by Ben Machell
She said that she’d never meant to hurt him and that she was sorry. She had tried calling him the previous week, but he’d never answered. Stephen told her that was because he’d been in a Dutch jail, and when she exclaimed shock and asked what happened, he simply brushed her off, ignoring the question. Instead, angry and on the verge of tears, he hung up on her. Immediately, he regretted it, and tried to call her back. She did not answer. He would never speak to her again.
Stephen felt his throat contract, and he clenched his eyes tight to stem the tears he could already feel forming. He stormed out of his room and into the cold, wet night, making for one of the playing fields just behind Wyvern Hall. He broke into a run and began to do lap after lap around the soccer pitch. Letting himself go as he ran, he gasped for breath between deep, ugly sobs, hot tears and cold raindrops streaming down his face. After twenty laps, he dragged himself back indoors and fell asleep on his single bed, exhausted and despondent.
Stephen finds talking about Rebecca difficult. He believes that, had they physically been together during this period, she would have been the only person able to talk him out of continuing with his crimes. That’s not to say she would definitely have been able to—“it could well have been that I had committed to this thing and nothing whatsoever would have deviated me from that path”—but, rather, she would have represented his last best chance at breaking the obsession and pulling away. “She is the only thing that could have stopped me.”
With Rebecca now gone, Stephen committed the very last wavering vestiges of himself to his mission. He had nothing else to commit to, nothing else to live for.
Stephen explains that he would rather not provide any details that might allow Rebecca to be tracked down and approached for an interview. He says that he does not want to intrude or impact on her life in any way, or run the risk of landing her in trouble, because while he is never entirely clear about the exact extent to which he revealed his plans and actions to Rebecca, he worries he may have said enough to incriminate her in some way or another. He also admits that there is an aspect of psychological self-preservation to all this. He does not particularly want to discover that she is now married, or that she has children, because it would only emphasize what he’d once had and lost. “Rebecca,” he writes in one email, “was like a beacon of light in a very cold cave, at a stage in my life when I was starting to lose hope and direction.”
Nobody from Dechen Chöling is able to recall her. Ralph Williams, Lisa Steckler, Maizza Waser…they all remember Stephen very well, having spent weeks working and living alongside him. But none of them remembers him having a relationship with a tall girl from Colorado with auburn hair, who enjoyed playing Scrabble and going on long bike rides, and who had a gentle but infectious laugh. Waser, the older German woman whose tent was opposite Stephen’s and who has autism herself, admits she is probably not the best person to ask about these things. “I am sorry; there are many romantic relationships that completely bypassed me. I just don’t have a sense for that. It has never developed in me all my life.”
Williams shared a tent with Stephen for six weeks. Under the canvas they had long late-night conversations about global income inequality. But Williams says they never talked about love or relationships. “He wasn’t dating anyone at the time; there were no romantic interactions and I got the feeling that I was his only kind of friend there. That I was his safe place.”
Williams left Dechen Chöling in late June or early July 2007, while Stephen stayed until the start of September, developing his obsessions with the likes of Carl Gugasian and André Stander. So it is quite possible that Rebecca arrived after Williams had gone. And his account of Stephen’s lack of a love life doesn’t mean it was impossible for him to form a relationship. In Stephen’s telling, the fact that Rebecca was able to see past his awkward exterior is what made her so special. That was the whole point.
Lisa Steckler, the chatty, outgoing head of human resources at Dechen Chöling, says that she has a good memory for people and simply cannot remember a Rebecca from Colorado matching Stephen’s description. Her brow furrows, and she puts a finger to her cheek. “I am going to do a little research because there is a part of me—and I hope this is not mean—that thinks…did he make her up?”
This is what DI Fox thinks. He says the whole thing is “bullshit.” He has Stephen’s journals from Dechen Chöling and reviewed them after they were seized. “A girlfriend in France, 2007? That didn’t happen,” he says brusquely. “I have got diary entries from every day when he was in France, and it’s all about how lonely he is and how nobody likes him and he has got no mates. There is no girlfriend. That is a fairly consistent theme through his stuff, that he is lonely. I am sure Rebecca or whoever exists and was there. But he certainly has not referred to any relationship or some sort of holiday romance or anything like that.”
Stephen laughs when he hears this. “Maybe he thinks I’m too ugly for a girlfriend,” he says, before saying that DI Fox is simply wrong. “I did write about her many times in the diaries. It just goes to show that he didn’t pay much attention.” Stephen thinks that Fox is subconsciously reinforcing his own view of Stephen as a dysfunctional loner. “It’s a phenomena. People see what they are looking for. He has probably constructed this image of me in his mind, a stereotype of a guy who was totally outside society.”
He says that he thought that, in and among the various materials he’d given me, there were police photocopies of diary entries that contained references to Rebecca. There are not. Within the material I have from the period and subsequent months, the name “Rebecca” does not appear once, though this material is by no means complete. There are a number of romantic and somewhat sensuous poems written later, after he returned from France. In one of these Stephen describes cycling from Dechen Chöling with a nameless young woman—“her auburn hair streaking behind in the wind as she cycles before me”—passing fields and châteaus as they traveled through the countryside.
Dr. Sajid Suleman says it is not uncommon for people with Asperger’s to invent imaginary or “fantasy” friends. But, he continues, when Stephen told him about his relationship with Rebecca during the compilation of his psychiatric report in late 2012, Dr. Suleman absolutely believed it to have been real. He still does. “I clearly remember the discussion,” he says, smiling. “At the time I didn’t have any impression of him making it up. The way he described it was, in my experience, quite typical of the way people with autism spectrum disorder form romantic relationships.”
So the fact that they both shared a deep interest in Buddhism was the common ground that first enabled Stephen to begin and then maintain a rapport with her. Then, as the relationship developed, Stephen found that he was more comfortable in group situations when she was with him, that he was able to take certain cues from her. This, says Dr. Suleman, is what he sees all the time in relationships in which one person has Asperger’s and the other does not. And if, as DI Fox maintains, the relationship was “bullshit,” that would mean Stephen contrived to concoct a fantasy account that somehow lines up exactly with what an expert in Asperger’s syndrome would expect to see. Dr. Suleman shakes his head. “It didn’t come across like that. She pushed him to do social things with others. I felt it was a real relationship.”
And Stephen has always maintained it was. His cycling poem, which is charged with emotion, describes an idyll. It may be a memory. It may be a daydream. A wish. The poem finishes with him and the auburn-haired girl arriving at a lake.
We both plunge into the sparkling water, washing away the sweat of the ride. And then, reaching the other side, we make love in the tall grass. A moment of heaven. There, in France.
Chapter Seventeen
It was a drizzly evening in March 2008 and Stephen was sitting in the corner of a small pub in a housing development not far from Birmingham city center. It was dimly lit and smelled of stale smoke. He sat on his own, nursing a
pint of lager. The pub was quiet, but the handful of regulars watched Stephen with a mix of amusement and suspicion. Across the room, at another table, two tall Afro-Caribbean men talked quietly into the ears of an older man who watched Stephen with heavy, impassive eyes. Eventually, all three stood up. Two of them, including the older man, left the pub and climbed into a car parked just outside. The third man walked over to Stephen and peered down at the blinking figure in an anorak and holding a hiker’s backpack between his legs.
“Come with us,” the man said.
Stephen got to his feet, clutching his bag. He followed the man outside and climbed into the back of the waiting car. The old man was behind the wheel. He turned around to look at Stephen again. Then, slowly, the car pulled away into the inner-city night. Stephen looked out the tinted passenger window and saw streetlights, raindrops, and darkness. Nobody spoke. He was on his way to do something he knew he must. He was on his way to buy a real gun.
Birmingham is forty-five minutes from Worcester by train, but the two cities could not be more different. Worcester is small, compact, and old. Birmingham is the second-largest city in the UK after London, a sprawling conurbation replete with sparkling high-rises and modern shopping centers. But like all large cities, it has areas of poverty, deprivation, and crime. Birmingham, in particular, has a problem with gangs and guns. Stephen knew this. Or at least he did by the time he had carried out some online research in Worcester, which told him that one of the most likely places to acquire a firearm in the UK was, so to speak, just down the road.
He signed up on a website called Couchsurfing.com, a sort of hippieish precursor to Airbnb that allows users to find hosts willing to offer free accommodation. Stephen created a profile in the hope that he would find somebody in Birmingham to put him up for the night. Stephen’s Couchsurfing.com profile page still exists, although he listed himself as “Stephen Mason.” It includes a photograph of him half-smiling at the camera as well as some basic biographical information. In the About Me section, Stephen created his own subheadings, which he then answered as follows.
CURRENT MISSION
To defy the odds
ABOUT ME
A traveller and seeker of truth
PHILOSOPHY
“It is your mind that creates the world”—Buddha
A Couchsurfing.com host read his profile, thought he sounded like a nice guy, and offered him a place to stay for the night.
When Stephen arrived, he began, “very discreetly,” to ask his host about guns. He explained that he was a university student and that part of his degree required him to conduct a study into crime in Birmingham, and he wanted to know the kind of areas where somebody might go and buy an illegal firearm. His host, who Stephen remembers as being Greek, wasn’t quite sure what to say. People who sign up to karma economy websites in order to offer Buddha-quoting strangers free accommodation do not generally know where to purchase illegal firearms. Nevertheless, there were certain areas of north Birmingham that did have reputations. Lazells. Ladywood. Balsall Heath. Stephen nodded as he jotted these down. Then thanked his host and left.
Stephen spent the next few hours traipsing these areas of inner-city Birmingham. As evening fell, he spotted what he judged to be the most disreputable-looking pub he’d seen all day and entered. “It was a Jamaican-type pub,” he remembers. He ordered a pint and loitered at the bar. Something about his manner seemed to invite an approach, and a pair of tall men moved beside him and asked, in friendly tones, if he needed anything. Was he looking for drugs? Weed? Coke? Stephen, still in his anorak, shook his head. “I said, ‘Look, I am looking for a firearm.’ ” Upon hearing Stephen say this with his matter-of-fact directness, they instantly became far more circumspect, almost concerned. They told Stephen to go sit in the corner, then quietly conferred before one of them made a phone call. Some time later, the older man arrived and then, some time after that, they all piled into his car to begin the process of finding Stephen a gun.
Stephen felt anxious. He was worried not for his safety, but that they might not succeed in getting the gun. The three men told him that for £2,000 they could get him a shotgun. “Which I thought was ridiculous,” he says, frowning. As they drove, Stephen and the men negotiated until they finally settled on £750 for a pistol.
Over the next hour, the men in the car made a number of stops, with one of them leaving the car to enter a building for a while before returning. None of this was explained to Stephen. Eventually, though, he was told that the next stop would be where they get the gun for him, so he needed to produce the cash and stay in the car while they went to retrieve it. Stephen hesitated. He wasn’t stupid and didn’t feel comfortable just giving £750 to a group of criminals at nighttime in a dark corner of a city he didn’t know. But then, he really wanted that gun. It felt so close. He gave them the cash. They pulled over on a quiet street, and the two younger men stepped out of the car. Stephen could see them dividing the money between them, which made him frown. He began to say something when, suddenly, they ran. In opposite directions. “They just…ran off with the money.”
Stephen pulled open the car door and chased after one of the men. Behind him, he heard the car accelerate and speed off into the night. Stephen didn’t even turn to look. He had one of the men in his sights and was gaining on him, pacing past streetlights, parked cars, and dark high-rise council blocks. Then, suddenly, up ahead, Stephen saw what he thought was a police car. This made him hesitate and break his stride. If the police saw Stephen chasing after somebody through inner-city Birmingham in the middle of the night, they would probably have questions. Questions he couldn’t exactly answer honestly. Rational thought began to whirr into gear. Because even if it wasn’t a police car and he did succeed in catching the man who had half his money, what then? “I reasoned with myself that, even if I did catch up with him, he would probably have beaten me in a fight,” he says. “Probably beaten me senseless.”
He returned to Worcester deflated. But in a pattern that was now established, any setback was simply interpreted as a reason to keep going with even more conviction. Inadvertently commit armed robbery at an Amsterdam youth hostel? Just a reason to keep going. Accidently vandalize a children’s charity? Just a reason to keep going. Ripped off by gangsters in Birmingham? Just a reason to keep going. Even his arrest in Holland was a reason to burrow deeper and deeper into his obsessive world. In his mind, it was just a matter of time before Dutch police shared his forensic information with British police, at which point both the Devon and Cornwall and West Mercia forces would receive an alert informing them that their man was named Stephen George Dennis Jackley and that he was a twenty-one-year-old student from Sidmouth.
As a result, Stephen developed a sense that he did not have much time to hit his target. “I had this increasing sense of a giant clock over me,” he says. He imagined that once he’d hit his £100,000 goal, he would have to assume a new identity and leave the UK forever. On some level, he hoped this was what he would have to do. But doing this would likely require even more money. So just another reason to keep going.
By February 2008, something else was happening, too. For the first time in his life, Stephen was beginning to know what it felt like to have access to money. Not loads of money, but still, several thousand pounds stashed in trees around Worcestershire and Devon. The exact status of this cash was ambiguous. Stephen says his plan was not, and never had been, to reach his £100,000 in increments. Instead, everything depended on him pulling off one big heist: forcing his way into a bank, cleaning out a safe, and vanishing forever. So the money he had already stolen served as a kind of expense account. Yes, he’d given a percentage of what he’d stolen to the homeless, possibly something in the region of £600. And he was anonymously paying back the NSPCC in installments, a sum that would stand at £1,255 by the time he was finally captured. He spent much of the rest on materials relating to the mission: disguises, fake beards,
battery-powered angle grinders, half a dozen replica pistols. He had just lost £750 on the Birmingham debacle. These things started to add up.
But he was also spending money on himself. Of the eventual £100,000 he hoped to steal and use as seed money for the Organisation, he earmarked a percentage that would serve, effectively, as a salary. “I think it was either 30 or 40 percent,” he says today. “I don’t think it was as high as 40. It might have been one-quarter. But there was a bit that I designated for me, for traveling and seeing the world.”
He told himself that traveling back to East Asia, to Thailand or Cambodia, would tie in with his overall philanthropic mission anyway. It would be like fieldwork. Going to Amsterdam to spend two days smoking cannabis, on the other hand, cannot be rationalized away. Stephen accepts this. “It would be wrong to say that ‘he did this exclusively for the greater good and not for himself,’ because I did write that there would be a percentage that I would keep personally.”
The West Mercia Police—the force who would ultimately prosecute Stephen—made much of the fact that he had planned to spend some of his stolen money on himself. DI Fox says that in the diaries they hold, there were lists of the things Stephen planned to acquire for himself, from laser eye surgery to round-the-world travel to his own flat. He does not believe Stephen’s plans for the Organisation were genuine. “He talks about setting up a company to look at living on the moon,” he says, before describing how strange he finds much of Stephen’s writing. “I think sometimes it’s almost like a brain fart. It comes out and appears on the page and then that’s that. It might not ever appear again.”