by Ben Machell
“I remember watching everything about Northern Rock, but it wasn’t a revelation to me,” Stephen says. The constant news coverage of what was being referred to as a “credit crunch” simply stoked his belief. Seeing other people becoming angry at what was happening and, increasingly, expressing their disgust at the banking system’s recklessness and greed made him feel even more righteous.
“There was going to be a recession. And because the recession will have been caused by the banks themselves, I was justified in what I was doing. That’s the thinking I used both morally and logically. That these institutions are effectively stealing the wealth of the world from other people. And if I stole from them and gave it back, in theory, morally you can’t say that’s wrong. I couldn’t see how anybody could say that it was wrong.”
Chapter Twelve
In late September 2007, Stephen caught the train north and arrived at the small, functional campus of the University of Worcester. A former teacher-training center and higher education college, Worcester has grown in reputation but it’s fair to say it’s not an elite educational establishment. He took his bags to his new room. If greeted, he nodded and muttered a reply, but kept walking, eyes down. There was still a bruise on his face from where Raymond Beer had struck him with the butt of his own pistol.
Once he was settled, he sat at a small writing table and opened a new notebook. He picked up a pen and began to write on the first page.
This book belongs to Stephen George Dennis Jackley
Flat 5, Room 5
Wyvern Hall
University of Worcester
Henwick Grove
Worcester
WR2 6AJ
The contents are dangerous. Do not read.
He also included his mobile telephone number. The fact that Stephen wrote his full name, address, and contact information at the start of a book in which he would minutely detail over a half dozen separate crimes is worth considering. Why go through all the care and effort of planning elaborate Carl Gugasian–style robberies with planted caches of clothes and multiple planned escape routes only to then just confess to everything, in your own handwriting, in a notebook you’ve made absolutely clear belongs to you? From a rational perspective it just doesn’t make any sense. Only, the possibility of capture didn’t occur to him at all. “I just didn’t see that eventuality,” he says. “It didn’t even cross my mind.”
This apparent contradiction, between extreme naïveté and surprising efficiency, quickly became a hallmark of Stephen’s criminal career. On the one hand, he absolutely shut himself off psychologically from the prospect of failure or arrest. On the other, he was able to apply a robust, clear-eyed logic to the question of “How might you successfully rob a bank?” He had already determined that it was perfectly possible and far more straightforward than most people allowed themselves to believe. On an intellectual level, you don’t really need anything more than common sense. The hard part—the part that makes most people tell themselves that a bank heist is impossible—is having the courage to actually do it. To pull on the ski mask and go in there with the replica gun and come out with a backpack full of cash.
Stephen had that courage. By the time he arrived at Worcester, he had already proved that to himself. There was a part of him that wanted to prove it to Rebecca, too. He says that he kept in contact with her via email and phone calls, hinting of his actions. “I didn’t tell her directly, but she knew where I was coming from. She knew my intentions. So I sort of said it in a way like ‘I am continuing with this mission to alleviate inequality,’ and she knew exactly what I meant by that. I didn’t tell her that I had robbed X bank on X date; it wasn’t like that. It was more the sense of, ‘I am continuing with this until I reach the goal,’ which was the £100K.”
In his heart, Stephen knew that the chance to have any kind of meaningful relationship with Rebecca had died when he opted to return to England rather than go with her to Colorado. He describes a coolness setting in as the reality of their situation became clear and he began to entertain the possibility that she was not the long-awaited soulmate he had been dreaming of. “Also, logically, how is it going to work? She’s in America, I’m in England and now I’ve made this choice, I can’t just suddenly fly over and stay there,” he says, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. “I was quite paranoid as well. That she had already met someone and just hadn’t told me.”
With each passing day, he sank deeper into a conviction that he was “at war” with a callous capitalistic society that was destroying the planet and ruining lives for no good reason. Everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of this. A form of confirmation bias set in. In the university library, he read the work of American academic, environmentalist, and activist David C. Korten. In his book When Corporations Rule the World, Korten writes about the need to rebalance the power of multinational corporations with environmental sustainability and what he describes as “people-centered development.”
For the sociology modules of his course, Stephen read the work of German political economist Max Weber, who built on the ideas of Karl Marx and described how exploitation is hardwired into capitalism, a system that demands social stratification, a division of the weak and the powerful, the haves and the have-nots. He made pages and pages of notes. He thought of the children sifting through rubbish heaps in Cambodia, the barefoot Thai villagers who fed him and helped him get back to his holiday lodge. He thought of the anxious pensioners queuing to retrieve their savings from Northern Rock. He thought of himself, and of his mother and father, in their shabby little council house on Manstone Avenue. He thought about the Organisation constantly. “I was so obsessive. It was the sole thing on my mind.”
Although, this does not seem strictly true. Rather, a kind of cognitive dissonance was at play. Yes, he was committed to becoming the new Robin Hood he felt he had no choice but to become. But he also seemed to know that university represented his best chance at quietly slipping into the conventional, carefree existence enjoyed by millions of young people all over the world. Like everyone else around him, he wanted to earn qualifications, make connections, and experience a rite of passage.
In his new university journal he reiterated this to himself via a short series of bullet points.
3 reasons for staying here come to mind.
To gain a degree
To meet friends—or better, a soul mate
To have a ‘base’ to commit crime and gain money and experience
True to his word, for the first week or so of term, Stephen did his very best to socialize. Wyvern Hall was a small, modern low-rise complex with a series of shared kitchens and communal living areas. Stephen discovered that most of his immediate neighbors were Chinese. “They were quite nice, and they used to make curries and we sat down to eat on a couple of occasions,” he says. More difficult was getting on with his fellow British students. Within days, the majority of the freshmen in Wyvern Hall had fallen into a close group, piling round to one another’s flats for drinks before heading out to the student union disco.
Louise Alice Cawood arrived at the University of Worcester from Leeds to study physical education, and quickly found herself a part of this Wyvern Hall mob. “We all knew each other and we would all go off in groups together, to do laundry or organize stuff,” she remembers. “It was like a little community within the university.”
Stephen, though, never found himself part of this instant community. “He was relatively anonymous. Which I suppose in a way is kind of strange, because everyone else in our halls all knew each other,” Cawood continues, frowning. “We knew what degrees we all did, we knew which friendship circles we all hung out with, which societies we were in and stuff. With him, nobody really asked, I suppose. But he was never there for any of us to ask. I never saw him in town or anywhere else on a night out. Even when we had nights at the student union, I never remember seei
ng him. After the first couple of weeks, people just forgot he was there.” It occurs to her, now that she thinks about it, that Stephen often seemed to receive a large number of packages and parcels. But beyond that minor detail? “He just melted into the background.”
It’s not that Stephen wasn’t trying. It was just that he very quickly concluded that he had nothing in common with the students he encountered. His sensitivity to loud noises was a massive hindrance, and his Asperger’s meant that, for all his experience in Australia and Dechen Chöling, he still struggled with small talk, social cues, body language, and jokes. He was struck by how little his fellow students seemed to know or care about the wider world and the threats it faced. Cawood admits that, among the Wyvern Hall group, an impending financial crisis and the impact of climate change were not hot topics. “I don’t really think it crossed our minds. Mostly because we were at the start of university. Everything was about what outfit are you going to wear that evening and stuff like that. We were in a bubble.”
Stephen joined the university’s kayaking society, but when he went out on a pub crawl with them, he was struck not just by their ignorance, but by their callousness. “I remember they were laughing and joking about a homeless guy, and I said, ‘Why the fuck would you do that?’ It was like…there’s something amiss here. There’s something they don’t get and I do. Because of that, I didn’t go to that group anymore.”
Instead, he kept to himself. He stayed in his room, planning his next move and doing his best to keep abreast of the police investigations into the crimes he had already committed.
Read on the internet (I’m continually searching for ‘armed robbery’ related articles) found the police in Exeter are still pursuing the failed Lloyds-TSB heist. Damn it! But it seems they’ve got no clear CCTV images of me.
He drifted off on his own to explore Worcester. He quickly realized that it bore many similarities to Exeter. Both are small cathedral cities with populations of less than 150,000. Both are surrounded by miles of rolling countryside. As he walked around the small city center, scouting for financial institutions he could target, he found himself passing the same department stores and the same billboards advertising the same brands. A historic English town suffocating in a corporate stranglehold. He looked in shopwindows and saw mannequins wearing clothes stitched by children in sweatshops to be sold to people who did not need them. He saw banks cheerfully offering hardworking people loans and the promise of stability and support while quietly making billions from their debt and stress.
The world is being consumed. Eaten up by the greed of an elite few (what David Korten calls the ‘stratos dwellers’, who live in luxury across a vast gap that most of humanity can never cross). These are the controllers. These are the rulers. I saw it today: people’s faces downcast and suspicious, brand shops pumping propaganda, market researchers assailing shoppers, beggars on street corners. And high up watches a camera, like the demented eye of a vulture, each lens seeking out some infraction—a possibility of a rule breaker. All for what? To protect? To maintain order?
In another entry he wrote:
To take just a drop hoarded by the rich and scatter but a little to the poor. Is it justice to keep millions languishing in poverty as a few hundred enjoy excessive wealth?
He asked himself this question again and again. One day, he approached a lecturer who had just given a talk about how society’s attitudes toward crime change over time. “We were talking about how crime is relative and how crimes today were not necessarily crimes in the past, and how crimes of the past could be regarded as positive things in the future, and how ultimately crime is about harm, and that if you prevent harm, it is the opposite of crime,” he remembers, talking briskly. “That kind of reasoning.”
It is quite possible that the lecturer who’d just been buttonholed by an earnest undergraduate enjoyed the conversation. Perhaps they felt flattered by the attention Stephen had clearly been paying to the themes discussed. What they could not have known as the young man walked away was that in his room there was a commando knife. There was a ski mask. There were boxes and boxes of items he had ordered off the Internet. Disguises. Wigs. Fake beards. A portable angle grinder. A replica pistol. And pages and pages of detailed plans for what were, as the two of them had already agreed, the very opposite of crimes.
* * *
—
On October 31, 2008, almost exactly one year after his conversation with the University of Worcester sociology lecturer about the relativity of crime, Stephen was sitting inside the holding pen at Strafford County jail in New Hampshire. Opposite him was a man dressed as a Halloween killer clown, his death-white face and gaudy outfit splattered with what appeared to be blood. Stephen had, finally, been moved from the Hole at Vermont’s Southern State Correction Facility while British and American authorities tried to work out what to do with him. He looked around anxiously. The silent Halloween clown was not the only other person sitting in the pen. There were recently arrested drunks being booked and inmates who, like Stephen, had just been transferred from other prisons. These men eyed him with interest. They tossed questions at him and then grinned and shared glances when they heard his English accent. They edged slowly toward him, asking the same question that everybody asked: What are you doing here? It was the first time Stephen had been so close to so many other people for at least five months, and it made him feel tense and afraid. It was not just their proximity, but the way they shouted questions at him and how their tones became harder and more goading the longer he tried to avoid answering them. A prison officer kept watch from behind a desk decorated with cheap cardboard jack-o’-lanterns.
After a few hours, Stephen was released from the holding pen and escorted by a pair of guards to a secure room where he was made to change out of his red SSCF inmate’s uniform and into a strange blue jumpsuit made out of a paper-like fabric. He was then handcuffed and marched through layers of security. Nobody told him where he was going or what was happening, though he assumed he was about to be placed in some form of segregation. Instead, he was taken somewhere odd. It was a brightly lit cell. Instead of a wall, the heavy door was set in some kind of transparent Perspex screen. Stephen was shoved inside, and the door was locked behind him. He saw that, on the other side of the screen, across the corridor, a prison officer sat behind a desk. This meant that, at least in theory, he was under constant observation. It was like something you might find in a zoo.
He did not know what was happening. Even worse, he didn’t know what would happen next. While this would be stressful for anyone, because of his Asperger’s it was exponentially so for Stephen. It took him a few moments to notice that, inside the empty cell, there were a pair of shapes lying on the floor, each covered in a green blanket. Suddenly, a bald head emerged from beneath one. Stephen almost screamed. The man’s face looked pale and weary, his eyes dull and impassive.
Stephen looked down and, before he could think, started to speak. “Why am I here?” he asked the bald man. “What is this place?”
The figure on the floor looked at him. Then rolled over and drew the blanket back over his head. The other figure sleeping on the floor did not move, so Stephen walked to the Perspex screen and banged on it with both fists, attempting to attract the attention of anyone who could tell him what was happening. Eventually, the prison guard slowly got up from behind the desk and approached the screen. He was a small man who could have been in his seventies. Talking quickly, Stephen asked again why he was there. The guard said nothing, peering at him with only faint interest before turning and walking away. Stephen shouted after him. He wanted to make a phone call. A legal phone call. He wanted to know what was going on. From the other side of the screen the old man pointed a bony finger at Stephen. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care,” he said calmly. “Just shut up and fuck off.”
The commotion woke the second figure in the cell. A young man with greasy, matte
d blond hair emerged from beneath the blanket. He rubbed his eyes and looked at Stephen. He asked if he’d just arrived. Stephen nodded. The young man’s voice sounded beyond weary and strange, as if his whole mouth was numb. Stephen asked him the same urgent questions: What was this place and why were they here? In response the young man said nothing but pulled a sheet of paper from under his blanket and, holding it up to the light, began tracing shapes on it with his finger.
A voice came from behind Stephen. From beneath his blanket the bald man was trying to say something. “You’re in the medical section,” he explained, forcing the words out with what seemed like extreme effort. “Under su…sue…suzie…” He couldn’t get the words out, and appeared to drift back into semiconsciousness. Under the cell’s bright fluorescent lights, Stephen looked at the two men. It felt like a woozy through-the-looking-glass existence of frustration and oblique non sequiturs. He stood against the cell wall watching the two men in silence.
Suddenly, the bald man shouted. He forced syllables from his mouth in a way that reminded Stephen of dirty water spouting from an old rusty tap in fits and starts. “We are under,” he strained through clenched jaws, “suicide watch.”
Stephen was stunned. He looked down at his paper boiler suit and then around the cell, which was stripped of everything save for the green blankets and thin foam mattresses on which the two men slept. His thoughts flashed back to when he first arrived at Strafford County. At one point during the processing procedure he’d been asked a series of questions about his health and well-being by a prison nurse. “She asked if I’d ever felt suicidal,” he says. “I just honestly said yes. I felt suicidal many times in the Southern State Correctional Facility, but never made an attempt to commit suicide or self-harm. When I felt down, I told myself that the experience was only temporary, with escape always being a possibility.”