by Ben Machell
“Each robbery I saw as a failure,” he says one afternoon, sitting in a small meeting room at The Times’s offices. “There were one or two that I saw as partial successes. But my idea was to walk into a bank and get access to the safe, because I had done research on this and once you had access to the safe, you could more or less hit £100K straightaway, if not more.”
Stephen knew what the problem was. The replica pistols he’d used so far had not done the job intended. Not everyone was as intimidated by them as he had hoped. Raymond Beer, the courier who’d given him a bloody cheek. The gambler at the Worcester Coral who’d tried to grab him as he was leaving. The William Hill manager who’d disobeyed his command to remain where she was, thus escaping and alerting the police.
But a real gun? That would change everything. Simply being able to fire a live round into the air upon entering a bank would show everyone that he was not brandishing a toy. A gun, he gradually convinced himself, was the answer. He imagined the different ways he might use one to best effect. He could make an appointment with a bank manager and arrive in a smart suit but with a pistol concealed on his person. Once he was alone with the manager, he could draw the gun and instruct them to take him “discreetly to the safe.” The problem with this plan was that it did not allow him to disguise his features, unless he was willing to chance it with fake facial hair and sunglasses. Which would most likely arouse suspicion. He had already ordered some stick-on beards off the Internet, though it turned out they were only fancy dress standard at best, adequate for hiding his features from CCTV but not for fooling a bank manager.
Another option was simply to stick to the Carl Gugasian approach. “Fire the gun in the air, jump over the counter, get access to the safe room,” he says. “If it was timed right, I could have got in. If you look on the Internet, there are plenty of examples of people managing to do that.”
* * *
—
The Crown Prosecution Service had initially indicated that many of Stephen’s diaries from around the period of his crimes had been seized, held, and then eventually destroyed. Later, though, DI Fox of the West Mercia Police said this was not the case. He had boxes and boxes of evidence relating to Stephen’s crimes, including notebooks and journals from 2007 and 2008. In the run-up to Stephen’s eventual trial in the UK, these journals were scoured for evidence that could be used against him. As a result, many of these diary entries were photocopied and presented in court. Stephen himself provided dozens of these police photocopies to me. What is not accessible are the physical diaries themselves, which contain writings that were never presented in court and that therefore remain Stephen’s private possessions, albeit ones held by the West Mercia Police.
The practical upshot of all this is that there is information in these diaries that the West Mercia Police can describe in a general sense—for example, the kind of stuff Stephen was writing about, the kind of schemes he was making—but which they cannot show or publish. Some of this information relates to his plans to move beyond the Gugasian method. “He talks about ‘tiger takeovers,’ ” says DI Fox, who describes the process by which Stephen would hope to break into a bank at night then pounce on the staff as they entered, forcing them to take him to the vault. “He was going to take them all hostage, basically, and keep them there until the vault had been opened.”
Stephen says that DI Fox is correct. He was constantly researching new ways to pull off that one big heist. “He is absolutely right. I had plans to escalate because the whole idea was to net as much as possible. And I had realized with these note jobs [robberies in which the thief submits a written note to the victim], I was only netting a few thousand at once.” But just because he wrote down how he might ambush a cash-in-transit delivery vehicle doesn’t mean he ever seriously planned to do it. “I wrote [about] all the different techniques, which doesn’t necessarily mean I would do every one. It was a mental exercise to see what I would be able to do and what the best way of doing it would be,” he says. “I had a whole folder of it.”
But to do any of this, Stephen needed a real gun. His problem was that acquiring a gun in the UK is incredibly difficult. The regulation of firearms is so tight that the number of reliable guns on the British black market is very small, which, in turn, makes the cost of acquiring one very high. Not only did Stephen lack the kind of money needed to buy a gun, he also had no underworld connections who could arrange this kind of a deal. Geography students from Devon with Asperger’s syndrome do not tend to have underworld connections.
On the other hand, Stephen discovered that as a geography student, he had other surprisingly useful resources available to him. At one point during his first term, a lecturer on his geography course asked if anyone would be interested in learning how to use some new 3D city-mapping software, a sort of proto–Google Maps. All the other students remained silent, bored, and impassive, but Stephen’s hand immediately shot up. He used this software, which was called ArcGIS, to scope out the streets of Worcester from a bird’s-eye perspective, to identify bank locations, and then to envision the different escape routes he could use. Once he had familiarized himself with the program, he spent hours toying with it. “I found that extremely useful. It was like a tool. I could plan exactly where I was going afterwards and where the changeover locations for the clothes would be and stuff.”
One December afternoon, during a reconnaissance trip to the Worcester town center, Stephen spotted something that made his heart skip. He was walking down a pedestrian shopping street with Christmas lights suspended overhead when he passed a HSBC bank. It was on the first floor of a four-story building, and while the branch itself had all the usual shutters and security doors, the bank’s admin offices on the floors above seemed practically unguarded. There were no bars over the rows of large windows on the second, third, and fourth floors. He jammed his hands in his pockets and kept his head down as he hurried past. The building was part of a large, slightly ramshackle four-sided block of street-facing businesses that included pubs, a Starbucks, discount shoe shops, and Mexican restaurants. Some of the buildings dated back to the eighteenth century. Some, like the bank, were modern. Running through the middle of this block was a series of alleyways to allow access to the rear of the businesses. Stephen quickly worked out that he could reach the back of the bank via this alley network.
Stephen returned to his room knowing that, gun or no gun, this was his best chance of breaking into a bank and executing what he called a “tiger takeover.” Wearing a ski mask, he would break his way into one of the top floors at night, move down through the building to the first floor, and then crouch in wait for the first employees to arrive. Then, exploding into action, he would use his knife and replica pistol to intimidate them into taking him to the safe, where he would fill his backpack before fleeing.
Two nights later, early on the morning of December 18, he slipped into the alleyway. There was a fire escape leading to the upper stories of the building, but it was locked from the outside. So he scaled up drainpipes and window ledges in order to reach a balcony. He smashed a window and stepped into the bank’s offices. Cautiously, he aimed a dim flashlight across the room. There were rows of desks, computers, photocopiers: the usual trappings of corporate life. His eyes cast about for an exit that would take him downstairs, into the branch itself. Minutes passed as he searched and searched, stumbling about, until he finally found what he calculated was the way down. But there was a problem.
“It was a massive metal door,” he says flatly. Stephen knew there was no way he was going to be able to force it open. Perhaps he should have expected that there would be massive metal doors—or at least something similar—preventing easy access to the bank. He shouted with anger and frustration, smacking his fist against the door with a dull clang. In a pique, he began to ransack the bank’s office, pulling computer monitors to the floor and snatching a camcorder from a desk and shoving it into his bag before fleeing
back the way he had come before the noise alerted anyone.
A few days later, Stephen was skimming the local news online when he read about a crime that had been committed in Worcester. The regional office of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) had been broken into and vandalized, causing several thousands of pounds’ worth of damage. He frowned. Who would go out of their way to vandalize and set back the work of a charity that helped to safeguard some of Britain’s most vulnerable children? As he scanned the story with increasing speed, a nausea began to swell in the depths of his stomach. The NSPCC offices shared the same address as the HSBC bank. Because the NSPCC offices were, in fact, above the HSBC bank. He began to tremble as he realized that the answer to his question—who would do such a thing?—was, simply, him. He had done it. He had assumed the office space he’d broken into belonged to the bank and that his vandalism, though petulant, was still a form of legitimate retribution. A small act of defiance against a corrupt financial system. Instead, he realized he had done something incredibly wrong. “It was the complete opposite of what I had intended.”
Stephen ran to his toilet and vomited. He cried. It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact this episode had on him. He had spent at least two years methodically constructing a moral universe in which his crimes were justified and righteous. But underpinning everything was the unshakable conviction that he was doing far more good than harm. His actions in the NSPCC offices seemed to undermine this completely, and he struggled to cope with the realization. Even today, discussing the episode is a struggle. Of all his actions, it is this, along with the Scream mask robbery, that causes him to scrunch his body inward, break eye contact, and lose his train of thought. He says that in the aftermath of this realization, he took his knife and cut his arm several times before pledging to repay the NSPCC £25,000, despite the fact that news reports estimated the total cost of damage to be less than £6,000. It was, he told himself, a promise “sealed in blood.”
A few months later, an NSPCC employee sorted through the morning’s mail and found an envelope that gave them pause. Instinctively, they knew what would be inside. Carefully opening it, they pulled out a large wad of cash, approximately £650 in banknotes. This was not the first time they had received this kind of mail. Somebody had been putting these envelopes through the charity letterbox for a while now. In addition to the cash, the envelope contained a note apologizing for the damage caused during the break-in and the promise of more money to come. The police had assured the NSPCC that they were looking into it, but the identity of the culprit—if that’s even the right word—remained a mystery. The only clue were two letters that were always written on the envelopes. RH.
* * *
—
Stephen returned to Sidmouth for the Christmas holidays a few days after the NSPCC fiasco. He had bought an old red Rover automobile for £500 and drove south. He was tense and uneasy. He felt no nostalgia for the house on Manstone Avenue. If the consultant psychiatrist who evaluated Stephen at nineteen was right and he’d been “inadvertently traumatized” as a child, then this small, increasingly shabby council house is where most of the trauma happened. It was a cold, gray day, with wind and rain rolling in off the sea. He lugged his bags to the house and knocked. A few moments passed, then his mother opened the door. She looked at him for a moment, then smiled. “Hello, Stephen,” she said. Stephen smiled back. “Hello, Mum.”
Peter Jackley no longer lived at Manstone Avenue. The prostate cancer he had been diagnosed with years earlier would become terminal. By late 2007, Stephen’s mother had been no longer able to care for her husband, so he was moved into hospice care in the nearby town of Exmouth. Stephen and his mother visited Peter, though all Stephen can remember was the oppressive, stuffy heat of the place, the old people drifting about the corridors, and the locks outside every bedroom door. At one point his father, diminished and frail, grabbed Stephen’s arm and said, “Get me out.” Stephen told him that he couldn’t. When he and his mother left the building, one of the residents attempted to escape with them.
Back at Manstone Avenue, Stephen struggled to communicate with his mother. “She was like someone that was drugged,” he says. Which is exactly what she was. Whichever different cocktails of medications she had been prescribed over the years, they all ended up having the same numbing effect on her. She sat quietly on the old brown sofa in her motley living room, her own sketches and paintings of plants and animals hanging from her yellow and green walls. Wearing a thick pink turtleneck sweater and a brown embroidered vest, Jenny Jackley quietly read and drank tea and talked to Stephen in an absent, passing sort of way. She never asked him questions. And when she responded to questions he asked, her answers were short and often inconclusive, though delivered with a smile.
Seeing her like this was painful. It was also frustrating, because Stephen knew she was creative and warm, but that these traits were being erased, collateral damage in the constant struggle between her illness and her medication. He didn’t like to admit it, but Stephen knew he had characteristics in common with his father, particularly when it came to being stubborn and single-minded. But he had even more in common with his mother. They both loved nature. They both seemed to ask searching questions about the world and reality. When Stephen was just a child, Jenny Jackley had written a poem called “Money.”
Money
Just pieces of crumpled paper
Small round coins
Marked with the face of “Her Majesty”
What majesty?
So small and insignificant
Yet why should it be so important?
What is money?
What is life?
Life is the sun…the wind…the sea
People who feel love and happiness
People who feel sorrow and pain
Money is…?…nothing
Why must it be so important in our lives?
Someday…one day
We’ll find a way…
…Follow the sun…
…Everyone run…
…Leave the world alone…
…Live…
* * *
—
A few days after arriving home for Christmas, Stephen successfully robbed his first bank. It was the Lloyds TSB in Seaton, where the cashier handing him the money asked if he wanted a bigger bag. He made his way back along the footpath posing as a hill walker, then deposited £4,830 into the nook of a tree in some woodland not far from Manstone Avenue. “Trees, for some reason, I thought were secure,” he says. “It was an old oak up the top of a hill, and it was really hard to climb. I thought that nobody else would have climbed it.”
In his diaries, Stephen wrote that, although he had not hit the £100,000 jackpot, the Lloyds TSB qualified as a “semi-success” rather than a failure. For one thing, he had escaped. More important, though, it demonstrated what he had always believed: that it was possible to walk into a bank, slip a note across a counter, and walk out with thousands of pounds. Now that he had done it, he had no excuse not to do it again.
His obsession with reaching his target was deepening by the day. On top of the “mission” he believed it was his responsibility to carry out, he now had an additional obligation to the NSPCC to repay them for the harm he had done. “It was just more motivation for me to get to that £100K. I had that extra pressure on me to do a proper heist. I had to pay them back tens of thousands of pounds, and I couldn’t do that just by going into a bookmaker and getting a few hundred.”
After returning to Manstone Avenue following the Lloyds TSB robbery in Seaton, Stephen couldn’t sleep. He was too keyed up. He sat on the edge of his single bed and looked around his tiny childhood bedroom: at his collections of fossils and minerals, the piles of reference books stacked up in the corner, the paintings of trees and flowers on his wall, done by his mother. Event
ually, he made a decision. He would carry out another bank robbery. The very next day. “I remember thinking, whilst I am in this mindset, I might as well do another one.”
The following day, at 4:50 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 2007, Stephen walked into the Britannia credit union in the Exeter city center. It was less than one hundred yards away from the Lloyds TSB he had attempted to gain access to three months earlier, on a bustling high street of shops, cafés, and offices. He was wearing a black beanie and had a black scarf covering all of his face apart from his eyes. As he strode toward the counter, he hurled one of his defaced pound coins, which had by now become a trademark of his robberies. In Stephen’s mind, this gesture was not so much a flourish as a necessity. “I saw it as something to get out of the way.”
Stephen accepts that announcing his crimes by throwing a coin toward the people he was about to rob was, from a practical perspective, probably not a good idea. For one thing, it gave them a split second to look up and register what was going on. Secondly, while it was strange and confusing behavior, it was not necessarily intimidating. Thirdly, it was evidence. Even if the police already had a pretty good idea that the mini crime wave erupting around South Devon and Worcestershire was the work of one person, these pound coin calling cards only proved it.
“I wasn’t stupid,” he says. “I didn’t do these things not realizing they would be able to connect them. But I felt I had a duty, and as part of the mission, it was my obligation to leave these things behind. It was out of principle.” He smiles awkwardly. “Which sounds strange, I know.”