The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  Stephen’s treatment was neither accidental nor arbitrary. The constant searches, the cell moves, the disorientation and despair…this had all been carefully preplanned by a tall, thickset man with a dark goatee. Mark Potanas was, at the time, chief of security at SSCF. He has a deep voice and a cool, methodical way of describing the demands of the role. Stephen, he explains, had been moved to the Hole at the specific behest of the director of facilities for the Vermont Department of Prisons. Stephen was an inmate who was under investigation by federal agencies in the United States as well as by police forces overseas, had been flagged by the U.S. Marshals as a potential escape risk, and had been found removing the caulking around his cell window as well as being in possession of a contraband razor blade. Potanas says that, in advance of Stephen’s arrival at SSCF, he established a program for him.

  “The plan I put in place was very simple. It was not to allow him to become comfortable in his cell. And by ‘comfortable,’ I mean not staying in one cell for any period of time. So I gave instructions to the supervisory staff that his cell assignment was to be moved randomly at least three times a week. So this was to happen at any time. Maybe he would come out from a shower or his recreation period and find all his belongings in a new cell.” This, says Potanas, was to prevent Stephen from “working” on any one cell over a period of days, whether that be attempting to loosen window frames or conceal items that could be used as weapons. “There is a certain psychological aspect to it, of course,” Potanas admits. “When you are not allowed to stay in the same bed for more than a couple of nights, I imagine he was constantly thinking about what would happen.”

  Still, he says, it was important not to emphasize the fact that Stephen was subject to extra measures. “We tried to avoid giving any inmate any kind of superstar status. Obviously, other inmates knew he was getting a kind of special treatment because they weren’t getting it themselves. So the security staff, the supervisors, were aware of his history.”

  On one occasion, Stephen was made to share a small exercise space with a large man who, the guards gleefully informed him, was a known “snapper,” someone who is in segregation for raping other prisoners. Stephen spent thirty minutes awkwardly doing squats and push-ups while doing his best to keep the tall, silent man in his line of vision. Guards occasionally peered in and sniggered. Sometimes, depending on which cell he found himself consigned to, Stephen could press his face to the barred window at night and catch glimpses of the stars in the night sky. He strained to identify constellations. To find comforting familiarity in the heavens above as everything around him seemed in constant, terrifying flux.

  * * *

  —

  In 1912, the British astronomer Norman Lockyer won support for the construction of an observatory on a wooded hill overlooking Sidmouth. Lockyer had, among many other things, discovered the element helium, and had retired to the Devon coast after a distinguished career. When he died in 1920, the white one-story facility with four large gray domes was renamed in his honor and became home to an amateur astronomical society.

  It was to the Norman Lockyer Observatory that a shy and socially isolated Stephen would often retreat after moving to the town. Stephen had always experienced obsessive interests as a child. But astronomy would prove to be the most profound and long-lasting of all, doing more to shape him and his view of the world than any other. He practiced his handwriting by copying out words like “Milky Way galaxy” and “Andromeda.” On the door of his family’s small living room, he tacked a poster of the Horsehead Nebula, a photograph of a beautiful and eerie intermolecular dust cloud, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, swathed in pink and gray and punctured by the iridescent light of countless stars.

  In one journal entry, dated January 6, 1995, he wrote about a visit to the observatory and how he had looked at the Orion Nebula. Six months earlier, at the age of eight, Stephen had been at the observatory to witness the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact Jupiter. Peering through one of the giant lenses, he observed the surface of our solar system’s largest planet and was left awestruck by the sight of the gas giant’s red-brown atmosphere being whipped by supersonic winds. An object 600 million miles away and observable in fine detail from the top of a hill a mile or so away from his council house in a quiet corner of Devon.

  For Stephen, it was not a simple feeling of euphoria and wonder. The Shoemaker-Levy impact was the first time humanity had been able to directly observe an extraterrestrial collision: in this case, huge pieces of rock and ice more than a half mile in diameter slamming into a planet at 134,000 miles per hour, disrupting the gas giant’s atmosphere and leaving prominent scars on the surface, visible for months afterward. Stephen saw this entire event play out before his very eyes, and as he traveled back down the hill to his home, he felt leaden with existential dread. What if that had been Earth instead of Jupiter? How many giant chunks of rock are out there, flying through space at incredible speeds? Life on this planet had come close to eradication after an impact before. Why not again? The prospect, to Stephen, didn’t just seem possible. It was probable. Inevitable.

  It was a “seed of doom” planted in his mind. The more he learned about the vastness of the cosmos, and the more he was able to directly observe everything from the rings of Saturn to the very heart of galaxies, the less significant Earth seemed. We were vulnerable, and life on this planet could not be more precarious, he concluded. It was sheer chance that we had ended up orbiting the Sun at a distance that allowed humanity to evolve. The smallest shift in this orbit would mean the end of everything. Death by heat. Death by cold. He began to read about the phenomenon of geomagnetic reversal, random events whereby a planet’s magnetic north and magnetic south swap positions. He visited the Exeter library and borrowed books detailing theories about how a magnetic reversal led to the loss of Mars’s protective atmosphere, stripping life from its surface and leaving it a barren wasteland.

  He read about how there have been an estimated 183 reversals on Earth over the past 83 million years, and how they have been linked to mass extinctions. The last such reversal took place 780,000 years ago. When will the next one occur? It had to happen at some point. So why was nobody talking about it? Why did nobody seem to want to acknowledge what to Stephen was becoming increasingly clear: that life on Earth is terrifyingly fragile? That we were teetering so close to annihilation that it gave him a head rush just thinking about it. When he was hiding from his teachers in the long grass field next to his school, or walking by himself along the banks of the River Exe, or sitting alone in his tiny bedroom at night, these were the thoughts that pulsed through his head.

  The danger wasn’t just from stray chunks of space rock, either. As Stephen entered adolescence he began to understand that the greatest dangers to humanity are manmade. Nuclear weapons. Greenhouse gases. A shortsighted disregard for nature in the pursuit of productivity. On October 9, 1998, the twelve-year-old Stephen produced an untitled poem for National Poetry Day. It was written in blue fountain pen in his determined cursive.

  At a time the world had

  beautiful trees sparkling water

  and fascinating animals but

  then a species arrived they

  cut down the trees and built

  horrible factories they made

  the water black and smelly

  they polluted the air with

  there smoking choking fumes

  and they killed and hunted

  the other animals how could

  a species do this?

  the species was

  Man!

  These concerns only deepened as Stephen moved into his teens. His mother still had Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament pamphlets from the 1960s and ’70s, and decorated their home with pebbles painted with the CND logo, as well as with her own pencil sketches of hedgehogs and paintings of trees. At night Stephen looked up at the sky and wondered why,
despite the overwhelming odds in favor of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life among the billions of stars in our galaxy, humanity had never made contact with an alien race. He read about the Great Filter theory, which solves this paradox by positing that all advanced races at some point acquire the technological means to utterly destroy themselves. And that most galactic races unwittingly do this before they are able to master interstellar travel. Hence the lack of alien contact. He wrote:

  This concept worries me. Do all races destroy themselves when they reach our technological level? This may be a ‘natural defense’ against beings advancing further and further until they have the power of gods.

  On the final page of one diary, Stephen wrote that he believed that humanity will destroy itself in 2039. It will be, he concluded, “the year of self-annihilation.”

  * * *

  —

  For all his pessimism, though, the teenage Stephen never descended into nihilism. In fact, he did the opposite. His appreciation of nature—of existence itself—intensified. His long, solitary walks around the wilds of Devon produced in Stephen a kind of bliss state. The plants, trees, birds, streams, fossils, and rock formations all took on an almost spiritual significance. He appreciated, when viewed on a cosmic scale, how miraculous it was that the world around him even existed.

  “Nature is perfect,” he scrawled in his diary at age sixteen. “When you gaze up at the night sky you are looking at the most beautiful thing anyone will ever see. It is the universe, all that there is. Galaxies, stars, time, everything.”

  He developed an overwhelming urge to travel, to see the world beyond Devon, to escape the stress and chaos of life at Manstone Avenue and enjoy the planet while he was still able. He wrote a short poem in his journal called “I Want.”

  I want to climb to the top of trees.

  I want to swim in the deep blue sea.

  I want to smell mint in the forest.

  And I want to lie in the desert at night looking up at the stars.

  He spent hours looking at the globe, tracing journeys he might one day make. He frustrated his math teachers by spending lessons drawing maps in his workbooks. Stephen allowed himself to imagine that when he was older, he would play a part in helping the Earth to avoid ecological disaster. To sidestep the Great Filter. He imagined cities built underwater and the colonization of distant stars. To Stephen, this was not science fiction. This had to happen. It was necessary forward planning.

  * * *

  —

  From the age of sixteen, Stephen found himself becoming more and more angry about the state of the world. He began to view his existential concerns through a social lens. “Why does ‘the greed of the few outweigh the needs of the many’?—this seems to be what the human race has lived by,” he wrote in one journal entry. “As certain individuals or groups gain power, they eventually abuse it….Power is the medium of corruption, all power in the hands of anyone is bound to corrupt them to a certain extent.”

  During their long country walks together, he pontificated to Ben Weaver about these things. He started to find the existence of poverty and the divide between the rich and poor intolerable. In hindsight, Weaver wonders whether this was a result of Stephen’s gradual realization that he came from a poor family. “I think a lot of the poverty stuff came from his father, because they didn’t have much money, and there just wasn’t really a way for him to get work.”

  Stephen held forth on these issues as the two teenage boys rambled across fields or sat in front of Stephen’s PC playing strategy games like Command and Conquer and Civilization long into the evening. “It always seemed like there were only absolutes for him,” Weaver remembers. “There was a right answer and a wrong answer, and gray areas never existed.” Stephen’s concern for humanity always struck his friend as sincere but also detached somehow. “When he talked about issues like poverty he had empathy for people, but only on an abstract level. It was like ‘this is happening and it’s bad.’ But on an individual level, he wasn’t really able to have empathy for other people. He wasn’t able to relate to others on that level. There was this emotional barrier.”

  Which I don’t think is necessarily true. It may have seemed like that to his friend because of the way Stephen expressed his emotions in person. But Stephen’s concern for those worse off than him goes beyond the abstract. In a red spiral-bound notebook, seventeen-year-old Stephen wrote a meandering prose poem about a homeless man who approached him in Exeter that evening, asking for some spare change. Stephen described how he walked past him without responding, but then turned around to see the man ask other pedestrians for whatever they could spare. Seeing this scene play out in the third-person, Stephen was horrified. Not just by the pathos of it, but by his own hypocrisy in simply putting his head down and striding past the outstretched hand.

  How can one have the heart and soul to refuse? Yet in my rush I did just this, while in my bag was tucked pounds, pennies galore. Why did I not stop? Guilt wracks my heart even now. Pray that this man approaches me again.

  Knowing the right thing to do in these situations—when faced with poverty or somebody in immediate need—was something that Stephen struggled with. He knew it was right to give money to those who needed it, but it seemed to him that there was no perfect way of doing so. “I can often remember that feeling, the feeling that I did something wrong, whether it be not giving money to someone on the street, or not giving them enough, or giving it to the wrong person because I’d then pass someone further down the street who could have needed it more,” he remembers. It was a dirty feeling that, as the years passed, never quite left him. If he was ever going to make a real difference, he was going to need more than his own pounds and pennies. Much, much more.

  Chapter Seven

  On September 8, 2007, Stephen woke from a restless sleep and winced. The area beneath his left eye was swollen and painful, and there was a rust-red bloodstain on his pillow. He sat up, touched his face, and quickly looked around. He was in his bedroom, on Manstone Avenue, back in Sidmouth. Downstairs, he could hear a kettle boil and the faint sound of a radio news station. As everything rushed into place, a deep lurch in the pit of his stomach pushed him back to the mattress. He had failed. After all his planning, after all his belief, he had failed to force his way into the Lloyds TSB opposite the Exeter public library and make off with the hundreds of thousands of pounds he was convinced he would. Yes, he had succeeded in using his stashes of clothes and his fake bomb to help him escape the police. But by allowing his replica pistol to be taken from him by the courier he had attempted to ambush and who then promptly used it to bust open his cheek, he knew he had provided the police with a sample of his DNA. He could have cried with frustration. The same blood covering his pillowcase would, by now, be in a forensic laboratory. It would be sampled, analyzed, and kept on a police database. A sword of Damocles, hanging over him forever.

  He had found the whole thing terrifying; the act of approaching Beer with his replica gun had felt like a queasy out-of-body experience. He had not wanted to do it, but felt he had to do it, like a young man volunteering for war because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t. “I felt like it was a duty,” he says. “I felt as if…I don’t know how to describe it, but I felt I had this obligation. And that by not doing it I would be failing people and failing myself as well. That was the mindset I had.”

  Stephen told himself that he couldn’t lose momentum now. Which was why, at 9:15 p.m. that same day, he burst into a branch of Ladbrokes betting shop on South Street in the Exeter city center. He entered through a rear door that he’d accessed via a backstreet.

  He pushed open the door and strode across the empty shop floor toward two startled male staff members who were counting up for the night. Stephen threw a small, hard object at the wall behind the men, then quickly rushed toward them. He was wearing a black ski mask, a black leather jacket, and black glov
es. He was holding a commando knife and a hammer. He shouted and screamed at them, instructing them to empty their tills. He forced the branch’s assistant manager to fill his backpack with cash before rushing out the same rear door. The whole thing was over in about ninety seconds.

  Stephen walked briskly. It was Saturday night, dusk had passed, and the streets were busy with people going to pubs and restaurants. Groups of young men and women shouted and laughed with one another. He sprinted away from the area surrounding the betting shop and into some gardens adjacent to a number of flats. Just like the day before, he had already planted a change of clothes. Streetlights cast a dull glow, but it was dark and quiet enough for him to tear out of his clothes and into some new ones without being seen. Walking back through Exeter, Stephen kept his eyes on the ground and tried to regulate his breathing. The sounds of shouting revelers and half a dozen different upbeat pop songs blaring out of half a dozen different pubs assaulted his ears. But he breathed deeply and sat at his bus stop, impassive and anonymous. An hour later, he was home. His parents were sleeping. In his room, he took the cash out of his backpack and counted it. He had stolen exactly £886. He put it in a large envelope, which he would later stash in a tree. Then he climbed into bed. And fell asleep.

  By Monday, September 10, 2007, the Exeter Express and Echo was carrying stories about the attempted Lloyds TSB robbery as well as the successful Ladbrokes heist. Within these reports, the Devon and Cornwall Police made appeals for information, offering descriptions of the suspect who was, in both cases, described as slim, young, and around five feet ten inches tall. Stephen was relieved to read that Raymond Beer had not been hurt, the courier cheerfully describing to the Express and Echo how he’d disarmed the masked man before forcing him to flee.