by Ben Machell
In the Britannia, he strode toward the middle-aged woman behind the cashier’s desk, tossed her a backpack, and demanded she fill a bag with cash. Only, she refused. DI Fox describes what happened next. “She stood up to him. He has come in and has pointed a gun at her and she said that she felt so angry that she throws the bag back at him and says, ‘Go on, take that and fuck off!’ ” He chuckles. “She sounds like quite a character, to be honest.”
At this point the bank manager, another middle-aged woman, stormed out of a back office and started yelling at the startled Stephen, ordering him, “Get out of my branch!” And so he did, turning and running out the door before making for the leafy cover of Rougemont Gardens, the same public park he had used to change clothes after the Lloyds TSB attempt. He walked back through town as police sirens blared, his eyes tracking the pavement ahead of him, hands wedged deep into his pockets. He caught a bus back to his house in Sidmouth, where he sat at the small dinner table with his mother, trying and failing to make conversation with the gentle figure he loved but couldn’t know.
Later, in his room, he analyzed the failure of the Britannia job. Why didn’t they take him seriously? “I think there were a few reasons,” he reflects today. “I was just one person, and most successful robberies with the exception of ‘note jobs’ are undertaken by groups, not individuals. Also, on top of that, it is well known that, in the UK, firearms are practically impossible to get hold of. So an individual who is probably quite young coming into the bank branch by themselves and acting bizarrely by throwing this coin? All of that probably didn’t encourage cooperation.”
Devon and Cornwall Police immediately knew that the enigmatic figure at the center of Operation Gandalf had returned to the south coast. He had robbed a bank in Seaton and then, the following day, attempted to rob the Britannia in Exeter. And yet again, on both occasions he had managed to just…vanish. They had his DNA, they knew he had been operating up in Worcester, but beyond that they were no closer to catching him than they’d been three months before. Detective Constable Alex Bingham says the department was, by this point, beginning to feel the weight of institutional expectation that they unmask whoever was doing this.
“There was a lot of pressure on the boss at the time,” he says. “You have had a number of armed robberies on your patch, you know, and the bosses above him want to know what’s going on.”
In January, the Devon and Cornwall Police arrested a twenty-nine-year-old local man in connection with the crimes, a fact that made the local news. When Stephen learned of this, he wrote an anonymous letter to the Exeter Express and Echo to announce that the police had the wrong man, and that he, in fact, was the person responsible.
“I will continue to take from the rich and give to the poor,” he concluded in his letter. “I am the modern day Robin Hood.”
Again, this action did not help Stephen in any practical way. Quite the opposite. But Stephen felt that it was part of his duty to let the authorities know he was still at large. “I just didn’t like the thought that someone else had been arrested for an offense that I committed.”
There was also a part of Stephen that enjoyed taunting the police. On more than one occasion during his childhood, he’d watched as officers removed his mother from their home, either during or in the aftermath of psychotic episodes brought on by her schizophrenia. And as far as Stephen could see, the police just didn’t seem to be any good at their jobs. With some sensible forward planning, Stephen had been able to evade them more or less at will. “I had this sense that they were totally incompetent, which didn’t help the situation, either,” he says. “I kept doing it and there weren’t any repercussions. They seemed to be going in the wrong directions and arresting the wrong people.”
Detective Constable Bingham says that the Devon and Cornwall Police viewed Stephen’s letter to the Express and Echo with a professional skepticism. “There are always suspects who want to try and wind you up or send you down different tracks and different avenues. You have to look at it and wonder if this is the actual person doing it? Or is it a hoax?”
Just because somebody contacts a newspaper claiming to be the perpetrator does not necessarily mean they are. During the Yorkshire Ripper investigations, continues Bingham, the police spent valuable time and resources pursuing leads provided to them by hoax calls. “It can lead you down a line of inquiry that stops you doing the actual inquiry.”
While the pressure Stephen felt to successfully pull off that one big heist grew by the day, he was also enjoying the double life he had created. Having spent so many years feeling thwarted and anonymous, he had created a world in which fantasy regularly became real.
“Why have I turned to crime?” he asked himself in his diary during his first term at university.
Many reasons. Anger at the establishment; the status quo, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The forgotten millions of southern lands who live in acute poverty, with just a grain of opportunity which Westerners ignore. And even the knowledge of being sought by the law is a draw in itself. It brings self-importance, you can make elaborate storylines out of every stroll, plotting and spotting the weaknesses of businesses. Always looking for opportunities, possibilities.
As the weeks passed and 2007 turned to 2008, the lure of this new identity meant that Stephen drifted further and further away from the insecure young man he had been. “I wanted to escape the child I had grown up as, and I wanted to put what I had experienced behind me and become someone else,” he says as we talk late one night on the phone. “Whether that was the Robin Hood persona that I embraced or someone pioneering a new future for humanity.”
He had blond highlights put in his hair. He swapped his glasses for contact lenses. He fell behind on his university studies. He smoked cannabis alone in his bedroom. The irony was that, taken in isolation, these were things that many undergraduates do during their first year of university. Reinventing yourself in this way is completely normal. What is not completely normal is coupling this reinvention with a compulsion for drawing detailed maps of city streets and bank locations, plotting escape routes, and creating whole folders of minutely plotted heists.
“Crime is so damn appealing,” he wrote to himself. “The money, the planning, the power, and the dubious fame of it draws me like a magnet.”
Stephen’s obsession was complete. The line between fantasy and reality was no longer clear. It was no longer an obstacle. “I am a bank robber, an armed raider and bloody proud of it,” he scrawled in his journal. Anything, he told himself, was possible.
Chapter Sixteen
Within a week of returning to Worcester to begin his second term at university, Stephen was contacted by an aunt. She informed him that his father had died. Stephen frowned. His response was just a soft “Oh.” He waited for a wave of grief to wash over him, but it did not come. He had known for a long time that the logical conclusion of his father’s cancer was that it would eventually kill him. When he first learned of the diagnosis, years earlier, he’d spent a whole night crying while Ben Weaver, round for a sleepover, snored on the floor of his bedroom. But in his residence hall bedroom, at the age of twenty-one, Stephen did not seem sure how to respond. “Although I had my issues with my father, I still considered him someone quite close,” he remembers. “I have a strange way of processing things.”
Peter Jackley remains an enigmatic, unresolved individual. Stephen still does not seem to understand the man his father was. He was somebody whose character was clearly marked by his own issues with mental health, but these were not issues he fully accepted or addressed. He appears to have been stubborn, secretive, controlling, obsessive, and quick to anger. His attempts at charm seemed to only repel people. Stephen believes that his “heart was in the right place,” but from the outside looking in, it is impossible to decide whether it was Peter Jackley who kept his small, dysfunctional family together, or whether it was him wh
o dragged them down, compounding their isolation and creating an atmosphere of conflict and tension.
That said, it is also clear that Peter Jackley faced many challenges beyond his control. He could not help that he suffered from bipolar disorder. He could not help that Stephen never received an Asperger’s diagnosis, which would have at least given him the chance to understand aspects of his son’s behavior and perhaps even begin to support him more effectively. He could not help that his wife was schizophrenic. Unless, like Ben Weaver and even Stephen up to a point, you believe that there was something about her condition that he liked—the vulnerability or malleability—and may have attracted him in the first place.
The day after he received the news about his father, Stephen flew to Amsterdam for the weekend. He had booked the trip when he had returned to Worcester to find the unreliable campus drug dealer was nowhere to be found, so he’d resolved to fly out and smuggle some cannabis back himself. Looking back, Stephen thinks that his fixation on this mission may have meant there wasn’t space in his head to accept and process his father’s death. “Plus, I saw myself as someone else, in effect. It kind of got pushed out of my mind that he had died.”
Returning to Amsterdam was a huge risk. It had been less than a year since Stephen pulled a knife on the Dutch hostel employee he felt was trying to fleece him before making off with a fistful of euros. But as he boarded his flight he reassured himself that everything would be fine. Nobody seemed to have connected him with the crime, which seemed strange. The hostel had made a photocopy of his driver’s license when he checked in, so the Dutch police knew his name. Yet for some reason they never contacted British authorities to let them know that a Stephen Jackley was wanted in connection with an armed robbery.
Or perhaps they did, but nobody was able to work out exactly who he was. Because, by chance, Stephen’s driver’s license contained a misprint. His date of birth was wrong. He can no longer remember exactly how wrong, but it was evidently wrong enough to make tracking him down very difficult. After his plane landed, he stood in line at Schiphol airport passport control until he was beckoned forward. He handed his passport to the Dutch border control officer, who scanned it before waving him through.
Stephen spent two days smoking and drinking in Amsterdam. He sat in the corner of cannabis cafés with his notebook, getting increasingly stoned, writing down plans for robberies and the Organisation, as well as long, meandering poems and stream-of-consciousness treatises on the nature of reality. Looking back, he wonders if the real reason he returned to Amsterdam was because, subconsciously, he wanted to get caught: that however much he was relishing his new identity as Robin Hood, there was still a part of him that remained an insecure boy from Sidmouth who wanted this all to end.
After two days in Amsterdam, Stephen began to descend to Earth, and the reality of his father’s death started to seep into his psyche. He realized the simple finality of it, and of the fact that it was now just him and his mother. He looked around him and saw strange faces speaking strange languages and felt an overwhelming need to return to Sidmouth. He abandoned his plan to smuggle a supply of weed back with him. Pale, pink-eyed, and exhausted, he returned to Schiphol. He went to the check-in desk, presented his passport, and was handed his boarding pass. Then, passing back through airport security, he was stopped by a member of staff who politely asked if he by any chance had a driver’s license with him.
Tired and foggy-headed, Stephen thought this was a strange question. But he “gormlessly” handed over his license. What happened next is jumbled in Stephen’s recollection, but he was told that he was going to be arrested. If he did have a subconscious desire to be captured, then in the moments that followed he did not act like it. He dropped his bag and turned to run, bolting toward a quiet-looking corridor leading away from security. He pumped his arms, but it felt like running from something in a dream, horribly slow and uncoordinated. Strong hands grabbed him from behind, and though he tried to prize himself free, it was useless. Stephen was placed in an armlock as travelers and airport staff stared at him impassively. His head was throbbing. His mouth was dry. All he could hear was the distant sound of departure announcements and of the two large men who had him by the arms chuckling and talking in Dutch. “They were just laughing and joking about it,” says Stephen. “I thought, shit. This is it. This is the end.”
He was taken to a small, bare holding room in the bowels of Schiphol. Every hour or so, a member of the cheerful security staff would pop their head in and ask if he would like a pack of cigarettes. “They were massively into smoking. I remember thinking I don’t want to say ‘no,’ because that would seem kind of rude. So eventually I just accepted.”
Dutch police came and explained to Stephen that he was being charged with “robbery or theft or something.” He was put in handcuffs, escorted to a van, and transported to Rotterdam, where he was placed in a holding facility. He had his fingerprints taken and then attended a court hearing in which a judge and other legal officials sat down with Stephen and explained that he would be held in a Dutch prison until a date for his trial was set.
It was Stephen’s first experience of incarceration, and the shock of it was overwhelming. Knowing that he was no longer free, he felt a wave of nauseous horror flush through his body. His pulse raced and he breathed in short, shallow bursts as he was processed and taken to his cell. At the time, he could have cried, though he admits that, looking back, this Dutch prison cell was incredibly comfortable compared to what he would later endure. “You walk into this massive room with an en suite bathroom. There are cakes on the table and loads of croissants and food everywhere. It was really unusual,” he says. “They have a different perspective on imprisonment there, I think.”
There was plenty of recreation time, prisoners were free to wander the wings of the jail, and Stephen dutifully smoked the cigarettes the guards kept giving him. When he finished a pack, they brought him more, so he felt obliged to smoke even more. They made him light-headed and giddy. Inside his comfortable cell he tapped his foot. He was convinced it was just a matter of time before everything would come crashing down. The Dutch police would contact their British counterparts to let them know of his arrest, which would somehow result in him finally being connected to the robberies. He chewed on a croissant and despaired.
Then, just like that, he was able to walk away. After a week or so in the Dutch prison, he was informed that he was being allowed to leave on compassionate grounds. Stephen had told them about his father’s recent death and impending funeral, and while this had not appeared to sway the authorities initially, it seemed they’d had a change of heart. He was told that he would be contacted in due course, when a court date had been set, and that he must then return to the Netherlands to stand trial when instructed. He agreed. And so they let him go.
* * *
—
Stephen arrived at his father’s small funeral in Exeter to be greeted with a flurry of hushed but urgent questions from his relatives. Where had he been? Nobody had been able to get in touch with him for the past week. Stephen looked at these people blankly. He was not close to any of them. He told everybody that the reason he had been out of touch was that he had been arrested over some “drugs issue” in Amsterdam, but that it was all sorted now. He was chided by some, but he didn’t care. He sat beside his mother during the service and then stood at her side during the wake. Lisa Watson, Peter’s daughter and Stephen’s half sister, remembers watching him and feeling uneasy, though not being able to say exactly why.
“I didn’t really understand everything that was going on because obviously you couldn’t really get much information from Jenny. I don’t know whether she was oblivious or just didn’t understand,” she says. “You only really heard snippets from other members of the family. But Stephen was being very mysterious at the funeral. I found him…he was mysterious over what he had done.”
Lisa describes
how Stephen didn’t just appear unmoved at the funeral. There was something else about him: an air of slyness and superiority. “I just thought it was strange that he didn’t seem to be upset. He just seemed to be…he had a smug expression on his face for half of the time, like a grin if you like. And I just found that really strange.”
She says that knowing about his Asperger’s might have helped her understand why he didn’t appear as upset as she’d thought he would be. But his expression was unsettling. Later, after the funeral, Stephen walked with Lisa and her husband near the seafront. “He was talking about money,” she says. “And he said, ‘I can give you a thousand pounds today.’ My husband and I said, ‘How can you do that?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got money hidden around Exeter.’ I think he said he had some money hidden in a tree by Exeter Cathedral. Three grand in a tree by Exeter Cathedral.”
Lisa and her husband looked at each other. Neither believed what Stephen was telling them. “We just thought it was fantasy.” Later, as the three of them passed a quayside, Stephen pointed at one of the boats. “He was saying to my husband, ‘I bet you I could jump down there onto that boat.’ Or something like that. My husband was like, ‘We’re at your dad’s funeral here. Why would you be doing stuff like that? I don’t even know you and you are making bets with me.’ ”
Stephen wandered off, but both Lisa and her husband were left unnerved. They discussed what happened later that evening. “My husband said, ‘He’s dead behind the eyes, he’s quite scary to look at.’ There was just no emotion there. He didn’t seem upset. There was just nothing behind the eyes.” She sighs. “He just seemed so separate.”
After his father’s funeral, Stephen returned to Worcester in early February 2008. Late one stormy night, alone in his room, he says that he called Rebecca. He described how immediately, upon hearing her voice on the line, he knew what was coming. In his heart, he had known since they parted at Dechen Chöling that a future together was only a faint hope and that their long-distance relationship was never going to be sustainable. But it still cut jagged and deep when she quietly told him that she had met somebody else at her university.