Robert Shepard didn't need a file baked in a cake to get out of jail. Dental floss worked just fine.
While cameras, guards and computer-controlled doors were keeping other inmates in, Shepard braided the floss into a rope as thick as a telephone cord and used it to scale an 18-foot wall.Now, townspeople are talking of Shepard as a real-life Spiderman - the comic-book hero who spins his web and hangs from ceilings - and dreaming up 1,001 new uses for floss.
"I just wonder how he got ahold of so much dental floss," said Mike Reiser, who lives near the South Central Regional Jail in South Charleston. "What did this guy do? Walk around with stuff in his mouth all the time?"
Shepard escaped from the recreation yard, which is surrounded by a cinder block wall topped with a chain-link fence.
The 5-foot-9, 155-pound inmate apparently attached a weight to his waxed and minty-fresh cord and hurled it upward to loop it through the fence. He then apparently used it to help him climb the cinder block wall, and hung from the cord while he cut through the fence with a 3-inch piece of hacksaw blade.
Shepard, 34, remained at large Friday, two days after the breakout. He had been awaiting trial on charges of robbing a post office, and his record includes convictions for manslaughter and armed robbery.
At the time of the escape, he was being disciplined with reduced privileges for using a handmade tool to scrape mortar in his cell.
For the time being, inmates will have to pick their teeth with matchbooks. Sales of floss have been suspended.