As far as hideouts go, it was pretty nice.
Charlotte, N.C., police say an escaped prison inmate lived a young boy's dream, inhabiting a storage closet in a vacant Circuit City (search) store, eating baby food and watching DVDs stolen from the Toys "R" Us (search) next door.
In the 4-by-10-foot space were a mini-basketball hoop, a bicycle, a bus map, a portable DVD player, several DVDs, "Star Wars" action figures, a fire extinguisher and a portable toilet, reports the Charlotte Observer.
On the walls were posters of Superman and Spider-Man and a Van Gogh print. On the ceiling was a smoke detector. Water had been rerouted from the Toys "R" Us, and electricity in the vacant Circuit City store had been kept on by its owners.
In fact, Jeffrey Allen Manchester might still be free today had he not fouled his own nest by robbing the Toys "R" Us at gunpoint the day after Christmas.
Manchester, 33, was doing a 45-year stint for robbery in rural Anson County (search) when he escaped prison on June 15, apparently by clinging to the underside of a truck.
Police say he made his way west to Charlotte, where he had his teeth fixed, got a girlfriend and moved into the vacated Circuit City. To get around, he rode his bike and took the bus.
"What he was doing was hiding in plain sight," Charlotte-Mecklenburg Officer Fred Allen told the newspaper.
A series of early morning break-ins at the Toys "R" Us had police puzzled, but there were no leads in the cases until a holdup as the store opened up Dec. 26.
During the robbery, an off-duty sheriff deputy's gun was taken, leading police to scour the scene of the crime.
A deputy found a hidden wall panel held in place by one screw. It led to the Circuit City next door.
Cops found several thousand dollars' worth of toys stuffed over ceiling tiles, but had no other leads.
On Jan. 2, Allen came back to the Circuit City and noticed that while the lights were on throughout most of the store, one corner was dark.
He walked back to the area, saw a board that looked like the hidden wall panel in the Toys "R" Us, and pushed it aside to reveal Manchester's deluxe hideaway.
"I personally have never seen anything like this," Capt. Eddie Levins, head of Charlotte-Mecklenburg police's criminal intelligence unit, told the Observer.
The space's inhabitant was nowhere to be found, but a fingerprint turned up Manchester's name.
On Jan. 4, Manchester's picture had been released to local news media, and reports that he was in the area began coming in.
Early in the morning of Jan. 5, Manchester's dentist's office was set ablaze, possibly in an attempt to destroy records.
At about 5 p.m. that day, police arrested Manchester outside a friend's apartment.
He faces six charges, including malicious use of explosives to damage property, burning an unoccupied building, breaking and entering, possession of a firearm by a felon and two counts of robbery with a dangerous weapon.
"I've never seen anybody so determined," said Allen. "He wasn't going to make a stupid mistake. We had to find him."
— Thanks to Out There reader Matthew N.
PG-Rated Photo Gets Wal-Mart Worker Fired
MUSCATINE, Iowa (AP) — A Wal-Mart (search) greeter was sacked for apparently showing too much of his friendly side to customers.
Dean L. Wooten, 65, was accused of greeting customers with a computer-generated photo of himself in which he appeared to be naked — except for a carefully placed Wal-Mart bag — and of telling customers that Wal-Mart was cutting costs and the sack was the company's new uniform.
A supervisor at the Muscatine store where Wooten had worked for seven years told him to knock it off after customers complained. He was fired five days later, in September, after he displayed the photo again.
Wooten's application for unemployment compensation was rejected by an administrative law judge, who said "a reasonable person would know the act of showing a naked body wearing a Wal-Mart sack would not be good for the employer's business."
Wooten said he did not see the harm in the photo, which he said was made by a friend who spliced a picture of Wooten's head onto a shot of another man's body.
"When I first seen it, I pretty near died laughing," he said.
— Thanks to Out There readers Kimberly W., Joe J. and Kurt R.
Wild Boar Tries to Reverse Direction of Food Chain
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A man escaped unscathed after a boar chased him around a hospital parking lot in southwestern Poland, the hospital spokesman said Thursday.
Cameras monitoring hospital grounds in the city of Legnica (search) captured a boar who approached the hospital's main entrance and then crossed the path of an unidentified man before dawn on Wednesday.
When the man tried to flee, the boar pursued him around a parked car for a few minutes until it apparently got bored, Rafal Pilch told The Associated Press.
"The man was taken by surprise and after a moment of consternation started to run," Pilch said. "The boar ran after him and chased him for a few minutes around a parked car and then left."
The man did not need hospital treatment.
Pilch said he did not know where the boar came from, but it could have been one of two tame boars owned by a nearby inn specializing in traditional Polish cuisine.
Ex-Candidate Sorry About 'Kevorkian Certificate'
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (AP) — A one-time Idaho House of Representatives candidate won't face criminal charges after mailing his Republican primary opponent a fake certificate for one visit to Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
Mike Adams resigned Jan. 4 as a precinct committeeman in Bonneville County and will no longer be the county's voting representative on the state GOP central committee.
Bonneville County prosecuting attorney Dane Watkins Jr. said Adams would not face misdemeanor charges of making a threat against a state official because the law requires that a specific threat be made.
Kevorkian was convicted in Michigan of second-degree murder in the 1998 poisoning of Thomas Youk, 52. Youk had Lou Gehrig's disease, and Kevorkian called it a mercy killing. The death was videotaped and shown on CBS' "60 Minutes."
Kevorkian is serving a 10- to 25-year sentence, and is eligible for parole in 2007. Kevorkian has said he assisted in at least 130 deaths.
Adams challenged Ann Rydalch in the GOP primary last year, but dropped out of the race a month before the election. Rydalch won the seat by 351 votes. Two months later, Rydalch reported receiving a death threat.
In a personal column published last week in the Post Register, Adams admitted sending the certificate. He apologized and said it was meant only as a joke, but Rydalch clearly didn't see it that way.
Rydalch said she was "scared to death," when the certificate arrived in the mail.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — It will take a lot of huffing and puffing to light this stogie.
A cigar maker here has hand-rolled a 62-foot-long cigar, which would be the world's largest if confirmed by the Guinness Book of Records.
Patricio Pena, 43, took about four days to manufacture the cigar in a plaza outside a farmer's market in the Santurce district of San Juan, finishing the project late Saturday.
"A friend of mine came up to me recently, and said why don't you try and make the world's largest cigar?" Pena said standing over the creation, which spanned the length of about a dozen tables.
Pena is attempting to displace Cuba — the king of cigar-making — as the home of the world's largest cigar.
The current Guinness record-holder is Jose Castelar Cairo of Havana, who made a 45-foot-long cigar in August of 2003.
Pena, originally from the Dominican Republic, first started rolling cigars at the age of 7, and has continued the practice in Puerto Rico, where he has lived for the past three decades. He has a stand outside the market where he rolls regular-sized cigars.
Compiled by FOXNews.com's Paul Wagenseil.
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