The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  Extracting yourself from suicide watch is a Kafkaesque process. The more desperate you appear to leave, the less likely it is that you will be allowed to do so. It took Stephen time to work this out. Over the next few days, meetings with psychiatrists were held in which they seemed to indicate that Stephen should be free to go. He returned to his cell only to be told by guards that, no, he couldn’t leave. When he responded to this with anger, they looked at him as though he’d just proved their point. Matt told him that this was common, that they liked to see how you reacted. Another day passed under twenty-four-hour fluorescent lighting and constant observation. Matt left, which came as a relief, but he was swiftly replaced by an equally young inmate who alternated between nonstop singing and what appeared to be shaking seizures. The first time this happened, Stephen rushed to the observation window and banged on it hard in an attempt to attract the attention of a guard. When one finally came, though, the inmate appeared to be perfectly well and was guzzling a carton of milk. The inmate grinned at him, finished the milk, and then carried on singing.

  * * *

  —

  At university, Stephen continued to shrink into himself. He couldn’t break into the social group that had coalesced around Wyvern Hall, and he struggled to connect with his course mates. He found the strobe lights and constant noise of student bars and nightclubs impossible to process, so in the evenings he isolated himself in his room. Sometimes he would emerge to complain about other Wyvern Hall residents playing music too loudly or making too much noise late at night, before retreating back behind his door.

  Seeing members of the kayaking club laughing about a homeless man only confirmed to him that these people simply did not see how unjust the world was and how precarious its existence. Or perhaps deep down they did see it, but were already too invested in the Western capitalist system to admit it to themselves. They rushed into town to buy new outfits before a big night out, never stopping to consider why the clothes were so cheap or who was making them. They showed up to lectures and sat there bleary-eyed and listless because they took no real pleasure or excitement in learning. All they really wanted was the piece of paper you got at the end that showed you’d been to university and could therefore command a higher salary. They already knew the companies they would like to work for and the kinds of cars they would like to drive when they did. Egged on by their families—egged on by society as a whole—their ambitions were to simply earn and consume. To take what they could from the world while doing everything in their power to make sure they were never the ones being laughed at by strangers for not having a roof over their heads, or stuck stitching clothes for less than a pound a day.

  It was easy for Stephen to reach this conclusion because, unlike the people he was observing, he was not invested. Just as with his parents, his stake in this society was virtually nonexistent. He had not drunk the capitalist Kool-Aid. Nobody had even offered it to him. He thought of all those failed job interviews and the embarrassment and frustration of not knowing why it was that nobody wanted him. He thought of the cautious excitement and optimism he had felt upon arriving at university, only to find himself unable to feel part of anything. At Worcester, he signed up with a recruitment agency who sent him to do some work as a waiter at a conference center. After his second shift, though, he was told not to come back by a manager who he suspected he upset by being “too direct.” It was, as ever, as though Stephen was in a different country and didn’t speak the language or know the rules. Sometimes as a child in Sidmouth, he would walk up the hill to the observatory long after it had shut for the night and just gaze at the heavens. “I remember looking up to the stars and wanting to be ‘rescued.’ I had this feeling like Earth was not really my home.”

  When not studying, he took his bike and went off on long rides. He followed the River Severn, exploring woodland and swimming from its banks. One October morning he traveled to the nearby Malvern Hills. Hiking to a summit, he stood among the ancient earthworks of an Iron Age hill fort and looked down at the English countryside below. There were miles and miles of patchwork fields, forests, rivers, and streams. It was bright, but there was an autumn chill on the wind. Alone, he walked along ancient tracks. He spotted little purple harebells and meadow saffron on either side of him. He saw sheep grazing on moorland. A pair of herons near the shore of a reservoir.

  Ever since he was a boy, Stephen had felt calm when surrounded by nature. This day, though, he remained agitated. He couldn’t enjoy the landscape around him because he knew it could not last. The fields and the reservoir, the grazing sheep and the grass-covered earthworks of the ancient stronghold: They were pretty but they were not natural. Humans had done this. And they would not stop. For years he had understood, intuitively, that the planet’s resources were finite, and that if we continued to exploit these resources, then it was logical to assume that we would eventually run out. That we would mine and burn and build our way to ecological apocalypse. Stephen’s fears for the environment did not run concurrently with his fears about global income inequality. Rather, they were one and the same. Our dependency on and addiction to fossil fuels, our obsession with growth over sustainability, our pathological eagerness to jump into a hamster wheel of consume and dispose: They were interwoven so tightly as to be indistinguishable.

  These were not paranoid anxieties. Everything Stephen read reinforced his belief that humanity was sleepwalking to a point of no return. Ice caps were melting. Rainforests were shrinking. The planet’s population was booming unsustainably. Biodiversity was falling off a cliff. In May 2007, four months before Stephen arrived at Worcester, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report that stated that unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions could drive global temperatures up as much as 6°C by 2100, triggering a surge in ocean levels, the destruction of a vast number of species, economic devastation, and mass human migrations. These scientists believed that global emissions must peak by 2015 for the world to have any chance of limiting the expected temperature rise to just 2°C, a rise that would still see billions of people forced to live without adequate water by 2050. In any event, humanity would sail past this 2015 deadline. The year 2018 would represent a record high for greenhouse gas emissions.

  Stephen found the lack of urgency within mainstream society about all this incredibly confusing. None of it was secret knowledge. It was public and peer reviewed. These were not conspiracy theories, murky stuff about the world being run by lizards or the Illuminati. Stephen had never been drawn to those ideas simply because, when scrutinized rationally, they never came close to standing up. But impending ecological catastrophe? When you analyzed all the different factors, it was just the logical consequence of an entire system geared toward rewarding and encouraging consumption. In December 2007, just ten thousand people would turn up to the Campaign Against Climate Change’s annual protest march through central London and past the Houses of Parliament. That same day, more than seventy-five thousand people watched Manchester United play Derby County in the English Premier League. This did not make any sense. Why wasn’t everybody as worried as he was? Why was nobody really doing anything? The sense that he was from another planet never really left him.

  On the bus journey back to Worcester from the Malvern Hills, Stephen told himself that he needed to do more than carry out hopeful raids on betting shops. He needed to get inside a bank. From his room, he continued to obsessively research and read about the different methods used by successful bank robbers. He checked his email. There was nothing from Rebecca. He says her correspondence had become increasingly terse and distant. He went back to reading about bank robbers. He drank a glass of whiskey. He smoked a joint. He thought about the Organisation and what it needed to do. Scholarships for children working in sweatshops. Hospitals. Schools. Funds for conservation work. Colonies for human habitation under the sea. Or on the moon. Outside his door, the laughs and giggles and crashes and bangs of s
tudents coming home from a night out reverberated. They did not wake him. He had passed out on his single bed, curled up in a ball.

  * * *

  —

  Stephen woke with a start. His bedroom was pitch-black and the alarm on his mobile phone was ringing. It was two a.m. on Thursday, November 29, 2007, and several weeks had passed since his trip to the Malvern Hills. He quickly climbed out of bed, dressed himself in dark clothes, picked up his backpack, and quietly slipped out of Wyvern Hall. He took his bicycle and rode away from the university campus, following the River Severn. It was cold. On the horizon, church spires rose into the darkness. Farther down the river, the medieval cathedral was illuminated by soft yellow light, the reflection of its tower shimmering on the black water like a candle flame.

  He got off his bike, pulled on his ski mask, and walked toward a branch of Barclays bank. There were security cameras attached to the building, and while the front doors were sealed tight behind heavy security shutters, a first-floor window was protected only by iron bars. Stephen already knew this. He had walked past this bank several times in an attempt to scope out any weak points. And in this window, he believed he had found one. Moving quickly, he opened his backpack and pulled out an angle grinder. Clenching his teeth against the high-pitched SCREEEEE he began to cut through the bars.

  The plan was straightforward. Using the battery-powered angle grinder he had ordered online, Stephen would force his way in through the small window. Once inside the bank, he would wait, concealed, with his knife, replica gun, and ski mask. As the bank’s employees arrived for the day, he would spring into action and force them to take him to the safe, whereupon he would take what he needed before escaping in his usual manner. Stephen kept looking behind him as the blade whirred, anticipating the outline of a figure to pass down the empty street or hearing the sound of urgent police footfalls approaching.

  It didn’t take long, though, before he was more concerned with what was happening in front of him. Which was…not much. Ten minutes had passed and his angle grinder barely seemed to have made a groove in the bar. He pressed the whirring blade with as much force as he dared, but there was little improvement. After twenty minutes he was still there, shivering, his arms beginning to cramp. After almost half an hour, his angle grinder ran out of battery. He had managed to cut exactly halfway through the first bar. “It must have been really cheap,” he says with a weary chuckle.

  Cold and frustrated, Stephen jumped back on his bike and returned to Wyvern Hall. He recharged the battery, then headed back to the bank with dawn still a few hours away. He pedaled fast but with the Barclays coming into view, he spotted something ahead of him that made him suddenly swerve into a side street. It was a police car, moving slowly along the road with its headlights off. Stephen’s front wheel slammed into a curb, and he was almost thrown from his saddle. He peered around the corner and saw the car still creeping. Had someone heard the noise of his angle grinder and reported it? Or was it just a patrol car doing its job? He couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that this mission must be aborted.

  He could have punched the wall. He’d had it so perfectly planned. He cursed himself for buying such a cheap angle grinder. He picked up his bicycle and tried to push off, at which point he realized that his front tire had been punctured. Tired and angry, he was forced to push his bike the mile or so back to his residence hall, his tools, replica gun, and knife in a bag slung over his shoulders. On his way back, he was passed by a police car. It did not slow down. If the officers inside had seen him, he would simply have been a skinny student returning to campus after a big night out. Which, in a sense, was true. Later, he wrote about the debacle in his diary.

  They say patrolling police officers don’t prevent crime. But they do.

  Three days later Stephen burst into a Coral betting shop in the Worcester city center. It was eleven a.m. and he was wearing the contorted ghost mask worn by the killer in the Scream horror movies and holding his fake gun and a knife. He bellowed as loud as he could. Rushing toward the terrified manager, he told her from behind his eerie long white face that he would slit her throat if she did not open the safe immediately. He recalls this in a steady, quiet voice. “This is one I am not keen on remembering.”

  In advance of this robbery, Stephen had come to the conclusion that he was not being sufficiently intimidating. Had the manager during the Ladbrokes robbery stopped dead in her tracks when Stephen had commanded her to, rather than flee the building and alert the police, he might have had enough time to force her to open the safe. Had Raymond Beer genuinely feared for his life during the Lloyds TSB attempt in Exeter, then even if he couldn’t let Stephen into the bank itself, he definitely wouldn’t have wrestled the replica pistol from him and smacked him in the face with it. Carl Gugasian had inspired terror—and thus compliance—by modifying already frightening Halloween masks into even more macabre visions. So Stephen decided it was time to try something similar.

  That he was targeting another betting shop should not come as a surprise. Whenever an attempt to rob a bank went wrong, he would often quickly follow up with a raid on a bookie. It was a kind of reflex, born of a need to maintain momentum: to remind himself that he was a criminal and that he wouldn’t use a failed bank heist as an excuse to back out of the whole endeavor. Because, for all his belief, Stephen still found the act of carrying out his crimes incredibly difficult. Just because he understood that walking into a bank or a bookmaker with a weapon and walking out with money was physically possible did not mean it came naturally to him.

  “I do think that if I didn’t have Asperger’s I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” he says one night. “I was so obsessive. It was the sole thing on my mind. The Lloyds TSB one, the failed one, every day I was going to the library and looking at this guy going in and out. I was timing it and I was obsessed by it. Without that obsession and fixation, I would have been too freaked out. I would have been too scared.”

  This was why he forced himself to keep going. “Imagine you were given a job, a very responsible job or a mission that you were tasked with accomplishing, and which is much greater than yourself or anyone else. I felt that I was going through life with this responsibility,” he says. “I got it in my mind that you have this obligation to do it. If you are not going to make a difference, then who is going to make a difference? And I felt that if I don’t do this, then I am just going to disintegrate. That I might as well die.”

  To help him carry out the Scream mask raid, Stephen took cocaine. He had remembered taking the drug with Julian and how it seemed to numb his anxiety and reduce his inhibitions. He considered it a “tool,” a logical means to an end and something, unlike marijuana, he never used for its own sake. Inside the Worcester branch of Coral, Stephen thrust his knife toward the manager’s face while demanding she open the safe. She was terrified and tried to comply. The problem was that the safe was secured by a time lock, which meant that once it had been opened and shut, it could not be opened again for a set interval of time. Not enough time had elapsed since the safe had last been opened for her to open it now. She was on her knees looking at the safe and shaking with fear. Stephen knew he had to leave quickly, so he opened a cash register and yanked on the tray, pulling it free before emptying the contents into his bag. As he backed out of the small shop, a customer walked in, saw what was happening, and moved to grab Stephen. The two men spilled out into the street.

  Worcester is an old city. It was a Sunday, and the peals of church bells echoed above its narrow and labyrinthine streets. Directly opposite the bookmaking shop was a ramshackle Tudor townhouse. Outside this building, a grappling contest ensued. In the process Stephen dropped his replica pistol. His mask was ripped from his face and his watch snapped from his wrist. He managed to pull himself away and with the hood of his coat still obscuring most of his face, he drew his knife a second time and screamed at the man to back away. Stephen could see his assailant hesi
tate, so he turned and sprinted down a long, tight passageway toward the center of town. A few passersby saw him hurtle past. And then he was gone.

  The local police couldn’t work out what was happening in Worcester. In the space of five weeks, there had been two armed robberies on betting shops and an attempted break-in at the Barclays bank. Detective Inspector Jim Fox of the West Mercia Police was one of the officers charged with investigating the crimes. He says that while violent robberies are rare enough in a region made up of largely rural areas and small towns, when they do happen, they don’t happen like this. “Usually when it does happen we either get cash-in-transit robberies, which are carried out by organized crime groups, or we get rubbishy, low-level robberies of convenience stores by idiots who had been in before and the proprietors know who they are,” he says. Stephen’s crimes were neither. “It was quite unusual. Not the kind of offenses you get from a lone robber.”

  Initially, the West Mercia Police had little to go on. Appeals for witnesses were made in local papers, but nothing came of it. “We had some CCTV footage of him, it had been in the media, but we were drawing a blank,” says DI Fox. What they didn’t know is that, two hundred miles to the south, DC Alex Bingham and the Devon and Cornwall Police were stuck in a similar rut. Neither force knew that the other was looking for the same criminal. How could they? They didn’t even know who he was.

  Then, a few days after Stephen’s Coral robbery in Worcester, the two forces suddenly found themselves working together. The Scream mask that had been torn from Stephen’s face during his tussle with a customer was sent for forensic testing at a police lab. They took a DNA sample from spittle around the mask’s mouthpiece. And when they added this information to the police database, they were told there was an existing DNA match in the system. It didn’t match to an individual, but rather, to a crime: an attempted bank robbery in Exeter, three months earlier. Somebody had tried to force a courier to let them into a Lloyds TSB, and when they were foiled, somehow managed to dissolve into thin air and evade the police.