Chillicothe, Ohio: a prisoner is on the loose. John W. Parson, accused of killing a cop in 2005, escaped jail Saturday afternoon by scaling an outside recreation area wall, crawling underneath razor wire, jumping on to a lower-level roof and then onto an inmate transportation garage before running away. At some point he then stole bicycle and took off to hide in the woods. At the time of this writing, he is still at large and considered very dangerous.

Now, I've never been in prison, but I know those recreation walls must be high. So how did Parson escape? According to Dayton's WDTN news, "Parsons scaled a 17-foot wall topped with razor wire using a rope made from toilet paper and bed sheets [1]."

I just walked out of the bathroom here at the Madison Avenue headquarters of the global advertising agency at which I work. The toilet paper here is cheap one-ply, barely possessing the structural integrity to survive even the most gentle brushes with soiled buttskin. I can only assume the toilet paper at the Ross County Jail is as bad, if not much, much worse. So how in the world do you convert such delicate tissue into a rope capable of supporting a full-grown man?

A cursory web search reveals that Parsons is not the world's first toilet paper engineering genius [2]. Clearly there must be some sort of toilet paper rope making tutorial out there in the world. Anybody have any idea how it's done?

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