Jeffrey Manchester: The Rooftop Robber

0:00Parler tout français. Hablas espanol. Parler l 'italiano. If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash wandery. spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Wondery. Rules and restrictions may apply. You may have heard of the sex cult NXIVM and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack.

0:47But she's never told her side of the story until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed and in my new podcast, I talk to Alison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member and what she thinks of it all now. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people? I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question. Alison, after NXIVM from CBC's Uncover is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

1:22For most of us, we wake up on our birthday hoping for a nice surprise. For Leigh Wainscott, her 40th birthday surprise was anything but pleasant. It was a cool overcast morning, quiet and unremarkable on January 5th, 2005. Leigh didn't have much planned to ring in the new decade, just a full day of work followed by a small celebratory dinner with her boyfriend, John Zorn. But those plans went out the window when the police and FBI showed up unexpectedly at her office, bearing news about her boyfriend that would leave her completely blindsided. Initially, Lee didn't believe them. She just laughed and insisted that these officers had the wrong guy.

2:16Her boyfriend was kind, charming, and generous. Not to mention a man she'd met at church. She couldn't help believing that this was, at best, a mistake, and at worst, a cruel prank. It wasn't until the officers escorted Lee over to her computer and pulled up his mugshot that it hit her. This wasn't some hoax. It was real. I just panicked. I was in shock. I started crying in disbelief. The man staring back at Lee on the computer screen was without question the sweet guy she'd been seeing for months. They said, the man that you've been dating is not who you think he is. The man that you've been dating is on America's Most Wanted.

3:21This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Jeffrey Manchester, The Rooftop Robber. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we're diving into the real story of a thief known as The Roof Man. A career criminal turned fugitive who somehow managed to live a double life as the ultimate nice guy. Thanks to the new Paramount film Roofman starring Channing Tatum, this opportunist's real name has found its way back into the spotlight. But not everything that made it to the screen was entirely true. This is the full true story you won't see in theaters.

4:22At 5am on May 20th, 2000, Elaine Snyder and her co-workers were settling into their early morning shift at the McDonald's in Belmont, North Carolina. It was a cool morning, hovering around 60 degrees. The sun hadn't risen yet. As far as they were concerned, it was going to be a routine Saturday at work. But they couldn't have been more wrong. Here's Julia Coyne, a courts and public safety reporter at the Charlotte Observer. These McDonald's workers were coming in to open the store and were starting to go about their individual routine tasks of firing up the grills, starting to make tea and coffee.

5:11and it was actually one of the workers' first day ever. And the manager was teaching him how to clean the restrooms when they heard this loud noise. It was then that Elaine, the manager, and 18-year-old Sean Fields, her new employee, turned around and saw a man crouch down behind them. The robber was wearing a mask, dressed all in black, and holding a.22 caliber rifle. It was clear he had jumped into the restaurant through a large hole he'd carved into the roof. Sean and Elaine were, rightfully, terrified. Sean later told police he believed that this man could have easily killed them all if he wanted to.

6:02But he didn't. In fact, the armed man was nice. According to police reports, he was calm and polite. He referred to Elaine as ma 'am. When he started making demands, he said, please. Still, he held Elaine at gunpoint, and in that moment, she had no way of knowing he wouldn't pull the trigger. In her witness statement later that same day, Elaine wrote that she experienced back spasms and struggled to breathe when the robber pressed the rifle into her back. He seemed genuinely sympathetic and gently told her to calm down. Apart from Elaine, four employees were working at the fast food chain that morning.

6:51All four were forced to lie face down on the floor, including Edith, a 78-year-old woman they all called Grandma, before the masked man directed Elaine to take him to the safe. And they went to the safe, the two of them. She was taking the money out, putting it into his bag or duffel bag, backpack that he had. And she asked if he wanted the coins. He said that he liked quarters specifically, and he wanted those. So she gave him the quarters and then started to file them into the refrigerator. The robber didn't move them into the refrigerator immediately, though. He let 19-year-old Mirvit Fayad tend to the food burning on the grill.

7:47He also ensured everyone had their jackets. We saw a lot of the victims, while giving their statements, being sure to say he said that the freezer would be too cold, so he put us in the refrigerator. But still made sure that they had their sort of McDonald's-issued jackets that workers who are working in those colder parts of the restaurant wear. Before fully locking all five workers inside, he apologized to them repeatedly, emphasizing that they were the good people and he was the bad guy. Then he left them in the walk-in cooler and jammed a lemon slicer into the frame to keep the door locked, promising them that someone would be around to let them out before long.

8:39Here's Elaine Snyder in a recent interview with the Charlotte Observer recounting that day. I wanted to be strong because I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything I could, that he wouldn't hurt us. I mean, and he really didn't ask that much from me. It was just, you know, find the safe, open the safe, give me money. And I did everything. And then when he put us in the core, he said, don't come out. We did that. We did everything. And it turned out good. It turned out good. None of these McDonald's employees were physically hurt, and they were actually able to break out of the cooler within minutes of the armed criminal's departure.

9:29They knew that for whatever reason, this refrigerator door never really locked all the way. He obviously didn't know that. So I think the lemon slicer kind of certainly jammed it up a little, but they were able to push it down and call police pretty quickly after. Police were starting to come to the restaurant when one of them saw a car parked in a church nearby. For Officer Tony Adkins, the white 1999 Pontiac Sunfire parked alone in Mount Moriah's church parking lot was an immediate red flag. Why would anyone be at church on a Saturday? When he pulled into the lot, he noticed no one was in or near the car, but there was a suspiciously large black bag sitting underneath it.

10:27He kind of just backed up into the trees and waited until Manchester came running out of the woods. And when the officer turned his lights on and started to try to approach Manchester, the report says that Manchester went, grabbed the bag that was underneath the car, started to run back to the woods, which, by the way, there's like a six foot fence there that he scaled. I think dropped the bag shortly after scaling it, hid in the woods near a water tower for a little bit. And the officer at that time called for backup so he wouldn't be the only one in the woods with him. And they arrested him very soon after that.

11:15So who was this guy? Police were able to quickly identify the man they arrested as Jeffrey Manchester, thanks to his military ID. In the Pontiac, Manchester's rental car, police discovered a rifle that had been purchased off the street, a road map of North Carolina, a DVD player along with eight movies, and Manchester's roof-cutting tools, which included a screwdriver, a hammer, a drill, and a crowbar. There's little information on public record about Manchester's past leading up to this arrest in May of 2000, but here's what we do know. Jeffrey Allen Manchester was born in 1971 in Sacramento, California, where he also grew up and graduated from high school.

12:07After that, he enlisted in the US Army. According to a childhood friend who served in the Army with him, as well as Manchester's mother, Manchester was a normal kid growing up. Smart, good in school, and overall, well-behaved. Here's Thaden Jaynes, a reporter at the Charlotte Observer. He was fairly normal. You know, he had friends, he had been stationed in different places with friends, and I think he had not gotten in any previous trouble. While in the military, Manchester got married and had three children. But by the time he showed up in North Carolina, Manchester was divorced and estranged from his family in California.

13:03He arrived in North Carolina as part of a military assignment in the spring of 2000. He was let out of that assignment a little bit early and he decided to stay in the state as some of the other members of his unit had left and gone back. After robbing the McDonald's in Belmont that Saturday, Manchester was promptly interrogated by police without a lawyer present. He immediately confessed to the crime. He told officers he'd only been in North Carolina three days at that point. It was then in the police interview that Manchester made a second confession. Prior to the Belmont robbery, he had stolen from a different McDonald's in Gastonia, a neighboring town just the night before.

13:54He used the same method of breaking in through the roof and locking employees in the cooler. Between the two back-to-back robberies, Manchester stole just over$8 ,000, including$420 in quarters. He apologized profusely for what he did. The officers then asked him why he did it. He said that he just robbed McDonald's for the money to pay bills and buy things for his kids. I'm reading directly from this police report where the officer said, why did you decide to rob McDonald's in Belmont's? And he said, I just came across it and it looked good. I just came across it and it looked good. And that's it.

14:49No big plan, no deep motive. Maybe he really just saw an opportunity and went for it. or maybe there was a genuine strategy and consistent pattern to this crime. He traveled around the country a lot. And later, as police started to investigate the McDonald's robberies, they kind of matched up his military travels with the locations of some robberies that they think might have been him, but that have never actually been completely 100 % tied to him. In fact, authorities would go on to claim that Manchester was behind over 40 robberies in California and surrounding states. Manchester denied all of it.

15:43But what was undeniable was the striking similarities of all these crimes. There were similarities in the way that he would or whoever the robber was, was going in through the roof of these chains. And also that victim statements really lined up with the victim statements that we saw here in North Carolina and that people were saying that they were really scared, but that this criminal who's wielding a gun and telling them to get into a freezer or refrigerator was actually being quite cordial and nice. But again, he told police here in North Carolina when he was caught that he had never done anything like it before.

16:37After Manchester's confession to the two robberies in Belmont and Gastonia, Belmont police charged him with multiple felony counts, including breaking and entering, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and eight counts of first-degree kidnapping. He was held on a$1 million bond. While Manchester pleaded guilty from the start, he refused to take a plea deal. According to his public defender, Kelly Morris, this was because he didn't see himself as guilty of kidnapping. However, the prosecutor didn't see it that way and insisted that Manchester, by forcing the fast food workers at gunpoint into the refrigerator, had in fact kidnapped them.

17:23Ultimately, the workers testified against Manchester during the trial. And in the end, the jury found him guilty. Had he taken that plea deal, Manchester would have been sentenced to serve 15 to 22 years in prison. But instead... He ended up getting 35 years, which seems, you know, pretty severe. But I think that part of what played into that was they kind of assumed that he was also guilty of these crimes that had happened back in California and throughout kind of the Western U.S. to save the California justice system essentially from having to go through a trial there and whatnot. They just basically threw the book at him here.

18:12In June of 2004, Manchester was taken to the Brown Creek Correctional Institution, a medium security prison in Polkton, North Carolina. He was expected to spend the duration of his 35-year sentence there. But after serving just four years, he became the first, and only, convict in the prison's history to escape.

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19:49By June of 2004, Jeffrey Manchester had been an inmate at Brown Creek Correctional Institution in North Carolina for about four years. He mostly passed the time by working in the prison's metal shop, where he learned how to make items like bed frames and lockers. He also passed the time by planning his escape. Many inmates dream about making a prison break, though few have the skills, luck, or ingenuity to pull it off. But on June 15, 2004, Manchester had all three. he basically was able to escape by hanging on to the bottom of a delivery truck he managed to install a piece of plywood underneath it and kind of got up on that piece of plywood in a space between the wood and the bottom of the truck to avoid detection as the truck is going out they use mirrors to make sure that no one's hanging on underneath but he had hidden himself with this piece of plywood.

20:56The truck left the prison and went beyond the prison walls, but it actually just went to this office building outside the prison. He was under the impression that it was going to be driven away from the prison. It would be much easier to escape. But it basically drove to an outbuilding, and he had to kind of wait there before slipping away. Manchester changed into a t-shirt and shorts he'd smuggled out of the prison. Clothes meant to help him pass as just another civilian. He knew time was running out. Any minute now, the guards would discover he was gone, and the last thing he needed was to draw attention to himself in his prison uniform.

21:41He walked to the main road and secured a ride. It was a teacher at the prison who picked him up. Jeffrey Manchester asked for a lift to Charlotte. This teacher was not going that way, but said he would take him to this gas station, which was nearby. Lucky for Manchester, this teacher had never had him in class and had no idea who he was. At the gas station, he was able to hitch a ride from a truck driver who brought him to Charlotte. And basically, after he got to Charlotte, he kind of vanished, as far as the police were concerned, for six months. But Manchester didn't go far. He made his way back to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he found a home in one of the most unexpected of places along Independence Boulevard, a Toys R Us.

22:36For the Toys R Us employees, a few things around the store in the fall of 2004 just started to feel off. When the morning crew came in, they'd noticed bicycle tire tracks in odd places. Tracks that definitely hadn't been there the night before. Work schedules were mysteriously changing in the computer system, as if someone was tinkering with them after hours. And managers were reporting that the store alarm was being tripped more and more often overnight. But every time they checked, there was no sign of a break-in. Eventually, they stopped using the alarm system altogether, believing these supposedly false alarms were costing the store too much money.

23:28Some workers also began to suspect that more merchandise than usual was going missing, but inventory was only counted once a year, so they couldn't be sure. Plus, this was a toy store, and kids pocketing candy or small toys wasn't exactly unheard of. But all their suspicions came to a head when an employee noticed that, beside the Power Wheels display, a piece of a Spider-Man bed sheet was jutting out from the wall. A false wall, as it turns out. Most of the wall looked sealed off, but it had been rigged to hide a cramped makeshift bedroom, just large enough for an adult to lie down. An inflatable pool float served as the bed.

24:15A Spider-Man 2 poster hung on the wall, and a few toys were strewn across the floor, including a small Nerf basketball hoop. Then it all started to click. The late night noises, the missing snacks, the emergency alarms. And the working theory? Someone, most likely a homeless man, had been secretly living inside the store and had managed to go completely undetected for months. But no one ever actually saw him. And no one suspected, once his hideout was discovered, that their mystery man would simply move to a different spot within the same building. That's when he moved over into the Circuit City.

25:06It's a closed electronics store that was next door to the Toys R Us. Same building, separated by a wall, that he cut a hole through. He actually cut it into the wall underneath a low shelf that he would kind of roll under, passed through into the old circuit city. And in this circuit city, which had been emptied out and closed for some time, under a stairwell, he had created another room. So if someone had walked into that empty circuit city, they wouldn't have known unless they found his false wall and went into it. He was living in there, but also at the same time, he was passing through that wall back into the Toys R Us, kind of whenever he felt like it, whenever he needed something or wanted something from the toy store.

25:53A few months later, when video games began disappearing from the Toys R Us shelves, no one suspected it was the same guy. But the missing games were the least of their problems, considering that they'd been harboring a fugitive. For a while, Manchester managed to keep himself busy during his solitary stay in Toys R Us. for a couple or a few months it's not clear whether he was leaving much at all he would basically pass the time by using the toys r us as kind of a playground he knew where all the security cameras were but he also he knew how to to hack them essentially he was stealing candy to eat he eventually was stealing baby food to eat he was taking bikes so that he could ride them around the store, and I assume probably around the Circuit City after he moved into that space for exercise.

26:54He was taking DVDs and they had, you know, portable DVD players and passing the time by watching movies. He would decorate his living spaces with action figures and posters.

27:11Manchester started going a little stir crazy. So in early November, he decided to take a risk and go outside. He was bored, lonely, and so that's when he ventured out, wandered over to that church, which was only about 300 yards away from that Toys R Us. Crossroads Church was a small Presbyterian congregation of about 200 members, led by 48-year-old Pastor Ron Smith. One Sunday during his sermon, Ron spotted a newcomer, a tall man, all the way in the back of the room. After the service, Ron made a point to introduce himself. Manchester seemed quiet and reserved at first, but he warmed up to Ron and the other church members who welcomed him that day.

28:07He told people there that his name was John Zorn and that he had a government job that he couldn't talk about. And they kind of accepted that. And he relatively quickly became kind of an active member of that church. And in a relatively short amount of time, he connected with Lee Wainscott. Lee Wainscott was a single mom of three. She'd been separated from her husband for several months and was on her way to a divorce. Ironically, her ex's name was Jeffrey. After her separation, Lee took the minivan and settled into her own place, a modest apartment in the McAlpine Ridge complex. She shared custody of her children with her soon-to-be ex.

28:58It was during that point in her life that Lee met Manchester. aka John Zorn. A few days after they met at church, the two got to know each other a bit better at a singles brunch at TGI Fridays. Or rather, Manchester got to know her, and Lee learned more about Manchester's alias, John Zorn. Of course, Manchester never disclosed his California roots, his past crimes, his ex-wife, or the three children of his own back home. Instead, he told Lee he was from New York, that he worked for the government, and that the things he did were classified. Lee thought he seemed genuine, not to mention kind, funny, and polite.

29:50She ultimately mustered up the courage to ask him out on a date. Manchester seemed taken with Lee, and she clearly liked him a lot too. They often spent their evenings walking together down the hill behind her apartment or along the quiet stretch of the McAlpine Greenway. They could talk for hours. Neither Lee nor Pastor Ron saw any warning signs. To them, Manchester was an outgoing, down-to-earth, good guy. He always seemed put together and clean-cut. He showed up to church regularly, went to Bible study, and participated in other church activities. No one seemed to find Manchester's secret government job to be cause for concern either.

30:37And when he told Lee his apartment building didn't allow guests due to the nature of his work, she believed him. he was really good at kind of just showing up at places and not making it obvious that he was walking over from a toy store and was also really good at making excuses when it came to you know why don't you have a car why don't you have a place that i can come live at and i think that one of his talents was just his ability to charm people and to be persuasive and to come off with someone who was a good guy. As charming, persuasive, and nonchalant as he was, Lee couldn't let go of the fact that Manchester didn't have a car of his own.

31:26She insisted he buy one and drove him herself to a small used car lot in Independence. Manchester picked out a green 1999 Chrysler Concorde that he managed to pay for in all cash. Our understanding is that he was getting money oftentimes by stealing stuff from Toys R Us and then going to a pawn shop down the street and selling it. Video games were the things that were most profitable for him. And then he was also involved in some minor robberies and that kind of thing. At the dealership, Manchester handed over$5 ,000 to pay for his new car. then turned to Lee and told her they were going to register it in her name.

32:14Lee was speechless. No one had ever bought her a car before. She went along with it. She handed over her driver's license, filled out the registration, arranged the insurance, all in her name. Granted, it was a bit of an odd gesture, but to Lee, it felt spontaneous, generous, and romantic coming from Manchester, which, after all, was very much his hallmark in those days. At the church Christmas party, for instance, Manchester showed up decked out in a full bunny costume. Everyone loved it. And once, he took Lee's youngest daughter to Toys R Us for her birthday, where he hopped on a big wheel and rode it haphazardly around the store.