The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  To Stephen’s annoyance, things were very different on this occasion. The two marshals were taking absolutely no chances. “I remember them being really keen that I was handcuffed to the wheelchair. They were totally obsessed about security,” he says, frowning, as though this were some curious personality quirk of theirs. “I didn’t expect them to be constantly watching over me.”

  He continued his bouts of fake convulsing. Doctors and nurses ran a plethora of tests. The room was filled with people, but Stephen’s plan required that he be left alone for at least a short period of time. “I thought that if I could get out of a window, then I could just run and outpace them,” he says, never mind the fact he was in handcuffs and leg-irons. “I am not a violent person, but worst-case scenario, I thought I will be able to disarm one of them. My preferable option would have been just jumping out a window. From there, I would have just run into the wild.”

  All the tests showed that Stephen was fine. He sat slumped in the wheelchair, pretending to be unconscious. Then the room began to empty. The voices of medical staff and the older marshal drifted away and a door shut. All Stephen could hear now was the low steady beep of a heart-rate monitor. Finally, he was alone. He let a few moments pass to be sure.

  “Then he opens his eye real quick, thinking no one else is in the room,” says Deputy Curtis, who had been standing over him in absolute silence. “He sees me and then closes his eye immediately. I have a quick conversation with him about how I am here and I just witnessed what he did and that it’s time for us to get back to the office. It wasn’t too long after that he recovered from his symptoms. I think he just needed someone to say, ‘The jig is up, you can stop with the act, this isn’t working and we have places to be.’ ”

  Deputy Curtis says that given the nature of his job, he was well used to being around some very desperate and upset people, and the key to managing these situations is to be firm but patient and understanding. “It’s the worst day of their lives, and I’m not trying to make it any harder.”

  Even now, handcuffed in the back of a secure moving vehicle, the front of his orange jumpsuit drenched in his own spit, Stephen had still not given up hope of escape. But he knew that he didn’t have much time. “I realized the doors were locked, but I thought there might be a way to disarm the lock, so I was discreetly trying to reach the buttons,” he says. Deputy Curtis could see what Stephen was thinking—he could see the thought bubbles over his head—and intervened. “He was paying way too much attention on how to exit the vehicle. I got his attention off the door and onto me and told him that it wasn’t a very good idea.”

  The marshals then made what seemed to be a series of long phone calls from the front of the van. They were speaking to the staff at the Northwest State Correctional Facility, where Stephen was being taken, and advising them about his behavior. Despite his crime and despite his diaries and despite the possibility he was wanted in other countries, at the start of the day, it was not guaranteed that Stephen would be placed straight into solitary confinement. But like a panicked child trying to free himself from a Chinese finger trap, the more he strained toward freedom, the tighter the grip around him became. “I am sure that information was passed on to the facility about his alleged seizure and his behavior,” says Deputy Curtis. “And the facility is going to treat it as they see fit. He happened to act up on one day with the marshal service while he was in federal custody. That’s it really.”

  When Stephen arrived at NWSCF, there were eight armed guards waiting for him in an underground parking garage. The doors of the van swung open and he was ordered to lie on his back. Large, heavy hands reached out and pinned his ankles to the floor as leg-irons were clamped and locked around him. The guards surrounded him and he was half-marched, half-dragged through the prison intake area. He passed the marshal with the bow tie, who was talking to a man in a suit. Both men watched Stephen as he passed, but said nothing.

  They entered a corridor. The chains around his legs made a long, eerie groan as he lost his footing and was pulled along the hard polished floor. Voices from the cells lining the corridor called out, shadowy faces pressed against doors, but Stephen’s eyes were on the floor. The procession stopped outside a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, and he stumbled inside as the door buzzed shut behind him. Breathing short, shallow breaths, he looked around him. All he could see was solid wall. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He shut his eyes and tried to wish himself free. Images flashed and dissipated. He saw the view from Owl’s Head Mountain. He saw a Cambodian forest at dawn. He saw a lake in the French countryside. From high in the branches of a tree he could see a small Devon town nestled beside a vast green sea, and it looked beautiful. He thought of Robin Hood. He thought of children searching through scrap heaps and of beggars in Exeter and of cities on the moon. He opened his eyes, and the walls were still there. It was the end. It was over. He sat down on his concrete bunk and cried.

  * * *

  —

  The materials uncovered at Wyvern Hall proved beyond doubt that Stephen was the mysterious figure at the center of Operation Gandalf. Prosecutors would later describe his room as being a “treasure trove of evidence.” DI Fox admits he has never seen anything like it. “You start reading this stuff where he’s basically confessing to the robberies in his diaries and you just think…he’s copped it for us,” he says, puffing out his cheeks. “I think the Americans call it a ‘slam dunk.’ ”

  DI Fox and Special Agent Murray conferred. Federal agents in the United States provided British police with Stephen’s fingerprints and DNA, helping to make the looming case against him watertight. The Dutch police issued a European Arrest Warrant after Stephen failed to respond to their requests to return to Amsterdam, and there was some to-and-fro among authorities in the UK, the United States, and the Netherlands over procedure. Upon learning the full facts of the case, though, the Dutch seemed more than happy to walk away. “I think they were pretty much like, ‘If you have him for eight armed robberies you can keep him,’ ” says DI Fox. “ ‘We don’t really want him that badly.’ ”

  The British police built their case against Stephen while, at the same time, he waited to be tried for his crime in America. After a month at Northwest State Correctional Facility, Stephen was moved to SSCF, to Foxtrot Unit and the Hole, to Stinky and the snapper. According to records held by the Vermont Department of Prisons, Stephen spent 134 days, 5 hours, and 36 minutes at SSCF. A few weeks before he left he was visited by Special Agent Murray and an FBI agent who briefly questioned him again. In late October 2008, U.S. Marshals escorted Stephen to the U.S. District courthouse in Burlington, where he stood trial for his attempt to buy a gun from Henry Parro using a fake ID. He was sentenced to ten months in jail, inclusive of the five he had by then already served. When asked if he wished to say anything upon being sentenced, he stood up. “I am sorry for breaking your law,” he said quietly, before being taken away.

  He was moved to Strafford County Jail, where he endured suicide watch before joining the general population. Then he was transferred to MDC Brooklyn, to the witch doctor, iglesia, and New Year’s fireworks over Manhattan. In February 2009, he was visited by a woman working for the British Embassy who explained to him that upon the completion of his U.S. sentence, he would be deported to the UK. If he contested his deportation, she said, he would simply be extradited. He agreed not to contest it. He was then moved to New York’s Orange County Correctional Facility, where he spent a further seven weeks serving out the remainder of his sentence, before being transferred to Varick Street Detention Center, a facility in Manhattan run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He spent almost two months there, guarded by ICE agents and waiting to be deported.

  On May 12, 2009, Stephen was escorted back to the United Kingdom. He spent the flight from JFK to Heathrow wedged between a pair of federal agents and was arrested the moment he stepped off the plane. That night, in h
is cell at Worcester police station, he wrote a long, rambling poem in black pen, filling both sides of a sheet of notepaper.

  Sitting in a jail cell, deep in the black night

  back from America, one year in prisons;

  back to the Isle—my home, my punishment;

  no chances, no ways—nabbed off the flight,

  first breaths of Freedom flew like a cloud

  just like the vapour the aeroplane passed

  I stole from the rich, gave to the poor,

  took from gambling houses, banks and corporations—

  now they’ve put my face on 21 cards;

  but no game of Blackjack is this, no Ace and King—

  it was sweet, when I ruled the world,

  when every horizon was a dream and opportunity,

  when the wind blew strong and fresh,

  the sky so high and clear—no barriers, no boundaries…

  but now these four stale walls border my world

  casting darkness deeper than the night outside

  The lamentation and self-reproach went on and on and on. There was angst but also a perceptiveness and self-knowledge that seemed to belie his actions over the past two years. One line, jotted at the bottom of the first side of paper, is jarring in its clear-eyed analysis.

  O learn this well and know the moral:

  Chase not your obsessions without forgetting your dreams.

  Epilogue

  On August 21, 2009, Stephen stood trial at Worcester Crown Court. He pleaded guilty to five offenses of robbery, three of attempted robbery, with seven related offenses of possession of an imitation firearm as well as burglary, attempted burglary, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The presiding judge, John Cavell, described the journal entries in which Stephen wrote about kidnapping bank staff as “chilling,” and stated that Stephen “would have carried on into more serious offenses” had he not been stopped. “I cannot begin to imagine what possessed a man of your obvious abilities to resort to this appalling series of serious crimes,” Cavell told him. He sentenced Stephen to thirteen years in jail. Had Stephen pleaded not guilty, which for a time had seemed a possibility, Cavell said he would have faced twenty years. Stephen did not react. He just stood there and wrung his hands.

  A number of Stephen’s victims were present at the trial. Luke Twisleton was there, the young William Hill employee who went several years unable to sleep without a nightlight after Stephen raided his branch. He remembered how Stephen would not make eye contact with him during the nine-hour trial, but just seeing him in the light of day made Luke feel a bit better. DI Fox says that some of the other victims voiced similar sentiments after seeing Stephen in the dock. “A couple of them, after they had seen him in court were like, is that him? Is that what I have been so upset about? This insignificant, skinny lad? But that’s not what they remember, is it? They remember the mask and the barrel of a gun.”

  Immediately after the trial, DI Fox stood outside the courthouse and addressed the assembled press. He told them that Stephen’s claims to have been motivated by a desire to rob from the rich and give to the poor were bogus. Of the £10,686 he stole, virtually nothing was recovered. Yes, he gave £1,255 to the NSPCC and wrote in his diaries that he planned to give them much more. But beyond that? Where did the money go? On travel. On trips to Amsterdam, Istanbul, France, Spain, and America. On guns and angle grinders and seafront hotel dinners for his mother. If he gave any money directly to the homeless, as he claimed, then it was impossible to trace or prove. “Jackley’s crimes caused a great deal of distress,” DI Fox announced to reporters. “The reality of his behavior is a far cry from the self-styled character of Robin Hood that he depicted in his deluded diaries.”

  Local press in both Devon and the West Midlands followed up on the story. Reporters knocked on the door at Manstone Avenue only for his mother to peer around the corner and softly tell them she did not want to speak to anybody. Quotes from unnamed neighbors described Stephen as quiet, nondescript, never any trouble at all. Ben Weaver remembers being at university and getting a frantic phone call from his stepmother. “She was saying, ‘You’ll never guess what Stephen has done!’ ” But when she explained, Weaver found he wasn’t surprised at all. “He was always very moral, even if it was ‘off’ in terms of him lacking empathy. But that he had seen an injustice in the world and tried to do something about it? There was no surprise in that. Most people would probably donate money to charity rather than try and act like Robin Hood,” he says. “But it wasn’t shocking. ‘These banks are making loads of money.’ I could see the logic that he might have been following.”

  In September 2009, Stephen made the front page of the Worcester News. There was a color photograph of his face and a headline in large, heavy type. “I’M SORRY” it read. “Armed robber’s letter of remorse from jail.” In a handwritten letter sent to the paper, he tried to explain how he now comprehended the lasting, long-term psychological pain he had caused.

  Reading the witness statements in the robberies has given me great shame and remorse. Innocent people were hurt through my actions. This was never what I intended. I am aware of the mental hurt and fear experienced by clerks and tellers in the robberies—which is totally unforgivable and totally unintended. To these people I can only express my deepest regrets and apologies. I am willing to see these people to say this to their faces and, if it would make them any happier, see the pain and depression I’ve gone through. If I’m able to repay the damage I did, I will do it.

  Alex Bingham of the Devon and Cornwall Police later spoke to the Express and Echo for an article headlined “Detectives believe ‘Robin Hood’ thief apology is genuine.”

  “Jackley has written a very articulate letter,” he told a reporter. “He is clearly an intelligent individual. He could have thought about his actions and how his victims would have felt at the time, but he chose to go on and commit those offenses—and there were numerous offenses.”

  Nevertheless, Bingham continued, “he doesn’t appear to be trying to gain anything in writing this letter, but is reflecting on what has happened. He’s trying to say he has done wrong and is sorry.”

  Like the sentencing judge—like so many people involved in the case—he said that he still could not begin to imagine what had possessed Stephen to do it.

  * * *

  —

  The possibility that Stephen may have some form of autism was raised before he stood trial in the UK. On July 30, 2009, Stephen was assessed by a psychiatrist at HMP Hewell following a period, he says, of “what they classed as ‘odd behavior.’ ” The psychiatrist concluded that Stephen may well have Asperger’s syndrome, and Stephen says he told his defense team that he would benefit from a full psychiatric report in advance of his trial. No request for such a report was ever made by his legal advisers. “I told my solicitor that the prison psychiatrist had said, ‘Look, I think you might have Asperger syndrome,’ ” says Stephen. “And the solicitor said, ‘Oh no, we can’t disclose this. This might risk you getting an IPP.’ ”

  An IPP was a type of indeterminate sentence known as “imprisonment for public protection.” They came into effect in England and Wales in 2005 and were conceived as a means of protecting the public against criminals whose crimes were not serious enough to warrant a life sentence. The idea was that upon completing an initial sentence, a parole board then would judge whether the inmate was safe enough for release. If the inmate was refused parole, they must wait another year and try again. And there is no limit to the number of times an inmate can be refused. Between 2005 and their abolition in 2012, IPPs were widely handed down but inconsistently and unpredictably applied. They became a source of controversy. You could, in theory, come up for parole after serving five years in jail for armed robbery, but then spend the rest of your life trying to prove you are no longer a danger to society.

  So you
can understand why some defense lawyers may have been spooked by the idea of presenting a direct link between armed robberies and a mental health condition, such as Asperger’s, that cannot be cured or treated. The possibility of being caught in a Catch-22 situation was real. Better to downplay or simply not mention it and take the certainty of a fixed sentence. In any case, Stephen did not question his defense team’s decision. “I just said, okay, whatever you think is best.”

  He began his thirteen-year sentence. He struggled badly. Whereas his time in the U.S. prison system had been hard, something about the surreality of it—the sense that the experience still formed part of the grand sweep of his adventure—had made it easier to manage. In the UK, this illusion was shattered. He couldn’t settle. His directness and social naïveté were not indulged by inmates and prison staff who did not find his Englishness a novelty. He was bullied for his obsessive need for routine and his urgent insistence that certain things be done in certain ways at certain times. He continued to chide himself for what he had done and the hurt he had caused. On sheets of official Prison Service notepaper, he sat in a cell and wrote to himself.

  My dreams were to be a modern Robin Hood, lifting the worldwide poor up from the oppression of banks and corporations. Steal from the rich and give to the poor, the voice of Justice resounded. Caught in a cycle of drugs, righteous indignation, social angst and an obsessive vendetta against capitalist foundations I followed the road of good intentions and ended up falling down into a pit of hell.