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Leigh Moore was meant to be celebrating her 40th birthday. Instead she received a visit from the FBI. “They told me the man that you’ve been seeing is not who you think he is; he is on America’s Most Wanted,” she recalls.
When agents showed her a picture of her boyfriend to prove it, Moore “fell to pieces” and cried. “They shattered my whole world. I was devastated, like someone had just died.”
The man in question was Jeffrey Manchester, an army veteran who robbed dozens of McDonald’s by sawing through roofs. In 2000 he was caught in North Carolina and was later sentenced to 45 years in prison. But in 2004 he escaped and, to elude the authorities, hid out in a Toys “R” Us store in Charlotte.
Manchester clandestinely lived there for months, eating what was on the shelves and, most audaciously, trying to pursue a seemingly normal life outside the store. He attended a local church and dated single mother Leigh Moore, then Leigh Wainscott, before his luck ran out for good.
The wild story is retold in Roofman, a film released on Friday starring Channing Tatum as Manchester and Kirsten Dunst as Moore. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance created an immersive environment that included casting people who knew Manchester in real life and restoring an abandoned Toys “R” Us by reinstalling electricity, plumbing, lighting and truckloads of period toys.
For Moore, 60, who recently visited Manchester in prison and makes a fleeting appearance in the film as a school crossing guard, it has been an opportunity to reckon with a brief but indelible period in her life – and to tell friends and acquaintances about the episode for the first time.
When she first met Manchester in 2004, she was going through a divorce from a 20-year marriage. “One day this new gentleman showed up in our church and there was definitely some buzz going on because we didn’t get new people that often,” Moore recalls by phone from Charlotte, where she works in the motor vehicle industry. “His intentions were to come into the church, sit on the back row and not be noticed. But that didn’t happen.”
Manchester was encouraged to get involved in church activities, especially around the holiday season. His first date with Moore was a long walk to a local park and they began seeing each other two or three times a week. He claimed to have just moved from New York and be working for the federal government.
She says: “There was nothing alarming about him. He was handsome. He always knew what to say to charm the ladies and make everyone feel comfortable. He was very crafty, very smart, had lots of energy and he was funny. He was well-dressed, clean, well-groomed, very polite, well-spoken and knew what to say at all the right times.
“I’m a very trusting person and the pastor adored him and the congregation adored him. I felt safe. There was no reason to suspect.”
Moore felt comfortable introducing Manchester to her 12-year-old son and daughters aged nine and 15. “He would bring them a little something to break the ice. He would always get down on their level and try to relate to them somehow. He had kids – I didn’t know that at the time – so he knew how to interact with kids and he was very good at it.”
She knew nothing of his back story. Manchester had once served in the 82nd Airborne Division and struggled to fit back into civilian life. He was rejected by his wife for being unable to support their three children. When an army buddy suggested that he apply the best of his abilities to pull his life together, Manchester took the advice in a wholly original direction.
Beginning in 1998, he applied his military precision and smarts to a new mission: robbing McDonald’s restaurants by sawing through their flimsy roofs in the middle of the night and then striking when the morning shift arrived. He is believed to have robbed more than 40 stores and displayed a cordial manner, telling McDonald’s employees to get their jackets before he locked them in a freezer.
Manchester was captured in 2000 and sentenced to 45 years in Brown Creek correctional institution. But in 2004 he pulled off a brilliant escape, stowing himself away under a truck that was leaving the prison’s loading dock. Now a fugitive, his choice of a hideout was as audacious as his robberies: a local Toys “R” Us in Charlotte.
He built a small survivor’s “nest” for himself behind a bicycle display and sustained himself on baby food and M&Ms taken from the shelves while decorating his makeshift bed with Spider-Man sheets. To avoid detection, he set up a selection of video baby monitors, giving him a constant watch on the store’s employees. From his hidden perch, he learned their routines and observed their behaviour, particularly that of an unpleasant manager whom he watched regularly mistreating his personnel.
After months of isolation, Manchester grew tired of being cooped up. In late October he began venturing outside, using an adjacent, closed-down Circuit City store as his secret entry and exit point. He began attending Crossroads church, run by Pastor Ron Smith and his wife Jan, where he quickly integrated himself into the community.
Looking back, were there any telltale clues? When Moore teased him about not having a car, Manchester bought a 1999 green Chrysler Concorde for $5,000, putting it in her name and paying in cash. She says: “I thought, well, the government pays really well! We went shopping one day at a department store and we bought a bunch of Christmas decorations, and he paid cash for that.
“We didn’t go out in public a lot and he would never sit with his back to the door. I thought that was military training because he had a military background. They teach you to watch your back and I didn’t think anything of it. Other than that, I didn’t suspect. He always showed up when he was supposed to. He always managed to get to church and where he needed to go.”
Manchester told Moore that he lived in a sterile government apartment and was not allowed to have guests. In reality he passed the time in his hideaway by watching DVDs including Catch Me If You Can, Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale, one of the most famous con artists in history, who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, doctor and lawyer. A fingerprint that he left on the DVD led to his capture.
He had only been dating Moore for a couple of months when in January 2005 – on the day that she turned 40 – the FBI came to Moore’s workplace and told her that Manchester was on their most wanted list. She left with them and was in their custody for most of the day. They asked for her help to capture Manchester and she agreed.
Moore admits: “It was heart-wrenching. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do but I had three children, I was a good girl, I didn’t want to get in trouble and so I helped them. They had me call him and pretend like everything was OK, like you see in the movies [though this moment does not appear in Roofman], and pretend that I was excited to see him that night for my birthday and to pick me up at seven o’clock or something.”
Manchester duly showed up at her home with a bouquet of flowers. Moore was in the back of a police car about a mile away listening to the drama unfold on the dispatch. “I could hear them saying, we’re in position or that he’s coming or here he comes. Then you could hear him being wrestled to the ground and everyone’s shouting and I knew it was over then.”
She spoke to Manchester by phone for a few minutes later that evening. “I apologised for having him arrested and he kept apologising for deceiving me, so there was a lot of crying and a lot of sadness and a lot of apologies made.”
A few months later she visited Manchester in prison. There was no further communication until Cianfrance began researching the movie and speaking to Manchester regularly. Moore went to see him again earlier this year and they now speak by phone every two weeks.
Moore, who remarried a decade ago, says: “We talk like old friends, we just catch up, we talk about our families and the movie and what’s going on. I’m not in love with him; I just consider him a friend and someone that I cared for long ago. My husband has always known and he’s always been very supportive and so he understands that I do talk to him occasionally. He gets it.”
Does she think Manchester regrets his crimes? “As he has had over 20 years in prison to think about things, he is very remorseful and realises that he made some stupid decisions and shouldn’t have gone down that path.
“A lot of us as parents use our kids as an excuse. We want to give our kids more; we want our kids to have what we didn’t have. It started off as that: he wanted to provide more for his kids, make his kids happy. In the movie they show that his daughter had a terrible birthday and then the next year, all of a sudden, she had a very lavish birthday.
“But later on he started enjoying playing the game and eluding the police and seeing what he could get away with for how long. He began to like it: the adrenaline, the Catch Me If You Can attitude.”
Now in his 50s, Manchester is currently serving out his sentence at Central prison in Raleigh, North Carolina (he can only make outgoing calls but Cianfrance estimates that they spoke more than a hundred times). He is not scheduled for release until 2036.
Yet Moore observes: “He seems so clearheaded and he’s so positive all the time; he’s never negative. He’s in a good place and I’m in a good place. We usually focus on the positive and look forward to the next time we can speak about this stuff.”
Both of them welcome Cianfrance’s movie and the attention that comes with it. “I’m glad that the story is out there because for so long I didn’t talk about it. All the people that have come into my life over the last 20 years, I haven’t gone around telling everybody about this part of my past. I pushed it down and didn’t talk about it. Then when it started coming back around, I felt like I needed to tell them.
“All my family know, all my friends know, everybody at work knows and so I don’t have to hide it any more. I’m comfortable talking about it and I stand firm when I say that he is a good person; he just made some bad decisions and there needs to be more grace and more forgiveness in the world.”
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Roofman is out in US cinemas now and in the UK and Australia on 17 October
