by Ben Machell
I take these bags home and begin, very slowly, to work through the contents. Ring-bound notepads. Workbooks. Thoughts and feelings scribbled on the backs of photocopied sheets of prison regulations. A quiet young man’s life in the form of hundreds of thousands of mostly handwritten words, stacked in rough piles on my bedroom floor.
I pull, at random, some stapled sheets of paper from one of the plastic bags and find that it is a copy of a complaint he made to the UK Ministry of Justice in 2013 while in jail. The nature of his complaint? That the prison had been built on a lapwing habitat, and yet he has not seen any nesting boxes provided for them.
“You must ask the question,” he wrote in the box provided on the official complaint form, “what was this location before it was a prison? If another building, what was it before then? A marshland? Forest? Arable fields? In any case its rightful residents (native wildlife) have been dispossessed and as a public body you should be taking steps to help existing species, ie, the lapwing population.”
I put this paper down and reach for a small, black hardback notebook with a red spine. Opening it to the middle, I see that it contains pages of what appear to be theories relating to cosmology and time, of contracting and expanding universes, the possibilities of different dimensions and of light-speed travel. It dates from 2001, when Stephen was fifteen, and is written out longhand, in blue fountain pen. It is dense and hard to follow. One page starts with a quote—“Time is the ultimate motion of existence”—and a small diagram with “Beginning,” “Nothing,” and “End” all joined together by a series of arrows forming an infinite loop, like some endless Scalextric track. He’s jotted a thought next to this.
Nothing is keeping the beginning and end apart, therefore they are the same ‘event’
There is a fault in my model of the universe; all evidence points towards there being a big-bang, so how can the universe expand and contract if the end is the same as the beginning? This needs to be sorted out!
I keep flicking. Phrases like “gamma rays,” “general relativity,” and “supermassive black holes” flash and vanish amid the stream of scratchy blue handwriting. On one page he writes about how, at nine p.m. on December 14, 2001, he observed a “spectacular meteor” appear above Devon.
I was able to see a green-white streak go across the lower sky and could also see it burn up. Very lucky indeed.
There are, in and among the piles of notepads, wads of what seem to be photocopied extracts of diary entries. Stephen explains that these are copies made by the police and were used as evidence during his prosecution. When I contact the Crown Prosecution Service to ask about retrieving the original diaries, I am told they have almost certainly been destroyed.
One evening, going through the mass of papers, I find one of Stephen’s old university essays titled “Social Harm and Social Justice.” One paragraph has been underlined in black ballpoint pen.
The notion of what constitutes a crime needs to be re-evaluated in terms of the social harm it causes. In many ways power and authority are the greatest legitimising forces on Earth. They determine right from wrong, justice from injustice, business transactions from outright crime. The wealth, power and influence of global corporations and governments provides a screen to their more nefarious activities, which often go right to the heart of causing social harm and injustice….In this way what can be seen as ‘just’ in one place actually causes massive social harms in another. To truly measure what is socially just, we must look at things on a global scale.
In a short note at the end of the essay, Stephen observes that this topic covered “issues I had strong feelings about, but I’ve tried to present the discussion objectively.”
He is not joking about “strong feelings.” Stephen, on one occasion, walked breathlessly into a university lecture having come directly from the scene of a bank robbery. He took a seat toward the back of the hall and sat upright and attentive. Unlike the other students around him, however, he did not pull out a pad and pen and start taking notes. Instead, he kept his backpack on the floor, firmly between his feet. Inside it were the thousands of pounds he’d just stolen from an international banking system that was, in his view, already collapsing under the weight of its own avarice. The lecturer spoke and Stephen watched their lips but did not hear a thing.
Chapter Four
From a young age, Stephen would take the bus from Sidmouth to Exeter to spend the day at the public library. A small, pretty cathedral city, Exeter was only thirty minutes or so away, so Stephen traveled there to find a quiet corner where he could research whatever particular subject happened to be his passion at the time. Archaeology. Astronomy. String theory. Steam engines. Jet planes. Tanks. Fossils. The library is a large, mid-1960s modernist block: a long concrete rectangle three stories high with a frontage made almost entirely of glass. Bright, peaceful, and airy, it was a popular refuge for many of the city’s homeless, who would sit and read until closing time. Sometimes, the ten- or eleven-year-old Stephen would steal glances at these tired-looking men and women. When they smiled at him, his eyes would dart back to his books. This building remained one of his favorite places throughout his adolescence and into his early adulthood.
On Friday, September 7, 2007, Stephen caught the bus to Exeter and walked to the library he knew so well. He was wearing a black three-quarters-length woolen coat, blue jeans, and a white T-shirt and was carrying a white plastic bag. He stopped within view of the library, near a narrow, empty backstreet called Musgrave Row. He checked his watch. He was early. He loitered by a corner, hiding his face from passersby. He checked his watch again, then glanced up and saw a van parking on Musgrave Row. It was 5:35 p.m. He knew exactly what was going to happen next. A sturdy-looking middle-aged man got out and walked toward a secure door. This door was the service entrance to a large branch of Lloyds TSB. The man was a courier, he was operating on a timetable, and he was about to unlock the door and enter the bank. From behind his corner, Stephen watched him vanish into the building.
A minute passed. Stephen shivered. The bright early evening sun reflected on the library behind him. There was nobody around. On the other side of Musgrave Row, he could hear the sound of people walking up and down the busy high street. Suddenly, the bank service door reopened and the courier stepped out, heading back toward his van. Stephen took two shallow breaths and then stepped forward.
The courier heard the footfalls behind him and instinctively turned around. He saw a figure with his coat collar turned up and a black woolen hat pulled low over his face. He saw the barrel of a black automatic pistol. “I have a gun,” the figure told him with urgent clarity. “Let me back in.”
This would be Stephen’s first-ever bank robbery. It was a moment he had been preparing himself for. “In my mind, I couldn’t see how it could go wrong,” he says. “But of course, it did go wrong.”
* * *
—
One week earlier, Stephen had been spending the afternoon at the library. He was on the top floor, sitting at a table by one of the large windows. As his mind began to wander, he let his eyes drift to the view outside. But there was really not much to see, just part of a narrow, secluded backstreet full of bins and the service entrances of the shops and businesses that open onto Exeter High Street. The shops. And businesses. And banks. Stephen cannot remember what he was reading when he looked down and saw a man walking toward the rear entrance of a Lloyds TSB and enter. A few moments later, he saw the man leave with a bag, get back into his van, and drive away. Stephen looked at his watch and made a note of the time in his notepad. It was 5:35 p.m.
He returned to the library the following afternoon, took the same seat by the window, and waited. Eventually, the same vehicle arrived, a man got out, entered the bank via its rear entrance, and returned outside a short time later. Stephen checked his watch and made another note of the time in his notepad. It was almost exactly the same as the previous day.
The following day, Stephen was back, sitting in the same seat, looking out the same window, while doing his best to appear inconspicuous. “I was reading continuously as well as making notes of the time the guy arrived,” he says. And the timings, he began to realize with each passing day, were remarkably close. Which made them remarkably predictable. Stephen—anonymous, bespectacled, and surrounded by books in a public library—sensed an opportunity. An opportunity to help change the world. Right under his nose.
Which was how, on Friday, September 7, 2007, just after 5:35 p.m., Stephen came to find himself aiming a gun at a startled courier and demanding to be let into a bank. He says he remembers feeling anxious, but beyond that, he finds it hard to describe what was running through his head in the lead-up to the confrontation. “I am good at recalling physical details, but I am not good at recalling emotions, unfortunately. I had been just around the corner looking at my watch, and I can remember being too early because I just sort of hung about for a bit waiting for him to arrive,” he says. “Then I just stormed up to him and that was that.”
Only, that wasn’t that. Stephen’s whole plan was founded on one fatally flawed assumption. Namely, that the courier worked for Lloyds and that he would, if threatened, be able to open the security door and let Stephen into the bank, where he could then demand money from cashiers or, even better, force them to take him to “the vault,” where he could fill his bag with hundreds of thousands of pounds. But the courier, whose name was Raymond Beer, did not work for Lloyds. He was just an external delivery driver who collected mail and who had to be buzzed in like anybody else. When Stephen demanded to be let into the bank, Beer simply replied that he couldn’t. Stephen was not expecting this and hesitated for a split second. And then the very next thing he knew, the man he had just been threatening with a gun was now charging directly at him.
Raymond Beer acted bravely. But he also wasn’t stupid. He could tell that Stephen’s pistol was not real. It was, in fact, a cheap pellet gun he had bought from a sporting goods shop. “That prompted him to try and get it off me and apprehend me,” says Stephen, shrugging. “Which is fair enough.”
Beer wrenched the gun from Stephen, kneed him in the groin, kicked him in the shin, and then hit him in the face with the butt of the pistol, opening up a bloody gash on his left cheek. Despite the shock and his creeping panic, Stephen knew that even if he couldn’t force his way into the bank, he absolutely had to retrieve the gun. If he couldn’t, it would be used as evidence with which to hunt him down.
And it wasn’t just that it now had his blood—and thus DNA—on it. There was something equally incriminating about the black BB gun. In the struggle Beer may not have noticed, but taped to the handle was a piece of paper covered in writing. In planning for his first robbery, Stephen recognized that if he was going to demand access to a vault of money, then he was probably going to have to talk to several members of bank staff, possibly a group of them. As a child, Stephen had been incredibly anxious when talking to groups of people, and now as a twenty-year-old, he was no better at it. So, thinking ahead, he’d written down the things he wanted to say and stuck the little script to his gun with all the nervous care of a schoolboy preparing to cheat on an exam.
“When I thought about how things would go after entering the bank, I worried I could get so overwhelmed and distracted that I would say the wrong things,” he explains. “It wasn’t a convoluted script, just something I could glance at very quickly. ‘Armed robbery. No dye packs,’ that sort of thing.” He read online that it’s important, when robbing a bank, to make sure that no tracing devices or exploding packs of dye are placed inside the bags of cash that you have just been handed. “And I thought there was a risk of me forgetting about that, which is why I wrote it down.”
After receiving the blow to his face, Stephen retreated to the other side of Musgrave Row. He then made a decision that would have profound consequences on the rest of his life. He produced a combat knife with a seven-inch, partially serrated blade and demanded that Beer return the pellet gun.
Stephen says that he was holding the knife as Beer made a second attempt to apprehend him. “He kind of came towards me and it connected with him,” he says. “I didn’t thrust it at him, but I was obviously aware that it had come into contact with him.” He managed to disentangle himself from Beer, gave up on recovering the gun, and turned and ran, dropping his white plastic bag on the floor as he fled. Later, Stephen says he felt sick with fear that the courier had been badly injured. “I was just really scared that he had been hurt. You might think, ‘Well, he is going to say that.’ But I was.” In the moment, however, his sole focus was on fleeing the scene. His only thought was of escape.
But at that point, escape seemed incredibly unlikely. He had just attempted to rob a bank, in broad daylight, in a compact and bustling city center. He was armed and dangerous. Within a minute or two, he could hear the sound of police sirens. Then came the ominous thrum of a low-flying police helicopter. He was sprinting for his life, holding a commando knife as blood ran down one side of his face. As he fled from Musgrave Row, he ran past several members of the public.
Stephen was not running blindly, though. He sprinted past the library and toward Rougemont Gardens, a large and leafy public park containing the partial ruins of a Norman castle. He came to a shady grove of trees and thick bushes and, fighting to catch his breath, slipped into the foliage and out of sight. Concealed among the branches was a plastic bag containing a change of clothes. Stephen quickly tore himself out of the black overcoat, jeans, and T-shirt he wore for the robbery, stuffing them into the empty bag before covering it up with leaves. Pressing a handkerchief against his cheek with as much discretion as he could manage, Stephen stepped out of Rougemont Gardens and began to walk back through the city center toward the University of Exeter–St. Luke’s campus. With the campus just closing for the day, the route he took was thick with other young people coming and going. He took his place among them, walking calmly away from the city center.
The stop-start wail of sirens still echoed behind him. The helicopter was hovering in the sky, scanning the streets below. Every part of Stephen’s flight instinct was screaming at him to just get away, to break into a sprint and to not stop sprinting until he was safely amid the woods and valleys he had grown up exploring. He fought the urge, beating it down with each slow, steady step. For a few moments, he believed that the helicopter was following him. He examined the possibility and then discarded it. “I thought it was illogical because I couldn’t see how they could possibly know it was me.”
After ten minutes, Stephen turned off the busy pavement filled with students and into a public leisure center called the Pyramids. As he walked into the male changing rooms his senses were hit by the hot chlorine tang and the distant sound of splashes and screeching children. He took a key from his pocket and opened a locker. Inside was a second change of clothes. Shielding his cheek, he moved to a shower cubicle and washed the blood from his face before changing into his third outfit of the day, one that happened to include a pair of large sunglasses.
Stephen had stashed other changes of clothes around Exeter as well. One was hidden in a small park next to the city’s medieval cathedral. Another was hidden in a locker at a second nearby leisure center. He’d arranged these contingencies well in advance. He had practiced walking to them, memorizing the fastest routes. He had timed himself to see how long it would take to reach each one and to see whether he could change clothes in public without drawing attention to himself. It turned out he could.
After leaving the Pyramids, he waited at a bus stop. His cheek had started to swell up behind his oversized sunglasses. He was anxious and impatient. The bus route back to Sidmouth took him down one of Exeter’s main arterial roads, and he was concerned that he would run into police blockades or patrolling officers looking for a tallish, youngish man with a bloodied cheek.
What Stephen didn’t
know was that, at that very moment, the police had a much bigger problem than an at-large armed robber. When Stephen fled the backstreet after his altercation with Raymond Beer, he’d dropped his white plastic carrier bag. When the police arrived at the scene they looked inside. They found a device composed of two clear chambers, each filled with a strange grayish effervescent liquid and connected by an ominous jumble of electrical wires. It was a bomb. Immediately, commands were issued for the street to be cleared.
A mass evacuation got under way. Shops and businesses were quickly emptied of staff and customers. Police officers helped to usher away members of the public before cordoning off and guarding the area to make sure it remained clear. A specialist bomb disposal team arrived and, very slowly and very carefully, approached the device Stephen had left behind. The surrounding streets were now silent. An officer in a blast suit reached out to open the bag. Seagulls cawed overhead.
Finally, upon close professional examination, something became very clear: This was not a bomb. It wasn’t really…anything. Just a couple of plastic bottles filled with Coca-Cola and milk. Stephen had made it with the vague idea that it might be a useful way of distracting the police if he had to make a sudden getaway. Which was exactly what happened. “It was just what I intuitively thought a bomb would look like, from films, I suppose. I just made it from stuff around the house. Wires. Tape. Used bottles.” He had hoped that if it was noticed and taken seriously by any pursuing police officers, it might buy him a minute or two. “Although the extent that it was taken seriously I was surprised by.”
So not only did the “bomb” do exactly the job he had hoped it would, it did the job better than he had dared imagine. Detective Constable Alex Bingham, the man who would effectively lead the Devon and Cornwall Police investigations into Stephen’s crimes, says this ploy absolutely helped him to escape that day. “Yes, because our priority isn’t to catch someone who has committed a crime. It’s people’s safety. One person gets away from an armed robbery? We can risk-manage that. But doing nothing and a bomb going off and there being numerous injuries? We cannot allow that to happen.” The fact that Stephen’s DIY effort with the bottles and wires caused this amount of alarm is not something to criticize the police for. The point, says Bingham, is that homemade bombs do tend to look homemade. “If it looks like a bomb, it will be treated like a bomb,” he says. By the time the truth was uncovered by the bomb disposal team, “most of Exeter town center was starting to be evacuated.”