Courtesy of WSOC-TV Channel 9” data-image-side=”” class=”hide-from-app” >
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 madebedframes 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…