After jailbreak, ‘Roofman’ hid in a Charlotte Toys R Us — but also in plain sight
Jeffrey Manchester didn’t exactly prove to be a robbing mastermind in 2000, when he botched the hold-up of a Belmont McDonald’s restaurant and landed in a North Carolina prison.
But four years later, a burst of criminal-minded ingenuity helped him bust out.
On June 15, 2004, the convicted “Roofman” robber escaped from Brown Creek Correctional Institution’s metal plant — where he made bedframes and lockers — by clinging to the undercarriage of a truck that took him just beyond the Polkton prison’s wall. From there, he was able to make it undetected to the main road, where he got a lift from an unwitting prison math teacher to a nearby gas station; then Manchester hitched a ride with a trucker, who took him 40 miles northwest into Charlotte.
After that, the trail went cold. Manchester became a ghost.
And a ghost, it just so happened, is what Don Roberson came to believe might be plaguing his workplace — the Toys R Us on East Independence Boulevard, about halfway between uptown and Matthews — as summer turned to fall.
Among the things that just seemed ... off to Don, who’d been hired as a high-schooler and was 20 years old at the time: He’d start his shift in the morning and notice bicycle tread marks — in conspicuous places — that weren’t there when he closed up the night before; his and co-workers’ work schedules mysteriously changed in the computer system, at random; and managers were reporting that alarms were tripped more frequently overnight, but there was no sign of forced entry.
It did feel to him sometimes like more items were missing than usual. But it was a toy store. Kids walked out with merchandise in their pockets all the time, Don knew. Inventory was literally done once a year. But an eerie feeling lingered, and managers started leaving the system unarmed, since the cost of so many “false” alarms was rising.
Then one day, in the fall of 2004, a co-worker approached Don and excitedly told him the case was solved: There’d been someone living in the walls of the store.
He took Don to a little area next to where the Power Wheels were stored, and gestured to a part of the wall that appeared to be closed off and finished. But it was actually jury-rigged to conceal a false wall, along with a small space behind it suitable for hiding a full-grown adult.
Someone discovered the hideout after spying a bit of Spider-Man bedsheet protruding from the false wall. Inside, they found evidence that someone had been sleeping there on an inflatable pool float. The “room” was decorated with a “Spider-Man 2” movie poster and a collection of toys including a Nerf basketball hoop.
The working theory was that a homeless man had managed to go undetected all this time, which seemed to explain months of in-store weirdness. And now that those accommodations had been rooted out, Don and his co-workers felt confident that he would find another place to play ghost.
They had no idea that he would simply move to another part of the building.
No idea that the same old culprit was responsible when a noticeable amount of video games started missing later in the fall.
No idea that on top of continuing to take huge advantage of the store in secret, he also had graduated to hiding — quite literally — in plain sight.
The new guy at Crossroads
Crossroads Church, a small Presbyterian congregation serving 200 people at most, sat on the edge of Monroe Road across from East Mecklenburg High School. It was led by a 48-year-old pastor named Ron Smith, who gave sermons wearing jeans, a golf shirt and shoes with no socks.
Around the beginning of November, Pastor Ron noticed a new guy in the back during a Sunday service. So after it was over, he approached the man — who introduced himself as “John Zorn.”
“Zorn,” Pastor Ron repeated, scratching his head. The church leader, known among his parishioners as a sports junkie, then asked: “Any relation to Jim Zorn, the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks?”
“No,” John replied, shrugging and smiling. “I don’t know Jim.”
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The following Sunday, John was back at church, and — though quiet and reserved at first — he warmed quickly to Crossroads’ laid-back members.
The one he warmed to most quickly was a single mom named Leigh Wainscott. Leigh had been separated from her husband for a few months and was on her way to a divorce. She’d just moved into her own apartment, in the McAlpine Ridge complex next to the Volkswagen dealership on Independence, and was sharing custody with her soon-to-be-ex of their daughter Ashley (age 15), their son Matt (then 12) and their daughter Ginny (then 9).
In turn, Leigh warmed to him. Not long after the two got better-acquainted at a singles brunch at TGI Friday’s, she asked him if he’d like to go out with her.
She was, from the start, under the impression that John was unmarried and childless.
She also was under the impression that he was a catch: a kind, gentle, polite, funny, clean-cut younger man who everyone at church seemed to be charmed by.
It wasn’t just her. Pastor Ron, too, saw him as an outgoing, engaging, “regular” and “nice” guy. He attended services faithfully, got involved in church activities, came to Bible study and just generally seemed to fit in well.
Neither saw red flags. Neither asked questions.
It didn’t strike them as odd when John said he worked a government job that he couldn’t tell them about. They’d both known people in roughly similar situations. And it didn’t strike Leigh as off when he said the government job required him to live in a building that prohibited guests.
And he really did seem to love spending time with Leigh. As their relationship developed, they often would find themselves going back behind her apartment, down the hill, and onto the McAlpine Greenway, where they would just walk and talk, sometimes for hours. I met him at church, she thought; and Pastor Ron seems to feel good about him.
He must be OK.
A season of incredible giving
If anything, Leigh did think it was a little strange that he didn’t have a car.
He always just seemed to just kind of show up. Just showed up at church, just showed up at her apartment. “OK,” she finally told him one day, “you need to get a car.”
John agreed. So she drove him in her minivan to a little used-car lot on Independence and he picked out a green 1999 Chrysler Concorde. Inside the dealership, he plunked $5,000 in cash on the table and said to her: “Let’s put it in your name.”
Leigh was stunned. No one had ever bought her a car before. She had to show her driver’s license, had to register and insure it in her name. But it was hers, and he’d paid for it. In cash!
The gesture was a little curious, but it also came off as sweet and spontaneous — which was kind of becoming John’s M.O.
He once showed up at a church Christmas party wearing, of all things, a bunny costume. Everyone thought it was hilarious. On another occasion, he took Leigh’s youngest, Ginny, to Toys R Us so he could buy her a birthday present, and started riding a Big Wheel around the store. Leigh and Ginny couldn’t stop laughing.
As much as anything, he seemed to love to make people happy. And while the car might have been his biggest show of generosity, it was hardly his only one.
He routinely arrived at Leigh’s apartment bearing a toy or two for her kids. There was a big box of origami paper for Ginny. A small pair of diamond stud earrings for Leigh. And two big Toys R Us bags full of toys for Crossroads’ Christmas toy drive. Even closer to Christmas, he drove Leigh and the girls to Target and spent about $300 on ornaments and lights and tinsel for their tree. For a single mom with not much disposable income, that was huge.
And, dressed as a bunny at that church Christmas party, John gave Ron a wrapped gift that the pastor took home and put under his tree.
When he opened it on the morning of Dec. 25 to find a DVD set of the first four seasons of “Seinfeld” — a show the men had shared laughs talking about — Pastor Ron was deeply touched. “Man, this is a nice gift. And expensive,” he told his wife, Janet. “I can’t wait to see him tomorrow at church to thank him.”
But the next day John was a no-show.
Ten days later, Pastor Ron would learn that this seemingly kind-hearted soul was in reality the armed-and-dangerous escaped convict Jeffrey Manchester … and that he wasn’t at church on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, because he was robbing the Toys R Us he’d been hiding in.
‘Let’s go get this guy’
In late 2004, Katherine Scheimreif was in charge of a federal task force responsible for bringing the most violent offenders in the area to justice.
Her group was the best of the best at CMPD, and its targets were the worst of the worst.
Right around the end of December, one of her detectives came to her and said, “Sarge, we’ve got something we’d like to work on. The day after Christmas, someone tried to rob the Toys R Us on Independence as it was opening for the day. The suspect posed as a uniformed police officer to get the jump on a county sheriff’s deputy who was working off-duty, took her gun from her, put it up to her head, told her to get on the ground, and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate.”
The guy apparently got thrown off his game, however, when two employees escaped while he was extracting money from the safe the manager had opened for him. He wound up fleeing into the back of the store — and since no emergency-exit alarms were triggered, responding officers believed he was still inside.
Although he managed to elude them, cops scoured the premises and discovered a secret passageway, obscured by a piece of plywood, underneath a low shelf in a back room.
The space led through the wall of the Toys R Us and into the adjacent, abandoned Circuit City electronics store, where surprised officers found a makeshift 4-by-10-foot living space hidden beneath a staircase. It resembled the one store employee Don Roberson had been shown earlier in the fall, only better-kept.
There was a children’s-sized mattress instead of just an inflatable pool float, though also with Spider-Man sheets, made up with military precision; more movie posters on the wall, alongside shelves full of expensive toy action figures; a portable DVD player and a stack of movies, including “Spider-Man 2,” “Matchstick Men” and “40 Days and 40 Nights”; baby monitors linked to cameras that peeked through the wall into the Toys R Us; a workout journal that outlined an intense regimen; cleaning wipes and hygiene products; jars of baby food; lots of candy; and teeth-whitening trays imprinted with the name of a nearby dentist office, which cops later deduced he visited due to a candy-heavy diet.
But best of all for police, there also was at least one usable fingerprint, which — to their astonishment — was a clear match for one Jeffrey Manchester, a convicted armed robber and kidnapper who had become the first person ever to escape from the state prison in Polkton back in June.
After taking in this long explanation from her detective, Sgt. Scheimreif looked at them and said, “Well, what are y’all waiting on? Let’s go get this guy.”
Toting the original mugshot from his 2000 arrest in Belmont after the McDonald’s heist and the photo taken when he was booked into prison that same year, Sgt. Scheimreif’s team began showing Manchester’s face to everyone they could in the areas immediately around the Toys R Us.
They eventually arrived at Crossroads Church — on Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2005, which just happened to be the day Leigh Wainscott was turning 40 years old.
It was about to become a birthday she would never, ever forget.
Continue reading: The real ‘Roofman’ | Part 3
Jeffrey Manchester was poised to make a final escape. Then his heart got him in trouble.
This story was originally published October 1, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "After jailbreak, ‘Roofman’ hid in a Charlotte Toys R Us — but also in plain sight."
