They had run-ins with ‘Roofman’ 20 years ago. How do they feel about him today?
Jeffrey Manchester. “John Zorn.”
More than 20 years later, the split personality still leaves a chasm between those who knew one or the other.
On one side, Manchester: the armed McDonald’s robber who entered through roofs and held his victims at gunpoint and (politely) trapped them in industrial coolers. On the other, “Zorn”: the sweet, caring, “nice guy” Manchester became after escaping the North Carolina prison where he was serving a 35-year sentence on kidnapping and armed robbery.
Paramount Pictures made a movie based off Manchester’s life, or, more specifically, the saga his two personalities lived from 2000 to 2005. It comes out Friday, Oct. 10, and features cameos from several of the real-life people he crossed paths with during his crime sprees.
Here’s how those who knew Manchester — whether by his real identity or his fake one — feel about him now.
The victims of his robberies
Elaine Snyder still remembers the feeling of Manchester jabbing the sawed-off .22-caliber rifle into her back as she showed a new hire how to clean McDonald’s bathrooms.
“This, to me, is a story of a bad guy,” she told The Charlotte Observer last month.
Twenty-five years ago, on May 20, 2000, she was the store’s 49-year-old general manager. Now she’s 75 and retired. But what Elaine can still recall about that Saturday morning lines up almost entirely with police records that documented her statements at the time.
She remembers the barrel, and she remembers Manchester’s eyes — they were the only thing peeking out from the black pants, black shirt and black mask he wore.
She remembers Grandma, too. She was the 78-year-old woman who made the biscuits every morning.
“She could have had a heart attack,” Elaine said from her southeast Charlotte living room.
“I just don’t understand why they would want to praise him and give him all this recognition for something that was very devastating to some people,” she said. “I’m not sure that I agree with that.”
Angela Hoyle, the Gaston County prosecutor on Manchester’s robbery and kidnapping case, remembers Elaine and the other workers “were terrified.”
“I know that Hollywood will make a movie out of any life experience,” said Hoyle, who briefly appears in a “Roofman” scene filmed at the Gaston County courthouse. “But I just hope the takeaway for people watching the movie is understanding that the victims, in real-life, actually experienced a very horrifying event.”
Don Roberson is more conflicted. He’s incredibly excited about the new movie, because for more than 20 years now he’s been fascinated by the fact that Manchester spent six months hiding in and around the store he worked at in 2004 and 2005: the Toys R Us on Independence Boulevard.
Still, while he wasn’t on the clock that day, Roberson still gets chills when he thinks about the real-life “Roofman” robbing his co-workers at gunpoint on Dec. 26, 2004 — an event that ultimately led to Manchester being recaptured.
To think about “such a violent thing happening there is ... just unbelievable,” Roberson said.
“When I hear people talking about, ‘Oh, he was unfairly treated. He was innocent, he’s too smart to be punished this way,’ and all that, I think to myself, ‘You know, he robbed my friends at gunpoint. He threatened the lives of my friends.’ ... I have some negative feelings toward him.”
The double life in between
Even 20 years later — and even though she’s aware many still view Manchester as a violent criminal — Leigh Wainscott smiles when she thinks about the man she briefly dated, back when he was pretending to be “John Zorn.”
“I just hold onto the good stuff,” said Leigh (whose last name is now Moore, having re-married in 2016), in a recent interview with the Observer. “I just know what a kind, sensitive, caring person he is.”
But that doesn’t mean she’s oblivious.
“He put all these people in a freezer,” she said. “Forced them into a freezer. ... I’m sure it’s very terrifying.”
“Knowing what we know now about him, how crafty and skilled (he was), I think he enjoyed the chase,” Leigh told the Observer. “It wasn’t about the money. ... I think he enjoyed eluding the police and being sneaky and seeing what he could get away with.”
Eddie Levins thinks “that’s bulls---.”
“This guy’s a damn gun-toting robber — an armed robber,” said the retired Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department captain, who supervised the task force that recaptured Manchester in 2005. “He should not be glamorized in any way, because all he did was put guns in people’s faces and robbed ‘em. I don’t care how nice they want to make the movie. ... The truth is, he was a bad person who needs to be in prison.”
Retired CMPD Sgt. Katherine Scheimreif, who was the leader of Levins’s task force in the field, joins that chorus. She shattered Leigh’s perception of John when she asked her to help police catch him. To her, Manchester is a sociopath who “really didn’t care about the people that he hurt.”
“He’s not a brilliant individual,” she said. “Maybe creative.”
“It’s not like he was a good person whatsoever,” said Scheimreif, who has a small cameo in “Roofman” and also is portrayed by actress Molly Price. “So many lives were touched and ruined in so many different ways by this guy. You don’t burn a dentist’s office down, and you don’t steal stuffed animals and toys to give to the church, and then act like you’re amazing.”
Ron Smith — formerly pastor of the church Manchester tried to blend into — doesn’t call Manchester amazing. But he thinks he deserves something in between berated and revered.
Grace, maybe.
“I err on the side of grace instead of legalism and pounding somebody over the head,” Smith said. “It’s just who I am.”
In Smith’s mind, his church was the only place Manchester ever really felt accepted.
“He told me he would have been long gone if it had not been such a real, down-to-earth, friendly, nice place where he felt accepted,” the former pastor said. “I don’t know what it was like before for him, but he apparently had never felt that acceptance.”
“He just wanted to do good things for other people,” Leigh Moore insists. “Did he feel bad about what he did? I’m sure he did. But he tried to make up for it, by being nice or by being generous.”
She and Smith have fallen back into regular contact with Manchester since “Roofman” director Derek Cianfrance got them involved in the movie-making process, during which they helped shape the storyline and characters played by Channing Tatum (as Manchester), Kirsten Dunst (as Leigh Wainscott) and Ben Mendelsohn (as Pastor Ron). (Leigh and Pastor Ron also appear briefly as both extras and as themselves in the film.)
In real-life, Manchester is in Central Prison serving a 35-year sentence for his Gaston County crimes and more than 25 years for his Charlotte crimes. The Mecklenburg judge who sentenced him ran those 25 years concurrently, or at the same time, as his prior sentencings, so he’s still expected to be released in 2036.
But when Leigh thinks about Manchester today, she focuses as much as she can on his goodness — and as little as she can on the thought of him forcing people into an industrial cooler, at gunpoint.
This story was originally published October 2, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
