The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  His mother had conversations with invisible people. To a young child, this was incredibly unsettling. “As a kid, I found that really scary. Obviously, I thought there was someone else there. Sometimes my dad had to explain that there wasn’t. But I couldn’t understand.” Even if she appeared to the casual observer to be “normal,” Stephen could pick up on the slightest signs that his mother was, yet again, beginning to slip away from him. “I mean, living with someone you love and who is your mum, you notice a change in voice tone or saying things that didn’t make any sense. While it wasn’t visible to other people, they were visible to me.”

  The fact that his mother was usually so loving and gentle only made the pain more acute when that loving and gentle mother would vanish. It wasn’t just that she was behaving oddly or hearing voices. It’s that she would look at Stephen as though she had never seen him before in her life. “When she got ill, our connection just evaporated,” he says. “So if anything I would have preferred it if she was less kind when she was well. Because then it wouldn’t have affected me so much when she was ill.”

  Jenny, like Stephen, wrote poems. Her verses are airy and gentle, full of trees, woods, animals, and nature. They are often melancholic, sometimes hopeful, though always with an undercurrent of soft, gentle pleading that can verge on the eerie. Her schizophrenia is constantly alluded to, as are her feelings of isolation and inability to connect with those around her. One such short poem is called “Drop Out?”

  Drop Out?

  Out of where?

  In a land of dreams

  which are apart from your world

  Your world exists like mine

  Your reality is strong and hard

  My reality is weak

  I cannot be so real

  because reality frightens me

  Please don’t condemn me

  for what I am…

  Eyes watching, waiting

  in the corners of my mind

  Piercing, striking…

  then retreating steadily

  when they find nothing is there

  * * *

  —

  Stephen remembers his mother being forcibly institutionalized. “The one characteristic of her illness that I remember the most was how it could come and go. For months she could be well, then for no apparent reason that I knew then, she lapsed, and had to be hospitalized,” he says. “Several times the police came and dragged her off.” He remembers the doctors and psychiatrists who would treat her, but as far as he was concerned, they were just as bad as the police. The former were taking his mother away. The latter were keeping her from him. He began to see authority in a negative way. Many years later, during the height of his crime spree, there was a part of Stephen that enjoyed the fact that he was, in his mind at least, making the police look foolish. It was a measure of revenge for the times they’d taken his mother away.

  * * *

  —

  Stephen says that his father, Peter, was a stubborn man, argumentative and prone to shouting. The first few times we speak about his father, I come away with the impression that this stubbornness was somehow plucky and pugnacious, a simple function of the fact that he seemed to be the one holding his small family together. He was the one dealing with everyone from disgruntled neighbors to psychiatric doctors. He was the one always trying to provide Stephen with some semblance of normalcy, going away on father-son holidays while Jenny was institutionalized or taking him on trips to the local observatory in Sidmouth as Stephen’s fascination with the cosmos developed. He was the one who, ultimately, chose to marry and then start a family, at the age of fifty, with a schizophrenic woman. To do any of these things, a degree of obstinacy probably doesn’t hurt.

  Stephen had, initially, talked about how his father had also seemed a generous man, always on the side of the underdog, insisting on picking up hitchhikers they’d pass on Devon country roads or allowing the Samaritans in for a chat “even when me and my mother asked him not to.” Again, it’s hard to hear all this about a man who would sometimes be forced to jump into a car with his young son in order to look for his missing wife and not feel that, ultimately, he must have been decent. Difficult, perhaps. But decent.

  But the more Stephen—and others—discuss Peter Jackley, the more this image changes. His stubbornness seems to morph into more malign characteristics. On the one hand, he could be controlling, manipulative, and arrogant. On the other, he could be needy, wheedling, and eager to ingratiate himself to others. Stephen says that his parents saw a lot of a local couple, Ken and Judy, who were born-again Christians, but that otherwise they did not attract many friends. There seemed to be something about Peter’s character that just made some people uncomfortable. “He was vile,” says Angela Thompson, flatly. “He would come into school and I would have these meetings with him. I didn’t like being in a room alone with him. He was horrible. A horrible man,” she says emphatically. “He was creepy. He would touch your knee. He was horrible.”

  “There was just something really off about him,” says Ben Weaver. “Even as a kid I remember feeling uncomfortable with him. I remember my stepmother asking, ‘Has he touched you?’ Because there was that kind of weird vibe from him. He never did. He was always very, very kind to me.”

  It had always seemed to Stephen, though, that his father was very good with people: that he appeared able to act with a confidence and assurance that seemed alien and impossible to Stephen himself. But he also talks, consistently, of how “controlling” and “domineering” his father could be. Where the truth lies is a hard thing to gauge, and for a couple of reasons. For a start, when asked for examples of his father’s controlling nature, Stephen tends to cite things that don’t seem that big of a deal. He complains that when his father carried out DIY work around their small home—such as putting together their odd jerry-rigged kitchen extension—he would allow Stephen to help only under close supervision. “Everything had to be done ‘just right’ and his way,” he remembers with frustration. But this, I try to explain to Stephen on more than one occasion, isn’t really that weird. If you’re going to let your child help with a household construction project or allow them to have a go with some power tools, you are, as a parent, going to want to supervise them closely. It’s not being controlling. It’s being responsible.

  What’s more, Ben Weaver says that as Stephen entered adolescence, it was clear that he “ruled the roost” within his house. He kept his own hours. He was allowed, it seemed, to come and go as he pleased. “I think he became aware quite quickly that he could do whatever he wanted and within reason it would be allowed to happen.” Stephen would sometimes try to make weekend plans with Ben, and Ben would have to explain that his parents had said he couldn’t spend his entire Saturday going on a hike because they had made other plans. “And he would be quite surprised that my parents would impose these limits on me.”

  So why does Stephen insist that his father was controlling? Part of the answer may lie in a phenomenon that has been observed across a number of studies involving the children of a schizophrenic parent. Specifically, that it is not uncommon for boys or young men with a schizophrenic mother to report having a difficult relationship with their fathers because they believe them to be too authoritarian. It’s not hard to imagine why this may be the case: As the father in this situation, you are often the one who must initiate the hospitalization of the mother. You are the one having to do the bulk of the day-to-day parenting while your wife is either physically absent because she has been institutionalized or emotionally absent because she is at home but so highly medicated that she is barely there at all. Either way, she’s not telling anyone that they can’t help with the DIY. So either your son perceives you to be controlling relative to his mother, or, when faced with the stress and chaos of a schizophrenic wife and a family to raise, you do actually end up being more controlling than the avera
ge father. You can’t really win.

  Weaver, when sharing his recollections of Stephen’s family life, makes what seems like a strange observation. “This is going to sound like an awful thing to say,” he begins. “But I always got the impression that the father liked the fact that Jenny was ill.”

  By which he means, for all the upheaval her schizophrenia could cause, in the long run, it made her easy to control. Weaver remembers Stephen’s parents having arguments—or at least, he remembers the feeling of just having walked in on an unresolved dispute—and something telling him that Peter was deliberately instigating the confrontations as a means of pushing his wife toward some kind of breaking point. “Sometimes I wondered if the argument that would then cause an episode were engineered by the father so that she would go away. They would fight over something, and she would then be sent away for treatment and come back high on whatever meds they had given her. But malleable.”

  “I would agree with that,” says Stephen. “And I have many times established that connection to when my mum got ill. Yes, she did have mental illness. But how much of it was exacerbated or brought on by my father’s behavior? I think it played a big part in her being hospitalized and possibly exacerbating the schizophrenia.”

  Money was another constant source of tension at Manstone Avenue. Because of her illness, Stephen’s mother received some state benefits. His father worked occasionally, but during his periods of depression, work was impossible. Jenny did have a small allowance left to her by her parents and which continued after they died, but her habit of buying things and just handing them out to strangers meant that her husband would hide the credit cards from her. As with so much of Peter’s behavior, this can be interpreted in two very different ways. Was he protecting her? Or was he controlling her? Or was it just convenient that one felt very much like the other?

  * * *

  —

  Peter’s first marriage—the failure of which ultimately caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown—took place in the late 1960s. Though born in London, he’d found himself living and working in the north of England, married to a Yorkshirewoman and running pubs in the Lancashire towns of Preston and Blackpool. In 1969, they had a daughter, Lisa. Ben Weaver remembers that there was always a small photograph of Lisa in the Jackleys’ living room, although he also remembers that when he asked who she was, nobody seemed to want to talk about her.

  Lisa—Lisa Watson, Stephen’s half sister—is today a mother of two. She lives on the Wirral, near Liverpool, and speaks with a gentle singsong Merseyside accent. She says that she doesn’t remember growing up with Peter as a father for the simple reason that her parents’ marriage ended when she was two years old.

  “One of the reasons my mum and dad divorced was because, I don’t know what job he had at the time but he had lost his job,” she explains. “And he didn’t tell her. He would pretend to go to work. My mum didn’t have a car so she would get on the bus, take me to nursery, then go to work. It would have been hard to tell her, but it would have made my mum’s life easier. But he didn’t tell her. He was quite selfish in some ways like that. Lots of things happened like that, and my mum, who is a very strong, independent woman, just wouldn’t put up with it anymore.”

  Lisa fell out of contact with her father during her teenage years, but during her twenties she recommenced her visits to Devon, by which point Stephen had been born and grown into a young boy. “He seemed like a happy little kid, but I did feel sorry for him. His parents were quite old and I thought it would be difficult to meet other kids because of his circumstances,” she says, meaning that the Jackleys were notably insular and antisocial. “I just felt that the way my dad and Jenny were, they wouldn’t encourage him to mix with other children or take him to clubs or things like that. I think he was quite isolated.”

  She was right. By the time Stephen was at secondary school, he found socialization virtually impossible. “I wanted friends,” he says. “It wasn’t that I disliked people. It was just very hard. A part of me was also quite scared that if I did make a friend, I would only lose them through moving house. Or they would come back to my house and they would see the state of my mum and my dad. That was the one thing with Ben Weaver—that didn’t seem to bother him, so I guess that is why he remained a friend. I’m not sure why.”

  Because of his mother’s schizophrenia, Stephen was placed under the care of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, who monitored how he was coping with her illness. He was seen by a succession of child psychiatrists and social workers who all did their best to encourage him to open up about how he was feeling. “Sometimes they took me out to different places, to do activities like walking, going to shops and cafés. I think they just wanted me to talk, to get me to say stuff. Emotions,” he says, a little impatiently. As a child, Stephen was instinctively wary of psychiatrists thanks to his experience of them in relation to his mother, and because his father had a habit of dismissing them as “quacks.” He remembers, “They just dug and dug and dug. They were not satisfied unless you told them everything about how you were feeling.”

  He was eventually diagnosed with a social phobia. Then, in 2000, at the age of fourteen, Stephen was made the subject of a child protection plan, which is a system devised by a local government authority to help keep a vulnerable young person safe. This was for a combination of factors: the stress that his mother’s illness was having on him, the increasingly fraught relationship he had with his father, and his inability to cope with school. Stephen’s medical records include a report of a child protection plan meeting on October 23, 2000. It includes an observation by one of Stephen’s teachers, which is recounted in the report:

  The teacher gave a disturbing account of how Stephen does not interact with people at all to the extent that he will not sit opposite them. Stephen never utters a single word to any of the youngsters. Fellow people are not unkind to Stephen and are very patient with him. If people brush past Stephen this is dreadful for him. He will utter abnormal comments about other children, for example ‘they sit behind me and they hit my chair’. Stephen also refuses to sit in the dining room on most occasions saying he does not wish to eat. Staff are finding it very difficult to cope with this disturbing and distressing behaviour. Stephen is slightly more relaxed with women teachers. He cannot bear any shouting. When Stephen has attended lessons he has displayed elements of bizarre behaviour. This consists of killing ants even when not in existence, turning around in circles in the classroom, pacing up and down, banging his head against walls and breaking his spectacles.

  In a letter to Stephen’s general practitioner, dated October 21, 1999, Julia Lee, the head of year nine at Sidmouth College, echoed many of these concerns. Stephen, she wrote, appeared depressed. He fell asleep in lessons. He twitched and scratched the desks and floors. “On 19 October 1999, he had to be taken to the health centre by the school health sister after losing control in school, snapping his glasses and banging his head against the wall, tearing his hair out, mumbling and shaking.”

  That same day, wrote Lee, Stephen expressed a desire to get away from his home for a while. Angela Thompson, the teacher who spent so much time looking after Stephen at school, says that Stephen’s mother seemed to agree this was a good idea. “One day she came and we had a meeting with the head teacher, and I can remember her saying to me, ‘Could he come and live with you?’ I said, sorry, no, I don’t think that would be appropriate. But she said, ‘He would be happy if he came to live with you.’ ”

  Throughout this period, Stephen’s great fear was that he, too, suffered from schizophrenia. It was a fear shared by his parents, although whenever the possibility was raised, they were assured that their son was not schizophrenic. “But part of me would have been relieved to have had it,” says Stephen. “Because then I would have understood why I wasn’t so good with social interactions. But everyone I saw was adamant I didn’t.”

 
Uncommunicative, anxious, and alone, around the age of twelve, Stephen took to writing down his thoughts. He acquired a black hardback notepad with a red spine and wrote “Stephen Jackley, Writing Book” on the front cover. From this point on, Stephen kept a regular journal, writing for nobody but himself. As he got older, these writings would take the form of diary entries reflecting on the events of the day, but to begin with, he seemed to jot down whatever was on his mind. On the inside front page of that first black “writing book” he elaborated: “Ideas, stories, notes, poems, handwriting practices, theories and other things.”

  It’s impossible to neatly characterize the contents of this first book, which all roll into one another in a flow of free association. They are equal parts touching, funny, strange, mundane, and, occasionally, unsettling. He wrote a short poem about the family pet, a yellow Labrador named Hammy, in which he declared his love for the dog but accepted that it would one day die. He noted various astronomical distances. The Sun is 93 million miles from Earth. Jupiter is 600 million miles from Earth. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.2 million light-years from Earth. He wrote episodic fantasy stories about a hero named Memo and his companion, a creature called Mingo Platypus. He practiced his cursive handwriting relentlessly, copying out the alphabet many times and reproducing certain sentences and phrases over and over again.