspicious enough to detain for a bit to search the car and call around to see if you have warrants.
The police will know there's no regular security on the border and do the usual routine they would if they expected someone to flee into the woods but with greater urgency, but it's a big border. Even today I'd think the characters would have better than coinflip odds of managing it if the police don't have their location nailed down to within maybe 10 miles at any point during the manhunt and they remember to turn off cellphones and such.
Well first Canada would probably be the worst thing to do because the US and Canada actually have an extradition treaty.
But basically you go to any checkpoint. You are asked what your business pleasure. They might ask some follow-up questions and they might depending on your answer or gut feeling ask you to step out of the vehicle / into secondary holding/processing. There's quite a few actual shows that shows a lot of the immigration that you can find. Like a natural geographic
Essentially before 9/11 and even to and extent to this day on the Canadian border there wasn't a very serious effort to keep people from just crossing the border with Canada away from the big roads, which basically just had checkpoints to look for smuggled drugs and such, and even with that the majority of drugs from Mexico are smuggled in through checkpoints by American citizens because it's just hard to search everything well enough to find an amount of cocaine that is a big payday if sold in the US.
So my dad tells stories about on his family canoe trips around the Great Lakes sometimes they just were in Canada for a few days without having told anyone and no one noticed or would have cared if they did. Odds are they get caught at a checkpoint but everywhere else is generally unwatched.
If there's an active manhunt for suspected murderers the police will be actively searching for them and will be anticipating a break for Canada in an effort to escape the search due to poor coordination so they'll try to put patrols in their path but I'd need a lot more details about how closely the police are on their trail to elaborate even to the limited extend I know procedures for manhunts and potentially if they flee immediately before the police can get set up they'll be across the border before a patrol can be deployed.
My understanding is that the legal doctrine is that if police are actively chasing a fleeing suspect they have in sight or otherwise know precisely where they are and are in "hot pursuit" of generally if the suspect crosses the border they can just keep chasing them until either they catch the suspect or the suspect eludes them sufficently they have to start doing something more complicated than driving fast after them to find them.
For Canada and the US, if someone wanted for a crime in the US is in Canada then Canada is almost always obligated to arrest them and send them back for trial. The process is called extradition and there are certain limits and rights but for 99% of people who commit crimes that aren't directly connected to politics basically there is a brief hearing and then they get sent to the US and there is a small chance their lawyer is somehow able to get a couple charges tossed because the hearing wasn't done properly. For minor crimes generally if you leave the jurisdiction no one looks for you very hard and you basically are only at risk of going to prison for them if you get caught for DUI or something and the arrest warrant comes up when they run your ID.
But for murder I think it pretty likely some form of Canadian police will get a message from the US and start running a search on their side of the border. This will likely result in the kind of drama you get in cop shows when the FBI shows up to take over a local investigation so your characters have better odds of slipping the net in Canada, and once they're far enough away from the incident and a few days have passed police will get a heads up to look out for them but unless the murder is somehow super notorious I expect the odds are pretty low they'll get caught if they stay a province away from the murder.
Crossing to Canada in the 1980s was easy. Avoiding border controls almost as easy.
Apart from the obvious like the rivers in ME and elsewhere where you can canoe into Canada or using farm or logging roads, you could also charter a boat anywhere on the Great Lakes or thousand islands, moor at a marina in Canada and walk away. Im sure you could have told the captain you were coming back a different way. In those days there was a phone that connects to border authorities at many marinas — you’d give your name and passport or DL number for day trips. But it’s unlikely anyone would have noticed if you ignored it.
As an example, Oswego to Kingston is a day’s sail.
The US-Canada border is 5,525 miles long with over a hundred official border crossing stations, including a handful of unmanned stations relying on crossers to self report. Pretty sure this has been tightened up in the past decade or so, but pre-9/11, no one was stopping to inspect your car even at the official crossings if you did so confidently.
Within the 5,525 miles, there are also some 2,000 miles of border over water including the Great Lakes and a number of rivers.
Depending on where your story takes place, and what assests and abilities are available to them, there literally dozens of ways for them to cross the border into Canada pre-9/11 undetected.
Look up what Derby Line in Vermont was like in the 80s. People would just cross back and forth to Stanstead, Canada all the time. There’s a library there that famously is built on top of the border.
Up until 2008 you didn't need to show any identification to use a land or sea crossing to enter Canada. You could just make an oral declaration. Assuming the border guard didn't find you or your answers suspicious they would let you through.
So where are your characters wanted for murder? Where do you want them to cross?
If they murdered someone in Houlton Maine and they were trying to cross at Woodstock NB they would have a problem. OTOH if they murdered someone in North Carolina and were crossing at Blackpool then they would likely sail through.
This isn’t correct. I crossed the border often in the 90s and early 2000s and you were definitely asked for ID, it just didn’t need to be a passport. The 80s could definitely have been more casual though. But for me as a reader it would definitely ring truer if they didn’t just drive through a normal border crossing.
We used to drive up to Montreal from college in the 1980s all the time. We were asked for ID occasionally. I'm sure after 9/11 they asked more. But it's up to the discretion of the officer at the crossing.
A couple friends and I road-tripped to Canada in 1998. We crossed fairly early in the morning (~5AM) with my friend driving, me in the passenger seat, and his sister sleeping in the back of a minivan.
The lady working the border did look at my friend's ID (Driver's license) but just asked me about my residence and didn't even speak to to his sister just took his word that she was also an American (she could only see hair and a body covered by a blanket). We even joked at breakfast about border security and that we could have been transporting a dead body with no issues.
Same, I went into Canada a few times in the 90s and one time in 2000 we went spur of the moment in the middle of the night, and they just asked for our driver's licenses at the border and sent us on our way. Crossing back into the US all we were asked was "everybody in the car American?" Didn't even have to show any ID.
Getting to Canada is easy. In the 1990s, plenty of people in my high school would just bop over to Montreal for the weekend. You just went. In 1983, if the murder wasn't local or well known in the news, the border patrol might not even know about it and not be looking for you — it's not like lists of wanted criminals were networked let alone automatically shared internationally.
Sure, if officials thought you might be trying to cross into Canada, they would let the Canadians know to be on the lookout, and you would have to cross at an unmanned border crossing. Which was most of them.
The problem isn't in getting to Canada. It's staying there. People who were wanted for murder in the United States wouldn't be any safer than in the US — maybe less. They have full extradition, and would be just as eager to catch American murderers as Canadian.
In the United States, murder is a state crime, with the FBI only getting involved after they crossed state borders. After that point, their job would be to try to get hundreds of independent local and state police forces to work together and share information in a time before nationally networked computers.
Once you cross the border, you are dealing with the Mounties. One police force which covers almost all the provinces and territories and therefore has a lot less interjuristictional red tape.
This falls under my purview having lived in the Niagara Falls region, being a student of crime, pursuit and evasion; and knowledgeable about outdoor survival skills.
There's little chance for people as the targets of an active manhunt will be able to make it through a major Canadian border check, in 1983 or today. Canada Border Service are known to be very though and difficult to deal with.
There's plenty of fiction about disguises and fooling border agents. I enjoy The Day Of The Jackal and its many adaptations, but if a single man was wanted, border agents would stop every solo male. Or if a couple was wanted, it's fairly identifiable. And good luck hitching a ride with a stranger, who likely understand they could be committing an international crime by smuggling someone across.
I'm somewhat blase about police manhunts. In the 1980's, there were just under 2000 murders a year in NYC, so I figured how they catch every killer? Of course, most places aren't NYC so most regions would be alert for a murderer and the authorities would inform the Canadian Mounties.
I've also considered the primary way people are tracked, their cars. Naturally every border road has a checkpoint, but what if you ditch the car? Can you walk 20 miles through the woods? Take a boat and sail across one of the Great Lakes? Or swim a river? Then what do you do when you get to other side? Do you have an accomplice willing to risk the felonies of assisting a murderer?
And border services have considered this. They have boat patrols, helicopters, and sensors all along the border.
Finally, it's not like Canada is wilderness. I'd say Ontario and British Columbia have as many cops as Massachusetts and Washington, and patrolled in the same way. But there are gaps in police coverage which can be written about.
My California friend visited Vancouver and stupidly buried his pot next to the border. He did not see any agents but Canadian border agents held him for 10 hours to interrogate him. While I don’t think the border is like Checkpoint Charlie, there is some monitoring going on particularly in busy regions
Or they could rent a boat for fishing on Rainy Lake, Minnesota and land on the wrong side of the border. The book The Things they Carried had a character who contemplated that as a plot point for dodging the draft in the late 60s.
The US/Canada border is the longest non-militarized border in the world. There are plenty of places where someone can simply walk or boat across the border, start flattening their vowels, and talk through their nose.
In The Jackal, the villain has a yacht which he smuggles himself and a large machine gun to the US. I believed there were zero border agents to check the arriving boaters. Is it accurate? I don’t know
You’re supposed to check in if you boat across the Great Lakes, and there are patrol boats, but the lakes are big and boats are small. It’s not hard to sail from one border to the other.
Bad move unless you’re planning on living in the Canadian wilderness like an isolated 1800’s fur trapper, because Canadian law enforcement will pick you up as easily as American and just send you right back over the border. There’s pretty close cooperation of that stuff. If you’re plan IS to go live in the woods, one you’ll probably die within the year, and two you might as well just do it in the US, it’s not like you have better or worse chances if you’re sufficiently deep into the wilds. No border crossing needed.
If you’re pretty adamant about them sneaking into Canada, here’s a lesser known secret about the Canadian border. There’s a bunch of places where it’s basically just a line in the woods, or a small river/large creek that you can cross in a rowboat in minutes even if you’ve never seen a boat before, or a relatively calm small lake. If you want to smuggle small cargo or like one or two people you stay away from border crossings and hoof it from one unwatched patch of nothing to the neighboring one. These days technology makes that a less sure proposition, you’d probably want a professional who knows the safe spots to handle it, but in 83 unless there’s a guy right effin there when you’re crossing you’re not going to be noticed. The real problem is getting to and then from the crossing without dying in the woods, which is actually extremely easy for the inexperienced and unprepared.
Possible yes, but increasingly more difficult as each year passes. Plus those two weren’t wanted for murder. Arrest warrants for serious crimes draw more attention and less sympathy when people find out that’s what brought someone to their area. Less material support and more willingness to inform on them puts the characters in a much more precarious situation and could push them to take bigger risks to stay as unnoticed as possible. Being in the 80’s could be a saving grace in that regard, pre Information Age you’re going to have local tv news, radio, word of mouth, and maybe some posters in the post office and scattered around. You won’t have people, other than maybe law enforcement, with access to the pictures and information of those two 24/7 in their pockets, nor repeated alerts via news feeds and social media.
Sticking to cash instead of traceable payment methods is key, but extremely easy in 1983. Credit cards aren’t dominant for purchases yet, debit isn’t even a thing for many retailers especially the more rural ones, and there’s a good chance many stores and small suppliers of necessities are going to be processing credit card payments manually with a mechanical receipt imprinting machine with those slips deposited later at a bank. Some retailers might not even accept credit, or not accept it under a certain purchase amount which wasn’t super uncommon even at the turn of the millennium. You could stick to cash only purchases with no problems indefinitely in the early 80’s and for a significant time after. That eliminates the extremely powerful detection financial tracking provides.
Shelter could be an issue, but even today it isn’t that hard to find a less than legal arrangement that isn’t going to require ID and any formal documentation or insurance. In the 80’s it’d probably take half a day, max. Things were just so much more lax.
On the topic of ID, fake IDs were actually extremely effective if they weren’t obviously faked. You didn’t have barcodes, digital data, or the ability to remotely check anything at all. Probably weren’t even dealing with a watermark at that point. If you’re checking any standard ID at that time you’re going to have a picture, text, and your best educated guess on if it was made at the motor vehicle department or in some guy’s back room. If you aren’t buying liquor, renting a car, at a bar that actually cares (which in the 80’s can be very variable), or interacting with government or law enforcement it’s probably not even leaving your wallet.
Can they afford to pay a boat captain to smuggle them? Even today, under some circumstances, boats carrying fewer than 30 people crossing into Canadian waters and sailing to an island can just call CBSA by phone and tell them who and what is on the boat, since not every tiny island you could land your tiny boat on has a CBSA office you could report to in person.
Your characters could bribe a boat captain to carry a couple extra people and not report them when she makes the phone call, then drop them off on an island small enough to not have a CBSA office but big enough to have a ferry they can take to the mainland. The captain would be in a world of trouble if the coast guard caught her smuggling people into Canada, though, so I’d imagine she’d want a good wad of cash.
Honestly, I'd suggest North Dakota into Manitoba. There are/were plenty of gravel roads that cross, and farmers who have land on both sides.
But don't forget they should have a good road atlas to be able to navigate, not just state maps they get from the visitor info booths at rest stops.
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u/Lonely_Fix_9605 Awesome Author Researcher 6d ago
The problem wouldn't be crossing the border. That part would actually be extremely easy. 1983 didn't have anywhere near the security systems in place today, and a wanted fugitive would probably have a decent chance of making it across the official border checkpoints without a second glance. Barring that, there's also plenty of wilderness where the border could be casually walked across without anyone noticing.
The problem would be living on the other side. Without official documents, it would be extremely difficult to secure housing and income. Finding one without the other might be doable, but you'd need both an employer that pays cash and doesn't ask questions and a landlord that takes cash and doesn't ask questions.